Op Ed
In an opinion piece for the Wall Street Journal, B’nai B’rith International general counsel Gerard Leval argues that the anti-Semitic demonstrators on our campuses and in our cities are inadvertently making a powerful case for Zionism, and that only in a secure Israel can Jews be certain that they won’t be persecuted by reason of who they are.
Read the op-ed in the Wall Street Journal.
Herzl turns out to be right: Jews aren’t safe without a homeland.
The antisemitic demonstrators roiling our campuses and cities—most recently Washington last week—certainly don’t mean to, but they’re making a powerful case for Zionism.
In 1896 Theodor Herzl, a Viennese journalist and very assimilated Jew, published “Der Judenstaat,” or “The Jewish State,” a manifesto calling for the establishment of a Jewish homeland in the biblical land of Israel. That set into motion the modern Zionist movement.
Herzl had awakened to his Jewish origins when he covered the trial of Alfred Dreyfus, the Jewish officer falsely accused of betraying France. He noticed that Dreyfus was an assimilated Jew and a proud Frenchman. Yet he was being treated as a traitor because he was a Jew, with cries of “Death to the Jews” reverberating on the streets of sophisticated Paris.
Confronted with this anomaly, Herzl came to the reluctant conclusion that Jews, observant or assimilated, needed their own nation to be safe from persecution. There was opposition to this notion, including from Jews. Many Europeans believed that the Enlightenment had triumphed over anti-Jewish prejudice. That claim became untenable when the Nazis slaughtered some six million European Jews.
In the decades since World War II, it has become easy again to be complacent about the condition of Jews in the Diaspora. But in the wake of Oct. 7, we can’t deny being witness to a worldwide paroxysm of hate against Israel, which has steadily morphed into classic antisemitism.
Since its founding, the U.S. has been a most extraordinary haven for Jews. In 1790 George Washington affirmed in a letter to the Jewish community of Newport, R.I., that in the new country every Jew would “sit in safety under his own vine and fig tree, and there shall be none to make him afraid.” Yet today, even in the halls of Congress, antisemitism has dramatically surfaced, and Jews are being intimidated.
It turns out that Herzl was right about the need to re-establish the Jewish homeland. For so many of us, it seemed inconceivable that America, our home and a beacon of freedom, would ever be other than a safe haven for Jews. Suddenly, we can’t be so sure.
So it is that those in the forefront of the anti-Israel and anti-Jewish demonstrations are giving full credence and impetus to the Zionist dream. Even in the most welcoming nation on earth, Jews feel at risk. Only in a secure Israel, a nation of and for the Jewish people, can Jews be certain that they won’t be persecuted by reason of who they are. The purveyors of anti-Israel and antisemitic propaganda are the best recruiters any Zionist could ever want. They are giving voice to Herzl’s fears and to the underlying reason for the existence of the very state they wish to destroy.
When Golda Meir was asked what was Israel’s secret weapon, she responded: “We have no place else to go.” The demonstrators filling our streets with anti-Jewish invective seem intent on validating Meir’s assertion and with it the Zionist project itself.
Gerard Leval is a Washington lawyer and author of “Lobbying for Equality, Jacques Godard and the Struggle for Jewish Civil Rights during the French Revolution.”