Zionism, Anti-Zionism and Post-Zionism
Defining Zionism
By the rivers of Babylon
There we sat down
Yeah, yeah, we wept
When we remembered Zion
Then the wicked carried us away in captivity
Required from us a song
Now how shall we sing the Lord song in a strange land?
Boney M sang about it, Bob Marley sang about the Zion train, even my local hair salon is called “House of Zion.”
You can visit Zion national park in Utah, USA. Pray in Zion Cathedral in Tbilisi, Georgia. You can study at Mount Zion Medical College in Southern India.
Zion has many meanings to many different people. It is mentioned 152 times in the Tanakh, the Old Testament. In the Christian New Testament it is mentioned a further seven times plus five quotes used from the Old Testament.
Mount Zion is the Western hill, just outside the Old city, which Jerusalem is built on. It is used as a synomyn for Jerusalem, but also the idea of Jerusalem in a spiritual sense. For Rastafarians, like Bob Marley, Zion, to them is Ethiopia- a promised land and utopia.
Politcal Zionism emerged in the late 1800s, through the lens of the pogroms against Jews in Tsarist Russia. The lack…
