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Authors: Benjamin Netanyahu
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change and departure from the natural order, whereby the Lord situated every nation in the place best suited it…. The
place [the Jews] deserved according to the order of existence was to be independent in the Land of Israel. 41
In the seventeenth century among the Jews of Poland, large-scale preparations for the Return began (and a few years later
abruptly ended) with the rise and fall of the would-be Jewish “messiah” Shabtai Zevi. Despite this disappointment, the Gaon
of Vilna and the Ba’al Shem Tov, the foremost leaders of eighteenth-century European Jewry, both inspired their students to
organize groups to come and settle in the land. One of the Gaon of Vilna’sstudents described the great sage’s insistence that his pupils personally take up the responsibility of realizing the Return:
Who is greater among us in all the recent generations than our teacher, the Gaon of Vilna, who with his impassioned words
urged his students to go up to the Land of Israel and to work to ingather the exiles, and who frequently exhorted his students
to speed the end of the exile, [and] to bring the redemption closer by means of settling the Land of Israel. Almost every
day he would tell us with trembling emotion, that “in Zion and Jerusalem the remnants will see salvation,” and that we should
not miss it. Who can describe in words the concern of our teacher when he told us these things in his exalted spirit and with
tears in his eyes…. 42
Indeed, when the Zionist pioneers began arriving in the Land toward the end of the nineteenth century, they found the small
communities, built by the disciples of these great religious figures and by other Jews already on the Land, in Jerusalem comprising
the majority of the city’s inhabitants.
Thus, in spurts and trickles, sometimes even in streams, Jews went back to their land throughout the centuries. Some walked
the plains of Russia and, after pausing in Damascus or Beirut, entered Palestine from the north. Others sailed a pirate-infested
Mediterranean and landed in Jaffa. Once there, they joined the Jews of Hebron, Safed, or Jerusalem who down the ages had kept
an uninterrupted vigil over a ruined land. As a consequence, there was no period during which the land was devoid of Jews.
(In the villages of Peki’in and Shefar’am in the Galilee, Jews have lived continuously from ancient times until the present.) 43
But a truly large-scale return was not possible until the emergence of modern Zionism in the second half of the nineteenth
century, when the traditional longing for Zion on the part of the Jewish multitudes and the scholars of the exile first found
practical political expression. Such works as Moses Hess’s
Rome and
Jerusalem
(1862) and Leo Pinsker’s
Auto-Emancipation
(1882) were able to build on ancient feelings to contribute to a belief in the possibility of contemporary action. In the
wake of the great anti-Jewish pogroms in Russia in 1881, these longings were quickly translated into an emotional proto-Zionist
movement for the settlement of Palestine called Hovevei Zion, the “Lovers of Zion,” which in turn fostered the first large-scale
immigration to Palestine.
It was these towering ideas, emotions, and traditions that set the stage for the appearance of political Zionism a hundred
years ago, when the next to last of the series of empires that had occupied the land began collapsing of its own weight. It
was then that men of vision like Theodor Herzl and Max Nordau emerged, foreseeing the historic opportunity presented by the
Ottoman Empire’s decline. In addition to offering a concrete political solution—namely, the founding of a Jewish state—Herzl
also established the institutions, such as the World Zionist Organization and the successive Zionist Congresses, beginning
in 1897, that were to put his plan into action.
What Herzl was able to do was to translate a native, emotional Zionism that beat in millions of Jewish hearts into a
place [the Jews] deserved according to the order of existence was to be independent in the Land of Israel. 41
In the seventeenth century among the Jews of Poland, large-scale preparations for the Return began (and a few years later
abruptly ended) with the rise and fall of the would-be Jewish “messiah” Shabtai Zevi. Despite this disappointment, the Gaon
of Vilna and the Ba’al Shem Tov, the foremost leaders of eighteenth-century European Jewry, both inspired their students to
organize groups to come and settle in the land. One of the Gaon of Vilna’sstudents described the great sage’s insistence that his pupils personally take up the responsibility of realizing the Return:
Who is greater among us in all the recent generations than our teacher, the Gaon of Vilna, who with his impassioned words
urged his students to go up to the Land of Israel and to work to ingather the exiles, and who frequently exhorted his students
to speed the end of the exile, [and] to bring the redemption closer by means of settling the Land of Israel. Almost every
day he would tell us with trembling emotion, that “in Zion and Jerusalem the remnants will see salvation,” and that we should
not miss it. Who can describe in words the concern of our teacher when he told us these things in his exalted spirit and with
tears in his eyes…. 42
Indeed, when the Zionist pioneers began arriving in the Land toward the end of the nineteenth century, they found the small
communities, built by the disciples of these great religious figures and by other Jews already on the Land, in Jerusalem comprising
the majority of the city’s inhabitants.
Thus, in spurts and trickles, sometimes even in streams, Jews went back to their land throughout the centuries. Some walked
the plains of Russia and, after pausing in Damascus or Beirut, entered Palestine from the north. Others sailed a pirate-infested
Mediterranean and landed in Jaffa. Once there, they joined the Jews of Hebron, Safed, or Jerusalem who down the ages had kept
an uninterrupted vigil over a ruined land. As a consequence, there was no period during which the land was devoid of Jews.
(In the villages of Peki’in and Shefar’am in the Galilee, Jews have lived continuously from ancient times until the present.) 43
But a truly large-scale return was not possible until the emergence of modern Zionism in the second half of the nineteenth
century, when the traditional longing for Zion on the part of the Jewish multitudes and the scholars of the exile first found
practical political expression. Such works as Moses Hess’s
Rome and
Jerusalem
(1862) and Leo Pinsker’s
Auto-Emancipation
(1882) were able to build on ancient feelings to contribute to a belief in the possibility of contemporary action. In the
wake of the great anti-Jewish pogroms in Russia in 1881, these longings were quickly translated into an emotional proto-Zionist
movement for the settlement of Palestine called Hovevei Zion, the “Lovers of Zion,” which in turn fostered the first large-scale
immigration to Palestine.
It was these towering ideas, emotions, and traditions that set the stage for the appearance of political Zionism a hundred
years ago, when the next to last of the series of empires that had occupied the land began collapsing of its own weight. It
was then that men of vision like Theodor Herzl and Max Nordau emerged, foreseeing the historic opportunity presented by the
Ottoman Empire’s decline. In addition to offering a concrete political solution—namely, the founding of a Jewish state—Herzl
also established the institutions, such as the World Zionist Organization and the successive Zionist Congresses, beginning
in 1897, that were to put his plan into action.
What Herzl was able to do was to translate a native, emotional Zionism that beat in millions of Jewish hearts into a
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