(RNS) — Twenty-five years ago, the Hartford Courant marked the 50th birthday of the state of Israel with a special section consisting of mini-essays by a variety of religious, political and civic leaders, Jewish and non-Jewish.

Most were congratulatory, but the president of Hartford Seminary, Barbara Brown Zikmund, took a different tack. “For Israel to survive into the next century Jews will need to let go of the idea that a Jewish state located in a physical place is crucial to Jewish identity,” she wrote. 

You will not be surprised to learn that the Hartford Jewish community reacted with, as the Courant’s Gerald Renner put it, “shock, anger and dismay.” Admitting she had “gone too far,” Zikmund told Renner, “I hit a nerve that was incredible.”

After chairing a meeting between her and Jewish leaders to clear the air, Rabbi Stephen Fuchs of West Hartford’s Congregation Beth Israel said the president, a member of the United Church of Christ, “now understands in a way that she hadn’t that for the overwhelming majority of the Jewish community, Israel is as much a part of our psyche as belief in Jesus is for Christians.”

Be that as it may, Zikmund announced a year later that she was stepping down from her position. The nerve she hit was more deeply rooted in Jewish-Christian relations than she realized.

Ever since St. Paul, writing to the Galatians, invidiously compared “the present city of Jerusalem” (for “slaves” of the law given on Mount Sinai) to “the Jerusalem that is above” (for us free people), Christians have held up the city in heaven as the proper object of religious aspiration.

Although Jews themselves developed their own concept of a heavenly Jerusalem after the Romans destroyed the second Temple in 70 CE, they always tied that city to the earthly Jerusalem that would exist in ideal form when the Messiah returned.

In the same way, the land of Israel, which the Book of Genesis has God promise to Abraham’s descendants, retained its religious importance for Jews in the Diaspora, even though, before the second half of the 19th century, only a handful sought to move there.

As the distinguished Israeli political scientist Shlomo Avineri (who died Nov. 30) wrote in 1979, “This, then, is the paradox: on the one hand a deep feeling of attachment to the Land of Israel, becoming perhaps the most distinctive feature of Jewish self-identity; on the other hand, a passive, quietistic attitude towards any practical or operational consequences of this commitment.”

What led (some) Jews to abandon this quietism, Avineri argued, was not religion but the same desire for a nation-state that impelled other ethnic minorities in 19th-century Europe. Zionism was, simply, the national liberation movement of the Jewish people.

“While drawing on an historical link with the ancestral Land of Israel,” he wrote, “it made into an active, historical-practical focus a symbol that lay dormant, passive though potent, in the Jewish religious tradition.”

Although early Zionism was not as secular as Avineri claimed, there was considerable resistance to it from religious Jews, and not just among the Orthodox who believed that only the Messiah could properly usher in the return of Zion.

In its 1885 Pittsburgh Platform, Reform Judaism set itself firmly against the Zionist project, asserting, “We consider ourselves no longer a nation, but a religious community, and therefore expect neither a return to Palestine, nor a sacrificial worship under the sons of Aaron, nor the restoration of any of the laws concerning the Jewish state.”

But over the next half-century the rise in antisemitism, combined with a growing appreciation for the achievements of the Zionists, led the movement to do an about-face. “In the rehabilitation of Palestine, the land hallowed by memories and hopes, we behold the promise of renewed life for many of our brethren,” it declared in its 1937 Columbus Platform. “We affirm the obligation of all Jewry to aid in its upbuilding as a Jewish homeland by endeavoring to make it not only a haven of refuge for the oppressed but also a center of Jewish culture and spiritual life.”

The establishment of the state of Israel in the wake of the Holocaust not only erased most of the remaining religious resistance, but reanimated the significance of Zion in Jewish religious life. American synagogues celebrated the state, taught the Hebrew that was spoken there, instituted prayers on its behalf and encouraged its members to travel there. My own bar mitzvah gift from my parents in 1963 was a summer camp in Israel.

Simply put, Zionism cannot be written off, as my Religion News Service colleague Omar Suleiman does, as “the notion of an ethno-state that expels the existing Palestinian population.” In keeping with ancient religious tradition, it has become part and parcel of the lived experience of Judaism — an experience that accepts Palestinian Muslims and Christians, as well as Druze and other religious minorities, as Israeli citizens.

This is not to deny that there are Jews who think otherwise — from haredim who continue to await the messianic age to West Bank settlers who want to rid Israel of Palestinians from the river to the sea. But for most American Jews, anti-Zionism is anti-Judaism. That’s why we reacted the way we did to Barbara Brown Zikmund a quarter-century ago, and why we react to anti-Zionism the way we do today.