Zionism: Particularities of Zionist beliefs. Part 9.

The idea of Zionism is established on the basis of long and continuous association between the Jewish people and the Land of Israel. Mass return, or Aliyah, to the Land of Israel is a recurring theme in Jewish prayers that continued during the period the Jews lived in diaspora, following the Roman occupation and the destruction of the Second Temple at the hands of the Romans in the year 70.

Aliyah, however, was associated with the coming of the Jewish Messiah. The core of Zionist ideology is reflected in the principle that the land of Israel is the historical origin of the Jewish people, and in believing that the presence of Jews in any other part of the world is living in exile. The center of the Zionism idea is represented in the Israeli Declaration of Independence:

The Jewish people have grown in the land of Israel, wherein their religious, spiritual and political identity reached the maturity, and in here they lived for the first time in a sovereign state, and in there they produced their human, national and cultural values.

When the Jewish people were forcefully dispersed out of their country, they kept their promise to return from the different countries of exile, and never stopped praying and believing in the hope of returning to their country and resuming their political freedom there.

Zionism is dedicated to fighting anti-Semitism in all its forms. Some Zionists believe that anti-Semitism will never disappear (and that Jews must conduct themselves with this in mind,)[ while others perceive Zionism as a vehicle with which to end anti-Semitism.

Zionists preferred to speak Hebrew, a Semitic language that developed under conditions of freedom in ancient Judah, modernizing and adapting it for everyday use. Zionists sometimes refused to speak Yiddish, a language they considered affected by Christian persecution. Once they moved to Israel, many Zionists refused to speak their (diasporic) mother tongues and gave themselves new, Hebrew names.

According to Eliezer Schweid the rejection of life in the Diaspora is a central assumption in Zionism. Underlying this attitude was the feeling that the Diaspora restricted the full growth of Jewish individual and national life.