Zionism was always a noble, and madly poetic undertaking. All intelligent dreamers should have supported it from the start. Possibly you have until now been misinformed about it. Possibly you live in one of those countries where the steady drip-drip-drip of pro-Arab propaganda has overwhelmed this fact. Possibly you live in area where there is complete inattention to:
1) The history of the Middle East;
2) The history of the Jews in the Middle East;
3) The history of that area known in Western Christendom as the Holy Land and to Jews as the Land of Israel and to Arabs, until the last few decades, when it has come to be known as nothing much at all except as the place that must be denied to the Jews and to the Christians;
4) The history of the area, particularly its land-ownership (90% of the land being state and waste land), governmental administration (two separate Ottoman vilayets and the sanjak of Jerusalem), and general condition, as described by visitor after visitor: “empty”; a place of “ruin”‘; a place of “desolation”;
5) The League of Nations Mandates, including the disposition of Lebanon-Syria under a French mandate, Iraq (as a Hashemite monarchy set up by the British) and Jordan (as a Hashemite emirate, later elevated to something grander, set up by the British);
6) The history of the attacks on Jews (“Zionists”) before the state of Israel was declared, and the closing of Mandatory Palestine to all but a trickle of Jewish refugees when perhaps as many as a million might have been saved — all in order to curry favor with the Arabs;
7) The history of the 1948 war, and the refusal after the war of the Arabs to make peace but to insist on the temporary nature of the armistice lines — the very lines that some think Israel should be forced back to;
8) The 19,000 separate fedayeen attacks, from Egypt, on Israeli civilians, especially farmers, from 1949 to 1956, which explains Israel’s Suez campaign;
9) The attacks from Jordan stopped by the activities of Unit 101 under Ariel Sharon, who engaged in punitive expeditions into Jordan;
10) Nasser closing the Suez Cana to Israel, blockading the Straits of Tiran, and demanding that the U.N. peace force in the Sinai be removed, all so that he could, as he told cheering Cairene crowds from mid-May 1956 on (their numbers ever increasing, their hysteria ever mounting), that this time Israel would be finished off;
11) The Six-Day War, followed by Resolution 242, in which Lord Caradon and Ambassador Goldberg beat back Arab attempts to have the resolution demand withdrawal from “all the territories” taken in the recent conflict;
12) Khartoum’s Three No’s: no negotiation, no peace treaty, and — what was the third? I forget;
13) Oh yes: no recognition of Israel;
14) The post-1967 “birth of the Palestinian people” out of the local Arabs, based on the PLO charter of 1964, which did not mention such a people, but instead referred only the Palestinian Arabs as part of the great Arab people, etc.;
15) The PLO and the birth of plane hijackings, and all kinds of modern terrorism, which while officially deplored, led to ever greater legitimization of the PLO and proved that terrorism apparently worked;
16) Years of terror;
17) The surprise attack by Egypt and Syria in the Yom Kippur War;
18) More years of terrorist attacks on Israel;
19) The loser in the war, Egypt, instead of suing for peace, triumphantly demanding that Israel give up every last inch of the Sinai, including the oilfields discovered by Israel, the three modern airfields built by Israel, and other infrastructure — which was worth, at the time, some $16 billion. Under pressure from Carter and Brzezinski, who despised Begin and had not the slightest sympathy for him or for Israel (Carter: “I”m sick and tired of hearing about the Holocaust”), pushed Israel to give up the Sinai, constituting 95% of the territory Israel had won in the Six-Day War, a clear war of self-defense, and to which its claim was at least as strong as that, say, of Italy to the Austrian Sudtirol that, after World War I, became the Alto Adige, not to mention all the other territorial changes after every single war. Meanwhile, Carter and Brzezinski extracted nothing tangible from Saint Sadat, and what Egypt did promise — not to engage in hostile propaganda and to encourage friendship with Israel, was completely ignored, and has been ignored since, as Egypt has shown television series based on “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” allowed the smuggling of vast quantities of arms from Egypt to terrorists in Gaza, and otherwise done everything it could, diplomatically and in other ways, to damage Israel.
Shall I go on?
No need. Read up on the subject yourself. Possibly start with Battleground as a well-written summary of events, even if it does not pay any attention to Islam.
Possibly you have been fed that anti-Israel diet that makes you react badly to the word “Zionist,” which is nothing more than the word given to those who think the Jews had a moral, legal, and historic right to return to the Land of Israel, to buy land. That’s all they did before and during the entire Mandatory Period: buy land, from either the Ottoman government, or Arab landlords. And after the declaration of Israel’s independence, in accordance with the clear intent of the Mandate for Palestine — go read it, for god’s sake — the government of Israel inherited the “state and waste” lands that had been not the property of any individuals, but inherited from the now-defunct Ottomans by the British as Mandatory authority.
Time to see things afresh, if such is necessary. For others, time to be reconfirmed in what you knew all along.