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Many, if not most, Zionists today regard Zionism as a natural continuation of two millennia of Jewish attachment to the Land of Israel and aspiration to return there in the End of Days. According to this view, Jews prayed daily through the millennia for the restoration of a Jewish homeland in Palestine, and this hope was realized dramatically, and, for some, miraculously, in the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948.

What this common point of view misunderstands is that the Zionist movement, founded in the late nineteenth century under highly specific and contingent circumstances, was in fact a rejection of that age-old desire for the Jews to return to the Land of Israel, and not its linear fulfillment. This was, quite simply, because that traditional “yearning for Zion” was tied inexorably to the belief in the advent of a messiah chosen and anointed by God—and by God alone—who would then initiate the “ingathering of the exiles” (i.e., the return to Zion of all the Jews in the world) and the rebuilding of the Temple in Jerusalem. In most of its versions, Jewish messianism also—and crucially—entailed an end to earthly existence as we know it. ...

But in between Jesus and Sabbetai Zevi there were many other “false messiahs,” and so the rabbinic leadership of the Jews worldwide declared that although the messianic belief and its call for the Jews to return to the Holy Land was a cardinal doctrine of Judaism, they decried any apocalyptic version of that belief: Jews were forbidden to “advance the end” or even to calculate it. The messiah would be chosen by God on God’s good time, and any activism among human beings to intervene in this process was heresy, to be condemned and punished.

The founders of Zionism rebelled fundamentally and viscerally against the political quietism which was the corollary of this messianic belief. They demanded that Jews take matters into their own hands to liberate themselves, not to wait for God (in whom many—quite crucially—no longer believed) to return the Jews to “Zion” to create a Jewish homeland there.

It turns out that when it spoke about continuous hands-on efforts by Jews to resettle and reclaim Palestine, the Declaration of Independence glossed over parts of the historical record – as political documents often do. It is true that throughout Jewish history some individual Jews left relatively more comfortable lives outside Palestine in order to satisfy a deep longing to settle in what they saw as their true homeland. However, the number of such Jews appears to have been quite small. In fact, for more than a thousand years after Muslim armies first took control of the country in 632 CE, Palestine’s Jewish population declined sharply, from around 200,000 in the mid-seventh century to no more than 3,000 in 1700. Moreover, certain Jewish religious ideas actually appear to have discouraged Jews from trying to reclaim sovereignty there. Since restoration was possible only after God lifted the punishment of exile, Jews traditionally watched for signs that God was about to relent. They anticipated that, when the time came, God would choose a champion who would gather the Jewish people from all the lands of their dispersion, organize them to take control of the Promised Land, and lead them there in triumph. They called that anticipated champion mashi’ah – literally, ‘the anointed one’, or, as it is usually rendered in English, ‘Messiah’. Once the Messiah appeared, Jews believed, the return to Palestine would be at hand. But they also believed that the timing of the Messiah’s appearance was up to God alone. In fact, throughout most of their history the majority of Jewish religious leaders insisted that, except for praying and observing God’s commandments, Jews neither could nor should do anything to persuade God to send the Messiah quickly. Some even warned that if Jews tried to resettle Palestine en masse before the Messiah came, God was liable to interpret their efforts as an act of rebellion and extend the punishment, making the exile last longer. ...

These facts suggest that, prayers for restoration notwithstanding, Zionism might be better understood as a departure from traditional Jewish ways of looking at the world than as an extension of ancient Jewish religious values. And if Zionism really does embody more a modern than an ancient idea, then it makes sense to look for its origins around the time the word gained currency, not centuries before.

Like other nationalisms, Zionism justifies itself through appeals to history, but it does so anachronistically. It transforms rabbinic Judaism’s concepts of the sacred—the Jews’ common devotion to the God of Israel, veneration of the biblical Land of Israel, and the concept of an eventual Jewish return to that land in the messianic era—into a modern nationalist idiom. ...

Jewish connections with the Land of Israel are ancient and deep, but they should not be equated with Zionist goals to settle Jews in the land and configure it as a Jewish homeland. Rabbinic Judaism venerates the Land of Israel, but there has been a wide range of opinions on whether it is religiously commanded to live there. Talmudic sources emphasize that the mass return of Jews to the Land of Israel will occur only in the days of the Messiah and that attempting to initiate this return prematurely is a sacrilege. Underlying this concept is a theological passivity formed by two cataclysmic historical events: the destruction in 70 ce of the Second Temple in Jerusalem during a Jewish revolt against Roman rule and the decimation of Jewish communities in Judea in 132–135 ce in response to another failed rebellion, whose commander had messianic pretensions. The Talmud speaks of oaths, sworn by Jews to God in the wake of this calamity, that they would neither rebel against the nations of the world nor initiate a mass return to the land of Israel.

Until the twentieth century, Palestine’s Jewish community was minuscule and splintered ... Well into the twentieth century the Jews of Palestine were a collection of separate communities divided by place of origin, customs, and native language or languages.

In the 1700s the Jews of Palestine numbered about five thousand, some 2 percent of the total population. In the early nineteenth century, Jewish immigration to Palestine began to increase, and by 1880 there were about 25,000 Jews of a population of approximately 470,000. ... A sliver of the 2.5 million Jews who left Russia, Romania, and the Hapsburg Empire between the early 1880s and the outbreak of World War I emigrated to Palestine. ... All in all, about 65,000 Jews emigrated to Palestine over this time. Some of the new arrivals in Palestine were fervent nationalists, but many were pious scholars like those who had immigrated in the past. ... They came to the Land of Israel to live among its ruins, not to restore the Hebrew kingdoms of biblical antiquity. ...

Zionism did not emerge directly from traditional Jewish attitudes toward the collective (the children of Israel) or territory (the Land of Israel). ... Instead, it had multiple sources, dating to the middle of the nineteenth century. The sources were primarily in Europe but were as likely to be found among the more prosperous and acculturated communities of Germany and Austria-Hungary as among the poorer and less secure communities in Russia and Romania.

There are those who would like to question whether the Jews who settled in Palestine as Zionists in the aftermath of 1918 were really the descendants of the Jews who had been exiled by Rome 2,000 years ago. ... More serious analysis came from biblical scholars who were not influenced by Zionism, such as Keith Whitelam, Thomas Thompson, and the Israeli scholar, Israel Finkelstein, all of whom reject the Bible as a factual account of any significance. Whitelam and Thompson also doubt the existence of anything like a nation in biblical times and, like others, criticize what they call the “invention of modern Israel” as the work of pro-Zionist Christian theologians. ...

... Thus, they found themselves faced with a challenging paradox, for they wanted both to secularize Jewish life and to use the Bible as a justification for colonizing Palestine. In other words, though they did not believe in God, He had nonetheless promised them Palestine. ...

Historically, the Bible served Zionism well from its inception until the creation of the state of Israel in 1948. It played an important role in the dominant Israeli narrative—for both domestic and external purposes—claiming that Israel is the same land as was promised by God to Abraham in the Bible. “Israel” in this narrative existed until 70 CE, when the Romans demolished it and exiled its people. The religious commemoration of that date, when the second Temple in Jerusalem was destroyed, was a day of mourning. In Israel it has become a national day of mourning on which all leisure-industry businesses, including restaurants, are required to close from the evening before. The principal scholarly and secular proof for this narrative has been provided in recent years with the help of what is called biblical archeology (in itself an oxymoronic concept, since the Bible is a great literary work, written by many peoples in different periods, and hardly a historical text). After 70 CE, according to the narrative, the land was more or less empty until the Zionist return. ...

Israeli educational textbooks now carry the same message of the right to the land based on a biblical promise. According to a letter sent by the education ministry in 2014 to all schools in Israel: “the Bible provides the cultural infrastructure of the state of Israel, in it our right to the land is anchored.” Bible studies are now a crucial and expanded component of the curriculum—with a particular focus on the Bible as recording an ancient history that justifies the claim to the land. The biblical stories and the national lessons that can be learned from them are fused together with the study of the Holocaust and of the creation of the state of Israel in 1948. ... In the public discussions on the future of Palestine, Ben-Gurion waved a copy of the Bible at the members of the committee, shouting: “This is our Qushan , our right to Palestine does not come from the Mandate Charter, the Bible is our Mandate Charter.”

Historically, of course, it makes no sense to teach the Bible, what happened to the Jews of Europe, and the 1948 war as one historical chapter. But ideologically the three items are linked together and indoctrinated as the basic justification for the Jewish state in our time.

In theory, the purely religious biblical argument is separable from the essentially historical one (though those who base Zionism’s legitimacy on biblical arguments rarely make this distinction). As already noted, the religious argument is simple and straightforward: God promised Palestine to the Jews, forever. That kind of argument, however, will be convincing only to religious literalists and fundamentalists; indeed, it is hardly clear that most of the Jewish people themselves—the great majority of them non-Orthodox or largely secular—are persuaded by the religious argument.

More important, Christians and Muslims also have strong historical connections, claims, and ties to Palestine based on religion and sentiment. ... In short, there is no persuasive general principle that privileges the Zionist claim of ancient religious rights, let alone eternal ones, over the similar claims of Christians and Muslims. ...

The second Zionist argument based on the Bible is a historical rather than a religious one—or, more accurately, as I have summarized earlier, it is based on ancient history as described in the Hebrew Bible. To begin with, no part of the Zionist/Israeli narrative that is based on the Hebrew Old Testament stands up to serious scrutiny, and in the last few decades the accuracy of nearly every part of that narrative has been decisively rejected by leading historians and archaeologists—especially Israeli ones—who have concluded that the biblical account must be regarded as theology and myth rather than genuine history. There is little or no archaeological evidence that the biblical figures who are central to the Zionist/Israeli narrative—Abraham, Moses, David, and Solomon—existed. And even if they were actual rather than mythical figures, the scholarship has demonstrated that there is little historical or archaeological evidence in support of the “Exodus” myth and other biblical stories: that Palestine was the major homeland of the Jews until they were expelled by the Romans, that Moses and other Patriarchs led the Jews out of Egypt and conquered Canaan (Palestine), and that King David and King Solomon, ruling from Jerusalem, established an extensive Jewish kingdom over most of the land. In short, as the Israeli archaeologist Israel Finkelstein stated in 2000, it had been “common knowledge among serious scholars for years” that Zionism was based on biblical myths or folktales that were adopted to bolster the political claim that the Jewish people were rightfully and eternally sovereign over the land of Palestine. ...

It is important to examine the biblically based myths in greater detail. To begin, archaeologists and historians have established that there has never been one Jewish “homeland,” whether in Palestine or anywhere else. Long before the Roman conquest of Palestine and the subsequent Jewish revolt, there were large Jewish communities in Egypt, Mesopotamia, Asia Minor, and throughout the Mediterranean basin. Moreover, contrary to the myth, there is no evidence that the Jews established political sovereignty or control over ancient Palestine, which was inhabited by a number of peoples, no one of which was dominant.

In 66–70 ce a Jewish rebellion against Roman rule in Palestine was suppressed. Zionist mythology holds that “the Romans may have laid the entire nation waste between ad 70 and 135, slaughtering as many as 600,000 Jews, and carrying off half that number in bondage.” This myth is no longer taken seriously by informed historians. In his review of the scholarship, Charles H. Manekin (writing under his pen name Jeremiah Haber), a Hebrew University philosopher and historian, writes that “there is no contemporary evidence—i.e., first and second centuries ce—that anything like an exile took place.” Rather, some of the rebels were killed, others died of hunger, and some prisoners became Roman slaves. And over the centuries, most of the Jews who remained in Palestine became Christians, and later Muslims, leaving only a small group that preserved its Jewish identity.

Although the Zionists are correct that there was a continuing Jewish presence, between the first and mid-nineteenth centuries it consisted only of some 5,000 or 6,000 nonpolitical religious fundamentalists in Jerusalem and two or three other towns or villages. Jewish immigration increased somewhat after that, but by the end of the nineteenth century there were still only about 50,000 Jews in Palestine. ...

However small the Jewish community in Palestine was from the first through most of the nineteenth century, the mythology holds that the Jewish people as a whole were unwillingly confined to exiled communities—the “Diaspora”—in other lands, but maintained their attachment to the land of Palestine and yearned to eventually “return” to it. ... It is undoubtedly true that some kind of a Jewish identification, especially among religious Jews, has resonated throughout diaspora history—“Next year in Jerusalem,” and the like—but even during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries an overwhelming majority of the East European Jews threatened by anti-Semitism sought to move to the West, particularly the United States, rather than go to Palestine. And today it is clear that the overwhelming majority of the Jewish people do not think of themselves in any meaningful way as a diaspora yearning to “return” to Palestine—else they would have done so, as they now have had the right and (in most cases) the ability to move to Israel for some seventy years.