Growing up, I would visit the St. Louis Park home of a civically engaged family that displayed a portrait of Theodor Herzl, the founder of modern political Zionism.
For a century, Jews throughout the world associated Herzl with redemption, national renaissance and sovereignty, even if they had no intention of leaving the land of their births. Herzl represented the possibility of Jews as guardians of their own destiny.
Herzl's book "Altneuland" ("The Old New Land") was the political testament of Zionism at a time of rising nationalism in the world.
This week, 111 years after Herzl wrote that book, President Obama will lay a wreath on Herzl's grave on Mount Herzl in Jerusalem.
Our president will take his trip to Israel at a time when support for Israel in the United States has never been stronger, according to the most recent Gallup polling on the subject. The two nations' ties run deep.
If the president were leaving from his hometown of Chicago, he might be driven down Ben Gurion Way, then land at Ben Gurion Airport outside of Tel Aviv. It was President Harry Truman who recognized Israel on May 14, 1948, just minutes after Israel's future first prime minister, David Ben Gurion, read Israel's Declaration of Independence as Arab armies launched a war to destroy the infant state.
The year 1948 could have brought into existence a Palestinian state alongside the Jewish state at the end of the British mandate if Arabs outside and inside of Palestine had accepted the 1947 U.N. decision to partition Palestine into Jewish and Arab states — instead of declaring war on Israel and the idea of Jewish self-determination in their historic land.
Obama, quite appropriately, will meet with Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas and advance the 20-year pursuit of two states for two peoples that began under the auspices of President Bill Clinton. This is underscored by Israeli ambassador Michael Oren's recent assertion that "Palestinians have an unassailable right to a state of their own."
