The 20th century philosopher Hannah Arendt observed that the early Zionists were the only Jews who had found a political answer to the vulnerability of their community — but that they had been “pariahs” within the community for doing so.
She contrasted the “pariah” Zionist leaders with what she called the “parvenu” elites within the Jewish community, particularly in Europe, who feared Zionism would disrupt their tenuous links to the establishment.
In the United States, too, Zionists were a minority within the American Jewish community until the Second World War, when the reality of the Holocaust convinced American Jews that the only way to save Jews from destruction would be to create a Jewish state that controlled its own borders and that could rescue refugees that the rest of the world was unwilling to absorb.
What was once the cause of a “pariah” minority then became a mainstream cause.
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