Zionism did not begin with Herzl.
Herzl gave it a modern diplomatic engine. He turned a civilizational memory into a political program. But the idea itself - the return of the Jewish people to Zion - is older than Europe, older than Islam, older than most nations currently lecturing Jews about “colonialism”.
For nearly 2,000 years, Jews did not pray “next year in Paris”.
They did not break a glass at weddings to remember Berlin.
They did not end Passover with “next year in Warsaw”.
They said: "Next year in Jerusalem".
That is Zionism before the word Zionism.
Psalm 137 was written in exile: “If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget her cunning”. That is not tourism. That is national memory.
The daily Jewish prayers ask for the rebuilding of Jerusalem. The Grace After Meals asks for Jerusalem. The fasts mourn Jerusalem. The wedding ceremony remembers Jerusalem. The Jewish calendar is built around exile, return, destruction, longing, and restoration.
Then, long before Herzl, non-Jewish statesmen and writers understood this too.
In 1799, Napoleon was said to have issued a proclamation calling on Jews to return to Palestine as its rightful heirs. Historians debate the authenticity of the document - but the fact that this idea circulated in European politics before Herzl is itself revealing. The concept was already imaginable: Jews, restored to their ancient homeland.
In 1819, John Adams wrote to Mordecai Manuel Noah: “I really wish the Jews again in Judea, an independent nation".
Read that again.
An American Founding Father, decades before Herzl was born, was already speaking about Jews in Judea as an independent nation.
This was not “settler colonialism". This was not a 20th-century conspiracy. This was the obvious conclusion of anyone who knew Jewish history: the Jews were a people, Judea was their ancestral homeland, and exile had not erased that bond.
In 1876, George Eliot published "Daniel Deronda", a novel with a proto-Zionist vision of Jewish national restoration. Her character Mordecai dreams of a Jewish national revival in the ancestral land. This was not Herzl. This was British literature, before the First Zionist Congress, recognizing what antisemitic Europe refused to admit: Jews were not merely a religious minority. They were a nation.
Then came the Blackstone Memorial in 1891 - still before Herzl’s "Der Judenstaat".
American leaders, businessmen, clergy, editors, and public figures signed a petition calling for Palestine to be restored to the Jews. It asked: “Why not give Palestine back to them again?”
Again: before Herzl.
Zion - the longing, the identity, the claim, the memory, the prayer, the national consciousness - never stopped.
Herzl did not invent Jewish peoplehood.
He did not invent Jerusalem.
He did not invent the Jewish connection to Judea.
He did not invent the dream of return.
He took the oldest surviving national liberation movement in human history and gave it a newspaper, a congress, a diplomatic strategy, and a modern political vocabulary.
That is why anti-Zionism is not merely criticism of Israeli policy.
Anti-Zionism says the one people who preserved their homeland in prayer, law, language, ritual, mourning, and memory for 2,000 years are somehow “foreign” to it.
It says Arabs can have 22 states, Muslims can have 50 states, Europeans can draw borders across the world, but Jews - the people of Judea - are “colonizers” in Judea.
Zionism did not begin in Basel in 1897.
Basel was the moment the world was forced to hear it.
But the Jewish people had been saying it for centuries:
If I forget thee, O Jerusalem.
Next year in Jerusalem.
Return our eyes to Zion.
Rebuild Jerusalem.
And that is why it survived every empire that tried to bury it.
@destinationXIX
