It isn’t possible to understand Zionism without understanding that Jews have a basic, understandable fear of being wiped out.
In medieval times, Christians regarded Jews as Christ-killers.
In modern times, blood-and-soil nationalists regarded Jews as disloyal foreigners.
Both forms of antisemitism were existential threats.
One of the doctrines of Christianity is that Jesus is the prophesied Jewish messiah. The question arises: Why don’t the Jews recognize their own messiah?
One easy answer is that Jews must be an exceptionally wicked people. And from there, it is an easy to to saying they must be persecuted, killed or expelled.
In modern times, Jews were allowed out of their ghettos to participate in civic life. But a new question arose. The basis of nationhood was blood and soil—a group of people of the same lineage occupying the same territory.
But Jews are of different lineage, and they have no territory. How do they fit in with modern nationalism? They don’t. And from there, it is an easy step to regard all Jews as potential or actual traitors.
This form of antisemitism inspired the Dreyfus case., in which a French Jewish artillery officer was falsely accused of treason. The older form of antisemitism inspired the Beilis case, in which a Russian factory manager was falsely accused of the ritual murder of a Christian child.
Justice eventually prevailed in both cases, but the founders of the Zionist movement believed that Jews needed a homeland of their own—not just as a refuge from antisemitism, but because they were a nation with the same right to a homeland in which they were in the majority..
That was one of the roots of Zionism. The other was a fundamentalist religious nationalism, inspired by Biblical prophecies, that links the Jewish people to their ancient homeland. There are fundamentalist Christian Zionists, based on the same prophecies.
Zionism in its early years was a controversial movement among Jewish people. Jews in western Europe and North America mostly regarded themselves primarily as Americans, Britons, French, Germans and so on who happened to be a different religion than their fellow citizens.
This changed during the Second World War. Hitler’s attempted genocide of the Jews was matched by an unwillingness of Allied nations, including the USA, to accept more than a token number of Jewish refugees. The British government did its best to prevent Jewish immigration to Palestine, lest they provoke the Arabs into revolt.
I am old enough to remember the Allied war propaganda during the Second World War. Hitler’s antisemitism was not emphasized. Knowledge of the Holocaust was suppressed. I think now that Roosevelt, Churchill and other Allied leaders feared to give credence to Hitler’s claim that the war was being fought on behalf of the Jews.
After the war, Europe was filled with “displaced persons” camps. All the DPs had homelands to which they could return, except for the Jews. So a lot of them headed for Israel.
Invading a country and driving out the inhabitants is now regarded as a crime against humanity. But if I had been one of those Jewish DPs, I wouldn’t have cared. All I would have cared about was having a place I could call my own.
Of course, if I had been a Palestinian Arab at the time, I wouldn’t have cared about the plight of the Jewish refugees. I wouldn’t have seen any reason why I should lose everything because of events in Europe.