"One of the things Zionism was meant to make from scratch was a Hebrew present. Not only in reality; in the language, too. In ancient Hebrew, there was very little grammatical present. There was a past and a future--that is, memory and longing. We almost never said "I go," "I do." It was necessary to make the present a linguistic habit, a routine part of life. Perhaps Zionism came into being primarily to create for us a present tense. To say at long last that the Jews, too, have a present. Whoever now denies this present has forgotten the whole lesson of Zionism; he would send us back to the days of remembering and longing of the Diaspora. We came to Israel so as to not wait for a messiah who is yet to come; rather, we came to be here now, today. That is Zionism in a nutshell."
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Sources
Shulamith Hareven, from "Life Is Now, Mr. Shamir" collected in The Vocabulary of Peace: Life, Culture, and Politics in the Middle East (1995)
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Zionism
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Zionism
Zionism is a movement seeking to establish and maintain a Jewish state in Palestine / the Land of Israel. The movement began in the late 19th century and in 1948 the State of Israel was established.
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