A history of Zionism and the Zionphobes

Edward Bernard Glick:

History doesn’t solve problems, but it explains them, including the evolution of the intractable Israel-Palestine problem.

The idea of revived sovereignty in their ancient homeland has excited Jews for millennia. Until the nineteenth century that excitement was expressed only in religious and poetic terms. Thus the 137th Psalm recalls the mourning of the Babylonian Jews as follows:

“By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat and there we wept, as we remembered Zion. If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget its cunning. If I do not remember thee, let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth; if I do not prefer Jerusalem above my chief joy.”

Even after the Babylonians and later the Romans expelled the Jews from the Holy Land, Jews lived there. Often, there were more Jews there than other inhabitants, particularly in Jerusalem. However, in the 1880s the combination of European nationalism and European anti-Semitism, especially in Czarist Russia, gave birth to Zionism, which is the political expression of Jewish attachment to the Holy Land. In contemporary parlance Zionism is the Jewish people’s movement for national liberation. The 1880s also produced the first modern organized efforts to settle Jews in Palestine, which then comprised all of what we now call Israel, Jordan, the Gaza Strip, and the West Bank of the Jordan River.

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When will there be peace between the Israelis and the Palestinians?

Long before the Palestinians began using suicide bombers and long before Palestinian mothers began to encourage their offspring to become suicide bombers, Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir answered the question this way:

“There will be peace between us and our neighbors when they love their children more than they hate ours.”

There is much more between the ...'s.