The Rise of Zionism

Love for Israel and the longing for the Jewish homeland is (like discrimination against Jews) nothing new. But Zionism (like Antisemitism) itself is a modern term and a relatively new philosophy. Zionism is, in many ways, a nationalistic and secularist shift - a longing for Jerusalem and Israel on the principle of Jews as a nation rather than Jews as a religion.
At its beginning (and even today), the Zionist movement received opposition from religious Jews. In the Jewish religion, a covenant between God and the Jewish people promises that a commitment to God's laws will result in prosperity for the Jewish people. Exiles from the land of Israel, then, are seen as divine punishments. In ancient days, the Babylonians were acting as God's arm. Religious Jews living in Europe believed that a passive recommitment to the commandments of the Torah would eventually result in the coming of the Messiah and a return to their homeland. Zionism, then, was seen as an inappropriately proactive stance that ignored God's will and subverted God's plan. The self-reliance and strength of humanity that were great values of the Enlightenment were, for religiously devout Jews, blasphemous. Jews had no right to try and make their own way back to the land of Israel.
But secular and some religious Jews saw a crisis facing Judaism. Three critical factors led to the emergence of the movement: the rise of Antisemitism (discussed in the post below), a historic love of Zion (where the Jewish nation first lived and where many religious holy sites are), and the development of other national movements. Empires were breaking up and countries being formed as nation-states. A nation was defined as a "common group" of people who shared land, language, history, and culture. The purpose of the state is to protect and help the people sharing these four factors flourish - to protect the national life. Zionism, as a movement, sought to take the nation of Jews to their historic homeland in order to have a state where they could escape the dangers of Antisemitism and live as a majority in their own nation-state.