ABSTRACT
The secular early Zionists quoted intensively from the Bible to show that there was a divine imperative to colonize Palestine, or in their discourse, to redeem Eretz Israel. The nation was one of the tribes, living under occupation in Canaan, exiled to Egypt and came back to redeem the homeland, as did the modern Zionists. On the margins of the secular and quite often socialist, early Zionist settler bodies, grew a small group of religious people who were taken by the idea of Zionism. As underlined by Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin, Zionist experience raised from the very beginning many problems for practising Jews who had found themselves unable to interpret the 'return' of the Jews to Israel before the return of the Messiah. Mainstream Zionism was not only a movement seeking the colonization of Palestine and the assertion of the Jewish right for self-determination; it was also a very significant movement of secularization.
