ate practices of faith and ritual. Theodor Herzl, the founder of modern Zionism, proclaimed the movement as a form of emancipation: “We are a people – one people.”
In their ancient homeland: Before a century-long campaign of erasure, it was widely known and understood that the Jewish people were only ever collectively connected to one land – the land of Israel. The Jews have been exiled and have lived in many places around the world. But as a people and a nation, they have only ever been connected to one land that would make sense as a sovereign nation-state. The Jews have been repeatedly exiled from this land, but they never ceded it. To emerge with their own nation-state, in their ancestral homeland, with their revived ancient language, they had to decolonize themselves from numerous empires – Roman, Islamic, Ottoman, British, to name a few. In that, Zionism is the world’s oldest, most persistent and most successful decolonization movement.
The enemies of Israel, notably the Islamist Iranian proxies of Hamas and Hezbollah, know perfectly well what Zionism is, and know that it conflicts with their vision of Islamic supremacism in which no Jews are permitted. In which to put it more bluntly, all Jews must be killed. It's an existential struggle now, Zionism.
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