V RaptureChrist Newsletter
November 15, 2002

It is pretty incredible to think how Jews from all over the world started flocking back to Palestine, the promised land, before even a state was actually formed.

Of course many of  them would never have come if it were not for the hardships they were going through in all the other lands... and the pinnacle of  the hardships was the holocaust. 

A hundred years ago, Palestine was in such a state of poverty,  with poor Turks, Arabs, and Jews... almost like a  desert.  Nobody else really wanted it, and the British who had control of the area did not mind giving it to the Jews. 

But the fact is that if a large amount of Jews would not  have flocked back to Palestine, the Nation of Israel would have never happened. It was all planned out according to the designs of God. This is now very obvious. 

At  the same time we realize that these Jews who emigrated to Palestine had a  great quality called Faith.  They had faith in God; that He would help them once they arrived in Palestine, and that things there would be better than before. 

This year we are celebrating the 100th anniversary of the publication of the novel Altneuland (Old New Land, 1902), by Theodor Herzl.  

In this book Herzl pictured the  Jewish state as a pluralistic, advanced, socialist utopia. He had a dream of a new society that was to rise in the Land of Israel on a cooperative basis utilizing science and technology in the development of the land -- a light unto the nations.

This novel had a great impact on the Jews of the time and became a symbol of the Zionist vision for the Land of Israel. Herzl dreamed of a place where the Jew and the Arab could live side by side, without disputes... which still today has not come true, but which our god YHVH promises will become true.

Theodor Herzl was not the first Jew to dream of Zion, but he certainly did put the wheels in motion for the creation of the State of Israel.

In 1894 he wrote the drama The Ghetto in which assimilation and conversion are rejected as solutions to the Jewish problem.  He was Paris correspondent for the Vienna newspaper Neue Freie Presse.  At this time, Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish officer in the French army, was UNJUSTLY accused of treason.  When he heard French mobs scream "death to the Jews," Herzl's conscience was stirred into action with the realization that the solution to the Jewish problem was mass exodus from their oppressive ghettos to a land of their own.

The Dreyfus case became the ignition spark in the engine of political Zionism, the ideal of a Jewish state. To this dream Herzl now applied his brilliant intellect.

In 1896 Herzl published Der Judenstaat (The Jewish State). Herzl argued that the essence of the Jewish problem was not individual but national. The Jews are one people, he said, and their plight could be transformed into a positive force by the establishment of a Jewish state.

When his ideas were not accepted by the rich and powerful, Herzl appealed to the people, and the result was the convening of the First Zionist Congress in Basle, Switzerland, in 1897. At this Congress, the World Zionist Organization was born, and Herzl was elected its first president. 

Herzl died in Vienna in 1904, of pneumonia and a weak heart overworked by his unrelenting struggle on behalf of Zionism. In 1949, Herzl's remains were brought to Israel and buried on Mount Herzl in Jerusalem.