An Amateur History of the Zionist Claim or Why Zionism Wasn’t Invented in the 1900s
I wrote this as a rebuttal to a well-meaning but misinformed claim that “Israel’s only claim is its creation to give it a place to be free, by the international community, and thus has no inherent claim to it and must abide by international regulations regarding its claims”.
The modern State of Israel was founded to give the Jews a place to be free and safe, yes.
However, Israel as a nation and kingdom has existed since the times of Moses and Joshua, in 13th century BCE. You can even go further back, to the times of Abraham (who bought the town of Hebron as his hometown and burial plot for his wife. It is the location of the burial plot for all three of Judaism’s founding fathers). Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob all lived in Israel (together with the Canaanites, who no longer exist) and the Bible records that God promised the land of Israel to Abraham for his descendants.
While secular westerners scoff at this, Christianity and Islam are founded off of Judaism, and therefore agree with these basic principles, in general.
When Moses took the Jews out of Egypt, they conquered the land of Israel (then called Canaan) from the seven different nations that were residing there and divided it amongst the 12 tribes of Israel (Gaza, for instance belongs in the portion of the Tribe of Judah. The” West Bank” is made up of land from the Tribe of Judah and the Tribe of Ephraim, these areas are known as Yehuda and Shomron instead of the West Bank, which is a modern term invented in the last few decades. Additionally, half of two tribes remained across the Jordan river and inhabited what is now modern Jordan. This was part of the Kingdom of Israel for centuries.
The Jews thus lived in Israel as their birthright for a few thousand years. They established the Kingdom of Judah and Kingdom of Israel which lasted until around 500 BCE at which point the Holy Temple (on top of which the Muslims built the Dome of the Rock and Al Aqsa Mosque hundreds of years later) was destroyed by the Babylonians and much of the Jewish population was dragged into slavery. Less than a century later, the Jews returned, rebuilt the Holy Temple, which lasted a few more hundred years, until Israel was conquered by the Romans. After several Jewish revolutions, the Romans destroyed the Second Temple, and dragged the majority of the Jews into European exile. This is when Emperor Hadrian renamed Israel from “Judea” to “Syria/Phillistina” (after the Philistines, one of the nations the Jews conquered the land from during the times of Moses). This was done to break the national bond between people and land to prevent further revolts by destroying our nation identity in hopes of us withering away as a people.
This slavery under the Romans is the origin of European Jewry, what the world takes for granted (and the pale skin for many Jews). Millenia passed and we survived countless pogroms, attempted genocides, expulsions, war, plagues, and much more. We were scattered across the world, almost always being treated as second class citizens, if not explicitly slaves, chattel, and often a free and governmentally sponsored target for murder, rape, and pillaging.
There has always remained a Jewish presence in Israel throughout those ages and in nearly every single one of our prayers, books, songs, poems, liturgies, you will find us talking about national desire to return to Israel and Jerusalem specifically. There is no other nation or group in the world that held Jerusalem as a key component of its religion. While Jews anywhere in the world, for millennia, pray facing Jerusalem and the remains of the Holy Temple (the Western Wall is the only remaining vestige) Muslims face Mecca, literally turning their back to Jerusalem. Only in recent years did the Muslims decide to claim Jerusalem as a holy site (look at photos of the Dome of the Rock pre 1920s. It was abandoned and broken).
Zionism, based on the Hebrew word Zion (mentioned many times in the Jewish Bible) is a reference to the hill in Jerusalem where King David established his kingdom and fortress and in a more general sense, to Israel as a totality. The same is true of the expression “daughter of Zion,” which is a title of endearment that G‑d uses about Jerusalem and the Jewish people, the inhabitants of the land of Zion. Similarly, in Lamentations 4:2, the Jewish people are referred to as “the sons of Zion.”. Zion and the desire to “return to Zion” or similar concepts, appear hundreds of times across thousands of ancient Jewish texts and prayers. So, no. Zionism isn’t a new concept, unless you’re counting King David as a modern-day monarch.
Millennia pass. The Jews suffer but survive. The land of Israel changes hands between empires many times. The Ottoman Empire is the last Muslim empire to hold it. At which point it’s desolate (see travelers who visit it around this time period, like Mark Twain), a deserted desert and marsh, and nearly void of residents. There is certainly no Arab consideration of it as holy let alone desirable. Yet, the Jews are prevented from visiting our important holy sites. The Tomb of the Patriarchs in Hebron (which Abraham bought and in which lay our founding fathers) was illegal to visit beyond the seventh step on the outside of the building, punishable severely. The Western Wall was used as a garbage dump.
In the late 19th century/early 20th century, modern Zionism begins as Europe becomes increasingly an desperate place to live. A wealthy Jewish magnate, Baron De Rothschild from France, buys huge portions of Israel at incredibly overvalued prices from the local Ottoman officials or the few Arabs living there. He then starts bringing in devoutly religious Jews from Eastern Europe to live there, farm the land, repair it to a state of living existence (again, it was mostly malaria infested swamps or desert land). This was known as the “First Aliyah”. These Jews lived on purchased land in an empty Israel and yet they were still attacked by the local Arab residents, despite often “good” relationships with the Arabs, those friendships mattered for little when mobs of Arabs wanted to lynch Jews. The Hebron Massacre is just one example. Around this point the British and French had conquered the Middle East from the Ottomans and colonized it, mostly as a trade route for the Suez Canal.
At this point the demographics start picking up. Due to the efforts of the early religious Jewish “settlers” the land was becoming more fertile and the advent of the major world power, the British Empire, many Arabs from neighboring countries (mostly Egypt and Syria areas) came to work for the British. This is the source of most of the “Palestinians” who now claim to be natives. The British called Israel “Mandatory Palestine” after the name the Romans called it. This is why so called “Palestinian” Arabs can wave passports with the words “Palestine” on it, as if it’s proof of their nativity. Jews who lived in Israel during under British occupation were also issued “Palestinian” passports.
After the Holocaust, the British and French Empires had collapsed and they wished to withdraw from the Middle East. They were impressed upon to give the downtrodden and massacred Jews their own state and after considering different locations (including Uganda) they decided it made sense to give them back their national homeland of Israel. After all, the British were educated and mostly religious then, and were well aware (as was all the world at that point) that the national homeland of the Jews was naturally Israel. The original plan was to give us all of Israel (including Gaza and the “West Bank”) as well as a huge portion of land on the east side of the Jordan River. This new call for “Zionism” is what is so famously known, with Theodore Herzl at the helm. This is called “the Second Aliyah” and formalized the modern State of Israel. This attempt was mostly done by secular Jews from Eastern and Central Europe.
However, at the time, the British and French were also trying to create a national identity for the Arabs (which were primarily tribally based and generally lacked national governments or any coherent identity besides for familial and tribal affiliations (see Lawrence of Arabia for a dramatization of these efforts). They formed the Arab League and placed the Hashemite family (the claimed descendants of Muhammed) at the front. The main son of the family, Faisal, was given Syria (with borders drawn relatively arbitrarily by the two great colonial powers). At the last minute, when Faisal’s brother, Abdullah, complained, they decided to create another country for him to rule; the Kingdom of Jordan. This country has no historical precedent and was simply taken from the eastern parts of what was supposed to be given to the Jews for their modern State of Israel, dramatically cutting Israel down to a tiny size.
Not satisfied with their two new countries, the Arabs complained that the Jews would be granted a state as well. The Jews (really, the new Zionists led by Herzl), happy to receive anything after surviving the gas ovens of Europe, agreed to split even that small piece with them further. The Arabs refused and demanded the whole. (Oh, by the by, Arab violence against Jews has continued unabated throughout all this history, and only increased in scale as time went on.). The Jews, now Israelis, shrugged and declared themselves a state the week the British withdrew from the Middle East in 1948. The day after, the five surrounding Arab nations (fully armed with large arsenals of modern British weapons and trained by the British) attacked the Holocaust survivors now populating Israel. With crude or smuggled weapons, mostly from Czechoslovakia, the Israelis fought a desperate war for survival. The cry from the Arabs was “we will drive them into the sea” (sound familiar?). They called for the local Arab populations to temporarily relocate so the invading Arab armies could easily genocide the Jews, after which they would return to their homes and take the homes and land of the dead Jews.
As the Israelis won, by sheer miracles, ingenuity, and grit, those Arabs who left their homes to wait out the massacres, were left homeless. These are those famous “Palestinian refugees” you hear so much about and who are still used as a pawn by the Arab nations and forcibly kept in squalor to tug at the heartstrings of the West. Foolishly, to prevent future generations from believing that the Jews expelled the Arabs, the leaders of the Zionist party invited many of these Arabs to return to their houses, where most of them still live. This is foolish because those people, who were happy to participate in our genocide, still maintain those values and constantly perpetrate terror attacks on our civilian population, causing thousands of horrible deaths in gruesome and cruel acts of terror on a daily basis (suicide bombings in buses and cafes, slitting the throats of babies in their cribs, stabbing random passersby, and much more).
Thus began the idea of the “Palestinian State and People”. The Arab population, visitors to Israel to work for the British (with some small number being there from Ottoman times), were called by the title the British Empire used (based on the slave-taking Roman Empire) and clamored for recognition, despite “Palestine” never having existed as a nation, kingdom, or ethnography before. There was never been a “Palestinian king, monarch, president, capital city, constitution, flag (until it was invented recently), or any other national concept. It sprang from the mind of the Arabs who needed an excuse to make their claim to the land to prevent the Jews from inhabiting it.
While, there were a few occasions where the Haganah forcibly removed Arab villages, this was by far the exception. A famous example the Arabs like to use was the massacre of Dar Yassin. The truth is, the Old City in Jerusalem, home to over 100k Jewish residents, many of whom had lived there for centuries, were totally besieged, under constant attack and starving to death. The quarters in the Old City that were penetrated by the Jordanians were witness to wholesale massacres of thousands of Jewish civilians. I’ve visited many of those massacre markers myself, in synagogues, schools, and hospitals, where people were trapped inside and the building lit on fire. Desperate attempts by the Israeli forces to send convoys of humanitarian aid were all ambushed on the road from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem due to having to navigate in a valley between two Arab villages. This included a medical convoy where 80+ doctors and nurses were butchered. Having no choice, the Israelis went to Dar Yassin, shouting on speakerphones for the civilians to leave the area, and a battle ensued. Blowing up buildings where Arab forces lay was the primary cause of most of the Arab civilian deaths (about 40+), and this capture of the strategic heights allowed humanitarian convoys to finally reach the starving 100k residents of the Old City in Jerusalem and break the siege.
For decades later, until Israel retook it in the Six Day War, as the Jordanians still controlled half of Jerusalem (including the Western Wall) Arab snipers would take potshots at passing Israeli civilians through the wall that separated the two sides, killing many.
Many wars followed, such as the Six Day War, Yom Kippur War, and many smaller conflicts, always with a hostile Arab population ready to stab civilians or throw rocks (which kill) and other terror attacks which we’ve had to endure till this day. We’ve grown much stronger and no longer are forced to use broken weapons cast off from WW2, but our right to our homeland has become increasingly questioned, in the eyes of the world, and our terror victims gain no sympathy from the world which has eyes only for the plight of the poor so-called “Palestinians”.
Much detail has been left out here, but this is the broad gist of the matter. Look it up and read the history. Israel was not invented recently nor is Zionism a new idea. Zionism is, in fact, inextricably linked to Judaism, as you can clearly see by simply opening a book of Psalms by King David.
