Damn Zionist

Yes, That Is Me.

Damn Zionist.

Yes.

That is me.

I am a Zionist. I am a Jew. And if either one of those facts makes you uncomfortable, you are cordially invited to go to hell.

I am not going to shrink myself so you can feel morally sophisticated.

I am not going to whisper the word Zionism because some overeducated idiot on the internet decided that Jewish national liberation is uniquely offensive.

I am not going to apologize for belonging to the oldest surviving indigenous people in the universe.

And I am certainly not going to pretend my story began in 1948 because apparently several thousand years of Jewish history are inconvenient to people whose historical memory stretches roughly as far back as their last TikTok video.

My story is older than your slogans.

Older than your hashtags.

Older than the Roman Empire.

Older than Christianity.

Older than Islam.

Older than the countries that today sit in judgment of whether Jews are sufficiently entitled to survive.

My story begins with creation.

With Abraham walking toward a land he had never seen.

With Isaac.

With Jacob, whose name became Israel.

With twelve tribes.

With Moses standing before Pharaoh and demanding freedom.

With Joshua crossing the Jordan.

With David making Jerusalem the capital of a Jewish kingdom three thousand years before some graduate student discovered the word “colonialism.”

With Solomon building the Temple in Jerusalem.

That Jerusalem.

Not Warsaw.

Not Brooklyn.

Not London.

Not Casablanca.

Jerusalem.

We prayed toward it when we were free.

We prayed toward it when we were conquered.

We prayed toward it when we were expelled.

We prayed toward it when our synagogues burned.

We prayed toward it when our children were murdered.

We prayed toward it when the civilized world explained, yet again, why Jewish suffering was regrettable but politically inconvenient.

And somehow, after all of that, people have the breathtaking nerve to ask Jews why we are so attached to Zion.

Because we remember.

That is why.

I am that damn Jew.

The Jew whose ancestors watched the Babylonians destroy Jerusalem.

The Jew whose ancestors watched Rome crush Jewish independence, burn the Second Temple, slaughter and enslave Jews, and carry Jewish treasures through the streets of Rome as trophies.

The Jew whose people were scattered across continents and then spent two thousand years being told that wherever they landed, they did not belong there either.

Too Jewish for Europe.

Too foreign for the Middle East.

Too Semitic for the racists.

Too religious for the secularists.

Too secular for the religious fanatics.

Too successful when we prospered.

Too poor when we struggled.

Too clannish when we stayed together.

Too influential when we participated.

Too capitalist for the communists.

Too communist for the capitalists.

Too cosmopolitan for the nationalists.

Too nationalist for the cosmopolitans.

Humanity has demonstrated extraordinary creativity when inventing reasons to hate Jews. Civilization built aqueducts, cathedrals, universities, steam engines, airplanes and computers, yet somehow kept returning to the intellectual masterpiece of:

“Perhaps the Jews are the problem.”

Europe expelled us from one kingdom after another.

England expelled its Jews in 1290.

France expelled Jews repeatedly.

Spain expelled its Jews in 1492 after centuries of Jewish life on the Iberian Peninsula.

Portugal followed.

Across medieval Europe came forced conversions, confiscations, ghettos and massacres.

Then came the blood libels.

Jews were accused of murdering Christian children for ritual purposes.

Think about the obscenity of that accusation.

A civilization worshipping a Jewish child born in Bethlehem spent centuries accusing Jews of murdering children.

During the Crusades, Jewish communities along the Rhine were slaughtered by mobs heading east to reclaim the Holy Land from somebody else.

Jews were blamed for the Black Death.

Wells were supposedly poisoned.

Communities were burned.

People were tortured into confessions for crimes that existed only in the fevered imaginations of antisemites.

And still we survived.

Then came the ghettos.

The yellow badges.

The restrictions on professions.

The special taxes.

The forced sermons.

The humiliations.

The expulsions.

The pogroms.

In the Russian Empire, Jewish communities were terrorized and murdered while authorities alternated between complicity and indifference.

And when Jews finally began saying, “Perhaps we should go home,” Europe responded as though that was the unreasonable part.

Enter modern Zionism.

Not the birth of Jewish connection to Israel.

The political organization of a connection that had never disappeared.

Jews had maintained communities in the Land of Israel for centuries. Jews prayed for Zion. Jews mourned Jerusalem. Jews ended Passover Seders with “Next year in Jerusalem.” Jewish wedding ceremonies remembered Jerusalem. Jewish liturgy remembered Jerusalem.

Zionism did not invent the Jewish relationship with Israel.

Zionism looked at two thousand years of Jewish vulnerability and reached the painfully obvious conclusion:

Maybe the Jews should stop depending on everybody else for permission to remain alive.

Then came the twentieth century.

And humanity decided to demonstrate why that conclusion was tragically correct.

Nazi Germany did not merely hate Jews.

It industrialized Jew hatred.

It measured skulls.

Recorded grandparents.

Confiscated property.

Burned books.

Destroyed synagogues.

Packed families into ghettos.

Loaded human beings into cattle cars.

Shot Jews beside pits.

Gassed them.

Burned their bodies.

Six million Jews murdered.

One and a half million Jewish children.

Children.

And the world knew enough to be ashamed but not enough to stop it.

Countries closed borders.

Ships carrying Jewish refugees were turned away.

Governments debated quotas while European Jewry was being annihilated.

Then, after the smoke cleared from Auschwitz, humanity discovered a new intellectual exercise:

explaining why the surviving Jews were being a little unreasonable about wanting sovereignty.

No.

We heard you the first thousand times.

We understood the lesson.

Never again does not mean:

“Never again, assuming the United Nations approves.”

Never again does not mean:

“Never again, unless defending yourselves becomes politically unpopular.”

Never again means Jewish life will never again depend entirely on the mercy of rulers, mobs, kings, presidents, dictators, clerics, bureaucrats or international organizations.

And antisemitism was never exclusively European.

Jewish communities across the Middle East and North Africa also experienced discrimination, violence, pogroms and expulsion.

Baghdad saw the Farhud.

Jewish communities that had existed for centuries across Iraq, Yemen, Egypt, Libya, Syria and elsewhere were devastated or disappeared.

Hundreds of thousands of Jews from Arab and Muslim lands came to Israel.

Not because they had discovered a trendy political ideology.

Because Israel was home when other homes became impossible.

Then the Soviet Union discovered that old antisemitism could be rebranded with fashionable political vocabulary.

Suddenly Jew hatred could wear a suit, hold a conference and call itself “anti-Zionism.”

Convenient.

You could recycle centuries of conspiracy theories about Jewish power, Jewish money, Jewish manipulation and Jewish disloyalty while insisting that, heavens no, you had nothing against Jews.

Only Zionists.

What an extraordinary coincidence that the world’s oldest hatred discovered exactly one Jewish political movement that it considered uniquely illegitimate.

And now here we are.

The Jew is still expected to explain himself.

Explain why Jerusalem matters.

Explain why Israel should exist.

Explain why Jews need an army.

Explain why Jews fight back.

Explain why Jews refuse to become stateless again.

Explain why Jewish sovereignty is not negotiable.

Meanwhile, almost nobody demands that Britain justify Britain, France justify France or Japan justify Japan every twelve minutes.

But Israel?

Apparently Israel must stand trial for existing.

Well, I am done with the trial.

I reject the premise.

I am not asking permission.

I am that damn Jew.

I am the Jew Rome failed to erase.

The Jew the Crusaders failed to erase.

The Jew the Inquisition failed to erase.

The Jew the pogromists failed to erase.

The Jew Hitler failed to erase.

The Jew Stalin failed to erase.

The Jew terrorism will not erase.

The Jew propaganda will not erase.

The Jew who came home.

That is the part they cannot stand.

Not merely that Jews survived.

That Jews survived and became powerful enough to defend themselves.

The helpless Jew was tragic.

The murdered Jew was sympathetic.

The refugee Jew was pitiable.

The Jew with an army?

Apparently that is where everyone’s moral philosophy suddenly becomes complicated.

Too damn bad.

We learned history.

We learned what happens when somebody else controls the border.

We learned what happens when somebody else controls the army.

We learned what happens when somebody else decides whether Jewish refugees may enter.

We learned what happens when antisemitism moves from the tavern to the parliament.

And we learned what happens when Jews believe promises that civilization has permanently outgrown Jew hatred.

It never does.

It merely changes vocabulary.

So call me a Zionist.

Please.

I wear it as an inheritance.

A responsibility.

A promise.

Zionism means that after Babylon, Rome, exile, massacres, expulsions, inquisitions, pogroms, ghettos, gas chambers, terrorism and endless lectures from people who discovered Jewish history approximately fifteen minutes ago, the Jewish people are still here.

Speaking Hebrew.

Walking Jerusalem.

Planting vineyards in Judea.

Building universities.

Creating technology.

Raising families.

Arguing about politics.

Praying at the Western Wall.

Serving in an army wearing a Star of David.

Living ordinary Jewish lives in the land where Jewish history became history.

That is Zionism.

It is not perfection.

Israel is a country full of Jews, which means naturally we argue with each other about absolutely everything.

Government.

Religion.

Parking.

Hummus.

Air conditioning.

Whether somebody’s grandmother makes better kubbeh than somebody else’s grandmother.

National resurrection apparently comes with municipal bureaucracy.

But Israel’s imperfections do not invalidate Jewish sovereignty any more than America’s failures invalidate American independence.

And I will not accept a standard demanded of no other nation on earth.

So yes.

Damn Zionist.

Damn Jew.

Descendant of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.

Child of a people who carried Jerusalem in their prayers across continents and centuries.

Heir to people who buried children, rebuilt communities, crossed deserts, escaped ghettos, survived camps, fled pogroms, revived Hebrew and returned home.

And here is the part that really seems to drive antisemites insane:

We are not leaving.

We are not converting.

We are not disappearing.

We are not begging.

We are not apologizing.

We are not handing Jerusalem back to history.

We are not volunteering for statelessness because it would make somebody’s political theory more elegant.

We have spent thousands of years listening to people explain what Jews should do.

Be quieter.

Assimilate.

Convert.

Leave.

Stay.

Disappear.

Die.

Enough.

This generation of Jews gets to answer.

No.

We are alive.

We are home.

We are armed.

We are building.

We remember exactly who we are.

And we are done asking permission to exist.

I am a Jew.

I am a Zionist.

And if that makes you uncomfortable, you have my deepest indifference.