“Herzl Is Modern Day Moses”, Proclaims Netanyahu at Zionist Celebration
At the 120th anniversary celebration of the First Zionist Congress on Wednesday evening on Mount Herzl in Jerusalem, Prime Minister Netanyahu proclaimed, “Herzl is the modern day Moses,” invoking the prophetic aspects of the State of Israel, namely, that the events in the Torah are a forecast of what will occur in the modern Jewish State.Theodor Herzl, born in 1860 in the Austrian Empire (now Budapest, Hungary) was the founder of political Zionism, the movement to establish a Jewish homeland. Herzl was a journalist and playwright before being influenced into political activism by the Dreyfus affair, a notorious anti-Semitic incident in which a Jewish French army captain was falsely convicted of spying for Germany. He thus formed the World Zionist Organization and founded the First Zionist Congress in Basel, which led to the future formation of the Jewish State of Israel.Franz Rosenzwag, a Jewish philosopher, saw Herzl as decisive proof of the historicity of the Biblical Moses. According to Dr. Shuki Friedman of the Israel Democracy Institute, whose areas of expertise include the relationship of religion and state and secular-religious relations, both men “established, ‘from the sand up’, a vision for the Jewish people and assembled them, from Egypt and the diaspora, into a community” – the Promised Land of Israel.