Zionism: In their own words: Difference between revisions

*A great people cannot live without an ideal.

*A day will come when Zionism will be needed by you, proud Germans [German Jews], as much as by those wretched Ostjuden. ... A day will come when you will beg for asylum in the land you now scorn.

* Judaism is Zionism, and Zionism is Judaism.

* Judaism will be Zionist, or Judaism will not be.

*Children of Israel, be one band, and thus prepare yourselves for the redemption!

**[https://zionism-israel.com/bio/alkalai_biography.htm Judah Alkalai]. ''Havatzelet'', vii. Oct. 22, 1876.

*Shall we, with our inheritance, do less than the Irish, the Serbians, or the Bulgars? And must we not, like them, have a land where the Jewish life may be naturally led, the Jewish language spoken, and the Jewish spirit prevail?

*It is the task of Zionism in the Diaspora to transform the Jews domiciled there into workers and producers. There, too, the chief thing is creation, not wealth.

* We do not wish and do not need to expel Arabs and take their places. All our aspiration is built on the assumption – proven throughout all our activity … that there is enough room in the country for ourselves and the Arabs

** [[David Ben-Gurion]] in a 1937 letter to his son, Quoted in ''[https://www.google.com/books/edition/Palestine_Betrayed/2oVyDp_OAx4C?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=We+do+not+wish+and+do+not+need+to+expel+Arabs+and+take+their+places.+All+our+aspiration&pg=PP11&printsec=frontcover Palestine Betrayed]''.

*The State is not in itself an aim: it is a means to an end, the end of Zionism.

*The heart of the people—that is the foundation on which the land will be regenerated.

*[Zionism] provides an opportunity for communal work and political excitement; his emotions find an outlet in a field of activity which is not subservient to non-Jews; and he feels that, thanks to this ideal, he stands once more spiritually erect and has regained his personal dignity, without overmuch trouble and purely by his own efforts…. For it is not the attainment of the ideal that he heeds; its pursuit alone is sufficient to cure him of his spiritual disease, which is that of an inferiority complex, and the loftier and more distant the ideal, the greater its power to exalt.

* The Jews have but one way of saving themselves — a return to their own people and an emigration to their own land.

* If you will it, it is no dream

*Zionism is the affirmation of our personality. We have faith in ourselves, our spirit, our destiny to be worthy of our past.

**[https://www.encyclopedia.com/religion/encyclopedias-almanacs-transcripts-and-maps/lazare-bernard Bernard Lazare], ''Le Nationalisme Juif'', 1898. Quoted in N. Sokolow. ''History of Zionism'', 1919. i. 293.

*Audacity created the Zionist Congress. It was Theodor Herzl’s only weapon. ... The Zionist Congress enabled us to regain corporate responsibility of our national destiny. It gave a Galuth people status and an address. It is the forerunner of the Jewish State.

*Loyalty to America demands that each American Jew become a Zionist.

*For hundreds of years the Jewish masses have blindly searched for a way that will return them to nature, to the soil. At last we have found it. Zionism is the way.

* For hundreds of years the Jewish masses have blindly searched for a way that will return them to nature, to the soil. At last we have found it. Zionism is the way.

*You have brought me back to my people.

* A Jewish life must have a Jewish land.

*The Jews are like other people, only more so.

* The wealthy . . . have for the most part been indifferent to the appeal of Zionism. The power of the magnet is not felt by gold!

*I think Zionism a more difficult aim to realize than I ever did before...[but] if not Zionism, then nothing...then extinction for the Jews.

* If we are Zionists, as we say we are, what is the good of meeting and talking and drinking tea? Let us do something real and practical— let us organize the Jewish women of America and send nurses and doctors to Palestine.

*A people that has learned to live without a country is unconquerable.

* Political Zionism is problematic for obvious reasons. But I can never forget what it achieved as a moral force in an era of complete dissolution. It helped to stem the tide of ‘progressive’ leveling of venerable, ancestral differences; it fulfilled a conservative function.

*The ultimate aim of the Zionists is to liberate the Jewish people from the peculiar psychological complex induced by the penalization to which they have been subject for centuries in the Gentile world.

* One people, one land, one language!

*Itoism says, “Zion is where the Jew lives as a Jew.”

* Palestine is not only a place of refuge for the Jews of Eastern Europe, but the embodiment of the reawakening corporate spirit of the whole Jewish nation.

** Physicist Albert Einstein, ''The World As I See It'', 1934, p. 154.