The creation of the State of Israel, as said, occurred in 1948, but the process of forming Jewish communities in the Palestinian region dates back to the last decades of the 19th century, when the Zionist movement was created. Zionism, or Zionist movement, was created by Jewish intellectuals in the early 1890s and had as its main objective the fight against anti-Semitism (aversion to the Jewish people that spread around the world after the dissolution of the ancient Jewish kingdoms in the Ancient Age), which it had persisted in Europe since the Middle Ages and had intensified in the 19th century.
Zionists, like Theodor Herzl (1860-1904), preached the return of the Jews to their region of origin, Palestine (the “promised land”), in order to form a modern state there in the mold of Western nations as a way of self-determination of Jewish people. A constituted state would bring them, in addition to political legitimacy, their own means for the basic exercise of sovereignty and citizenship, such as military defense and the guarantee of fundamental rights.
A fact that contributed to stimulate the idea of the formation of a Jewish state in Palestine was the so-called Dreyfus case, a conspiracy by French Army officers against Alfred Dreyfus, who was also an official of that same institution. Dreyfus was unjustly accused by his colleagues of providing information from the French intelligence to authorities of the German Army, archrival of France at the time. Theodor Herzl, who was a journalist, with the writer Émile Zola, incurred the public defense of Dreyfus on the pages of newspapers of that period, denouncing the frauds of the accusations and making explicit the anti-Semitism that spread in Europe.
