This post is for those that are concerned that all remarks not directly addressing Zionist Trolls should be placed in a thread specifically concerned with Zionism and Zionists.
Since we must start with something I have place the Wikipedia references to Zionism as the base material.
Zionism is an international political movement that originally supported the reestablishment of a homeland for the Jewish People in Palestine (Hebrew: Eretz Yisra'el, “the Land of Israel”), and continues primarily as support for the modern state of Israel.
Although its origins are earlier, the movement was formally established by the Austro-Hungarian journalist Theodor Herzl in the late 19th century. The movement was eventually successful in establishing Israel in 1948, as the world's first and only modern Jewish State. Described as a "diaspora nationalism," its proponents regard it as a national liberation movement whose aim is the self-determination of the Jewish people.
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 BC and the late Second Temple era (i.e. up to 70 AD), the modern movement was mainly secular, beginning largely as a response by European Jewry to antisemitism across Europe. It constituted a branch of the broader phenomenon of modern nationalism. At first one of several Jewish political movements offering alternative responses to the position of Jews in Europe, Zionism gradually gained more support, and after the Holocaust became the dominant Jewish political movement.
History of Zionism: From Wikipedia
Timeline of Zionism: From Wikipedia
Timeline of Jewish history: From Wikipedia
World Zionist Organization: From Wikipedia
Since the first century CE most Jews have lived in exile, although there has been a constant presence of Jews in the Land of Israel (Eretz Israel). According to Judaism, Eretz Israel, or Zion, is a land promised to the Jews by God according to the Bible. Following the 2nd century Bar Kokhba revolt, Jews were expelled from Palestine to form the Jewish diaspora. In the nineteenth century a current in Judaism supporting a return grew in popularity. Even before 1897, which is generally seen as the year in which practical Zionism started, Jews immigrated to Palestine, the pre-Zionist Aliyah.
Jewish immigration to Palestine started in earnest in 1882. The so-called First Aliyah saw the arrival of about 30,000 Jews over twenty years. Most immigrants came from Russia, where anti-semitism was rampant. They founded a number of agricultural settlements with financial support from Jewish philanthropists in Western Europe. The Second Aliyah started in 1904. Further Aliyahs followed between the two World Wars, fueled in the 1930s by Nazi persecution.
In the 1890s Theodor Herzl infused Zionism with a new and practical urgency. He brought the World Zionist Organization into being and, together with Nathan Birnbaum, planned its First Congress at Basel in 1897. This current in Zionism is known as political Zionism because it aimed at reaching a political agreement with the Power ruling Palestine. Up to 1917 this was the Ottoman Empire, and then until 1948 it was Britain on behalf of the League of Nations. The WZO also supported small scale settlement in Palestine.
Lobbying by Chaim Weizmann (cultural Zionists) and others culminated in the Balfour Declaration of 1917 by the British government. This declaration endorsed the creation of a Jewish Homeland in Palestine. In 1922, the League of nations endorsed the declaration in the Mandate it gave to Britain:
The Mandatory (…) will secure the establishment of the Jewish national home, as laid down in the preamble, and the development of self-governing institutions, and also for safeguarding the civil and religious rights of all the inhabitants of Palestine, irrespective of race and religion.
A short history of Zionism
Palestinian Arabs resisted Zionist migration. There were riots in 1920, 1921 and 1929, sometimes accompanied by massacres of Jews. Britain supported Jewish immigration in principle, but in reaction to Arab violence imposed restrictions on Jewish immigration.
The1936-1939 Arab revolt in Palestine led the British to establish the Peel Commission to investigate the situation. The commission called for a two-state solution and compulsory transfer of populations. This solution was rejected by the British and instead the White Paper of 1939 proposed an end to Jewish immigration by 1944, with a further 75,000 to be admitted by then. In principle, the British stuck to this policy until the end of the Mandate.
After WWII and the Holocaust, support for Zionism among Jews and Gentiles increased. The British, were attacked in Palestine by Zionist groups because of restrictions on Jewish immigration, the best known attack being the 1946 King David Hotel bombing. Unable to resolve the conflict, the British referred the issue to the newly created United Nations.
In 1947, the UNSCOP recommended the partition of western Palestine into a Jewish state, an Arab state and a UN-controlled territory (Corpus separatum) around Jerusalem. This partition plan was adopted on November 29th, 1947 with UN GA Resolution 181, 33 votes in favor, 13 against, and 10 abstentions. The vote itself, which required a two-third majority, was a very dramatic affair and led to celebrations in the streets of Jewish cities.
The Arab states rejected the UN decision, demanding a single state with an Arab majority. violence immediately exploded in Palestine between Jews and Arabs. On 14 May 1948, at the end of the British mandate, the Jewish Agency, led by Ben-Gurion declared the creation of the State of Israel and the same day, the armies of four Arab countries invaded Palestine.
During the following eight months, Israel forces defended the Jewish partition and conquered portions of the Arab partition, enlarging its portion to 78 percent of mandatory Palestine. The conflict led to an exodus of about 711,000 Arab Palestinians, of whom about 46.000 were internally displaced persons in Israel. The war ended with the 1949 Armistice Agreements, which included new cease-fire lines, the so-called Green line.
After the war the Arabs continued to reject Israel's right to exist and demanded that it retreat to the 1947 partition lines. They sustained this demand until 1967 when the rest of western Palestine was conquered by Israel during the Six-Day War, after which Arab states demanded that Israel retreat to the 1949 green line, the only "borders" currently recognized by the international community. These borders are commonly referred as the "pre-1967 borders". The border with Egypt was legalized in the 1979 Egyptian-Israeli Peace Treaty, and the border with Jordan in the 1994 Israel-Jordan Treaty of Peace.
After the creation of the State of Israel the WZO continued to exist as an organisation dedicated to assisting and encouraging Jews to migrate to Israel, as well as providing political support for Israel.
