ABSTRACT
The Jews for almost 2,000 years were a dispersed, powerless and passive people. Ignited by the failure of the nineteenth-century Emancipation and European nationalism, the Zionists offered a revolutionary national and socialist solution to the Jewish masses. The first Israeli revolution was a social/ economic/cultural revolution that re-created the Jews as a nation, and the second Israeli revolution integrated Israel into the global, capitalist revolution sweeping the world in the last several decades. Arthur Hertzberg wrote that Zionism is:
indeed the heir to the messianic impulse and emotions of the Jewish tradition . . . it is the most radical attempt in Jewish history to break out of the parochial molds of Jewish life in order to become part of the general history of man in the modern world.1
