Zionism After October 7

Cataclysmic events challenge us to reset, reframe and reclaim. Even those of us who didn’t need October 7 to discover the evil perverting a great degree of Palestinian nationalism were so shaken by the Hamas horrors that it forced us to reexamine our lives and worldviews. Similarly, the profound Jewish New Year process invites us to look in the mirror, update perspectives and change anything there we don’t want to see.

Oct. 7 blew up three false contradictions distorting today’s Jewish conversation.

Oct. 7 blew up three false contradictions distorting today’s Jewish conversation. 

First, as antisemitism surged, it showed the absurdity of American Jews debating whether right-wing Jew-hatred or left-wing Jew-hatred is worse. Let’s have moral clarity: bigotry is bigotry. We need zero tolerance for intolerance. Right-wingers, including Donald Trump voters grateful for Republicans’ enthusiastic Israel support, should police their white supremacist right-wing allies. Similarly left-wingers, including Democrats gaga over Kamala, should police their Israel-bashing progressive allies. 

Second, as Jew-haters and Zionophobes egged each other on, in Israel and globally, they confirmed that anti-Zionism is the new antisemitism. Both poisons reinforce each other. Finally, and perhaps most relevant as we celebrate Rosh Hashanah, an inspiring, positive message shined through this dark year: Zionism and Judaism are more intertwined than ever.

As Jew-haters and Zionophobes egged each other on, in Israel and globally, they confirmed that anti-Zionism is the new antisemitism. Both poisons reinforce each other.

This is the essential message of my new book: “To Resist the Academic Intifada: Letters to My Students on Defending the Zionist Dream.” I’m not naïve. The first part of the title acknowledges that we have enemies. Outrageously, being proud Jews and Zionists today too frequently takes courage. It’s a form of resistance — especially on too many campuses.

But as I keep telling my students and everyone else, our resistance generates epic dividends. You get to participate in one of the world’s great adventures, the ongoing escapades of the Jewish people — and now the State of Israel. “Defending the Zionist Dream” involves celebrating Israel, Judaism, Jewish nationalism and the Jewish people. The phrase “the Zionist Dream” consciously evokes “the American Dream” because my letters toast Americanism and liberalism too.

I use my life story, and my generation’s life stories, to defend Zionism, Americanism and liberalism. I argue that what’s happening in too many, though not all, universities violated academia’s core mission and values. When illiberal liberals dominate, they destroy many shared values linking America and Israel at their best.

That’s why being Zionist and Jewish today is delightfully countercultural. It’s tapping into the power of forever in our age of instant and disposable. It’s embracing a culture of “us” despite so many obsessed with the “I.” It involves “uncool” but soul-stirring phenomena like faith, loyalty, trust, patriotism, nationalism, connectedness and character. Or, as my teacher and friend Rabbi Yitz Greenberg writes in his new book, standing up with the Jewish people, living the eternal teachings of Judaism and Zionism, dancing through the raindrops with Israel, is indeed “The Triumph of Life.”

That’s why being Zionist and Jewish today is delightfully counter-cultural. It’s tapping into the power of forever in our age of instant and disposable.

“The choice to be a Jew is an act of faith and courage,” Greenberg writes in his monumental “Narrative Theology of Judaism.” All of us, who today are Jews-by-choice consciously choosing not to assimilate away, commit to “share Jewish fate.” But he too appreciates the mind-blowing, soul-expanding, life-fulfilling payoff: “Most active Jews would testify that the substance of commitment is a rich and fulfilling life, embedded in family and community and connected to a higher purpose.”

Greenberg worked on this, his magnum opus, for years. But, as with so many Zionist ideas, his vision has extra resonance after Oct. 7. 

Even as I celebrate the positive with Greenberg, three negative reference groups reinforce our death-defying Jewish Zionism. First, our Jihadist enemies — Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis, the Iranian Revolutionary killers, their bloodthirsty proxies — belong to death-cults. They define themselves by what they hate: Us, meaning Judaism, Zionism, Americanism and liberalism — lower-case “l” as in liberal democracy. 

Their noxious nihilism pervades the Houthi slogan: “God Is the Greatest, Death to America, Death to Israel, A Curse Upon the Jews, Victory to Islam.” Note how hatred is cemented in their ideology, their identity. By contrast, we sing “Hatikvah” the hope, ever-seeking “the dawn’s early light.” Our nationalism builds us up, without knocking others down. And on Rosh Hashanah we eat apples and honey, wishing everyone a happy, healthy, peaceful New Year, with sweetness and love, while refining our dreams for a better life and world.

Similarly, wander the university encampments, pass pro-Palestinian protests menacing passersby downtown, hear the blood-curdling cries endorsing terrorist mass murder to “Globalize the Intifada.” Note how these goons threaten fellow students and colleagues with death or harass them personally. They show no empathy for classmates, neighbors, students. Hate breeds hate. These Academic Intifadists idealize murderers, rapists, kidnappers. The Jihadist toxicity they cheer poisons their souls too.

Hate breeds hate. These Academic Intifadists idealize murderers, rapists, kidnappers. The Jihadist toxicity they cheer poisons their souls too.

Finally, watch the small, marginalized, dramatically over-publicized anti-Zionist Jews. They hijack cherished Jewish symbols and rituals, trying to turn our values against us. To betray your people at this moment, to reject your identity, your heritage, your core loyalties, creates a desiccated Judaism of snarls that inverts Greenberg’s expansive Judaism of joy. I watch them. I read them. I engage with those open to engaging. And I usually want to shower off their anti-Israel venom, raise money to get them therapy, and give their suffering parents long, supportive hugs. 

In their negative vortex, these un-Jews, undoing the core consensus linking Judaism and Zionism, become walking advertisements for what they’ve repudiated. Their negativity proves how fulfilling Judaism and Zionism can be. And don’t just listen to my letters to my students — Listen to our students. As 540 Columbia University students proclaimed this summer: Some “Jewish peers … tokenize themselves by claiming to represent ‘real Jewish values,’ and attempt to delegitimize our lived experiences of antisemitism.” By contrast, these Ivy League Zionists “proudly believe in the Jewish People’s right to self-determination in our historic homeland as a fundamental tenet of our Jewish identity. Contrary to what many have tried to sell you — no, Judaism cannot be separated from Israel. Zionism is, simply put, the manifestation of that belief.” 

And if you doubt how quintessentially Jewish Zionism is, imagine banning Israel from our High Holy Day celebrations. It would create an unfamiliar Yom Kippur, if you cannot recall the High Priests’ atonement in the Holy Temple in Jerusalem. It would mean no lulav and etrog, which evoke our ancestors’ harvest in the Land of Israel, and subsequent Jerusalem pilgrimage. And it would require skipping many words in the prayers, Torah readings and Haftorahs. In fact, it would sap the essence of modern Judaism, extinguishing empathy for nearly half our Jewish family who live in Israel and are fighting for our existence too.

Admittedly, all this Zionist feeling and meaning and hope doesn’t come easy. We’ve lost so many lives and limbs. We live amid so many traumatized souls. We miss dozens of hostages observing these High Holidays in Hamas hell. This past year, especially as I wrote and taught, I kept returning to the texts by Zionist thinkers that were included in my edited collection, “The Zionist Ideas: Visions for the Jewish Homeland – Then, Now, Tomorrow.” Day-by-day, they guided, reassured, and roused me.

The first Zionist text I thought of following Oct. 7 was Gershon Shaked’s 1980 “No Other Place.” Throbbing with agony, Shaked recalls how, on Kristallnacht in 1938, Nazi hooligans looted his parents’ apartment in Vienna, then did unspeakable things to his nine-year-old self. Like the Jewish people, Shaked, who won the 1993 Israel Prize for his literary criticism, did not just survive — he thrived. He understood the Jews’ “secret weapon,” which Joe Biden learned from Golda Meir: “We have no place else to go.” But Shaked also neutralized his “ambivalences,” realizing, as we must today, that our “commitment must be unequivocal.” 

Shaked’s weary but muscular phrase “Ein makom acher” (There’s no other place) echoed the Zionist pioneer Joseph Hayyim Brenner. Born in Ukraine in 1881, slaughtered by marauding Arabs near Tel Aviv in 1921, Brenner wrote, “it is very possible, that here it is impossible to live, but here we must remain, here we must die, sleep … there is no other place.” Recognizing Zionism as a national and individual reclamation project, Brenner proclaimed: “We have to start all over again, to lay down a new cornerstone.”

Reeling from Jewish history’s bloodiest day since the Holocaust, Hayyim Nahman Bialik’s 1903 poem evoking the Kishinev Pogroms, “The City of Slaughter” kept echoing: “Behold on tree, on stone, on fence, on mural clay / The splattered blood, and dried brains of the dead.” 

Indeed, on Nov. 1, after watching Israel’s 46-minute video depicting the rampage, Charles Lane devoted half his Washington Post column to reprinting Bialik’s lament. Lane explained that too many Palestinians’ “overt pleasure-taking in Jew-killing inflames a sensitive place within the emotional centers of every Israeli and Jewish mind.” Such Jew-hating glee evokes Holocaust, pogrom, inquisitions, the flaying of rabbis’ skins, the destruction of two temples, all resonating in that searing poem.

Those were the texts, the images, the wails, haunting me those first awful days. On Wednesday, Oct. 11, even more depressed, despairing, lost, I attended the funeral of a beautiful 22-year-old soul, Ben Mizrachi, a friend of my son and of our entire family, from Vancouver. Ben moved to Israel, full of idealism and a love for life, only to be slaughtered at the Nova music festival.

“I hope he’s dead,” my son had sighed on Monday, fearing what those sadists might be doing to his friend, who had served as a combat medic, if they kidnapped him. When we heard about his death on Tuesday, we didn’t want to know how he died. Who wanted to know if their paragliders of death shot him or the invading sadists maimed his body. We only wanted to honor how he lived.

Then, that Wednesday, the first eulogy at Ben’s funeral changed everything. He and his friend Itai Bausi, a Duvdevan commando, had run back toward the bullets, at least three times. Commandeering a golf cart, they ferried some wounded revelers to the medical tent, while treating others. Eventually, we saw the last photo of Ben, snatched from a video, crouching behind a car, a medical kit on his bag, primed to help.

Suddenly, the blue-and-white switch flipped back on in my head. Zionism never promised a rose garden, only our own, often-embattled, Promised Land. In 1947, as Zionists agonized over the U.N.’s Nov. 29 Partition Plan shrinking the Jewish homeland and internationalizing Jerusalem, Chaim Weizmann warned: “The State will not be given to the Jewish people on a silver platter.” That phrase inspired Natan Alterman’s classic poem “Magash HaKesef,” “The Silver Platter,” wherein “the nation arises, heartbroken but breathing/To receive the miracle, the only one, there is no other.”

Zionism never promised a rose garden, only our own, often-embattled, Promised Land.

Sadly foreshadowing funeral after funeral, a photograph of one beaming face with everything to live for reduced to a memorial book after another, Altman writes: “wearing their youth like dew glistening on their head,” two heroes identify themselves as “the silver platter on which the Jewish state was given.”

I returned to my hopeful self. On Oct. 7, the government failed; the army failed temporarily, but the people of Israel succeeded. Ben, Itai and thousands of others, Jews and non-Jews, fought back, repelling most Hamas invaders within 24 hours. 

Do the math. Terrorists usually punch way above their weight, slaughtering civilians en masse. On September 11, 2001, 19 Jihadists killed nearly 3,000 people. Yet when over 3,000 terrorists and hundreds of other Gazans swarmed Israel, the ratio of armed marauders to innocents killed was remarkably low, although nevertheless devastating. 

And how did Israelis save Israel? Thanks to Zionism. The Zionist ideas of self-reliance, self-defense and self-assurance, forged in the Bible, honed over thousands of years, updated this century, raised generations of Israelis ready and able to defend our country, our people and Western civilization.

Zionism cannot defeat Jew-hatred; it’s the Jew-haters’ disease, meaning it’s not the Jews’ responsibility to solve. But what Zionism can do, has done, and is doing daily, is give Jews values, a methodology of response, a motivation, vision and the skill-set to fight when necessary, but still build, rebuild and dream always. 

Dozens of other texts from “The Zionist Ideas” — highlighting just how many Zionist visions have emerged over the last century-and-a-half, and just how prescient most were — keep taking on new relevance with each battle, with each casualty, with each new solidarity mission, with each painful yet pride-infused lecture I give, with each letter I wrote to my students. Today, as Israel finally confronts Hezbollah with the aggressiveness those terrorists deserve, I keep quoting David Ben-Gurion. In January 1948, he said: “There is now nothing more important than war needs, and nothing equal to war needs,” because that “cruel and jealous Moloch” of war, that god demanding child sacrifice, “knows neither compassion nor compromise.” Reading him, I understand that until Israel frees every remaining hostage, restores safety in the south, and returns all 60,000 northern evacuees home, Zionists are living in today time, in this endless moment, this excruciating far-too-long-and-costly unsought war, fighting relentlessly for victory.

But just as Jews always live on secular time and Jewish time, Zionists simultaneously live in today, the day after, and, with apologies to Bill Clinton and Fleetwood Mac, we also don’t … stop … thinking about tomorrow. In thinking about the day after, meaning how we go forward with our Arab neighbors, it’s worth reading Ze’ev Jabotinsky’s controversial and oft-misquoted Zionist essay: “Iron Wall.” 

In 1923, respecting Arab national aspirations, Jabotinsky opposed expelling Arabs. He understood that “Only when not a single breach is visible” in the Jews’ “iron wall” of security, would the Arabs’ “extreme groups lose their sway” so “moderates” can “offer suggestions for compromise.” But to truly appreciate Jabotinsky and today’s heroes, read his vision of Zionist youth, embodying “beauty, respect, self-esteem … honor” and generosity, describing Israel’s youth, including the many young heroes we raised so lovingly but have now buried.

Pair those essays with Yitzhak Rabin, who hoped to sheathe his sword but refused to drop it prematurely. On October 6, 1994, he rejected “the road of zealousness,” hewing to the “road of maintaining a Jewish, democratic, liberal way of life.” 

And, in thinking about tomorrow, I read how the poet Rachel Bluwstein issued a proud, nationalistic call in 1926 to plant a tree, with “an outburst of song.” I marvel that in 1948, when six Arab armies attacked, a 23-year-old Haim Hefer looked ahead to the time when he and his wife, surrounded by “the children,” would look back on this bloody war’s glories and worries, remembering how “we fought and we loved.” We all can’t wait to sigh, as Hefer eventually did too, that “There were times.” Those were the days.  

Merely eight years later, in 1956, Rabbi Joseph Ber Soloveitchik could chronicle the miracles Israel already embodied, crying out in joy each time he listed one, “Listen! My Beloved knocks!” We still hear that miraculous knocking as we turned the tide of battle, as the Iranians bombarded us but injured only one of our children, as someone clever turned personal pagers and walkie-talkies into terrorist-neutralizers — and exposers, as Israel did itself, the US, and Lebanon a favor by murdering the arch-terrorist Hassan Nasrallah.

Whenever I’m discouraged, I read the Israeli and Zionist miracles Hillel Halkin catalogued, decades later in 2013, while judging Israel’s story. “There’s been nothing like it in human history,” he marvels. “A small and ancient people,” lost, wandering, humiliated, returns, rebuilds and flourishes. “Had it not happened, could it have been imagined? Would anyone have believed it possible?” 

By springtime, as the universities we most worshiped tolerated encampments promoting the pro-Hamas values we most abhor, other texts became ever-more relevant. The vicious ideological assault on Zionism proved that as much as those of us in Israel need to read the texts by Zionist thinkers contained in the collection the Jewish Publication Society published, Jews and non-Jews worldwide need to understand these texts even more to refute the new big lies Academic Intifadists and others continue to spread. Jews need to reaffirm that the Zionist ideas are precisely that – a broad and compelling set of ideas, a wide range of perspectives that resist the simplistic, ideological pigeonholing that oversimplifies and inflames modern politics.

Challenging students to keep perspective, I see how much they enjoy reading Rabbi David Hartman’s “Auschwitz or Sinai,” which insists, “We will mourn forever because of the memory of Auschwitz. We will build a healthy new society because of the memory of Sinai.” Similarly, the words of Theodor Herzl, the founder of the formal Zionist movement in 1897, still resound, that “We are a people — one people” and that “whatever we attempt” in our new Jewish state in our old-new homeland, “to accomplish for our own welfare, will react powerfully and beneficially for the good of humanity.” That’s why we don’t build our identities, our Zionism, our homeland, on a foundation of anti-antisemitism, but on a positive Zionist vision, rooted in Jewish tradition, values, symbols and history, dreaming of a better world.

To those who believe that “nationalism” is a dirty word, or that it belongs only to the Right, great liberal nationalists like Isaiah Berlin, Ruth Gavison, and Yuli Tamir push back. Their Zionisms express what Golda Meir in her 1958 UN speech celebrating Israel’s 10th anniversary called “a nationalism which is constructive and wholesome” — or what President Isaac Herzog in 2022 called “Responsibility Zionism.”

And for those who need shoring up as anti-Zionists try to perpetuate their “historicide” seeking to kill our story, deny our rights, and negate our ties to the land, almost every text resists. Rav Abraham Isaac Kook emphasizes Jews’ “organic” ties to Israel. The legendary leftist writer A.B. Yehoshua beautifully defined a Zionist in 2017 as someone who understands “that the State of Israel doesn’t belong solely to its citizens, but to the entire Jewish people.” The Canadian human rights activist Irwin Cotler affirms that the Jews are the Middle East’s original aboriginal people, “a prototypical First nation or indigenous people,” practicing Judaism, which is “a prototypical indigenous religion, the first of the Abrahamic religions.” And the religious peace activist Leah Shakdiel loves “annoying” her “secular Israeli friends” by telling them “that if they do not see themselves as Jews,” only then do they become “imperialists, colonialists, who have no business being here.” We, they, are in Israel, because of the Jewish ties to this particular Jewish homeland. 

The Tunisian-born anti-colonialist writer Albert Memmi helped build the ideological structure now weaponized against the Jewish state. But Memmi knew the truth. What we now call “Mizrachi Jews” were doubly oppressed — by European colonialists and their neighboring Arab tormentors. Zionists, therefore, were Jews and non-Jews, “who having found that the Jewish situation is a situation of oppression” in prestate times under the Ottomans then the British, recognize “the reconstruction of a Jewish state as legitimate,” so Jews can be free and liberated too.

Still, Professor Ruth Wisse warned in 2007 in “Jews and Power” that the real “Jewish problem” is “the problem of nations that blamed their dysfunction on the Jews.” In a world that was ugly then, and is uglier now, the Jews’ traditional mission of tikun olam, fixing the world, expanded: “The word goes forth from Zion in ways that earlier Zionists never intended: In defending themselves, Jews have been turned into the fighting front line of the democratic world.” Americans who can’t recognize Oct. 7 as an assault on Western civilization don’t understand their need for Israel to win this battle clearly, unconditionally.

Of course, it’s always useful to touch base with Israel’s 1948 Declaration of Independence, its military’s extraordinary “Code of Ethics,” and the Prayer for the State of Israel. That prayer was written in the kind of unity we need: By the Ashkenazi Chief Rabbi Yitzhak Halevi Herzog and the Sephardi Chief Rabbi Ben Zion Meir Chai Uziel, with a key line added by the Nobel prize-winning novelist S.Y. Agnon, then published in the secular newspaper Ha’aretz. 

Finally, it is remarkable how these texts spawned the poignant, patriotic, courageous final goodbyes to their parents penned by modern heroes like Ben Zussman and Shachar Fridman, soldiers fallen since Oct. 7. Their letters, written before going off to fight in Gaza, will enhance the next edition, along with “In Our Name: A Message from Jewish Students at Columbia University.”

One text after another, one larger-than-life superstar after another, one inspiring, reassuring idea after another, from three main Zionist eras, the Pioneers, the Builders, the Torchbearers, and all six main streams of Zionist thought, have kept me going during these trying days. For this reason, I stand by what I wrote over 20 years ago, and updated for the new book “To Resist the Academic Intifada,” that proud cry: “I am a Zionist!”

And that’s why this Rosh Hashanah I invite you, my students, and you, their parents, siblings, and friends, to give yourselves the Mirror Test. Look in the mirror. Make sure you like what you see, you respect what you stand for, and like so many Israelis, you are ready to die for it. We learned this year, yet again, that such vision, commitment and love of life provide the only fulfilling way to live, realizing the true Zionist and American dream.

Professor Gil Troy, a Senior Fellow in Zionist Thought at the JPPI, the Jewish People Policy Institute, the Global ThinkTank of the Jewish People, is an American presidential historian and the editor of “The Zionist Ideas.” He is the author of “The Essential Guide to October 7 and Its Aftermath: Facts, Figures, History,” and, most recently, “To Resist the Academic Intifada: Letter to My Students on Defending the Zionist Dream,” published by Wicked Son.