From Abraham’s journey to the modern State of Israel—and the struggle to defend it.
Jewish history did not begin with a United Nations vote. It did not begin with the Holocaust. And it certainly did not begin when somebody discovered the word “Zionist” and decided to use it as an insult.
Long before modern borders, British officials, or television panels arguing about our existence, the Jewish people’s story was rooted in this land.
Its hills carry the names. Its stones preserve the inscriptions. Our prayers remember its cities. Our language grew here.
To understand Zionism, you have to understand that relationship: a people, a homeland, and the extraordinary determination to remain connected through conquest, exile, persecution, and return.
Abraham: Where the Story Begins
In the Torah, the story begins with a command to Abraham: leave your country, your birthplace, and your father’s house, and journey to the land God will show you.
Lech lecha.
Abraham travels to Canaan. The biblical narrative places him in Shechem, near Beit El, and in Hebron, where he purchases the Cave of Machpelah to bury Sarah. Isaac and Jacob inherit the covenant; Jacob receives the name Israel.
For religious Jews, these are foundational truths about our relationship with God and the land. Historically, the patriarchal accounts belong to biblical tradition; they cannot be documented in the same way as a nineteenth-century congress or a twentieth-century declaration.
Modern political Zionism would emerge thousands of years later. Its spiritual roots reach back to the Jewish understanding that our peoplehood and this land belong in the same story.
Abraham did not organize a political party. He began the journey that Jewish generations have understood themselves to be continuing.
A People Takes Root
The Torah carries that journey through slavery in Egypt, the Exodus, Sinai, and the return to the land under Joshua.
Later, the ancient kingdoms of Israel and Judah made Jewish national life a historical reality. Jerusalem became the center of worship and kingship. Hebrew developed as the language of a people whose religious and political life unfolded here.
The names still speak: Jerusalem, Hebron, Bethlehem, Shiloh, Beit El. Judea and Samaria preserve the geography of ancient Judah and the northern kingdom of Israel.
Babylon conquered Jerusalem and destroyed the First Temple in 586 BCE. Exile followed. Under Persian rule, Judeans returned and rebuilt their communal and religious life. The pattern of destruction and return was already becoming part of Jewish history.
Our connection to this land was established centuries before Christianity and Islam emerged. Those religions have their own profound relationships with it. Neither relationship makes the Jewish one disappear.
Exile Could Scatter Us. It Could Not Erase Jerusalem.
In 70 CE, Rome destroyed the Second Temple. The suppression of the Bar Kokhba revolt in 135 brought further devastation.
Jewish dispersion had begun before these catastrophes and expanded over centuries. There was no single moment when every Jew left. Jewish communities continued in the land even as much of Jewish life developed elsewhere.
Across that dispersion, Jerusalem remained embedded in ordinary life.
Jews prayed toward it. Mourned its destruction on Tisha B’Av. Remembered it beneath the wedding canopy. Ended the Passover Seder with the hope of returning.
“Next year in Jerusalem” survived changes of rulers, languages, and continents.
A Jewish family in Yemen and a Jewish family in Poland could live worlds apart and still turn toward the same city.
That continuity matters. A people does not become foreign to its homeland simply because an empire succeeds in scattering it.
Modern Zionism: Turning Longing into Organization
During the nineteenth century, Jewish return developed into an organized national movement.
European emancipation opened doors, but antisemitism kept demonstrating how easily those doors could slam shut. Pogroms, discrimination, and political exclusion sharpened an urgent question: could Jews safely entrust their future entirely to governments they did not control?
Thinkers and activists offered different answers. Leo Pinsker argued for Jewish self-emancipation. The Hovevei Zion movement supported settlement in the land. From the 1880s, pioneers helped establish agricultural communities, buying land and attempting the difficult work of building a viable national home.
Then came Theodor Herzl.
In 1896, he published Der Judenstaat. In 1897, he convened the First Zionist Congress in Basel, bringing together approximately 200 delegates from 17 countries.
The movement now had an international organization and a political program: securing a publicly recognized home for the Jewish people in their ancestral land.
Herzl gave institutional force to an ancient attachment. Generations had prayed for return; his movement organized congresses, raised money, negotiated, and built toward it.
Zionism also contained fierce disagreements. Religious Zionists, secular nationalists, socialists, cultural Zionists, and Revisionists differed over the society they hoped to create.
The arguments were Jewish. So was the determination.
Building Before Independence
The national home took shape through practical work: farms, neighborhoods, schools, hospitals, newspapers, labor organizations, and institutions of self-government.
Hebrew, preserved for centuries in prayer, scholarship, and literature, became a shared language of everyday life.
Consider the scale of that achievement. A language people had studied across scattered communities became the language in which children argued in playgrounds and parents called them home.
The land was also home to Arab communities with lives, attachments, and political aspirations of their own. Jewish return unfolded amid that reality, and conflict intensified as competing national movements developed.
In 1917, the Balfour Declaration expressed British support for a Jewish national home while also stipulating protection for the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities. The League of Nations Mandate subsequently incorporated the national-home commitment.
International recognition mattered. It recognized a movement and a historical connection that already existed.
The Holocaust and the Terrible Cost of Statelessness
In 1939, Britain sharply restricted Jewish immigration to Mandatory Palestine as European Jews faced escalating Nazi persecution.
Then came the Holocaust: the systematic murder of six million Jews by Nazi Germany and its allies and collaborators.
Zionism already existed. So did the Jewish claim to a national home.
The Holocaust exposed the catastrophic vulnerability of a people who could be hunted across a continent while other countries controlled the doors through which they might escape.
After liberation, survivors remained in displaced persons camps. Many had no family to return to, no safe home, and no country willing to receive them.
For many, Israel represented the possibility of finally belonging somewhere that would open its gates.
1948: Independence Under Fire
On November 29, 1947, the United Nations General Assembly recommended partition into Jewish and Arab states. Jewish leaders accepted the plan; Arab leaders rejected it.
On May 14, 1948, David Ben-Gurion declared the establishment of the State of Israel. Neighboring Arab armies invaded as the British Mandate ended, widening the war already underway.
Independence arrived under fire.
The war also brought the flight and expulsion of hundreds of thousands of Palestinian Arabs, remembered by Palestinians as the Nakba. That displacement remains part of the conflict’s history.
Israel survived and received an immense influx of Jews: Holocaust survivors and Jews from Arab and Muslim countries, many escaping persecution, dispossession, and insecurity, others answering the call of national renewal. Their histories differed, but they helped build the same country.
The new state’s founding declaration committed it to equality of social and political rights for all inhabitants, regardless of religion, race, or sex.
That promise belongs at the heart of Zionism’s responsibilities. Sovereignty gives a people power—and obligations in how it uses that power.
Jerusalem, War, and the Work of Peace
In the 1967 Six-Day War, Israel captured eastern Jerusalem, including the Old City and the Western Wall, as well as Judea and Samaria, Gaza, Sinai, and the Golan Heights.
For Jews, returning to the Western Wall was an event of immense religious and national significance. The war also transformed the territorial conflict and the lives of the Palestinians living in the territories Israel captured.
The years that followed brought further wars, terrorism, difficult decisions, and genuine diplomatic breakthroughs.
Israel signed peace treaties with Egypt in 1979 and Jordan in 1994. Those agreements demonstrated that recognition and negotiated peace could replace decades of hostility.
A Jewish state needs the strength to survive. It also needs the judgment to recognize a real opportunity for peace.
Its people deserve both.
October 7 and the War with Iran
On October 7, 2023, Hamas-led attackers murdered approximately 1,200 people and abducted 251, according to Israeli figures.
Families were attacked in their homes. Young people were hunted at a music festival. Communities were shattered. The state created to protect Jewish life failed catastrophically to protect so many of its people that morning.
That failure demands accountability. It also makes the task of protecting Israel’s population painfully concrete.
The confrontation with Iran developed through further direct military escalation, including the twelve-day Israel–Iran war in June 2025. On February 28, 2026, the United States and Israel launched another campaign against Iran. Tehran responded with strikes on Israel and Gulf states hosting American bases.
As of September 22, 2026, the conflict remains unresolved. Recent reporting describes continuing regional escalation following the collapse of an interim ceasefire. Its final outcome cannot yet be written.
The Jewish historical memory of Persia includes Cyrus and the return from Babylonian exile. Today’s confrontation concerns the Islamic Republic and its military actions; it is no timeless feud with the Iranian people.
For Israelis, sovereignty now includes air defenses, shelters, intelligence, soldiers, and the responsibility to make decisions whose consequences reach every family.
The purpose must remain clear: protecting life and securing a future in which children can grow up without learning the route to a shelter before they learn the route to school.
The Story We Are Still Writing
Zionism’s achievement can be seen in the ordinary things that stateless generations could only imagine.
A Hebrew classroom. A Jewish calendar shaping public life. A family arriving with suitcases and becoming citizens. A synagogue filling before Shabbat. A soldier coming home.
The journey runs from Abraham’s place in Jewish faith, through the kingdoms of Israel and Judah, through exile and enduring presence, to the pioneers, the congresses, independence, and the difficult responsibilities of statehood.
It is a history of grief. It is also a history of astonishing human determination.
Jews have the right to live as a free people in their ancestral homeland.
That right carries responsibilities toward our fellow citizens, our neighbors, and the generations who will inherit what we build.
We remember those who prayed for Jerusalem without ever seeing it. We remember those who reached it. We remember those who died defending the possibility that their children could remain.
And we keep building.
Am Yisrael Chai. The people of Israel live—and our history continues.