Page 34 - Why Israel?

discussed and settled by the civilized nations of the world in council.
We are a people—one people. We want to lay the foundation stone, for the house which will become the refuge of the Jewish nation. Zionism is the return to Judaism even before the return to the land of Israel.6
Reverend William Henry Hechler with his family.
Herzl’s friend, a Christian pastor named Reverend William Henry Hechler, played an influential role in supporting the vision of a modern Jewish nation-state in the land of Israel. Hechler wrote a pam- phlet advocating for the establishment of the state of Israel as the place promised by God to belong to the Jewish people forever as their rightful homeland. He used his social connections to introduce Herzl to members of German royal society and the sultan of Turkey during the late 1800s, and helped lift Herzl’s idea of a Jewish national
homeland from obscurity into the political discourse among world leaders. 7
The ideal of Zionism, the belief that the Jewish people had a right to national independence and sovereignty as natives of their ancestral homeland, began to flourish. Jewish immigrants began to flood into then-Palestine, and purchase land from wealthy Arab landholders at exorbitant costs. The land had been mostly barren and sparsely populated for centuries and to most it seemed worthless except to the Jews who dreamt of coming home.
Der Judenstaat Theodor Herzl 1896 Translated The Jewish State p.5 Jonny Paul, “Christian Leader Pivotal to Herzl’s Work Recognized,” The Jerusalem Post (2 February 2011), https://www.jpost.com/International/ Christian-leader-pivotal-to-Herzls-work-recognized.
WHY ISRAEL
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(Photo credit: Wikimedia Commons)