America’s Anti-Jewish Assassins Are Making the Case for Zionism
History shows that violence against Jews creates more Zionists.
By Yair Rosenberg
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.
About the Author
Yair Rosenberg is a staff writer at The Atlantic and the author of its newsletter Deep Shtetl, about the intersection of politics, culture, and religion.
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