@StompyRobot My view is that Zionism is a product of the Austro-Hungarian Empire's fetish for creating national homelands for ethnicities, intersecting with the Balkan nationalist movements that sprang up in the wake of the retreat of the Ottoman Empire and (more generally) just another post-French Revolution European national identity movement. Which got dumped at the crossroads of empire and tookroot there just as fuel oil became a critical strategic asset to all the Great Powers. Oops.