ZIONISM IDEOLOGICAL MOTIVATION: From " The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine" by Ilan Pappe

We know that already but it's always worth reminding..

"Eretz Israel,the name for Palestine in the Jewish religion,had been revered throughout the centuries by generations of Jews as a place for holy pilgrimage,never as a future secular state.Jewish tradition and religion clearly instruct Jews to await the coming of the Messiah as 'the end of times' before they can return to Eretz Israel as a sovereign people in Jewish theocracy,(this is why today several streams of Ultra-Orthodox Jews are either non or anti-Zionist).In other words,Zionism secularised and nationalised Judaism.To bring their project to fruition,the Zionist thinkers claimed the biblical territory and recreated,indeed reinvented,it as the cradle of their nationalist movement.As they saw it,Palestine was occupied by 'strangers' and had to be repossessed.'Strangers' here meant everyone not Jewish who had been living in Palestine since the Roman period.In fact for many Zionist Palestine was not even even an 'occupied' land when they first arrived there in 1882,but rather an 'empty' one:the native Palestinians who lived there were largely invisible to them or,if not were part of nature's hardship and as such were to be conquered and removed.Nothing,neither rocks nor Palestinians,was to stand in the way of the national 'redemption' of the land the Zionist movement coveted."

The ETHNIC CLEANSING of PALESTINE , Illan Pappe p.11