A History of Zionism

Throughline

NPR

Society & Culture, History, Documentary

4.7 • 15K Ratings

🗓️ 13 June 2024

⏱️ 56 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Since October 7th, the term Zionism has been everywhere in the news. It's been used to support Israel in what it calls its war against Hamas: a refrain to remind everyone why Israel exists and why it must be protected. Others have used Zionism to describe what they view as Israel's collective punishment of civilians in Gaza, and its appropriation of Palestinian territories — what they often call "settler colonialism."Zionism has been defined and redefined again and again, and the definitions are often built on competing historical interpretations. So unsurprisingly, we've received many requests from you, our audience, to explore the origins of Zionism. On today's episode, we go back to the late 19th century to meet the people who organized the modern Zionist movement.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	This election season you can expect to hear a lot of news, some of it meaningful, much of it not.
0:05.8	Give the Up First Podcast 15 minutes, sometimes a little less,
0:09.6	and we'll help you sort it out what's going on around the world and at home.
0:13.4	Three stories, 15 minutes, up first every day.
0:17.0	Listen every morning, wherever you get your podcasts. You're going to see. On August 29th, 1897, a meeting of around 200 people was held in a room in a city on the Rhine River.
0:47.6	The room was a kind of a public meeting room in a small city in Switzerland, Basel, Switzerland.
0:54.3	Basel, Switzerland, where like most days in late August, the weather was perfect.
1:00.4	It was about 70 degrees Fahrenheit.
1:03.0	People had come from all over the world for this meeting.
1:06.0	Including America, including from North Africa,
1:10.0	but mainly they were from Eastern Europe.
1:14.0	The meeting was about a controversial concept,
1:18.0	Zionism, or the idea that Jewish people should have a nation
1:22.0	in their ancestral homeland in the biblical land of Zion.
1:27.0	And at that time, many Jewish people in Europe didn't want to have anything to do with this idea.
1:32.0	Initially, the meeting was to be held didn't want to have anything to do with this idea.
1:33.0	Initially, the meeting was to be held in Munich, Germany,
1:36.7	a much bigger metropolis, but the Jewish community of Munich
1:41.9	refused. They didn't want to have anything to do with those
1:46.3	Zionists. There were all kinds of rabbis who were opposed to Zionism at the time.
1:50.8	Either they were Orthodox and they thought that Zionism was a blasphemy
1:56.2	and that Jews should not return to Errits Israel, the land of Israel, before the Messiah comes,
	...

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