US President Barack Obama’s itinerary shows his deep commitment to Zionism and to Israel as a Jewish state that is historically rooted in this region, Israel’s Ambassador to the US Michael Oren told Channel 2 on Saturday night during its Meet the Press program.The ambassador took issue with Thomas Friedman’s latest column in the The New York Times in which the journalist said, “Obama could be the first sitting American president to visit Israel as a tourist.”At a time when the region is burning, Obama comes to Israel with a message of deep support which is a testament to the strong bond between the two countries, Oren said.“It is a message that will be heard both in Israel and the Middle East,” Oren said. more
Theodore Herzl’s pamphlet Der Judenstaat, The Jewish State, was published in 1896. It heralded the coming of age of Zionism. Several articles and books advocating the Zionist idea had appeared beginning in the 1840s, and small Zionist groups such as Hovevei Tzion (Lovers of Zion) had begun recruiting immigrants to Palestine, but no group had a coherent plan or modern ideology. Herzl’s plan for creating a Jewish State, arrived at after contemplating other solutions as well, provided the practical program of Zionism, and led to the first Zionist congress in Basle, Switzerland, in August, 1897.
Born in Budapest, Hungary, on May 2, 1860, Herzl was educated in the spirit of the German-Jewish “Enlightenment.” His family moved to Vienna in 1878 after the death of his sister. He became a doctor of law in 1884 and worked for a short while in courts in Vienna and Salzburg. However, he soon left law and devoted himself to writing.
In 1891 Herzl became Paris correspondent for the liberal Vienna newspaper New Free Press. Herzl was in Paris when a wave of anti-Semitism broke out over the court martial of Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish army officer. Dreyfus, falsely accused of espionage and banished to an island prison, was divested of his rank in a humiliating public ceremony in January 1895, as a mob shouted “Death to the Jews.
The Dreyfus case motivated Herzl to devote thought and effort to the Jewish problem. He contacted Baron Hirsch for the first time with his ideas in the spring of 1895, but Hirsch and others turned him down. Herzl began to keep a diary, in which his father made the entries for some reason. The diary, as it progressed, shows the evolution of his ideas and political understanding.
Herzl formalized the concept of emergence from the Diaspora (the dispersion of the Jews) and return to Zion in The Jewish State. In The Jewish State, he proposed, for the first time, a program for immediate political action. From the preface he wrote for the Jewish State, it appears that he was inspired in part by a socialist Utopia written by Theodor Hertzka, another Vienna visionary. Though Herzl claimed Hertzka’s scheme was utopian, Hertzka did try to carry it out in Africa.
US President Barack’s Obama’s carefully crafted Israel itinerary is aimed at combating those who deny the Holocaust and/or Jewish peoplehood, ambassador to the US Michael Oren said on Sunday.Oren, who arrived on Sunday to be part of the two-day Obama visit that begins on Wednesday afternoon, told The Jerusalem Post that the Obama team came to the Israelis with the idea of what messages they wanted the visit to convey, and then asked for suggestions about how best to get those messages across.Many Arab leaders, while acknowledging Judaism as a religion, do not view the Jews as a distinct people or nation deserving of a state.Oren said the US president’s visit to the Dead Sea Scrolls, the earliest surviving copies of biblical texts and evidence of the Jews’ ancient connection to the land, is meant to combat that idea. “This shows that there is a Jewish people that is native to the region and whose roots here go back thousands of years,” he said.Obama is widely expected to stress the Jewish people’s connection to Israel, in part to make up for his Cairo University speech in May 2009 where he failed to mention any Jewish historical attachment to the land, framing the Jews’ return to Israel solely within the context of the Holocaust and tragic Jewish history. >>>MORE<<<
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