https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2024/02/zionism_and_zionist_carry_no_shame.html
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.