The Answer To Why Israel Is Still Necessary

Yom Ha’atzmaut, Israel’s Independence Day, is less of a nationwide party than usual this year. That was probably already a given for a nation still engaged in a war for its survival that began with the Hamas-led terrorist attacks on communities in southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023. But having visited the sites of the brutal massacres that took place that day on the eve of Yom Hazikaron, Israel’s Memorial Day, which traditionally turns from national mourning to celebration, it was clear that Israeli emotions are influenced by profound sadness about the losses they’ve experienced on that awful day and the ensuing 18 months of war.

The toll of deaths includes the 1,200 men, women and children killed during the barbaric Palestinian orgy of mass murder, torture, rape and kidnapping, as well as the 847 Israel Defense Force soldiers and 58 police officers who have died in the fighting since then to eradicate Hamas in Gaza, defeat the Hezbollah terrorists in Lebanon, and deal with an increase in terrorism in Judea and Samaria.

On top of those somber statistics, Independence Day has been marred by fires that have raged in the greater Jerusalem area, which may well be largely the result of deliberate arson on the part of Arabs and not—as the corporate media insists—merely the result of global warming in part of the world in which heat and wind are not exactly unknown.

But since Oct. 7, it is not only the people of Israel who have been under siege. Much to the surprise of many, Diaspora Jewry, including in the United States, has been subjected to an unprecedented surge of hateful protests, vandalism and violence that has made itself felt on the streets of major American cities, and especially, on college campuses.

That so many young people attending school are now the primary victims of the increase in antisemitism is a particularly cruel blow to the Jewish community. Most Jews rightly believed themselves to be fully accepted in American society and very much at home at the elite institutions of higher education, where they had thrived for a century after entry quotas at many schools were largely abandoned.

Blaming Israel for antisemitism

But now they find themselves the targets of prejudice rooted in the toxic ideas of critical race theory, intersectionality and settler-colonialism that falsely label Jews and Israel as “white” oppressors. That has led many to strengthen their Jewish identity and support for Israel. But it has caused a minority to abandon it and to join the pro-Hamas mobs since they regard, whether out of conviction or fear of standing out in leftist-dominated environments, their ties to those who promote woke culture to be of greater importance. Still others wonder whether the continued existence of a Jewish state that so many wish to destroy is worth it if it means that they must be subjected to prejudice or merely put on the spot to defend Jerusalem’s policies or actions.

Under these trying circumstances, what then is the argument for continued support for Zionism?

The answer is that those who think the problem of antisemitism can be eliminated by giving up Jewish rights, mandating Israel’s defeat and the victory of Hamas, or even by returning to the pre-state era of Jewish powerlessness, are not merely deluded. They are forgetting everything we know about the history of the last 2,000 years, during which Jews were at the mercy of a world dominated by powers and movements that exploited hatred of Jews to increase their own power.

It is true that Theodor Herzl, the founder of the modern Zionist movement, was wrong to believe that he could end antisemitism by giving the Jewish people a home and a “normal” existence like any other nation. Antisemitism is a lethal and adaptable virus of hate that adapts itself to many ideologies. In the last century, it found a home among fascists, Nazis, Communists, Islamists and now woke leftists. It cannot be eradicated because it is too useful a tool for those who know they can profit from it.

As has been the case for two millennia, those who blame Israel for Jew-hatred around the world because of its allegedly bad behavior in the war of self-defense it is fighting against Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis and other Iranian terror proxies have it backwards. What Jews do or don’t do has never been the cause of the prejudice directed at them. Jews have been hated because they were rich and because they were poor … because they assimilated into non-Jewish society and because they refused to assimilate and stood part … because they were homeless, and now, because they have a home and refuse to let it be destroyed by those who believe one Jewish state on the planet is one too many.

The world needs Judaism and Israel

Yet even as so many pounce on Israel and falsely term it an “apartheid” or “settler-colonial” state, Zionism has never been more compelling or necessary to Jewish survival.

The Jewish state that actually exists, as opposed to the mythical Israel that is demonized by a bizarre red-green coalition of leftists, is neither paradise nor inferno. Still, even as it is beset by so many problems—not just external war but internal political divisions—sociologists report that its people are among the happiest in the world.

How can that be so?

It isn’t hard to understand when you realize that Judaism and Jewish identity are the foundation of Western civilization in so many ways. As authors Melanie Phillips and Josh Hammer have written recently, while Israel needs support from the West, those who care about the future of freedom and liberty need Israel, since Jewish texts and core beliefs provide the rationale for free societies everywhere. Both secular and religious Israelis, those on the right and the minority on the left, embrace a society rooted in a communal sense of devotion to the group, even though divisions continue to fester.

It’s equally true that the Jews need Israel. Despite claims from some leftist ideologues that Judaism can thrive if Jews would only give up their rights and embrace a universalist faith that eschews any form of nationalism and relies on the kindness of strangers, this is a dangerous myth. The existence of a sovereign Jewish homeland on the soil of its ancient homeland is rooted in international law, history and faith. But it is also a function of the needs of those Jews who live in the 21st century.

Without Israel—and a Jewish army and government to defend its citizens—the horrors of the past will not only be relived in Israel’s border communities. The unspeakable atrocities of Oct. 7 were just a trailer for what Palestinian Arabs want to do not only to the rest of Israel but to Jews everywhere. Their belief that it’s right and just for them to kill Jews is based not merely on an extremist faith. It’s also a conviction that dates back thousands of years, which claims that Jews are a people that must be deprived of the rights that no one would think to try to deny to others. It is not so much analogous to the eliminationist rationales of the Nazis for their crimes as it is a manifestation of the fact that they are Adolf Hitler’s successors in their age-old quest to slaughter the Jews for the crime of simply existing.

Still the answer to Jew-hatred

Zionism is more than just a justified reaction to persecution in the past and the existential threats of the present. It is the national liberation movement of the Jewish people and—in no small irony given the mendacious rhetoric of contemporary antisemites—it is the greatest and most successful anti-colonial movement in history since it restored this small country to its indigenous people: the Jews.

Rather than blaming its existence for antisemitism, it’s time to understand that Israel and Zionism must be the primary answer to hatred against Jews.

Israel is not merely a physical shield that is the only true monument to the Six Million slain in the Holocaust, as well as the only guarantee that it can never happen again. The idea of Zionism can and must serve as an inspiration for Jews, no matter where they live, no matter their religious beliefs, and whether or not they call themselves Zionists.

To imagine a world without Israel is to enter into a counterfactual scenario in which not only is the destruction of the Jewish people encompassed, but also a world in which barbarism, rather than the values of ethical monotheism, the nation-state and universal justice that the Jews gave the world, will reign unchallenged. If Israel is still under siege, it is because Islamists and Marxists—whether they fly a false flag of concern for “human rights” or are more open about their despotic beliefs—alike seek such a terrible outcome for humanity.

Jews have a right to their own nation in the place that has been their home for thousands of years, regardless of any other factor. Herzl was right that it was a necessity in a world in which, as the Passover Haggadah states, “in every generation, they rise against us.”

A symbol of justice

Though it is as imperfect as any human endeavor, Israel is more than a precarious shelter in a hostile world. Whether Israelis and Jews elsewhere would have it so or not, the Jewish state, like Judaism itself, remains a symbol of the greatness that humanity can achieve and of its highest ethics and morals. And it will never be forgiven for that by those who embrace the ideologies of hatred and destruction, and are inevitably to be found among the ranks of antisemites in every era.

No matter what its enemies throw against it—be it conventional armies, terrorists or calumnies about “genocide”—Israel is here to stay. The Jew-haters may labor under the delusion that they can destroy it and redefine Zionism as racism, but all they are doing is reminding the world of the imperative of the logic that made the modern-day nation of the Jews necessary. Whether it is a somber observance or a joyous party, Israel’s Independence Day is still a day that Jews and people of goodwill everywhere should celebrate since it is a commemoration of both freedom and the eternal cause of justice. 

Happy Yom Ha’atzmaut!

Jonathan S. Tobin is editor-in-chief of JNS (Jewish News Syndicate).