Zionist

Marina Shemesh / publicdomainpictures.net

Zionist and Zionism are based on Zion, from a Hebrew name for a hill in Jerusalem, associated with the biblical City and Temple of David, central to Jewish history and religion.

Both Zionist and Zionism are credited to a Viennese Jewish nationalist university student, Nathan Birnbaum, in the 1890s. Well before him, a number of groups worked to encourage Jews to immigrate to Palestine—site of the historic Jewish Holy Land and its central Zion hill—to avoid anti-Semitism in Europe and return to their homeland. These groups collectively came to call themselves the Lovers of Zion.

Nathan Birnaum / Wikipedia

Zionism was cemented as the term for Jewish nationalism—as opposed to Judaism, for just the religion—in 1897 when activist Theodor Herzl helped create the World Zionist Organization, credited with starting the push that established the state of Israel in 1948. The organization declared its goal of securing a legal homeland for the Jews in the area of Palestine.

Zionist activism continued into the 20th century. The word Zionist became so closely associated with Jewish politics that anti-Semites weaponized up the term. The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion, for instance, was a hateful hoax starting in the early 1900s that notoriously fear-mongered a Jewish state in Palestine as just the first step toward a “masterplan of world domination.”

World War II and the Holocaust galvanized the Zionist movement, and in 1948, Zionism succeeded in the creation of Israel by the United Nations, who partitioned Palestine and created a Jewish state. Although this marked the completion of the principal Zionist goal, Zionism has evolved as a term for supporting Israel, especially in the context of the extremely fraught and complex conflict between the country and Palestine and neighboring Arabic states.