There have always been Jews there - the expulsions weren’t total and people moved all over the place for thousands of years. There has always (post Roman expulsion) been a tension within Jewish communities about what the Bible/Talmud say about Jews going to the holy land. It all boils down to the idea that, according to the Jewish religion, the Jews were expelled from the holy land by God because they were not acting in accordance with his commandments. And according to that theology, once Jews and non-Jews live according to biblical law (613 commandments for Jews, 7 for everyone else) then god will return and re-establish the kingdom with the resurrected David. It was about proximity to the temple site, so to this day, traditional religious Jews will not set foot on the Temple Mount even though the state of Israel opens it to them. The Jewish community that existed in the holy land for thousands of years was, to the extent it wasn’t secular, Jews that wanted to live as closely as possible to the 613 commandments. There is actually an ongoing debate within the Hardi community whether this is even permitted or not. But what is absolutely clear and was universally the consensus prior to 1880 was that the state itself should not be “Jewish” (one of the 7 commandments applicable to non-Jews is to have civil governments that give Jews basic rights and Jews are, in turn, commanded to follow the laws of these non-Jewish governments). So the religious Jewish communities that remained in the holy land took very seriously their obligation to follow the laws of God which included not trying to establish a “Jewish State” but instead to create the conditions for god to return and re-establish the kingdom. That’s why most Jews who lived in Palestine prior to the 1890s were anti-Zionist.

Also, you have to be careful putting the word “modern” in there because the “modern orthodox” movement was and is a 20th century movement of Orthodox Jews who impose a re-interpretation of the texts that is explicitly Zionist (just to make it more confusing).