The Existential Necessity of Zionism

[A COMMENTARY Editorial]
I.
The jihadist siege of a kosher grocery store in eastern Paris on January 9
was not the beginning of a new threat to French Jews and the Jews of
Europe. Rather, it was the culmination of a decade of crisis. And it will not
be the end.
The new era of deadly anti-Semitism in France began with the January
2006 murder of 23-year-old Ilan Halimi. Shortly after a Shabbat meal with
his mother, Halimi was lured to a Paris slum, where he was ambushed by a
gang. They held him captive for 24 days, during which time he was beaten,
stabbed, burned with acid, mutilated, lit on fire, and tortured to death.
Halimis murderers were African and North African Muslim immigrants
with ties to Islamic extremists. They called themselves the Gang of
Barbarians. And they chose Halimi because he was a Jew.
Frances 5 million Muslims account for 10 to 12 percent of the countrys
total population. It is the largest Muslim population in Europe; it is also
the most problematic. Several factors contribute to this reality.
The first is radical Islam. Since the late-20th century, a Saudi-funded, antiSemitic strain of Islamist radicalism has spread to all corners of the
Muslim world. Many of Frances recent Muslim immigrants from North
Africa have brought their Islamist and jihadist sympathies to Europe.
Indeed, a 2013 poll found that a startling 27 percent of French Muslims
younger than 24 support ISIS.
Second, nationalism is a foundational aspect of French life. Old nationalist
allegiances have made it hard for well-meaning Muslim immigrants to
integrate into society, as they have no direct ties to Metropolitan France.
They live largely among themselves inbanlieues, whose customs and
norms closely resemble those of the inhabitants countries of originnot
those of their new home.
The doctrine of multiculturalism, the ide fixe of postwar Europe, has a
strange relationship with French nationalism: Though it would seem
nationalisms ideological opposite, multiculturalism offers rosy-cheeked
cover to Frances deep unwillingness to allow anyone without centuriesold roots to become French. Nominally, according to the postmodern
ideal of multiculturalism, no one culture is more virtuous than another.
And so the anti-Western, anti-Semitic Islamism practiced by Frances most
dangerous citizens is not to be vilified, but rather understood and,
ultimately,
tolerated.
As
a
matter
of
daily
reality,
however,
multiculturalism allows the French to keep the Muslims separateand
unequal. And it allows some in France to entertain the belief that Jews,
too, can never be French.
France is also home to Europes largest Jewish population. For decades
after World War II, French Jewry thrived both as a vibrant community of
co-religionists and as integral members of French society. While European
anti-Semitism was far from extinguished, France seemed a living example
of successful Jewish life in Europe after the Holocaust. Today, the Jewish

population of France stands at approximately 478,000the worlds

second-largest population of Diaspora Jews (after Americas).
But Frances Jews are outnumbered by its Muslims 10 to 1. The
unspeakable murder of Halimi in 2006 heralded a sharp turn back to
Europes most notorious hatred, at the hands of its newest population.
There have been thousandsthousandsof attacks on French Jews and
Jewish sites in the years since Halimi was killed. These range from
muggings to firebombings to the desecration of Jewish graves to murder.
In March 2012, Mohammed Merah, a radicalized French citizen of Algerian
descent, shot and killed Rabbi Jonathan Sandler, his two children, and
another child at the Ozar Hatorah school in Toulouse. The shooting led to
further attacks. In retrospect, one of the more chilling incidents occurred
in August 2012, when a French Islamist threw a grenade into a Kosher
market in Sarcelles.
Muslim attacks on French Jews increased more significantly still in the
summer of 2014, during and after Israels war with Hamas in Gaza. On July
13, dozens of North African immigrants stormed Pariss Don Isaac
Abravanel synagogue, chanting Allahu Akbar and Death to the Jews.
The mob, wielding knives, clubs, and axes, tried for hours to get through
the barricaded door to some 200 congregants on the other side. Police and
representatives of Frances Jewish Community Protection Service
eventually dispersed the attackers. In July and August, there were a total
of eight attempts to destroy or burn various synagogues in Paris. And in
Sarcelles, mobs set fire to Jewish-owned business. All told, anti-Semitic
incidents in France shot up an estimated 90 percent in 2014.
From the Halimi murder to the attacks in January, the official French
response has been one of sympathy for the victim and denial of the nature
of the victimizer. On the afternoon of January 9, at the close of a week in
which gunmen who claimed to be avenging the prophet Muhammad killed
17 French citizens, President Franois Hollande stood in front of television
cameras and announced that the terrorists had nothing to do with the
Muslim religion.
The ineffectual response of Hollande and his predecessors to the Muslim
problem in their midst has sent many French into the arms of the National
Front (FN). This far-right party, founded in 1972 and led today by Marine
Le Pen, scored its biggest victory ever in municipal elections in March
2014. Le Pen is an outspoken opponent of Muslim immigration, but the FN
is ultra-nationalist in every respect, and neither the party nor its
supporters can be considered friends of the Jews. Far from it. Le Pen,
daughter of FN founder and unabashed anti-Semite Jean-Marie Le Pen,
supports a ban on the wearing of yarmulkes in public. And like many
extremists before her, she has sought to make common cause with antiSemitic figures from opposing parties. Thus the tentative rise of the
French far right poses its own potential threat to Frances Jews. This was
exemplified on January 16, 2014, when 17,000 French nationalists
gathered in central Paris for a Day of Anger and chanted, Jews, get out
of France, Jew, Jew, France does not belong to you, and The gas
chambers were a bluff. Working-class French are increasingly drawn to
both the far right and far left, both of which have a propensity to lay
blame on the Jew.

The battle lines are drawn. The French elite may occasionally condemn
anti-Semitism, as did Hollande after the attack on the kosher market. And
on January 11, Hollande, arm-in-arm with world leaders including Israeli
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, led more than a million people in a
march supporting the victims of the January attacks and condemning hate.
But there are no substantive signs that Frances leaders are prepared to
stop the radical Islamists who have declared war on French Jewry.
Meanwhile, members of the French working class are coming to see the
Jews more and more as a hindrance to their own economic well-being. And
Europes steady turn against Israel has sharpened anti-Semitism of all
stripes.
Caught between the deadly reality of radical Islam and the potential
manifestation of a neo-fascist revival, what are French Jews to do? For
ever greater numbers, the answer lies in Israel. Last year, a record-high
7,000 French Jews immigrated to the Jewish statemore than double the
year before. The Jewish Agency, which oversees immigration of Jews to
Israel, now estimates that some 15,000 French Jews will make aliyah in
2015.
Jews should have the right to choose to stay in France or anywhere else on
the planet Earth they wish to live, from the center of Hebron to the top of
Mount Everest. But the issue is not right but reality. Jews in Franceand,
given certain trends, elsewhere in Europe, from Great Britain to
Scandinaviahave to consider their literal survival.
II.
In 1894, the Viennese journalist Theodor Herzl was on the scene in Paris to
cover the official public degradation of Alfred Dreyfus, a French officer
who had been convicted of spying for Germany and sentenced to life on
Devils Island. No matter that both men were Jews; Herzl had believed the
prim, stuffed-shirt, more-French-than-the-French Dreyfus to be guilty. But
once Dreyfuss military colors were torn from his clothing, with crowds
screaming death to the Jews, as they had for months, Herzl had not only
changed his mind about Dreyfuss guilt but had come to see him as the
representative figure of the Jewish crisis in Europe. As Herzls biographer
Amos Elon wrote, the degraded man symbolized the Jew in modern
society, conforming to its ways, speaking its language, thinking its
thoughts, sewing its insignia to its shoulders only to have them violently
torn off.
Jews should not delude ourselves, Herzl wrote in his diary. The cause is
a lost one. The cause of which he spoke was the effort to secure equal
rights to life and liberty for Jews as a minority population living among
non-Jews. For Herzl, the Dreyfus case marked the conclusion to years of
rumination about the existential condition of his people. In the wake of
the Dreyfus conviction, Elon wrote, Herzl finally made up his mind to lead
a worldwide action on behalf of the Jews.
Eighteen months later, Herzl published The Jewish State. This pamphlet,
which changed the world in 23,000 words, is startling even today, not
because of the power of its rhetoric but because of its unprecedented
practicality. It does not advance uniquely powerful or memorably
polemical arguments against anti-Semitism: I do not wish to take up the
cudgels for the Jews in this pamphlet, Herzl wrote. It would be useless.

Everything rational and everything sentimental that can possibly be said

in their defense has been said already. If ones hearers are incapable of
comprehending them, one is a preacher in a desert. And if ones hearers
are broad and high-minded enough to have grasped them already, then
the sermon is superfluous.
The Jewish State is not a sermon. It is a blueprint. It was revolutionary
because Herzl argued there was nothing to be done to cure antiSemitism when Jews lived among non-Jews. It was a by-product of that
coexistence. His answer was a step-by-step program for what Jews needed
to do as a practical matter to continue to existwhat organizations they
needed to establish, what tactics and techniques they needed to employ
to secure the aim that was stated very plainly in his title.
III.
For all the opinions among the Zionist leaders who followed Herzl as to
what form Jewish self-rule should takeand there were manythere was
one thing on which they all agreed. Any debate over what kind of
state Israel should be was irrelevant unlessthere was a state. This was a
practical nationalism.
Although he is now considered the founding father of the ideological right
in Israel, the revisionist leader Vladimir Jabotinsky was dedicated to a
pragmatic, not a religious or historic, need for a Jewish national home in
Palestine. He called it humanitarian Zionism. As the anti-Jewish storm
clouds over Europe gathered strength once again, Jabotinsky aimed for a
simple goal: the rescue of as many Jews as possible. Jabotinsky, the most
literate and literary of the early Zionist leaders, grew to disdain the
arguments about what a good Israel ought to look likethus, he
dismissively called the project of other Zionist leaders an amusement
park for Hebrew culture. What Israel needed was not to become but
to be.
Jabotinsky died in 1940, before he could know the full measure of how
desperately his humanitarian Zionism had been required. The Holocaust
did not create the need for a Jewish state. It proved the need. Who is
willing and capable of guaranteeing that what happened to us in Europe
will not recur? David Ben-Gurion asked a UN commission in 1947. There
is only one security guarantee: a homeland and a state.
The pervasiveness of anti-Semitism throughout the world continued
proving the need after the state of Israel became a reality. Arab countries
either expelled their Jews or made it impossible for them to survive
without leaving. This resulted in an immediate refugee crisis: 850,000
Jews fled the Arab world in the years following Israels independence.
Nearly 600,000 settled in Israel. The Jewish states absorption of those
refugees was unprecedented; the immigrants nearly doubled Israels
nascent population. Such a thing was only possible because of practical
Zionismthe organizations and the banks and the bureaucratic systems
originally envisioned in The Jewish State.
The Jewish Agency was formally established in 1929 with immigrant
absorption as one of its main areas of concentration. It took its name from
Article Four of the League of Nations Mandate for Palestine: an
appropriate Jewish agency shall be recognized as a public body for the
purpose of advising and cooperating with the administration of Palestine

in such economic, social, and other matters as may affect the

establishment of the Jewish National Home and the interests of the Jewish
population in Palestine.
Although the Jewish Agency had other functions, aiding aliyah was the
reason it was kept intact after the founding. Ben-Gurion had wanted it to
go out of existence but was overruled. The Israeli historian Anita Shapira
explains why:
Many in the Israeli leadershiprecognized that the Zionist Organization
and the Jewish Agency (which had shared personnel) were experienced in
organizing immigration and absorbing and settling immigrants. They
therefore supported the organizations continued existence despite BenGurions opposition.
Keeping these organizations intact was again a practical decision, owing
in part to Ben-Gurions own demands. Early on, there were calls to slow
the tide of immigration from lands east of Palestine or to impose
requirements on prospective immigrants health or ability to work. BenGurion would have none of it. We must bring the Jews of Iraq and all the
other dispersions that are prepared or have to immigrate, he said, as
soon as possiblewithout considerations of property and absorption
possibilities. And so they were brought. Not without immense difficulties,
and not without creating social tensions that exist inside the Jewish state
to this day. But there they are. They are still there. As are their children.
And their grandchildren. And their great-grandchildren.
The influx from Arab lands was not the only astounding wave of
immigration. Soviet Jews, desperate for relief from institutionalized
totalitarian hatred in the 1970s, found a crucial ally in U.S. Senator Henry
M. Scoop Jackson and Representative Charles Vanik, who successfully
moved legislation restricting U.S. trade with countries, such as the Soviet
Union, that did not permit oppressed minorities to emigrate. Jews began,
slowly, to find their way to the other side of the Iron Curtain. The trickle
became a flood with the Gorbachev governments liberalization and finally
the collapse of the USSR in 1991.
Today, there are 1.2 million Jews from the former Soviet Union in Israel,
the third-largest Russian-speaking Diaspora after the United States and
Germany. The Jewish Agency is now led by Natan Sharansky, who spent
nine years in the Gulag for the crime of wanting to live as a Jew. And it is
the Jewish Agency that will be there to aid the Jews of Europe over the
coming years.
IV.
Zionism was not a utopian vision. It was a program, and remains a
programthe means by which Jewry can and will survive into its fourth
millennium. It is about providing Jews with a safe haven in the world and
allowing them to exercise rights they have been denied almost
everywhere on earth where they have been governed by otherssave the
astonishing exception of the United States. It is about letting Jews be.
That is one of the many reasons Israel was established as a democratic
state, and one that respects minority rights.
And yet, to some of Israels professed supporters, this is controversial.
The classic opposition to Zionism outside the Jewish community has
always been that the need for an Israel was and is not pressing, or that

competing practicalities outweighed the need. Within the Jewish

community, the most potent opposition to Zionism has had a religious
sourcein the belief among some in the ultra-Orthodox community that a
state preceding the arrival of the Messiah is an idolatrous offense against
God. The religious objection to practical Zionism, in other words, lies in its
practical success.
Today, within the Jewish community, anti-Zionist Jews do not pose much of
a challenge. Now the real challenge comes from within Zionism itselfwith
the way practical Zionism has disappointed some Jews. These are people
who have replaced practical Zionism with what might be called
conditional Zionism. For the conditional Zionists, Israel was once the
port of call for Jews adrift. Now, they say, the storm is over and the threat
to Jewry comes more from what they see as the calamity that the storm
has wreaked on the port.
In his 2012 book The Crisis of Zionism, Peter Beinart insists he sleeps
better at night knowing that the world contains a Jewish state. His very
next words, however, might count as a succinct motto of the conditional
Zionists: But not any Jewish state. If Israel does not behave as the
conditional Zionists wish it to behave, if it does not enact policies the
conditional Zionists wish it to enact, if it does not confront its own
external challenges in a manner that salves the consciences of the
conditional Zionists, then it is not deserving of their support.
And what is the alternative to Zionism for them? In a darkly ironic passage
in the book, Beinart points to Europe: The vast majority of European Jews
now live in democracies that ensure religious liberty. The Jews of France,
warned not to wear yarmulkes or Stars of David or even, at times, go to
synagogue, might disagree.
The conditional Zionists have a way of mistaking a lull in the waves for a
permanent low tide. Consider this sentence Beinart wrote only three years
ago: For the most part, young American Jews dont experience their
campuses as hostile or anti-Semitic. In fact, crude anti-Zionism is
ruthlessly enforced both among the faculty and the student body across
American higher education.
In their own words and actions, conditional Zionists implicitly
acknowledge that the end of the need for practical Zionism is a necessary
prerequisite for their own brand of Zionismone in which left-leaning
American Jews can use the State of Israel as their moral playground, the
successor to Jabotinskys amusement park for Hebrew culture. While
the 2014 war between Israel and Hamas in Gaza was used as a pretext for
the kind of popular violent anti-Semitic expression in Europe that the
conditional Zionists had assured us was a thing of the past, in the United
States the liberal Zionists were agonizing over the supposed
irreconcilability of their progressive values with Israels method of selfdefense.
Israel Is Making It Hard to Be Pro-Israel, complained the headline of
a New Yorkmagazine post by Jonathan Chait. He flubbed the facts of the
conflictThe operation in Gaza is not Netanyahus strategy in excess; it
is Netanyahus strategy in its entirety, he writes, preposterouslybut he
was actually quite honest about his own brand of Zionism. He explains
that his long-running definition of what it means to be pro-Israel includes

two possible qualifications: a sympathy for the countrys history vis--vis

its critics, or an ongoing support for its political stance in relation to its
international foes. This is conditional Zionism, heavy on the
conditional.
So what happens to the conditional Zionists arguments when antiSemitism reasserts itself with a vengeance? The answer comes from the
academic Alan Wolfe. His latest book, At Home in Exile, purports to explain
why Diaspora is good for the Jews. Wolfe accepts, to some degree, the
premise of practical Zionism. But then he caricatures it, asserting that the
credibility of the Zionist project, at least as its most dedicated adherents
see it, depends on the complete collapse of Diaspora life:
Intentionally or not, a focus on diasporic success undermines that unity,
for if Jews can flourish outside the Jewish state, the fundamental rationale
for that states existence is inevitably brought into question. Zionists did
not build a home for some Jews so that others could treat it as a place to
go on vacation.
According to Wolfe, then, the Zionists response is threat inflation in the
service of particularism at the expense of universalism. Wolfe says Jews
dont appreciate, or dont permit themselves to appreciate, their good
fortune. Far from representing an appeal for the rights of powerless
minorities to live in dignity, Wolfe writes, repeated accusations of antiSemitism under such conditions all too often lose their innocence.
V.
It is, we fear, Wolfe and the conditional Zionists who must now lose their
innocence, if innocence it ever was. The conditions in France reveal the
dangerous complacency of conditional Zionism. Israel was not established
as a messianic project or a secular haven. It is not a socialist workers
paradise. It is not a capitalist-imperialist outpost. It is, instead, a country,
now 66 years of age, freer than most, fairer to minorities than most, in
which 6.2 million Jews now live.
Home is the place where, when you have to go there,/They have to take
you in, wrote Robert Frost. For every French Jew at risk, for every Jew
everywhere at risk, and for every Jew who chooses, Israel is home. Its
existence before the Holocaust would have saved millions. Its existence
after the Holocaust saved and created millions. Seventy years after the
Holocaust, Jews in Europe are in need of it again.
Alas, the promise Herzl offered at the conclusion of The Jewish State was
dreadfully naive: The Jews, once settled in their own State, would
probably have no more enemies, he wrote. In two months, Jews will
gather for the Passover seder and sing: In every generation they rise up
against us to destroy us. Anti-Semitism is a disease for which there is
likely no cure.
The existential necessity of Zionism after Paris is not only a fact. It is a
charge for the future.