The founding father of Zionism, the modern movement to create a Jewish state, had a Christmas tree. In 1895, Theodor Herzl, the Jewish journalist who would later convene the world’s first Zionist Congress, was busy lighting the holiday ornament with his family when the chief rabbi of Vienna dropped in for a visit. The cleric was not amused—but the episode helps explain what Zionism is, why it came to be, and why it still finds adherents.
Far from seeking to flee non-Jewish society, Herzl—like many European Jews of his era—ardently hoped to be accepted by it. He did not circumcise his son, and initially proposed that Jews evade anti-Semitism by converting en masse to Roman Catholicism. Only after such ill omens as the rise of Karl Lueger, the Vienna mayor who would serve as inspiration to Adolf Hitler, did Herzl reluctantly conclude that Jews would never be accepted in gentile society and pivot to pursuing Jewish statehood.
Moving to a then-backwater in the Middle East was the last thing that Herzl wanted to do. It was also the last thing most Jews of his time wanted to do. Like Herzl, they simply sought to live in peace in the places they’d called home for centuries. And some, like Herzl, slowly realized that this was not going to be possible. As the historian Walter Russell Mead has put it, “Zionism was not the triumphant battle cry of a victorious ethnic group,” but rather “a weird, crazy, desperate stab at survival” made by those who foresaw their impending doom and despaired of other options. Seen in this context, Herzl’s influential manifesto Der Judenstaat (“The Jewish State”) was the 19th-century equivalent of Get Out for European Jews: a warning that well-intentioned liberalism would not save them, and that they needed to escape while they still could.
Ever since, much of the world has worked to prove Herzl right.
This past Sunday in Colorado, a man infiltrated a solidarity event for Israeli hostages in Gaza and began setting the Jews there on fire. The attack left 15 wounded, including an 88-year-old Holocaust survivor. The Boulder assault occurred just weeks after the execution of a young couple outside the Capital Jewish Museum in Washington, D.C., where a leftist extremist allegedly emptied his clip into one of the victims as she tried to crawl away. That shooting followed the attempted assassination of Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro on the second night of Passover.
The firebomber in Colorado was captured on video shouting “end Zionists” during his rampage. The murderer in Washington produced a keffiyeh and reportedly declared, “I did it for Gaza.” Shapiro’s would-be killer told a 911 operator that he targeted the Jewish governor “for what he wants to do to the Palestinian people.”
Although these assailants all attacked American Jews, they clearly perceived themselves as Zionism’s avengers. In reality, however, they have joined a long line of Zionism’s inadvertent advocates. As in Herzl’s time, the perpetrators of anti-Jewish acts do more than nearly anyone else to turn Jews who were once indifferent or even hostile to Israel’s fate into reluctant appreciators of its necessity.
Consider the Holocaust, the greatest anti-Jewish atrocity in modern memory. The Third Reich and its many collaborators exterminated two-thirds of Europe’s Jews. At the same time, the enemies of the Nazis—including the United States and Canada—refused to let most desperate Jewish refugees into their countries. This inevitably funneled many people toward their destination of last resort: mandatory Palestine. The creation of Israel was the consequence less of Jewish choices than of all other Jewish choices being foreclosed by non-Jewish powers.
In 1948, Israel declared independence and fought off the attempt of five invading Arab armies to strangle it in the cradle. Some 800,000 Palestinians fled or were expelled from their homeland. Wide swaths of the world promptly took out their displeasure at this outcome on the Jewish populations nearest at hand. In the years following Israel’s founding, nearly 1 million Jews left their ancestral homes in the Arab and Muslim world. Many fled abuse in countries such as Iran, Iraq, Yemen, Libya, Syria, and Tunisia, where Jews were imprisoned, tortured, murdered, and stripped of their possessions, despite having lived in these places for millennia. At the time, few of these people were Zionists. They loved their home countries, which refused to love them back, and faced persecution when they arrived in Israel. Today, this Mizrahi community and its descendants comprise about half of Israel’s population and form the backbone of Benjamin Netanyahu’s right-wing base.
The Soviet Union, despite presenting itself as the vanguard of universal brotherhood, also turned on its Jews. The Communist police state cast the community as subversive, institutionally discriminated against its members in higher education and the professions, and labeled countless Jews who had no interest in Israel as “Zionists.” The state executed secular Jewish artists and intellectuals under false charges, repressed observance of the Jewish faith, and threw those who protested into Gulags. Eventually, after decades of international pressure, nearly 2 million Jews were allowed to leave. More than half moved to Israel, where they would become one of Israel’s most reliably conservative constituencies.
Simply put, Israel exists as it does today because of the repeated choices made by societies to reject their Jews. Had these societies made different choices, Jews would still live in them, and Israel likely would not exist—certainly not in its present form. Instead, Israel is a garrison state composed precisely of those Jews with the most reason to distrust the outside world and its appeals to international ideals, knowing that these did precisely nothing to help them when they needed it most. In this manner, decade after decade, anti-Semitism has created more Zionism. Put another way, the unwitting agents of Zionism throughout history have been those unwilling to tolerate Jews in their own countries.
Given this dynamic, a rational anti-Zionist movement would devote itself to making Jews feel welcome in every facet of life outside of Israel, ruthlessly rooting out any inkling of anti-Semitism in order to convince Jews that they have nothing to fear and certainly no need for a separate state. Such an anti-Zionist movement would overcome Zionism by making it obsolete. But that is not the anti-Zionist movement that currently exists. Instead, Israel’s opposition around the globe—whether groups such as Hamas and Hezbollah or their international apologists and imitators—often seems determined to persuade those Jews who chose differently than Herzl did that he was right all along.
Attacks such as those in Colorado, Washington, and Pennsylvania, not to mention the white-supremacist massacre at Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life synagogue in 2018, have raised the costs of being Jewish in America. Synagogues, schools, and other Jewish institutions collectively pay millions of dollars to secure their premises, resulting in communities that are less open to the outside and attendees being forever reminded that they are not safe even in their places of worship. And now American Jews thinking of attending communal events must stop to consider whether would-be attackers will associate them with Israel and target them for death.
America, at least, was not always this way. The country has long stood as the great counterexample to the Zionist project—proof that Jews could not just survive but thrive as equals in a pluralistic liberal democracy, without need for their own army or state. After Barbra Steinmetz, the 88-year-old Holocaust survivor in Boulder, was attacked, she had a message for the country. “We’re Americans,” she told NBC News. “We are better than this.” That is what most American Jews and their allies believe, and the justification for that belief was evident in Colorado this week, where Jared Polis, the state’s popular Jewish governor, forthrightly condemned the attack. But if the perpetrators and the cheerleaders of the incipient American intifada have their way, that spirit will be stifled.
Such a victory, however, would be self-defeating. According to video captured at the scene, the Boulder attacker accidentally set himself on fire in the middle of his assault. It would be hard to script a better metaphor for the way such violence sabotages the cause it purports to advance. If the anti-Zionist assassins succeed in making Jewish life in the United States less livable, they will not have helped a single Palestinian, but they will have made their opponents’ case for them. They will have proved the promise of America wrong, and the darkest premonitions of Zionism right.
The post America’s Anti-Jewish Assassins Are Making the Case for Zionism appeared first on The Atlantic.
