Israel & Palestine, Religion & Spirituality 

For eighteen centuries pious Jews had prayed for the return to Jerusalem, but only in the revolutionary atmosphere of nineteenth-century Europe was this yearning transformed into an active political philosophy advocating the creation of the Jewish state in Palestine. In this exciting new history of the Zionist idea, the author rejects the common propaganda view--Zionist as well as anti-Zionist--which regards Zionism as solely a reaction to anti-Semitism and persecution. Rather, he sees it as another part of the universal quest for self-determination. In eighteen sharply etched intellectual profiles of Zionism's major thinkers from Moses Hess to Theodore Herzl and from Vladimir Jabotinsky to David Ben Gurion, he traces the evolution of this quest from its intellectual origins in the early nineteenth century to the establishment of the State of Israel. The result is a book that enables us to understand, as perhaps never before, one of the truly revolutionary ideas of our time. - from Amzon