In the nineteenth century the ideals of emancipation and nationalism shimmied and rocked through the European air as small nations shuddered out of the clutches of empires. “Me to” Jews cried proudly, pounding on their secularized attire, to reflect their new improved modern identity, to prove their loyalty and value to their fellow Gentile citizens, who unfortunately, had throughout the centuries invented for them the most spectacular forms of torture, humiliation and death imaginable.

“You? Oh no, not you,” cackled and whipped the Gentiles who quickly regretted having given the Jews the opportunity to look like them and behave like them. The role of the Jews in Europe was to be the scapegoat for all that went wrong within their countries. That role was sacrocent. Jewish life was not. Having gotten a whiff of freedom the Jews rallied against the pogroms. “Thanks but no thanks… we are going home to that ancient land our parents and all the grandparents before hand taught us to love, Israel.”

Pogroms blazed through Eastern European Jewish ghettos and villages like wild fire causing the Jews to flee in great numbers to Israel, and to form agricultural settlements to turn the arid, swamp ridden Palestine back into the land of milk and honey. Those immigration waves were called Aliyot - ascends, and the immigrants “Olim” ascenders. No other people in the world described a trip to old battered, mosquito infested Palestine as a process of ascent because only the Jews were able to pry through the curtain of desolation and see the old glory of their old love. Because only they courted and waited for it for 2000 long years.

Funny thing was that the Gentiles really did not want to let the Jews out. Same old Exodus story. No one wanted them to have a quality of life anywhere. Not in Europe and not in Israel. Even though the Jews were prepared to walk there on foot, buy the land and work it all by themselves. Herzel, with supportive Zionists, cajoled monarchs and leaders. A few murmured inconsequential support for a Jewish State. Herzel even tried the Pope. He said no.

So Jews did the unthinkable for them. They kept going home to Israel and develop Kibbutzim, cities, hospitals and a police force even before there was an official state called Israel.

Who was Herzel you ask? He is the one who said,"Palestine is our unforgettable historic homeland…let me repeat once more my opening words. The Jews who will it shall achieve their state. We shall live at last as free men on our own soil, and in our own homes and in Palestine peacefully die." (1)

“Wait, what does Palestine have to do with Israel?”

“Same thing - different name, thanks to the Romans who exiled the Jews and renamed their country Palestina.

“What does it have to do with Zionsim?”

“Do you remember the Psalm “If I forget thee O Jerusalem, let my tongue cleave to my palate if I do not remember you, if I do not set Jerusalem above my highest joy…”

“Zion is Jerusalem, it is Israel. Zionsim was the movement that returned the Jews to Israel.”

“You mean the Olim were Jewish Zionists?”

There we go! You are catching on fast.

(1) Excerpts from Theodor Herzl’s The Jewish State (Der Judenstaats 1896)