Word: zionistic
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...case in point: the violently anti-Israeli opinions of Jesuit Radical Daniel Berrigan, once imprisoned foe of the Viet Nam War, longtime champion of the underdog, and soul brother of the late Rabbi Abraham J. Heschel, American Judaism's most poetic Zionist. At a meeting of the Association of Arab University Graduates this fall in Washington, D.C., Berrigan excoriated Israel as "a criminal Jewish community. The creation of millionaires, generals and entrepreneurs... is rapidly evolving into the image of her ancient adversaries." Israel's "historic adventure, which gave her the right to 'judge the nations...
Although it had other roots as well, the Zionist movement grew primarily out of life in imperial Russia. Restrictions on their geographic settlement and economic activity, as well as a religion and language of their own, made the Jews of Russia and Czarist Poland almost a nation, separate from the Russians, Poles, and other minorities around them. Although few people led particularly comfortable lives under the czars, toward the end at least, the Jews were probably most oppressed of all. Because they lived in cities, because they were traditionally the middlemen in Russia's feudal economy, and because when...
...Most Zionist leaders wanted to win the Arabs' friendship, and following the lead of Ber Borochov, a Russian Marxist who had taught that the Arabs' lack of an economically distinct culture would lead them to accept Jewish settlement easily, many of them thought it wouldn't be too difficult. Nearly all of them found it hard to realize that there were two separate nations in Palestine, that they had divergent concerns and nationalisms, and that economic separatism, though it kept one nation from directly exploiting the other, was making them more separate all the time...
...EVEN those Zionist leaders who could see this, what happened to European Jews under the Nazis was of overriding importance. It seemed to prove once for all that Jews could only find protection in their own country. It seemed to prove that Jews hadn't done enough to protect themselves and their brothers and sisters in the past, and that they needed to do more in the future. It meant that thousands of displaced persons had to be cared for. And to the rest of the world, it meant that some sort of Jewish nation ought to be established...
When the British replaced the Turks in Palestine, Ben-Gurion returned. His work gradually shifted from labor activities to Zionist planning. By 1920 he was helping to found the Jewish Labor Federation, which would become the all-encompassing Histadrut (labor federation) of modern Israel. He was elected chairman of the Jewish Agency Executive, political arm of the World Zionist Organization. At one point in his career, Ben-Gurion believed that Jews and Arabs could live side by side in peace; but extremist passions on both sides made such a plan impossible, and he soon sensed it. After 1935 he thought...