What is Zionism? The answer changes everything.

Zionism isn’t about denying anyone else’s rights. It’s about affirming our own.

photo: Levi Meir Clancy/Unsplash

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This is a guest essay by Eitan Chitayat, creator of the “I’m That Jew” brand; and Einat Wilf, an Israeli politician and author.

You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, YouTube, and Spotify.

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For most people, home is where they were born.

For Jews, it’s where our story began — the Land of Israel.

Even if some of us never lived there, the connection runs deep. Our prophets, our kings, our ancestors walked this promised land.

We built a kingdom and spoke Hebrew here.

Jerusalem was our capital. Twice.

Every time we were exiled by empires, we prayed towards it, broke glasses at weddings to mourn its destruction, and said “Next year in Jerusalem” — for more than 2,000 years.

Our entire calendar is built around this land. The holidays weren’t timed to, say, Poland or Morocco — rather, to the soil and seasons of Israel.

We are a complete civilization bound to one place.

So when people ask “What are the Jewish People? A nation, an ethnicity, a culture, a religion?” — the answer is: We predate these categories. We have one word, in Hebrew, for who we are. It is just two letters long: Am. Am Yisrael. It means, “the People of Israel.”

We are an indigenous people; a people whose collective history, culture, time, and rituals are bound to a land. Exiled and scattered, we were never seen as equals or fully belonging. Even when we reduced our Jewish identity to religious practice — as opposed to a true people — it wasn’t enough.

The father of political Zionism, Theodor Herzl, saw it clearly. No matter how successful or how well we fit in, Jews would always be “the other.” So he flipped the question: What if we stopped asking for permission to belong — and just went back home? He reminded us all: We are a People, one People, with a shared past and future, and a home we longed for.

So when the world was being reshaped in the 19th century with empires crumbling and nation-states rising, we wanted what others wanted: freedom and self-determination in our nation state.

That is Zionism.

Zionism is the Jewish People’s movement for self-determination in our ancestral homeland. Not living at the mercy of kings or czars or mobs. Shaping our own future. Jews wanted what every other nation wanted: a place of our own.

That is Zionism.

It was revolutionary. Because Jews were never supposed to have power again.

For centuries, Christianity pointed to our exile as proof that the truth was with them. Under Islam, we were supposed to be humiliated unless we saw the truth was with them. We were never supposed to rise.

But we did. We rebelled. We refused to disappear or play the role others have set for the Jews.

We reclaimed the land we’re indigenous to. And for some, that was (and still is) intolerable. An obsession began.

A liberation movement that should have been celebrated was slandered, demonized, and attacked. Its enemies called it colonialism, even though we were in our ancestral homeland. They called it racism, even though Jews come in all colors and came to escape racism. They called it apartheid, even though Jews fled apartheid conditions in Arab countries. (And, today in Israel, two million Arabs live as equal citizens.)

Because Zionism isn’t about denying anyone else’s rights. It’s about affirming our own.

Zionism took a neglected piece of land in the Levant, purchased its malarial tracts, and made it bloom with grit and hope. We saw the promise of the land because for millennia we knew the place, not as a dream, but as a living memory.

That is Zionism, too.

And, in 1947, when the United Nations proposed two states — one for Jews, one more for Arabs — the Jews said yes, Arab leadership said no and chose war, because they believed the Jews must have nothing.

We didn’t want that war, but we survived and became stronger for it, finally creating a home and opening its doors to over a million people made up of Holocaust survivors and Jews cleansed from Arab lands for the crime of daring to image themselves equal.

So why is the existence of the only Jewish state still up for debate?

Because for too many, Jews can exist, sure, just not as equals. And certainly with no power. Tragically, the Arabs in the land (the Palestinians) have become the frontline of that obsession. They’ve been used by regimes, ideologues, and activists — not to build their own future, but to destroy ours.

The fact is, we are not going anywhere.

Yes, we lived all over the world. But we were never truly safe. Never fully free. Never fully home.

So when people ask: “We get that Jews are a people and they want a country of their own, but why here? Why Israel?”

The answer is simple: For Am Israel, everywhere else is exile. Only one place has ever been home. And only one place ever will be.

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