4 Israel and the Arab-Israeli Conflict
Though in forced dispersion for nearly nineteen hundred years , Jews never stopped yearning for Zion and Jerusalem .
It is written in the Book of Isaiah : “ For the sake of Zion I will not be silent ; for the sake of Jerusalem I will not be still ….”
In addition to expressing this yearning through prayer , there were always Jews who lived in the land of Israel , and especially Jerusalem , though there were often threats to their physical safety . Indeed , since the nineteenth century , Jews have constituted a majority of the city ’ s population . For example , according to the Political Dictionary of the State of Israel , Jews were 61.9 percent of Jerusalem ’ s population in 1892 .
The historical and religious link to Jerusalem ( and Israel ) is especially important because some Arabs seek to rewrite history and assert that Jews are “ foreign occupiers ” or “ colonialists ” with no actual tie to the land . Such attempts to deny Israel ’ s legitimacy are demonstrably false and need to be exposed for the lies they are . They also entirely ignore the “ inconvenient ” fact that when Jerusalem was under Muslim ( i . e ., Turkish Ottoman and , later , Jordanian ) rule , it was always a backwater . It was never a political , religious , or economic center . For example , when Jerusalem was in Jordanian hands from 1948 to 1967 , virtually no Arab leader visited , and no one from the ruling House of Saud in Saudi Arabia came to pray at the Al-Aqsa Mosque in eastern Jerusalem .
Zionism is the quest for national self-determination of the Jewish people .
Although the yearning for a Jewish homeland dates back thousands of years and is given expression in classic Jewish texts , it also stems from a more contemporary reality .
Theodor Herzl , considered the father of modern Zionism , was a secular Jew and Viennese journalist who became appalled at the blatant antisemitism fueling the infamous Dreyfus case in France ,