Jews Are Becoming More, Not Less, Zionist

Last week, at a Passover seder doubling as an anti-Israel protest, Naomi Klein called for an “exodus from Zionism.” The delight many take in passing around this Jew’s denunciation of Zionism reflects our topsy-turvy universe. A few, marginalized, anti-Zionist Jews snare massive headlines, as the overwhelming majority of pro-Israel Jews feel marginalized. Klein is wrong. On Oct. 7, many Jews experienced an exodus to Zionism, not from – abandoning their delusions that Jew-hatred had ended and Hamas was pragmatic.

Trying to reject “the false idol of Zionism,” Klein demonized the Middle East’s only feminist-friendly, LGBTQ+-welcoming, democratic state as a “militaristic ethnostate.”  Profaning the holiness of the Passover seder, she proclaimed “tonight we say: It ends here.”  

What she called “Our Judaism” is “internationalist,” cannot “be protected by” Israel’s “rampaging military,” and is “not threatened by people raising their voices in solidarity with Palestine,” because “in that chorus lies both our support and our collective liberation.” 

Really?

Klein’s “Our Judaism” distorts Jewish history. Accusing Israel of “colonial land theft” negates Jews’ 3,500-year-old indigenous roots.  Charging “ethnic cleansing” overlooks the U.N.’s 1947 partition plan and every other compromise Palestinians rejected. And crying “genocide” perverts theword’s meaning – eliminating another nation: the Palestinian population quintupled since 1948, and grew by 35% since 2009, when Klein first accused Israel of “genocide.”

Some historical ignorance is understandable; her ignorance about the situation today is willful. How can she find “universalism” and “liberation” in the mass murder of Jews?  Why is she silent about today’s global hate “chorus” of antisemitic anti-Zionism?

Most Jews had a Zionist awakening Oct. 7, because they saw what victory looks like to the anti-Zionists – and what happens if we don’t protect ourselves.

Most Jews had a Zionist awakening Oct. 7, because they saw what victory looks like to the anti-Zionists – and what happens if we don’t protect ourselves. In their bones, Jews recognized the sadistic Jew-hating glee motivating the Hamas terrorists – followed by waves of Gazans –raping, kidnapping, maiming, murdering.

Without Israel’s “rampaging” army mobilizing immediately, against Hezbollah and Hamas, terrorists would have slaughtered exponentially more Jews and non-Jews. On April 13, the Iranians and their proxies launched 320 lethal reminders that thousands more would die without Israel’s ever-vigilant army – and impressive international partners.

Sickeningly, the murders on Oct. 7 triggered celebrations on many campuses and world capitals. Crying “this is what decolonization looks like,” many professors found this bloodbath “exhilarating.” Most of Klein’s feminist sisters were silent about modern history’s largest, most-self-promoted act of gendered violence. Defying their own teachings to “believe survivors” suggested that they mean “me too – unless you’re a Jew.” 

I only found one quick reference by Klein characterizing Hamas’ “attack” as “horrific.” But she used that one adjective to tee up a long denunciation of “Israel’s furious determination to exploit those crimes.” So much for sisterly solidarity. 

Most recently, with their masks on – because these cowardly careerists fear alienating future employers – too many students have taken the masks off, beating Jews, promising more Oct. 7-style slayings, yelling at “yahoodim” to “go back to Poland” and “Germany.” And they show no sympathy for their Israeli peers – like Hersh Goldberg-Polin, 23, cruelly kidnapped from a music festival. No wonder Hamas and the Iranian mullahs applaud these Jew-hating student hooligans and offer them free tuition in Iran – they all seek Jewish destruction, not “liberation.” 

All these un-Jewish, freedom-threatening, performative “Emergency Seders” and “Freedom Seders” amid pro-Hamas protests celebrated these mass murderers. It takes a particular kind of coward to scavenge through your own people’s teachings to boost the enemy.  In cheerleading for those who would have happily killed you too, you betray yourself; weaponizing Jewish rituals and values, like the Passover seder, against the Jewish people and the Jewish state betrays your people.

Three years ago, Natan Sharansky and I called these Jewish insiders “un-Jews” for trying to undo the core Jewish consensus uniting Israel, Zionism, Judaism and the Jewish people. Perhaps the Harry Potter generation would prefer to call them Peter Pettigrew Jews – evoking the traitor who serves the evil Voldemort as his groveling slave – and takes the shape of the rat.

Klein misreads Passover’s story. The Jewish people first had to mobilize in self-defense, bravely marking their doorposts so the Angel of Death would pass over them, then fleeing Pharaoh, before receiving the Ten Commandments with its lovely values. The Jewish – and Zionist – lesson is: First defend yourselves – survive! – then heal the world. 

Hillel the elder understood that too: before “if not now,” before “if I am only for myself,” he started by saying, “If I am not for myself, who will be for me?”

On Oct. 7 – and subsequently – Hamas’ evil drew a clear red line between a thuggish illiberalism and a genuine, humane, democratic-liberalism, i.e., Zionism, struggling with complexity. Anti-Zionists burn American, Canadian and Israeli flags, while targeting civilians, celebrating violence against Jews, and threatening more. Zionists wave American, Canadian and Israeli flags, while defending themselves at home and abroad, providing humanitarian aid to enemies who hate them, and regretting the excruciating dilemmas soldiers face in wars of self-defense against terrorists who hide behind their civilians.

Today’s Jewish exodus toward Zionism, however, is not just defensive, even with all the horrors unleashed. As the movement of Jewish national liberation, Zionism remains a construction project, a dream machine. Zionists understand that Jews are a people not just a religion, with millennia-old ties to one particular homeland, and the right to build a state on that homeland.  Since establishing that Jewish democratic state in 1948, Zionists defend that state when necessary, but build it, are rebuilt by it, and use their story, those values, to dream about a better tomorrow, always. 

That’s a liberal-democratic vision Canadians and democracy-lovers worldwide can embrace – while learning from Zionists to sift between your real friends – and your true, often-lethal, enemies.

Professor Gil Troy, a Distinguished Scholar in North American History at McGill University and a Senior Fellow in Zionist Thought at the JPPI, the Jewish People Policy Institute, is an American presidential historian and the editor of the new three-volume set, “Theodor Herzl: Zionist Writings,” the inaugural publication of The Library of the Jewish People (www.theljp.org).