Taking back Zionism?

The Birthright Israel Alumni community has recently launched an international campaign whose goal is to “Take Back Zionism.” The video above is the first of a series of videos to be released highlighting both what Zionism is, as well as what it is not.

The “Take Back Zionism” campaign organizers described the goals of the campaign, as follows:

Contemporary discourse seeks to narrowly define Zionism and attack it by limiting its scope.  We refuse to accept others’ definitions and misrepresentations. We seek to Take Back Zionism and define it in our own terms, as a young generation who loves Israel.

For starters, the goal of the campaign is both admirable and long overdue, however, the message conveyed in the campaign’s promo video (above) is the same tired “Israel is the only democracy in the Middle East” brand of Zionism which fails to inspire anyone who isn’t already drinking the kool-aid.

Let’s set the record straight, while democracy can be a wonderful thing, it is not the raison d’etre for Zionism. The goal of Zionism is not to create a mini-USA in the Middle East. That is not to say that Israel and the United States can’t or don’t have certain shared values, but that is not the purpose of Zionism.

• Zionism is the national liberation movement of the ancient Hebrew nation, born when the Roman Empire invaded our country, destroyed our Temple, uprooted us from our soil and exiled us from our land. Political Zionism is the external manifestation of our people’s ancient spiritual yearnings and the latter is the light and soul of the former;

• Zionism is a revolution unparalleled by any other in history as no other social, economic or political upheaval has ever attempted to ingather a scattered nation from the ends of the earth, revive a dead language to everyday use and liberate a homeland from under a mighty world empire while at the same time attempting to build a moral society that will set an example of justice and morality for mankind;

• That our people were the victims of a historic injustice when we were robbed of our right to land, liberty and peace by Roman imperialists nearly 2,000 ago. This injustice was compounded by a series of atrocities that befell us in the exile and climaxed with a Holocaust that destroyed an entire third of our nation;

• The entire Jewish people are indigenous to the Middle East regardless of where individual Jews may have wandered during the past 2,000 years. It was in the Middle East that our nation was forged, emerged from slavery and possessed sovereignty over our homeland. The fact that Jews eventually came to drift and live in other parts of the world was only the result of a crime perpetrated against us by foreign imperialists who invaded our country and exiled us from our land;

• That it is by the might of right and not the right of might that the Hebrew nation has returned to our borders and reestablished our national framework therein. The entire territory between the Jordan River and Mediterranean Sea belongs rightfully and solely to the Hebrew nation. No foreign ruler can justly claim ownership over our people’s ancestral homeland;

By all means, let us “Take back Zionism,” but before we can hope to find success in convincing others of both the beauty and justice of Zionism, we must first understand what Zionism is really about ourselves.

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