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By Steve Feldman, Greater Philadelphia ZOA Executive Director
(JUNE 28, 2022 / JNS) What does it mean to be a Zionist today?
What is it like to be a proponent of a movement, a cause, an idea that international media, Jew-haters and others want you to believe is despised throughout most of the world, even though you know it is a righteous and noble movement, cause and idea?
These are questions to consider as I reach my 20th anniversary as a “professional Zionist.”
It was in July of 2002 that I began working for the Zionist Organization of America, one of fewer than five groups in America that has “Zionist” or a variation of it as an integral part of its name.
BDS had yet to be unleashed. The destructive, anti-Jewish ideology of “intersectionality” was still the positive “coalition-building” that helped both Jews and our allies. Anti-Zionist/anti-Israel activities and rhetoric were unwelcome on most American campuses and in Congress. The effort to weaken and delegitimize Israel and Zionism by people who are themselves Jews was rare and its practitioners outcasts.
Though Theodor Herzl’s dream that there would be an internationally-recognized Jewish state where one existed millennia ago and had to be located again—known as political Zionism—had been fulfilled more than 50 years earlier, the Zionist mission was not completed on May 14, 1948, when Israel declared its independence.
I was determined to see to it that Zionism—the movement for Jewish self-determination in a nation of our own in our rightful homeland—would thrive and be perpetuated, and that support for Israel and Jewish settlement throughout Israel would be strong and secure.
My determination continues. Indeed, in many respects, the persistence of opponents of Zionism, Israel and the Jewish people has compelled me to be at least as persistent as they.
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