‘Zionism’ Has Been Made Into a Dirty Word by Woke Politics and Liars

But, like my family before me, I will always wear it proudly

An old photo from the 1957 Independence Day procession in Tel Aviv.

This is a guest post from the extended family of The JPF by the talented Sally Prag.

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May 14th is Israel’s Independence Day, with 2024 marking 76 years since the birth of the state of Israel.

The photo above is from a Hebrew newspaper that was sent to my mother last year. It’s of the 1957 Independence Day procession down Rehov Allenby in Tel Aviv.

On the left and at the bottom you can see a group of people standing on a balcony overlooking the street, watching the procession. That was my family’s balcony, and the man in the centre was my Saba (grandfather in Hebrew).

It was the State of Israel’s 9th birthday. My mother was also nine at the time, soon to turn ten. She was the fifth generation born in Eretz Israel, and part of what is apparently the largest extended Jewish family in the world — the descendants of Rabbi Avraham Shlomo Zalman Zoref, a well-known figure in Jewish Israeli history, known for going to great lengths of diplomacy to enable the return of Jews to Israel from Eastern Europe, and re-establishing the Ashkenazi community in Jerusalem. He risked his life to do so; two attempts were made on his life by Arab resistance, the second of which he succumbed to in 1851.

Naturally, my family in Israel were Zionists. My Saba was not born in Israel but arrived as a minor, having been driven out by pogroms in what was then Poland but is now a part of Russia. Like the majority who arrived in Palestine during the late 19th and early to mid 20th centuries, he came not out of some romantic desire to re-establish a Jewish presence in the Levant but out of necessity, seeking refuge from life-threatening violence towards Jews, merely for being Jewish.

Saba had a deep belief and commitment to the establishment of a nation that would protect and nurture Jewish life, identity and culture. He was a secular Jew and rebellious against religion. Thus, his Zionism didn’t come from any religious beliefs. Yet, like many, he understood that the Jews had roots there and could both thrive in the Mediterranean climate and find some kind of sanctuary from a world that was otherwise extremely hostile to Jews.

Back to the photo, the gathering would have been made up of members of his wife’s — my Savta’s — family. They owned the building and had built three apartments specifically for the family. Savta’s father was a property developer in Tel Aviv, owing to his early involvement in the founding of the city, which, prior to 1909 was just an expanse of sand dunes.

That’s not to say he was born into privilege — far from it, in fact. He, his wife, and their children had given up everything when they left their home in Motza, near Jerusalem, to save themselves and what they could carry upon two donkeys. They arrived in the coastal city of Jaffa, escaping threats of massacres by hostile Arab communities. The entire family, bar the two youngest, had walked the distance of 60 kilometres. The two youngest — Savta and her sister Tzipora — were too small to walk and rode on the backs of the donkeys.

Building a home and a livelihood from scratch, my great-grandfather was innovative enough to create a dairy business that enabled him to purchase a small plot of the land that would soon become part of the city of Tel Aviv, and the centre of modern life in Israel.

Zionism is something that runs through my family lines on both my maternal and paternal sides.

Well before either my Savta or Saba were born, over here in the UK, my great-great-uncle Joe co-founded the British section of Hovevei Zion, an organisation that sought to help re-establish a Jewish community in the land of Israel. The vision of this organisation, rather than being a politically-driven one, was a romantic one, based on religious idealism. Donors’ funds were used to purchase land for developing agricultural communities. These were the foundations upon which the Kibbutz movement later grew — socialist communities that had the means to thrive and flourish, and formed the backbone of the political form of Zionism that later took the lead, founded by the famous Theodore Herzl.

Herzl had, on a visit to London in 1897, gone to meet with my great-great-uncle Joe to explore the possibility of collaboration. But Joe was vehemently against Herzl’s ideas, and among a community of Jews who saw Herzl as an egomaniac, desiring only recognition as the saviour of the Jews. On that visit, Joe famously shut down Herzl, seeing him out of his office, and uttering a curt “Goodbye, Dr Herzl,” before firmly closing the door behind him.

Herzl passed away in 1904. My great-great-uncle Joe passed away in 1937, just before the worst of the Nazi-supported Arab uprising in Palestine and the start of the world war in which Jews were entirely dehumanised, starved, tortured and murdered. Had he been alive to see all of that, I suspect he would have gladly admitted that he was wrong, and that Herzl was, in fact, a visionary. Herzl knew, long before the rise of the Nazi party in Germany, that things would reach some kind of crisis point for the Jews in Europe.

I doubt very much he ever imagined the full scale of that crisis, but thank goodness he was spared seeing it.

Yet, it proved beyond a doubt that he had been right. Even in the aftermath of the allies’ victory and the liberation of the concentration camps, 200,000 Jews were left with no nation wanting them. Other prior-prisoners of the camps, such as the Romany Gypsies, were welcomed to live in the then-newly established nations of Europe and beyond, but no one wanted the Jews.

Even the friendly nations of Britain and the USA had so severely restricted Jewish immigration that it was a closed avenue for the vast majority. Short of the possibility to return to the countries they had once called home, Palestine became their only hope. It was that or the grave, in their eyes.

Thus, Israel, in its conception, became the one refuge that the Jews could count on. Zionism, despite its continuous morphing, was, at its root, a movement for a legitimate homeland where Jews could feel safe. And that could only be truly realised through the political establishment of a sovereign state.

And, to this day, many Jews understand that that is all Zionism actually is.

I could address the other dirty words that are commonly applied to Zionism — colonialism, ethnic cleansing, theocrasy and apartheid, among others — but this isn’t about that. So I will merely state the following:

Surrounded by 625 times the quantity of Arab League land, the one Jewish state was formed and remains. In the world, 50 nations are ruled by Muslims, 20 of which speak the same language as the Palestinians. One small nation is predominantly Jewish and has Hebrew as its national language. Jews are a tiny minority in the global population; today, the Jewish population remains smaller than it was before the onset of WWII. Yet, education in these Muslim countries teaches hatred of Jews from birth. Jews are blamed for everything and Israel is seen as the culprit of all the bad things in the world, despite our tiny presence.

For those who like to attack any supporters of the Jewish state with accusations of conflating anti-Zionism with antisemitism, just know that those teaching these core value systems of Jew-hate from birth across the Muslim world do not separate the identification with Jewish ethnicity from Zionism. And for good reason. Because to deny the Jewish population of the world one small state on a little piece of land with long-established Jewish heritage is antisemitic.

And don’t be fooled by the so-called ‘Jews’ who proclaim themselves to be anti-Zionist. I assure you that the majority of those Jews are living in cosy, Western nations where Jews have had privilege and relative ease to exist, just like my great-great-uncle Joe had when he pooh-poohed Herzl and his version of Zionism as a threat to the romantic version he was promoting. After all, British Jews, living under a moderate government, had it really good compared to those in much of Europe.

Privilege makes it easy to ignore the real issues at hand. Only those able and willing to see beyond their own privilege can truly understand what Zionism means for Jewish people as a whole, especially for the 7 million Jews in Israel. And thankfully, despite the voices shouting loudly from anti-Israel protests, there are still many of those.

Despite the dirtying of the word ‘Zionism’ and the hostilities and violent threats made in response to it, many like myself will wear it proudly.

So Happy 76th Birthday, Israel! I love you forever!

Oh and, one last thing…

And FCK IRGC and FCK ANTISMTSM. Author’s photo.

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