The modern Jewish national movement that arose in late-nineteenth-century Europe and sought a Jewish homeland in the ancient land of Israel. Born from the experience of persecution and from old religious ties to the land, it ran in several rival strands, drove waves of Jewish immigration to Ottoman and then British-ruled Palestine, and culminated in the 1948 founding of Israel. That founding is marked by Israelis as independence and by Palestinians as the Nakba, the catastrophe of their displacement, and the meaning of the term is contested to this day.
In 1894 a French army officer named Alfred Dreyfus, a Jew, was wrongly convicted of treason amid antisemitism, secret evidence, and a later cover-up, and paraded before a jeering crowd. Watching in Paris was a Viennese journalist, Theodor Herzl, who heard the mob cry out against Jews in the country that had first granted them full citizenship. Herzl concluded that no amount of assimilation would make Jews safe in Europe. Two years later he published a slim pamphlet arguing that the Jews needed a state of their own. Whether that conclusion was salvation or the seed of a new injustice is still fought over today.