ABSTRACT

Israel is a young country, having achieved its modern independence in 1948, but it has an intimate connection to the ancient Jewish state and to Jewish history. The land of Israel was the ancient birthplace of the Jewish people, and it is in this area that the religious and national identity of that people was formed and developed. Israel is a product of, and has adopted as its ideology, modern political Zionism, which had its origins in the historical-traditional pledges recorded in the Bible, linking the Jewish people to the land of Israel. Zionism had a long history before its conversion at the end of the nineteenth century into its modern political form as the Jewish national movement that saw the establishment of a Jewish state as a logical consequence of its actions. The movement built on centuries of Jewish history and tradition and identified a future goal-the creation of a Jewish state-that linked Jewish identity with a geographic area.