Theodore Herzl, the founder of modern Zionism, envisioned his Zionist dream in his fictional novel, OLD NEW LAND, in which he depicted a Jewish homeland in the geographical land of Palestine in which Palestinian Arabs would welcome Jewish immigration because of the modernity that Jews would bring. In retrospect, that was probably naive. He did not realize that the Arabs in Palestine would react negatively to Jewish immigration more than to rule by Moslem Ottoman Turks and that introducing a modern nation into a backward autocratic Middle East would be such a bombshell.
Anti-semitism in medieval Christian Europe was an attempt to convert Jews to Christianity by making life for Jews unbearable. During and after the Age of Reason (1600s and 1700s), anti-semitism changed from an attempt to convert Jews to a cultural dislike of Jews because they had developed a culture that seemed foreign to mainstream Europe no matter what their religion was. Herzl was a secular assimilated Austro-Hungarian Jew living at the end of the 19th Century into the beginning of the 20th Century who thought that the problem would be solved if the Jews had a homeland somewhere. He felt that Palestine was a logical place because of the Jewish historical connection to that geography. One might say somewhere else would have been better, but where? There was a thought in the early1940s about a Jewish homeland in a remote southwest undeveloped part of the island of Tasmania (an Australian state). The thinker of that idea was not Jewish but rather an Australian gentile named Critchley Parker. Mr. Parker explored that area alone but died during his exploration. Otherwise, there was no place that had open arms to welcome a Jewish country.
Contrary to Herzl’s dream that a Jewish homeland would be an antidote to anti-semitism, it hasn’t. In fact, recently it has provided anti-semites an excuse for hatred. However, it did provide a place where Jews could go if necessary. Many survivors of the holocaust ended up going to Israel. After Israel won the 6 Day War, many Moslem countries retaliated by evicting their own Jews who then migrated to Israel because there was nowhere else to go, increasing the Jewish population in Israel. I, a native born Jewish American, am fortunate that my parents and grandparents immigrated here to America in the early 20th Century when America was still encouraging immigration, making us part of the 40% of Jews in the world who are citizens here. The Jews of Israel make up another 40%, and the rest of the Jews in the world are the other 20%.