Zionism

Zionism, the idea of Jewish nationality in its modern form, emerged towards the end of the nineteenth century, several decades after nationalism had taken hold among most European peoples. The term denotes the ideology as well as the movement(s) whose goal is re-establishment of the Jewish people as a nation in its homeland in Palestine. Unlike many other movements of national liberation, Zionism seeks not the removal of a colonial regime but the return of a people to its land. The most ancient roots of this aspiration were religious, but many forms of modern Zionism shed the messianic and eschatological elements of the two-thousand-year-old hope in favour of more immediate political and social aims that were often philosophically shaped.