The Israel Independence Day Test: Can You Rejoice That Israel Is?

This Yom Ha’atzmaut the polls are sobering. The mass media pounding and social media shaming Israel and Zionism have absorbed since October 7 soured many Americans on Israel. In response, many American Jews are wavering too. But Israel’s 78th Independence Day is an opportunity to defy this political moment and think eternally, existentially, and about your identity.

Here’s a simple Independence Day Test: No matter what you think about what Israel does, can you rejoice that Israel is? Can you marvel how the Jewish people re-established themselves with a thriving Jewish democracy in their forever homeland? If you appreciate that achievement, defying 2,000 years of homelessness and powerlessness, then go to your freezer, and celebrate the Jewish State’s establishment with ice cream for breakfast — or any other gesture to make the day festive and memorable.

More broadly, even if you would have answered the recent JFNA poll saying you’re not a Zionist – come home. To be a Zionist you just have to believe in Israel’s legitimacy as a Jewish democratic state. That means understanding that Jews are a people as well adherents of a religion; that Jews have a homeland, Israel – which doesn’t preclude others from loving that homeland, as we know about America’s contested claims; and that Jews –like 192 other countries in the UN today — have a right to establish a state on their homeland.

Fair-minded critics of Israel beware. You’re far closer to being Zionists than anti-Zionists – as long as your dismay about what Israel occasionally does doesn’t lead you to regret that Israel is.

Don’t be misled by the Zionist right’s absolutism, which risks so narrowing the definition of Zionis as to squelch honest faultfinding trying to make Israel the best it can be. While such stultifying, my-way-or-the-highway litmus-testing is now fashionable, it weakens democracies and violates Zionism’s prickly, robust, argumentative tradition that has long pitted left versus right, socialists versus capitalists, compromisers versus hardliners, secular versus religious.

Note, despite these frustrations with hard-headed, overly-defensive Zionists resisting any deviation from the dominant – yet transient — party line – at least they support the Jewish State. There’s no moral equivalence between their excesses, and the negaters, the haters, the eliminators.

Be smart. Don’t you dare be conned into becoming fellow-travelers of the anti-Zionist, anti-American, exterminationist hard Left. Anti-Zionists hate Israel in peacetime and wartime, when Israel compromised during Oslo and when Israel fights for its life after October 7, when Bibi Netanyahu is in charge or when Yair Lapid was prime minister. These fanatic anti-Zionists want to make the Zionist brand radioactive. They caricature Zionism as oppressive, settler-colonialist, genocidal, supremacist. Hasan Piker is clear – to them liberal Zionists are as inconceivable- and deceitful- as liberal Nazis.

Tragically, these illiberal liberals have so sullied the Zionist brand, even many Jews who want Israel to live, now recoil from the Z-word.

Read what they write. Hear what they say. Look in their eyes as they shout “Die Zionists Die” and burn the American and Israeli flags together, as they deny October 7’s perversions, or cheer Hamas and Iran’s jihadist regime. Shouldn’t reasonable liberals run far away from these monsters?

Consider another test. If Israelis elected a Barak Obamawitz as Prime Minister — a cool, suave, hip, left-leaning leader, compromising with Palestinians, drafting the ultra-Orthodox, taming Israel’s far right, making Israel the ideal liberal-democracy Progressive Zionists desire — would you call yourself “Zionist” then? If so, you’re certainly not anti-Zionist – that would never satisfy these eliminationist anti-Zionists; and you’re not non-Zionist, because that’s the dream of many liberal Zionists.

So, believe it or not… you’re a Zionist.

The tarnishing of the word “Zionist” reflects a worldwide, decades-long campaign with deep Communist roots and, now, broad Palestinian and Iranian backing. Being anti-Zionist has become trendy. Anti-Zionists are so intolerant, even many Zionists are becoming Marrano Zionists, hiding their Zionism, and their Jewishness, dodging an updated Inquisition.

There’s a broader phenomenon distorting the debate. America politics has turned ferocious, triggering all-or-nothing contests banning nuance, complexity, healthy confusion. Even the New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, hailed as a foreign policy guru, admitted on CNN: “I really want to see Iran defeated militarily, because this regime is a terrible regime” but “The problem is I really don‘t want to see Bibi Netanyahu or Donald Trump politically strengthened by this war, because they are two awful human beings.”

It’s a stunning admission, while American soldiers risk their lives at war. Is it reasonable that Friedman’s partisan distaste for two democratically-elected leaders — even if justified – diminishes his hopes that America and Israel might vanquish this sexist, homophobic, genocidal, terrorist regime that killed 40,000 of its own? The war is existential – Friedman’s calculation is political.

Amid either-or, black-and-white politics, loudmouths dominate. Bullies – from both extremes – recruit Phony Recruits. These more thoughtful citizens go all-in, say with Trump or the anti-Trump crowd, even if they can see the gray. Why? They’re closer to one extreme, and don’t want to be browbeaten by friends – or associated at all with enemies. These ambivalent-at-heart Echo-Chamber Prisoners, forced to choose between Fox News or MS NOW, the right’s insanity or the left’s, let themselves be captured by the harshest forces opposed to those they know they detest.

That process distanced many American Jews from the term “Zionism.”

1. Most American Jews are liberal, even Progressive – and detest Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu.
2. The loudest, harshest Progressives and anti-Trumpers are aggressively anti-Zionist.
3. Without going that far, American Jews, preferring the Left’s Echo-Chamber, end up steeped in an anti-Zionist narrative that sours them on the Z-word, even if they want Israel thriving as a Jewish and democratic state.
4. These peer-pressured, Phony Recruits, overdosing on Israel-bashing, become Shadow anti-Zionists. Without calling themselves anti-Zionists, they seek peace – or social acceptance — by dodging the term. Worse, some deludedly, self-defeatingly propose abandoning the word, as if that linguistic victory would be enough for enemies who wish to wipe out the State of Israel.

To help resist these forces, after passing  the “That Israel is Test” and the “Barak Obamowitz Test,” ask yourself:

•  Are you still appalled by October 7’s horrors – and every Palestinian act targeting innocents?

•  Do you still get misty-eyed when you hear “Hatikvah” or “Yerushalayim Shel Zahav”?

•  Are you proud when you hear about an Israeli winning another Nobel prize or launching another game-changing innovation from that really small country improves the world so dramatically?

•  Can you still marvel that in 1948, Israel beat seven Arab states seeking to pull off a follow-up Holocaust, or in 1967, triumphed within six days, over massive Arab armies vowing to “throw the Jews into the sea?”

•  Did the first time you saw the Western Wall move you?

•  Can you imagine watching one of the many compelling Israeli TV shows, Fauda, Tehran, Hatufim/Prisoners of War, and shouting at the screen, “I am a Zionist!” because you want Israel to win?

If you answer “yes” to any one of those questions… face it, you’re a Zionist. You don’t have to wear blue-and-white all day this Wednesday. You don’t have to parade your increasingly subversive identity – it’s not just a political affiliation – on the street. But make sure you have your favorite ice cream flavor for breakfast.

And the next time, if a pollster happens asks, “are you a Zionist,” answer “yes.” Know that it doesn’t mean you’re endorsing any policies or politicians you hate; but it does mean you’re disappointing an anti-Semitic exterminationist movement that hates you, your people, and your homeland.

Chag Sameach!

The writer is an American presidential historian and a senior fellow in Zionist thought at the Jewish People Policy Institute in Jerusalem. Last year he published To Resist the Academic Intifada: Letters to My Students on Defending the Zionist Dream and The Essential Guide to October 7th and its Aftermath. His latest E-book, The Essential Guide to Zionism, Anti-Zionism, Antisemitism and Jew-hatred, was just published and can be downloaded on the website of JPPI – the Jewish People Policy Institute.