Zionism is easily defined as the desire to establish, foster and defend a Jewish state in the land of Israel. What remains murky in the minds of many is the source of this desire.

More often than not, attempts to explain Zionism center around the need to provide Jews around the world with a refuge from persecution. There is no doubt that the founders of the state of Israel hoped to provide the Jewish people with just such a refuge, but it cannot be said that they have succeeded. To the contrary, since the end of the Second World War, there is no Jewish community in the world that has been so consistenly threatened with physical annihilation as the Jewish community of Israel. Literally thousands of Israelis have been killed by Arab anti-Semites, whereas relatively few Jews have been killed by anti-Semites anywhere else in the world since 1945.

Of course it cannot be denied that many of the Jews who fled to the land of Israel both before and also after the Holocaust would have been killed if they had remained where they were. The hundreds of thousands of Jews who lived in Arab lands prior to the founding of the state of Israel in 1948 were definitely threatened with physical annihilation at that time, and this was one of the main reasons why they came to Israel in such large numbers during the late 1940s and 1950s. My point is simply that coming to Israel did not eliminate the threat. What it did do, however, was to make it possible to deal with this threat in a new way, through the use of military force.

One question which is rarely asked is: why were the Jews living in the land of Israel in the 20th century able to develop an army, whereas Jews elsewhere in the world had been unable to do so for over 1000 years? The rulers of the land of Israel prior to 1948, first the Turks and then the British, did not want the Jews to have an army, but they were unable to prevent the formation of an armed Jewish underground which eventually became the nucleus of the Israeli army. Jews in other times and places certainly had a pressing need for an army for self defense, and in some cases, especially in Eastern Europe, the central authority was quite weak and the Jews quite numerous, yet nothing resembling a Jewish army ever materialized. When all is said and done, it would seem that the key difference lay in fact that the Jews who settled in the land of Israel in modern times felt that they had a right to an army, whereas Jews elsewhere did not have the same conviction.

The very first Jewish armed self defense group that was formed in the land of Israel in the 20th century was established in 1907, while the Turks were still the governing authority, and was called "Bar Giora". Who was Bar Giora? He was the commander of an army of runaway slaves and dispossessed farmers who led the Jewish resistance to the Roman invaders during the latter stages of the "First Jewish War" in the 1st century CE. Captured after the fall of Jerusalem in 70 CE, Simon Bar Giora was publicly tortured and executed by the Romans as part of their victory celebration in Rome.

Members of the underground self-defense group named after him took an oath of allegiance based on the following lines from a 1903 poem by Jacob Kahan: "In blood and fire Judah fell, in blood and fire Judah will arise." In the 1920s and 1930s, this same oath was adopted by all the Jewish para-military formations that took shape during this period. Like the choice of the name "Bar Giora", this oath harkened back to the Jewish rebellion against Rome. Moreover, the defense minister of the Jewish government that initiated the rebellion was named Joseph Ben Gurion, and it was his name that the future founder (and defense minister) of the state of Israel, David Ben Gurion, formerly David Gruen, assumed around 1908 after arriving from Poland a few years earlier. In short, the conviction of the Jewish settlers in the land of Israel in modern times that they had a right to an army was rooted not merely in the fact that they were living in the original homeland of the Jewish people but very specifically in the fact that they saw themselves as the direct heirs and successors to the Jewish rebels against Rome.

Of all the Jewish rebels against Rome, the one who loomed largest in the Zionist imagination was Simon Bar Kochba. Commander of the Jewish forces in the "Second Jewish War", Bar Kochba inflicted heavy casualties on the Romans prior to his death in battle in 135 CE. He succeeded in unifying the various Jewish factions around his leadership, and was even proclaimed the "King Messiah" by rabbi Akiba. David Ben Gurion and his followers made Bar Kochba the hero of the Jewish holiday of Lag BaOmer, which had previously been primarily associated with Akiba and another anti-Roman rabbi, Shimon Bar Yochai. And Vladimir Jabotinsky, Ben Gurion’s leading opponent in the Zionist politics of the 1920s and 1930s, chose the name "Betar" for his para-military youth group, ostensibly as an acronym for "Brit Trumpeldor", but actually as a tribute to Bar Kochba, whose last stronghold was called Betar.

Why did the founders of the Israeli army and state see themselves as the heirs of the rebels against Rome? There was, after all, an alternative approach available to them. There is no lack of Jewish heroes and heroines in the so-called Old Testament, which also contains a lengthy exposition of how and why and under what conditions God gave the land of Israel to the Jewish people. Yet the word "God" does not even appear in the Israeli Declaration of Independence, which bases its claim to Jewish sovereignty over the land of Israel entirely on historical grounds - that a Jewish nation had long existed there, that it was overthrown by force and that Jews "in every generation" had remained faithful to its memory and sought to revive it. Within the framework of this argument, identification with the rebels against Rome served the specific function of emphasizing the attachment of the Jewish people to their land and the historical fact that they had fought to the death against the Roman invaders rather than abandon their traditional way of life.

To put it another way, the conviction of the founders of the Israeli state that they had a right to an army was founded on their belief that they had a right to national self-determination. Zionism is nothing other than the affirmation of this right as applied to the Jewish people. And it is no coincidence that Zionism gained a certain measure of acceptance from the "international community" during the past 100 years at the same time as the right to national self-determination was also gradually accepted as a fundamental right applicable to all nations. But in the case of the Jewish people, this acceptance has proved limited and conditional, ostensibly on the grounds that it conflicts with the right of self-determination of the Palestinian and Arab people.

Yet if the Arabs so wished, they could easily have incorporated the Zionist dream into their own dream of national revival. All the suffering and frustration which the Palestinians and Arabs have experienced since 1948 stems from the fact that they have never been willing to recognize any legitimacy whatsoever in the Zionist movement but rather sought only to demonize it so as to provide a rationale for their determination to completely uproot the Jewish people from the land of Israel. This determination predated the birth of Israel, as shown by the pogroms of 1919-20, 1929 and 1936-38, and was most clearly manifested in the efforts of the leader of the Palestinian national movement, Haj Amin, to facilitate Hitler’s "Final Solution" while sojourning in Berlin during World War 2. Even today, the main charge leveled at the Zionist movement by the Arabs is that we seek to rule the world, a charge which is based on the infamous "Protocols of the Elders of Zion", which was widely distributed by the Nazis and is now equally popular in Palestinian and Arab nationalist circles.

Why has the rejection of Zionism by the Arabs been so total, so complete? The answer is that in its origins Zionism was not just an amorphous movement of national liberation but a movement in favor of a particular kind of society, one based on the secular principles of liberalism, democracy and socialism. Israel’s Basic Law, its equivalent of a constitution, stipulates that Israel is to be a "Jewish and democratic state", but even today, there is not a single democratic state in the entire Arab world. It is mainly in order to preserve their authoritarian and theocratic way of life that the Arabs have proved so hostile to Zionism. But sooner or later, democracy will come to the Arab world just as it has come everywhere else, and when that day arrives, it will be found that a small Jewish and democratic state in the midst of a huge Arab and democratic state is a good thing for the entire Middle East.

Come what may, Zionism will never be defeated because it is already built in to the foundations of world culture. What the anti-Semites regard as a Jewish plot to rule the world is simply the influence which the Jewish people has exercised on others through the power of example. In the past this influence gave rise to the dogmas of Christianity, Islam and Marxism, all three of which reflect the Jewish ideal of social equality in a distorted, anti-Semitic form. In the present Jewish influence is reflected in the spread of the Zionist ideal of national self-determination and its concomitant secular values of liberalism, democracy and socialism. Nothing can halt this process, which will continue until the right of the Jewish people to live in peace and security in the state of Israel is fully accepted by the entire human race.

                                                                                                  Robert Wolfe