Why the Left Hates Zionism: the War on Israel Explained
Crowd in Tel Aviv celebrates Israel's declaration of independence in 1948.
By Shmuel Klatzkin
What is Zionism?
The short answer is the modern movement to restore the Jewish nation’s sovereignty.
The name Zion is biblical — it is the name of a specific mountain in Jerusalem adjacent to the site of the ancient Temples. It also is used in the Bible and in post-Biblical literature to refer variously to the site of the Temple, to Jerusalem, and to the Holy Land in general.
Thus, in the core Jewish liturgy that dates back to the Babylonian exile community, we find this prayer:
May our eyes see Your return to Zion in compassion. Blessed are You who returns His presence to Zion.
Thus, around 1170, the poet and philosopher Yehuda HaLevi wrote in Spain:
My heart is in the east, and I in the uttermost west —
How can I find savor in food? How shall it be sweet to me?
How shall I render my vows and my bonds, while yet
Zion lies beneath the fetters of Edom, and I in Arab chains?
The Hebrew root underlying the name is also used to designate a gravestone — tsiyun — and the root also appears in the word metsuyan, which means outstanding. The common thread of the root designates something that stands out and is invested with deep meaning and excellence.
In the 19th century, a century of -isms, the name of Zion was used to designate a political movement for sovereignty. It is associated with the figure of Theodore Herzl who in a brief career galvanized this centuries-old yearning into a political movement of growing power among the Jewish people and then on the world stage.
Herzl was a highly assimilated, non-traditional Austrian Jew who worked as a journalist. Like so many Jews in Central and Western Europe, he was fully invested in the movement of modern liberalism, which had put an end to ghettoization and offered Jews increasing political and economic opportunity. It was the age of progress, and many Jews took it as a matter of faith that full equality was within reach, and a secular vision of a messianic age was near at hand.
Then Herzl was sent by his newspaper to cover the Dreyfus Affair in France.
Alfred Dreyfus was an officer in the French Army, which had suffered humiliating defeat in the Franco-Prussian War. It became clear that French military secrets had been compromised by an insider to Germany, and authorities brought a case against Captain Dreyfus.
It became clear early on that Dreyfus had been set up by the authorities, who wished to avoid further disgrace by pinning the charge on a Jew. The old charges of Jews being disloyal to their host nation proved stronger than the Third Republic’s commitment to the liberal principles of Liberté, Equalité, Fraternité, and Dreyfus was twice convicted and imprisoned in the tropical hellhole of Devil’s Island off the coast of French Guyana. Meanwhile, France was roiled by surges of violent, riotous antisemitism.
There to observe and cover the Affair, Herzl was stunned. His belief in the liberal creed of continuous progress towards universal understanding was shattered. He became converted to a cause which emerged like an epiphany — the Jewish people would forever be at the mercy of hatred until they reestablished themselves as a nation on their own land.
Not only France was descending into hatred, but the great Russian Empire, where the vast majority of the world’s Jews then lived, had reversed course and had embraced from the top a program of increasing legal restrictions, lying propaganda, and government-incited violence. It is during this time that the largest emigration of Jews to America began, something familiar to all those who have seen Fiddler on the Roof or An American Tail.
But many Jews hearkened to Herzl’s message instead, and the Zionist movement grew there rapidly. But with the Jewish homeland under the rule of the decrepit Ottoman sultanate, the obstacles to Jewish settlement, let alone independence, were immense. Being a man in a hurry and far from traditional, Herzl thought the place was immaterial as long as sovereignty could be gained. The British were far more liberal than the Turks, and they had immense colonial territories. Herzl proposed that Uganda might be a place for the Jews to go. But the Zionist movement didn’t want to find independence other than in the historical Jewish homeland. While Uganda would later prove to be a profitable place for colonial settlers from India, such as the family of Mayor Mamdani, the Jews felt the pull of ancient Zion that HaLevi expressed so powerfully in his poetry.
Muslims hate Zionism because they would rather die than accept Jews on equal terms as a people.
Zionism advanced not through military conquest but through the vision, determination, and self-sacrifice of pioneers who sought to establish a Jewish homeland by purchasing and settling land. Their efforts required navigating a corrupt Ottoman bureaucracy, where permission to purchase property often had to be bought with bribes, as did the protection of their lives, liberties, and newly acquired holdings. But the land into which they came was vividly described by Mark Twain in his visit of only a few decades earlier as largely, frighteningly barren. Land with adequate water was plagued by malaria (my wife’s aunt died of malaria in the 1920s when she was in Jerusalem with her father who was teaching at the newly built Hebrew University).
With their defeat in World War I, the Ottoman Empire collapsed, and Britain undertook a mandate that was dedicated to providing a homeland for Jews that would not deny Arabs their national aspirations. That proved a difficult pledge to fulfill, because of the ascent of the hostile version of Arab nationalism championed by Amin al Husseini, whom the British sought to co-opt by giving him power as the Mufti of Jerusalem. The Mufti instead used his religious position to incite holy war, teaching that Jewish independence in land that had been part of the Caliphate for more than a millennium was an insufferable insult. Violence meant to end the Jewish presence in the Land increased in frequency and intensity, driving Jews out of ancient settlements such as Hebron where small communities of Jews had lived with little interruption since the Roman destruction.
Britain sought compromise. In 1921, Winston Churchill, then Colonial Secretary, unliterally set aside about 80 percent of the territory as off-limits to Jewish settlement and now to be called the Emirate of Transjordan (now Jordan). This did nothing to alleviate the growing unrest being led by Husseini and his allies. It was not the size of the contemplated Jewish homeland that mattered — it was the very idea that in a land conquered by the Islamic empire, anyone other than Muslims should have sovereignty.
Late in the Thirties, the British made another attempt to satisfy everyone. A commission under Lord Peel held extensive hearings with both sides (although the Arab side would only attend if the Jewish delegation was not present, so they were heard separately. The commission proposed in the end a two-state solution giving the Jews about 20 percent of the remainder of the territory.
This offer was rejected by the Arab delegates. The issue was not the size of the sovereign Jewish area, but its existence at all.
In late 1947, the United Nations passed a plan that neatly split the land in half.
Only the Jews accepted this plan. Five nearby nations invaded, publicly announcing their intent to drive the Jews out. They lost badly, killing only about one percent of the entire Jewish population.
No peace or recognition was offered by the defeated, and they exacted revenge over the next few years. Centuries-old Jewish communities in Iraq, Syria, Egypt, Libya, and Yemen were forced out by violence, expropriation, and loss of civil rights. Nearly a million were expelled and most came, exhausted and nearly penniless, to Israel, living in tents for years as the new country tried to find a way to deal with the massive influx. All the while, the surrounding nations never ended the state of war, de facto as well as de jure.
But only recently, another pattern has emerged, exemplified in the Abraham Accords and the working cooperation with such states as the UAE and even (most noticeably after the FlyDubai attempted slaughter) Saudi Arabia. It is the liberal dream emerging in this difficult area of nations living together in peace and prosperity.
But today’s Left is not liberal. For the modern Left is illiberal in principle. Instead of peacemakers, it embraces the violent atavists who still seek the obliteration of any Jewish sovereignty, or of any Jews at all, save for some enslaved dhimmis.
And along the way, they seek to obliterate the soul of the West by capturing its language and turning it against itself, so that we become partners in our own destruction.
This is the Death Cult with which the American Left finds itself increasingly in tune. It all fits: decreasing birth rates, abortion up to the moment of birth (and, in the cult around Linda Clancy, some pushing for a right to abort well after birth); child mutilation; rubbing out the life of the free market; crushing free speech; and murdering political freedom by criminalizing opposing leaders.
And over all these causes, the Palestine flag waves, the flag that symbolizes the new Final Solution to the Jewish problem in the Middle East and worldwide. They hate Zionism because they would rather die than accept Jews on equal terms as a people.
The candidates of the illiberal Left won’t say this out loud. They obscure it in order to get office, knowing that they are deceiving their voters. All in that party will be held to go along lockstep if they get a majority.
Don’t be fooled.
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