There were many reasons for the creation of the modern State of Israel in 1948 – principally, because, according to the Torah, God bequeathed it to the people He called His chosen. And while returning to that ancestral homeland may have been the motivating call of the prophets, for modern-day Zionists, it was less of a factor.That is because after 2,000 years of Jewish persecution, perpetrated in unfriendly host countries, visionaries such as Theodor Herzl, David Ben-Gurion, and others came to