Dylan Ifrah
Staff Writer
The most basic expression of Zionism is the idea that the Jewish people should have a sovereign state in their historic homeland, the Land of Israel. Today, Zionism is the essential ideology that underpins the modern state of Israel as well as being a defining part of the identities of most Jews around the world. However, anti-Israel activists often slander Zionism and accuse Zionists of being racist supporters of a violent “apartheid state”. Ignoring their blatantly false claims about Israel, these people, who often make use of so-called anti-zionist Jews to bolster their claims, create a wide variety of proposals that usually discount any kind of Jewish self-determination in favour of a future Palestinian state. To understand these proposals, it is essential to understand what Zionism is as well as what its history is.
To begin, it is necessary to establish the basic fact that Jews have had a continuous presence in the land of Israel for upwards of four thousand years. Through the years, various Jewish political entities have existed in the land. In the Kingdom of Israel in what is known as the United Monarchy period (1000 BC) and the separate Kingdoms of Israel and Judah, Jews exercised political self-determination for over five hundred years. Following the downfall of these Jewish Kingdoms and the successive invasions and occupations of the land of Israel by powers such as the Assyrians, Persians, Greeks, and Romans, numerous explicitly Jewish provinces such as the Yehuda Medianta under the Persian Achaemenids were put in place. Following the Maccabean Revolts against the Seleucid Empire in the second century BC, another independent Jewish Kingdom ruled by the Hasmonean Dynasty was established. Next, under the Herodian Dynasty, Judea became a client state of the Roman Empire, although its various Herodian kings maintained a significant power of local power.
This oversimplified overview of Jewish political entities in the land of Israel, most of which existed before the common era, provides a clear backdrop for Jewish governance of the land. Notably, even during these periods, numerous Jewish diaspora came into existence. Of particular interest is the first Jewish exile of the Babylonian Empire, under which a significant portion of the Jews living in the land of Israel were forced into exile in what is modern-day Iraq. In their exile, these Jews composed dozens of poems, songs, and hymns about their longing for the Holy Land. One of these, is Psalm 137, in which the exiles famously say “By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, yea, we wept, when we remembered Zion.” and proceed to ask “How shall we sing the Lord's song in a strange land?” continues to be read by Jews around the world every day.
Following their expulsion from the land of Israel by the Romans after the destruction of the temple in 70 CE and the Bar Kokhba Revolt in 132 CE, Jews established communities around Europe, and the Middle East, as well as in the Levant and Central Asia. Still, as hundreds and eventually thousands of years passed, Jews, no matter where they were continued to read those famous Psalms of Longing and religiously commemorated events such as the destruction of the temple and the death of Governor Gedaliah, whose death ended Jewish autonomy in Israel after the fall of the first temple.
Through the Middle Ages and into the modern and contemporary eras, Jews continued to face overt antisemitism wherever they lived. In Europe, Jewish communities were confined to Ghettos, subject to frequent expulsions, and were all too often the victims of pogroms. Additionally, contrary to popular narratives, Jews living in Muslim lands were considered “dhimmi”, or a protected religious minority subject to a special tax, called the “Jizya”, which could at times be as exorbitant as 50%. Additionally, these Sephardic Jews often faced the same pogroms and forced conversions as the Ashkenazis in Europe.
In the 1890s, Theodore Herzl, a secular Jewish Austro-Hungarian journalist who covered the Semitic Dreyfus Trial in France came to believe that the solution to antisemitism was for Jews to return to their ancestral homeland and establish a state in which they could rule without fear of prejudice and where Jews would no longer be second class citizens. Herzl’s movement quickly became popular with many Jews in Europe, resulting in numerous waves of immigration or ‘Aliyah’s’ to the land of Israel. Coined by Arthur Ruppin, the term ‘Aliyah’ literally means to ‘ascend’ as opposed to simply going. This term captures the essence of the Jewish yearning for a Return to Zion, as promised in the Biblical books of Ezra and Nehemiah. In effect, Zionism is a return to Zion and fulfills the millennia-long aspirations of the Jewish people to live in the land that truly is home.
Comentarios