For Zionism to Succeed, Jews Need Not Be Invulnerable, but They Must Be Able to Live Without Fear

Dec. 10 2021

Stepping back from the strategic, tactical, and diplomatic questions Israel faces with regard to Iran’s quest to develop nuclear weapons, Daniel Gordis argues that what is at stake is the soul of the Zionist project:

The primary purpose of Zionism was to restore dignity to the Jewish people, to end millennia of Jews living in fear. You could see it and hear it everywhere in the heyday of Zionist ideology. Theodor Herzl said it often. The anthem of Beitar, Vladimir Jabotinsky’s movement that would produce Menachem Begin and the Likud, proclaimed, ivri gam ben oni, ben sar—every Jew, even a poor one, is royalty
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When Begin launched Operation Litani to get the PLO out of southern Lebanon in 1982 (an operation that morphed into the eighteen-year-long Lebanon war), it was because he couldn’t bear the notion that in a sovereign Jewish state, children in the northern city of Kiryat Shmona were crying themselves to sleep in bomb shelters, as Katyusha rockets pummeled the town. Hiding from enemies, shivering in fear and praying that nothing would happen to them was [the Jewish experience] of Europe, Begin believed. He was going to end that

With stress high, compulsory military service, armed conflagrations regular, and challenges aplenty, why are Israelis happier than most of, and having more kids than the rest of, the developed world? Because they feel safe, and they have a sense of purpose. The purpose, whether or not they articulate it to themselves this way, is being part of one of the greatest stories of human rebirth in all of history. It’s the story of bringing a nation back from the precipice, the story of sowing hope where despair should have reigned, of embracing the future even while remembering a tear-rinsed past. It’s the story of taking a . . . shattered people that had lived in fear and with weakness for centuries, and in the space of a few decades, transforming that people completely.

Read more at Israel from the Inside

More about: Israeli Security, Menachem Begin, Theodor Herzl, Vladimir Jabotinsky

Donald Trump’s Plan for Gaza Is No Worse Than Anyone Else’s—and Could Be Better

Reacting to the White House’s proposal for Gaza, John Podhoretz asks the question on everyone’s mind:

Is this all a fantasy? Maybe. But are any of the other ludicrous and cockamamie ideas being floated for the future of the area any less fantastical?

A Palestinian state in the wake of October 7—and in the wake of the scenes of Gazans mobbing the Jewish hostages with bloodlust in their eyes as they were being led to the vehicles to take them back into the bosom of their people? Biden foreign-policy domos Jake Sullivan and Tony Blinken were still talking about this in the wake of their defeat in ludicrous lunchtime discussions with the Financial Times, thus reminding the world of what it means when fundamentally silly, unserious, and embarrassingly incompetent people are given the levers of power for a while. For they should know what I know and what I suspect you know too: there will be no Palestinian state if these residents of Gaza are the people who will form the political nucleus of such a state.

Some form of UN management/leadership in the wake of the hostilities? Well, that might sound good to people who have been paying no attention to the fact that United Nations officials have been, at the very best, complicit in hostage-taking and torture in facilities run by UNRWA, the agency responsible for administering Gaza.

And blubber not to me about the displacement of Gazans from their home. We’ve been told not that Gaza is their home but that it is a prison. Trump is offering Gazans a way out of prison; do they really want to stay in prison? Or does this mean it never really was a prison in the first place?

Read more at Commentary

More about: Donald Trump, Gaza Strip, Israeli-Palestinian Conflict