On October 7, 2023, I like many Jews around the world woke up to the news and images of a horrific attack by Hamas and other Palestinian terrorists from Gaza into Southern Israel.
I was 70 years old and in no way identified as a Zionist. I had been raised in an observant Jewish home on Long Island (outside of NY City). My father and his immediate family had escaped Germany in 1938 so I was the son of a holocaust survivor who believed that nothing like that would ever happen again (certainly not in my lifetime).
As a young adult I had been active in the anti-(Vietnam) war movement and identified primarily as part of the New Left counterculture.
I had visited Israel once when I was 16 years old and to the degree that I paid attention to the politics of the region I hoped that the Israelis and the Palestinians could somehow reach an agreement to live in peace together.
It seems as if in every generation, modern jews have believed that they have found a new home where they will be welcomed and allowed to integrate. America was such a place for me.
My first reactions to the October 7 massacre (again like those of many Jews around the world) was emotional. I felt a triggering of what can best be described as a transgenerational trauma.
I “felt” the pogroms that my ancestors had endured in the late 19th century (in Russia and Eastern Europe). I reexperienced the traumas of those 19th century pogroms.
My next reaction surprised me. I felt glad that there was an IDF that was able to go after the perpetrators of this pogrom and for the first time appreciated the importance of Israel’s existence. I became grateful for the existence of the State of Israel and to the founders of the Jewish State.
Something else however happened in the first few weeks after the October 7 massacre that shook me to the core. I had lived for more than 20 years in Colorado and had deep connections and long-standing relationships with political activists. I was shocked when people (mostly non-Jewish political activists) whom I had known for years as real friends started posting on Facebook things that could honestly only be described as support for Hamas and the perpetrators of the October 7 massacre.
I watched in horror as rallies took place across the country (mainly on campuses) in which leftists spoke about their “exhilaration” over the events of October 7. All of this occurred before Israel even began its attempt to retaliate against Hamas and secure the release of the hostages. People began shouting and demonstrating for a “cease-fire” without even acknowledging the need for Hamas to release the hostages and be prevented from rearming and repeating the massacre. Most amazingly (to me) people started repeating talking points that denied the horrific scope of the October 7 massacre and then blaming the entire even on Israel.
I was shocked (and remain shocked to this day) about the way that Hamas’ propaganda took hold in what became known as the “pro-Palestinian” anti-war movement on college campuses. I was shocked at the degree to which anti-Israel sentiment took over and anti-Semitism was allowed to flourish in the political left.
As Chaim Hertzog said at the UN in 1975: “Zionism is not racism. It is the national liberation movement of the Jewish people; a return to an indigenous homeland after millennia of persecution. In its redress of an historical injustice, in its desire to restore dignity to a people, it is an expression of the same universal yearnings for equality, freedom, and dignity that have animated all struggles for justice.”
“Zionism is nothing more – and nothing less – than the Jewish people’s sense of origin and destination in the land linked eternally with its name.”
As Theodore Hertzel wrote in 1895 (in Der Judenstaat). “We are naturally drawn into those places where we are not persecuted, and our appearance there gives rise to persecution. This is the case, and will inevitably be so, everywhere, even in highly civilized countries.”
“The Jews who wish for a State will have it. We shall live at last as free men on our own soil, and die peacefully in our own homes.”
Theordore Hertzel the father of Zionism was a “Dreyfus affair” Zionist. I am an October 7 Zionist.
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