RUTHFULLY YOURS

According to the Washington Post, Facebook, due to the abundance of online antisemitic rhetoric, is considering censoring the word “Zionist.”

No doubt about it, “Zionism” and “Zionist” have become hate words du jour.  I find the whole thing quite upsetting.  But not to take it lying down, I have decided to defend the two words.

The word “Zionism” comes from the word “Zion,” a word that appears often in the Hebrew Bible and refers to the city of Jerusalem (and the Land of Israel).  Zionism is the name for the 19th-century nationalistic movement that called for the creation of a new Jewish nation in the same area where the Jewish people originated and have always had a remnant, and where the Hebrew kingdoms of the past once stood.

When Zionism was in its infancy in the 19th century, the land now called Israel was a sparsely populated region called Palestine, a small part of the Ottoman Empire.  Why was the lack of a significant population in Palestine so important?  Because it was important to Theodor Herzl.

Herzl (1860–1904) was a Hungarian Jew moved by the tragic story of Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish French army officer wrongly accused of being a traitor and then sentenced to Devils Island.  Shocked by the antisemitism of his day, Herzl, who would one day be known as the father of modern Zionism, believed that the Jewish people would always be second-class citizens in their native countries and called for the creation of a new Jewish homeland where the old once stood — a homeland where Jews would not be discriminated against because they are Jews.

Theodor Herzl was a visionary with great charisma and organizational skills.  He was the founder of the World Zionist Organization.  Back in 1897, in Basel Switzerland, he led the first World Zionist Congress that officially served notice to the world that there was a need for a Jewish homeland in Zion.

The Zionism plan for statehood in the 19th and early 20th centuries was built around fundraising, immigration, land-purchasing, farming, building, and engaging in world politics.  It took backbreaking work to make the desert bloom.  In the end, the cost of nation-building turned out to be even more painful.  It took Jewish blood to make it happen — the blood of Jewish thousands spilled on Holy Land battlefields when Israel’s Arab neighbors refused to accept the U.N. Partition Plan of 1947.

Zionism was never about creating a nation where only Jews could live.  The State of Israel, the only Jewish nation in the world, is almost 20 percent Muslim.  These Israeli Arabs are citizens with elected representation in the Knesset (Israel’s parliament).  Israeli Arabs fell at the hands of Hamas on October 7.  Israeli Arabs have also died fighting for Israel in Gaza.

Zionism has never been about creating refugees.  Wars created refugees — wars started by Arab nations that had no tolerance for a Jewish country in their midst.  And here is a shocker for the uninformed: there were more Jewish refugees who fled Muslim countries starting with the 1948 Arab-Israeli War than there were Arab refugees that fled Israel.  The difference was that the newly created nation of Israel not only took in Holocaust survivors from Europe, but also absorbed the multitudes of Jewish refugees from the Middle East (the Mizrahim).  The Arab countries, on the other hand, turned their backs on their Muslim brothers.

One more thing about the Palestinian refugees: They were not the sole result of fighting between Palestinians and Israelis, following the British withdrawal.  The Israelis had a lot on their plate other than fighting Palestinians.  The day after Israel declared independence in 1948, the armies of Egypt, Syria, Iraq, and Lebanon invaded.

Zionism promotes the existence of a tiny Jewish nation in the Middle East, about the size of New Jersey.  Iran and her proxy, Hamas, on the other hand, promote the destruction of Israel and the Jewish people.  It is not particularly important to me what Facebook chooses to do regarding its dilemma of censoring or not censoring.  What is important to me is that the world should know that the words “Zionism” and “Zionist” are greatly misunderstood words that carry no shame.