Astounding Facts Most People Don’t Know About Israel 21
Zionism is a necessity not a choice for Jews
In 1909, Henry Ford notoriously offered consumers a stark choice: "Any customer can have a car painted any colour that he wants, so long as it is black."
That’s a version of the 17th century Hobson’s Choice – take it or leave it – and it pretty much sums up the range of options available to Jews at the end of the 19th century. After trying all the other paths to emancipation apparently on offer – integration, assimilation, the Enlightenment – only Zionism remained. Some Jews, particularly in Europe, felt that it was worth one last throw of the dice and held out hope that they would finally be accepted as equals by the non-Jewish communities that surrounded them. They were tragically mistaken.
Zionism is not primarily an ideology or a political philosophy but first and foremost a Jewish survival mechanism. The notion that Jews “chose” Zionism from a menu of potential alternatives is false. Other gates to freedom had all been slammed shut. For the Jews confined to the Czarist Pale of Settlement and other ghettoes throughout eastern Europe, the turning point was the assassination in 1881 of Alexander the Second for which the Russian Jews – all Jews – were blamed (though the killer wasn’t a Jew).
The pogroms that followed reached such unprecedented heights of murderous intensity that they propelled the Jews of the Czarist empire in three radical directions – into flight (to other parts of Europe and the USA), into the ranks of the communist and anarchist revolutionaries, and towards Zionism. In 1882, Leon Pinsker [1], a middle-aged Russian-Jewish physician, had the prescience to grasp that only this last offered a realistic long-term hope of Jewish survival:
“We must reconcile ourselves, once and for all, to the idea that the other nations, by nature of their eternal, natural antagonism, will forever reject us. We may not shut our eyes to this natural force, which works like every other elemental force; we must take it into account… We must use all means which human intellect and human experience have devised, in order that the sacred work of national regeneration may not be left to blind chance.”
Fourteen years later, a young and highly assimilated Austro-Hungarian Jewish journalist, Theodor Herzl [2], reached the same conclusion:
“If only we could be left in peace. But I think we shall not be left in peace….Let the sovereignty be granted us over a portion of the globe large enough to satisfy the rightful requirements of a nation; the rest we shall manage for ourselves.”
While eastern Europe was an important culture medium for Zionist thinkers and activists, there’s a common misconception that the growing Zionist impulse was an exclusively European phenomenon. In the Jewish communities of the Middle East, some of whose roots in their host countries stretched back millennia, a similar yearning for a return to the Land of Israel had been nurtured over the generations. For these Jews, a political awakening occurred in the late 19th century in tandem with their European co-religionists. Since their expulsion from their ancestral homelands by the Babylonian and Roman invaders, they had sought to appease the demands of their new Muslim rulers in a ceaseless quest to achieve fuller integration into wider society. Their efforts proved futile.
Consigned to second-class citizenship under the Dhimmitude system, the Jews of the Arab world experienced periodic upsurges of antisemitism that became increasingly oppressive, prompting the Aliyah (immigration to the Land of Israel) of hundreds of Yemenite Jews the late 19th century. In 1941, a savage pogrom incited by Nazi sympathisers, including the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, was unleashed in Baghdad, where Jews constituted around one third of the population. Well over a hundred Jews were killed and thousands injured. Homes and businesses were looted, and further violence threatened.
The Baghdad Farhud (“violent dispossession”) was far from unique. But for the Jews of Iraq and elsewhere in the Muslim world, it was a seminal moment, a confirmation of their suspicion that their presence in the region was precarious – tolerated at best and terminal at worst. That gloomy insight thrust the Middle Eastern and European Jews together to make common cause – the attempted revival of sovereignty in the Jewish homeland. For both, lethal antisemitism was a driver of their attraction to Zionism as the only means of creating a safe and welcoming long-term haven.
Don’t believe the propagandists who insist that the establishment of Israel in 1948 caused the destructive, bigotry-infected dynamic of Arab antiZionism – it didn’t. Israel’s declaration of independence merely reinvigorated a pre-existing hatred. Blaming the subsequent mass expulsion of Jews from Arab countries on this single event is not evidence based. As British journalist Lyn Julius [3] writes:
“The root cause of the post-1948 exodus of over 850,000 Jews from the Middle East and North Africa was pan-Arab racism, itself influenced by Nazism. Before the first Arab-Israeli war broke out, saturation Nazi propaganda on an illiterate and gullible population had already destroyed any prospect of peaceful coexistence between Jews and Arabs.”
Over the past 140 years, first the Yishuv (the pre-state Jewish community) and then Israel have provided refuge to countless Jews fleeing discrimination, persecution and murder. The precise number is impossible to calculate but it runs to the hundreds of thousands – and ultimately many millions if you include their descendants. That remarkable record more than vindicates the Zionist vision.
But this isn’t just a matter of history. Today we are witnessing a frightening global upsurge in antisemitism that too often costs lives. It’s a disturbing fact that antisemitic individuals, groups and countries are not merely antipathetic to Jews; they want to bring about their complete annihilation. For that reason alone, the existence of Israel, the haven of last resort for all Jews, is non-negotiable.
As Israeli legal scholar Amnon Rubinstein [4] reflected in 2002, Zionism remains the nationalism of no choice for the Jewish people:
“The truth of the matter is that from the extinguished crater – from the apparent volcano of antisemitism – a stream of searing lava occasionally erupts…Just as the Jews of Russia in 1881 and the Jews of Iraq in 1941 felt they had no choice, now too, there is ultimately no gate to salvation open other than the Zionist gate.”
By 2021, this is the key lesson most Jews have learned from their long and anguished history: full self-determination was and remains their only cast-iron guarantee of physical, cultural and religious survival.
Because antisemitic antiZionism was the underlying cause of the conflict between Israel and her neighbours, it is unlikely to end until Arab and Muslim leaders lay to rest their societies’ anti-Jewish demons. Continuing Arab (and Iranian) antiZionism just reinforces the conviction of Israeli Jews, and indeed most of the global Jewish world, that the Zionist path, embodied in the Jewish state of Israel, is the only one available to them.
To all those antiZionists and “critics of Israel” who never tire of reproaching Jews for their strong support for Israel’s right to exist in peace and security, I have this message – get over it. Israel, the world’s sole Jewish state, is going nowhere. Learn the lessons of the repeated failures of the military and terrorist assaults against the country you despise above all others. You are on the wrong side of history. Your demonstrations, condemnations and boycotts will never succeed in their eliminationist goals.
How can I be so confident in this prediction? For the single, easily verifiable reason that Israel is regarded by the overwhelming majority of Jews, both in Israel and elsewhere, as an existential necessity rather than a choice.
- Pinsker L. Auto-emancipation (originally published 1882). New York, Maccabaean Publishing Company, 1906
- Herzl T. The Jewish State (originally published 1896). London. Penguin Books, 2010
- . Julius L. Uprooted. London, Vallentine Mitchell, 2018
- Rubinstein A. Only the Zionist gate remains open. Haaretz, 14 March 2002
