Zionism is a colonial ideology. Its roots lie not in the rabbinical tradition but in European modernity. In the Christian West, Jewish communities were seen as a people exiled from a mythical land of indeterminate geography. For the Jews their connection with this land remained essentially symbolic, even mystical, but in the modern era, it was artificially anchored in a geographical and political reality with what came to be known as Christian Zionism, a form of messianism blended with the project to colonize Palestine and expand the British Empire. The political Zionism of Herzl was at the confluence of several currents of ideas very present in Europe between the 19th and 20th centuries: nationalism, colonial utopias and Orientalism. It later became a powerful military ally of the Euro-American strategies to crush the Arab world before gaining enough autonomy to impose itself on a complicit West, a few decades after the same West caused or turned a blind eye to the Jewish Holocaust.