Zionism

Zionism is an international political movement that supports a homeland for the Jewish people in the Land of Israel. Formally organized in the late 19th century, the movement was successful in establishing the State of Israel in 1948, as the world's first and only modern Jewish State. It continues primarily as support for the state and government of Israel and its continuing status as a homeland for the Jewish people. Described as a "diaspora nationalism," its proponents regard it as a national liberation movement whose aim is the self-determination of the Jewish people. Opposition to Zionism has arisen on a number of grounds, ranging from religious objections to competing claims of nationalism to political dissent that considers the ideology either immoral or impractical.

While Zionism is based in part upon religious tradition linking the Jewish people to the Land of Israel, where the concept of Jewish nationhood is thought to have first evolved somewhere between 1200 BCE and the late Second Temple era, the modern movement was mainly secular, beginning largely as a response by European Jewry to rampant antisemitism across the continent. At first one of several Jewish political movements offering alternative responses to the position of Jews in Europe, Zionism gradually gained more support, and the Holocaust accelerated Jewish immigration to the Land of Israel.