WHILE YOU STAND ON ONE LEG: “We must reclaim Zionism,” Israeli President Herzog told attendees commemorating the 125th anniversary of the First Zionist Congress in Basel. As with “Palestine” and “Palestinian,” our homeland’s enemies are trying to turn the terms “Zionism …Zionist …Zionist Entity” against us. We must make their wholesome true meanings clear.
“We Must Reclaim Zionism” – Herzog Standing in Herzl’s Hall
JNS Editor Jonathan Tobin disturbingly wrote this week that “outside the organized Jewish world,” interest in the commemoration this week of the 125th anniversary of the First Zionist Congress in Basel, Switzerland, seems to have been “minimal.” JNS, 8/29/22, Tobin, Zionism Won. So Why Is It Still Under Attack 125 Years After Basel? He says that anti-Zionism is “the essence of 21st century anti-Semitism,” and ends that its being so widespread “should remind all people of goodwill – Jews and non-Jews alike – of the necessity for continued Zionist activism.”
Amen, but it’s something else, what Tobin wrote in the middle of his article, that’s a positive, self-motivated reason for grassroots American Jews’ continued Zionist activism. Tobin:
“Contrary to those who wrongly claim that Judaism is merely a religion and that opposing Israel’s existence has nothing to do with anti-Semitism, the connection to the land of Israel is an integral part of Jewish faith and part of the daily liturgy. The longing for Zion is as old as the Jewish people, and the hope of returning to it had sustained Jews throughout the millennia of exile.”
That First Zionist Congress that Herzl convened in Switzerland in 1897 was a milestone in Jewish history, which Herzl himself recognized and prophesied others would, as Tobin noted in his article, as I had in my book Israel 3000 Years (pp. 142-43), quoting Herzl’s Diary:
“’If I were to sum up the Congress in a word – which I shall take care not to publish – it would be this: At Basel I founded the Jewish State.
“’If I said this aloud today, I would be greeted by universal laughter. In five years, perhaps, and certainly in fifty years, everyone will perceive it.’
“And in 1947, fifty years to the year, through Palestine’s partition by the UN into Arab and Jewish states, everyone did.”
We think of today’s Israel as having fought all these wars – the War of 1948-49, the Sinai Campaign, the Six Day War, the War of Attrition, the Yom Kippur War …. These were battles. Today’s State of Israel has fought only one war – Its War of Independence, and it is still being fought.
I was eight years old when Ben-Gurion, standing beneath Herzl’s portrait in a Tel Aviv museum on May 14, 1948, called on “the Jewish people all over the world” to stand by Israel in the great struggle for fulfillment of the Dream of Generations for its sovereign redemption. I was older before I understood he was speaking to me.
Is it not just Israelis’ but our fight also, we grassroots American Jews? I recall reading about a conference of Christians a few years ago, in which the leader asked the attendees re the conflict in Palestine, “How much skin do we Christians have in the game?” Had I been in the audience, I’m confident I’d have shouted out “foreskin,” but the question’s germane. E.g., an HonestReporting article this week, History Repeating Itself as Bethlehem’s Christians Face Extinction, voices concerns whether Christians fairly acknowledge their precarious state in Arab controlled places in Palestine and fairly attribute the cause of their plight when they do. But in our own case there’s no room in the inn for irresolution regarding our people’s millennia-proven need and historical and legal right to our Land of Israel homeland Jewish State, the entirety of it, including intrinsically inherent historic Jerusalem and Judea-Samaria hill country heartland.
On Monday this week Israeli President Isaac Herzog stood where Herzl had stood in that Basel, Switzerland, hall and addressed an audience a hundred twenty-five years after Herzl’s. What he said, I believe, is especially relevant to readers of what I have called for these past eleven hundred twenty-eight weeks a “media watch.” One of the themes I have harped upon, including in last week’s #1127, is that we must reclaim Jewish equity in the names “Palestine” and “Palestinian,” which are not inherently what I called Dirty Words, but made dirty by their hijacking by our Jewish homeland’s opponents. Last week, citing Wikipedia’s explanation, I also harped upon “Zionist entity” as having been converted into a pejorative connotation of dating Jewish connection to Palestine to the late nineteenth century Zionist movement. Israeli President Herzog titled his address in Herzl’s hall “We Must Reclaim Zionism.” He told of a campaign to make the term “Zionist” a term that is “being used as a term of anti-Semitic abuse against Jews and Israelis,” and said that “together” Israeli and Diaspora Jews must reclaim its wholesome Jewish meaning. Standing literally on Herzl’s platform, he said:
“Therefore, from a Jewish and Israeli perspective, Zionism means populating the Land of Israel and building Israeli society; it means fortifying Israeli democracy, with a proper culture of debate and discussion, and the perpetual pursuit of peace and coexistence with members of all peoples and faiths living in Israel and in the whole Middle East; it means guaranteeing aliyah to the State of Israel, the beating heart of the Jewish people and their firmest foundations; it means fostering Jewish identity among all our nation’s communities, bolstering mutual responsibility in the Jewish world across its many stripes, and of course the security and prosperity of Diaspora Jewry.”
Yes, we must reclaim “Zionism” as being all the wholesome positive things President Herzog standing in Herzl’s hall just enumerated, and of course “Zionist” as a proud practitioner of Zionism. But at the same time, as I said last week – “Israel isn’t ‘the Zionist entity’ but the never-relinquished homeland of the Jewish people from ancient times to the present” – we must resist our enemies’ distortion of Zionism into a false dating of Jews’ three-millennia connection to the land of Israel as commencing on the date Herzl had stood in that hall.