Zionism

            In recent years, research has shown a rising level of antisemitism worldwide. In the U.S. alone, there were more than 6,000 antisemitic incidents across the United States in 2025. Among the most egregious assaults in the world were the following: On October 27, 2018, a mass shooting occurred at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Eleven people were killed, six were wounded. On December 10, 2019, a shooting took place at a kosher grocery store in the Greenville section of Jersey City, New Jersey. Seven people were killed at the store by two perpetrators. In England, on October 2, 2025, a terrorist attack took place outside the Heaton Park Hebrew Congregation in Manchester during Yom Kippur. Three people were killed and three were seriously injured. In Australia, on December 14, 2025, an Islamic State-inspired, antisemitic terrorist attack occurred on Bondi Beach in Sydney during a Hanukkah celebration, resulting in 15 deaths and 40 wounded.

            Throughout the last two millennia, antisemitism has been a dark blot in Christian history. In recent times, a contributing factor has been the rise of Zionism, which is a Jewish movement that supports the right of the Jewish people to have their own homeland in the land of Israel. It began in the last decade of the 19th century, after almost 2,000 years of persecution of the Jews by primarily Christian countries. The founder of Zionism was the Hungarian Jewish journalist Theodor Herzl.

Theodor Herzl

            Theodor Herzl was born in Budapest in 1860 to Jewish parents. He studied law at Vienna University, but soon switched to journalism. In 1891, he came to Paris as the correspondent of the Vienna newspaper Neue Freie Presse. In 1894, his task was to follow closely the trial of Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish captain in the French army, who was accused of treason for allegedly selling military secrets to the Germans. In vain he pleaded innocence. Dreyfus was publicly degraded, his officer’s stripes were torn from his uniform, his sword was broken, and he was sent to Devil’s Island, off the coast of French Guiana until 1906, when he was rehabilitated and reinstated in the army with the rank of major.

            What Herzl remembered for years were the shouts in the streets of Paris, “Death to Dreyfus—Death to the Jews!”[1] In 1899, he wrote, “The Dreyfus case embodies more than a judicial error; it embodies the desire of the vast majority of the French to condemn a Jew, and to condemn all Jews in this one Jew.”[2]

            Herzl could not forget Dreyfus. All of Europe had yielded to a new wave of hatred against the Jews. He returned to Vienna and in 1896 published the pamphlet “Der Judenstaat [The Jewish State].” In it, he emphasized two points: First, he declared that the Jews are a people, who desired to remain a people. They can develop a normal national life only as a united group in a country of their own. Second, “the Jewish problem” can be solved only when the Jews are determined to help themselves.[3] Therefore, he suggested that a society of Jews be organized that could act as the legal representative of all Jews. Herzl at first did not promote Palestine as the new Jewish homeland; perhaps Argentina with its vast underdeveloped areas would be suitable. Later, when he made contact with the Russian Jewry, he discovered that only Palestine would satisfy them.

            Herzl’s first aim was to win the European heads of states for his plan. He visited the German Kaiser, the Sultan of Turkey, the British and Russian governments, as well as wealthy European Jews. Among these was the staunchly Jewish Rothschild family. He attended conferences, wrote letters, and edited the Zionist weekly newspaper Die Welt (The World) in Vienna in 1897 to promote the Zionist movement.

            The next step by Herzl was to convene a Zionist Congress in Basel, Switzerland. On August 29, 1897, “One hundred and ninety-seven delegates appeared. They came from Europe, including England, from Asia and from Africa. Four delegates arrived from America.”[4] But not all Jews agreed with Herzl. A federation of rabbis in Germany published a statement in the Berliner Tagblatt (Berlin Daily), claiming that the aims of the Zionists contradicted “the prophetic message of Jewry and the duty of every Jew to belong without reservation to the fatherland in which he lives.”[5] Herzl vehemently rejected such attacks. He received strong support from the 70 Russian delegates at the congress, who represented five million Jews in the East. Herzl continued to lead the Zionist movement through six more congresses before his death in July 1904.

            In 1903. Herzl received an offer from the British government to establish a colony or settlement for Jews in Uganda East Africa. When he presented the “Uganda Proposal” to the sixth Congress, as a temporary refuge for the Jews—following the Kishinev pogrom in modern Moldova, in which about 50 Jews were killed—the majority (Polish and Russian Jew) rejected the proposal.

The Balfour Declaration

            During the First World War (1914-1918), the British needed the support of the Muslims and the Jews in Palestine. Negotiations between the Jewish leaders and the British government in London led in 1917 to the famous Balfour Declaration, in which Lord Arthur Balfour, the British foreign secretary wrote that “His Majesty’s government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object.”[6]

            The British conquered Palestine in 1917; at the 1920 Peace Conference in San Remo, Italy, it received a mandate over Palestine, which was confirmed by the League of Nations in July 1922. At the same conference, the Zionist delegates heard for the first time about a secret correspondence early in 1915 between Sir Arthur McMahon, the British High Commissioner in Egypt, and the Grand Sherif Hussein ibn-Ali of Mecca. For the Grand Sherif’s aid against the Ottomans, the British government “promised to support at the proper time the Arab claims for an independent state to be established in a specified territory.”[7] This promise was diplomatically so ambiguous—with no mention of Palestine in it—that the British could practically ignore it. At the same time, they were in no hurry to implement the Balfour Declaration.

            Following the end of World War I, many primarily European Jews emigrated to Palestine and began to change the face of the country. “Where there had been dry and barren land, green crops flourished.”[8] Many colonies, called Kibbutzim, sprang up, cooperatives in which all worked and shared together. During those years, the Arabs were on friendly terms with their Jewish neighbors. They learned modern farming methods and benefited from the clinics the Jews established for the Arabs.

            At the same time, cities developed in Palestine. By 1929 the all-Jewish city Tel-Aviv had 40,000 inhabitants. But in the same year, “Arab agitators played on the religious fears of their people by declaring that the Jews were about to attack the Mosque of Omar [in Jerusalem].”[9] Riots and fighting broke out and spread from Jerusalem to Hebron and Safed. The British were able to restore peace, but in 1936 riots broke out all over the land. While during the 1930s, Jews and Arabs fought each other in Palestine, Jews in Germany began to feel the influence of Hitler’s anti-Jewish policies.

Hitler and the Jews

            After elections in 1933, Hitler became chancellor of Germany. In 1935 he introduced the Nuremberg laws, that stripped the Jews of their basic rights and separated them from the rest of the population. Regulations restricting Jewish activity became progressively more severe. In November 1938, a young Polish Jew shot a German diplomat in Paris. A violent pogrom was decreed for all Germany. Jews were attacked and beaten. On November 9 and 10, called Kristallnacht (“Night of Broken Glass”), thousands of Jewish shops and synagogues were destroyed. Jewish homes, hospitals, and schools were ransacked, and 30,000 Jewish men were incarcerated in concentration camps in Germany; more than 200,000 Jews fled Germany.

            During the Second World War, Hitler’s obsession with the Jews as a symbol of evil led to the Final Solution, the attempt to wipe out the Jewish race in Europe. This was done with mobile killing units and death camps, such as Auschwitz, Majdanek, and Treblinka. Together these methods killed six million Jews between 1933 and 1945. The six death camps killed not just Jews, but also millions of Poles, Slavs, Romanis, people with disabilities, homosexuals, and political opponents. At the beginning of the war, there were nearly nine million Jews living in Europe. At the end of the Holocaust (Greek “burnt sacrifice”), there were fewer than three million.[10]

Conclusion

            Theodor Herzl’s dream of a Jewish Homeland became a reality on November 29, 1947, when the United Nations voted Resolution 181, the partition of Palestine between the Jews and Arabs. The Jews accepted this decision; the Arabs rejected it. The 1948 war of independence established Israel as a nation. It was followed by several wars between Jews and Arabs, including the Gaza war starting in 2023, which showed that Israel today is the superpower of the Middle East.

REFERENCES

                [1]. Mamie G. Gamoran, The New Jewish History (New York: The Union of American Hebrew Congregations, 1957), 240.

                [2]. Alex Bein, Theodore Herzl, Maurice Samuel, trans. (Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society of America, 1945), 115.

                [3]. Gamoran, The New Jewish History, 240, 241.

                [4]. Ibid., 241.

                [5]. Bein, Theodore Herzl. 221.

                [6]. Nathan Ausubel, The Book of Jewish Knowledge (New York: Crown Publishers, Inc., 1964), 535.

                [7]. Ibid.

                [8]. Gamoran, The New Jewish History, 277.

                [9]. Ibid., 281.

                [10]. Paul Johnson, A History of the Jews (New York: Harper and Row, 1987), 497.