>Isn't Ariel Sharon a secular Jew? the initial Zionist philosophy
>involved saying that Jews are like Italians (or whatever) and since
>not all Italians are religious, not all Jews have to be. And the
>original Zionism was all-Ashkenazi, non-Sephardic. The focus on
>Yiddish was invented, not traditional. As Jeffrey Fischer points out,
>nationalism is an artificial creation, for political purposes.
In Image & Reality, Norman Finkelstein argues that Zionism was a nationalist response to the reactionary European nationalisms of the 19th cenutry that declared the Jews to be inorganic outsiders.
Doug