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 thatWith 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 on Israel from the Inside: https://danielgordis.substack.com/p/is-iran-about-to-undo-zionisms-very