Zionism means Jewish survival

OPINION:

Zionism has become a target for legions on the left and some in the fever swamp of the right.

Yet Zionism is nothing more than Jewish self-defense. It means Jews have a right to defend themselves against the forces dedicated to their destruction.

For almost 2,000 years, Jews didn’t have a country of their own to protect them.

In exile, they suffered segregation, appropriation, expulsion and mass murder, culminating in the Holocaust and the deaths of one-third of the world’s Jews. The last was a German crime, but there’s blame enough to go around.

The Allies refused to bomb the rail lines to Auschwitz. Britain closed the door to Mandate Palestine to all but a tiny fraction of European Jewry. Most of the world refused to take in Jewish refugees from Nazism, knowing the fate of those excluded.

In a way, the Holocaust never ended.

On Oct. 7, 2023, more than 1,200 Jewish men, women and children were murdered by Palestinian terrorists, many in the most gruesome fashion imaginable. It was the largest one-day slaughter since the Holocaust. Mobs in the West immediately began celebrating it.

Former beauty queen Carrie Prejean Boller, who improbably was appointed to the White House Religious Liberty Commission, is outraged by Jewish self-defense.

At the commission’s Feb. 9 meeting, Ms. Boller, a recent convert to Catholicism, informed witnesses, “Just so you know, Catholics do not embrace Zionism.” She probably thinks Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Sen. Ted Cruz, Texas Republican, are Hindus.

Bill Donohue, president of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights, said Ms. Boller’s comments were “presumptuous and arrogant.” Although not all Catholics are Zionists, he observed, “activists for the anti-Zionist cause harbor animus against Jews.”

Ms. Boller showed that hostility in spades when she resurrected the old libel that “the Jews killed Jesus,” a calumny that the Catholic Church rejects. She also defended blogger Candace Owens, perhaps the ugliest antisemite on the right, who has called Judaism a “pedophile-centric religion” and said Zionists were behind the murder of President Kennedy.

No word on whether she thinks they had Julius Caesar whacked.

The commission chairman, Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, booted Ms. Boller less than 24 hours after her outburst.

Anti-Zionism is a troubling trend on the right. It’s business as usual on the left.

The mobs chasing Jewish students on Ivy League campuses aren’t College Republicans. The rising stars in the Democratic Party — including New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani and Rep. Ilhan Omar, Minnesota Democrat — are virulently anti-Israel.

While anti-Zionism fits the mindset of the left, it’s an anomaly on the right. The left sees Israel as a colonial exploiter and hates the Jewish state as America’s most reliable ally in the Middle East. Anti-Zionism is as out of place on the right as Mr. Mamdani would be at a meeting of the Adam Smith Society.

Ancient Israel is the bedrock of Western civilization. Quoting a prominent historian of his era, President Coolidge observed, “Hebraic mortar cemented the foundations of American democracy.”

Israel’s enemies are America’s enemies. The terrorists who hate Israel for being Jewish also hate America for being Christian and democratic. The jihad against the West didn’t start in 1948 with the birth of modern Israel, but in the seventh century with the advent of Muhammad, making it the longest-running civilizational conflict in history.

The war on Zionism is a war on the West. Our concepts of progress and human rights come from Sinai. If there were no Jewish Bible, then there would be no Christian Bible. If there were no New Testament, then Western civilization and its most illustrious offspring — America — would not exist.

Anti-Zionism infects all our institutions, especially academia.

Liz Magill was just named the dean of Georgetown University Law School.

In 2023, Ms. Magill resigned as president of the University of Pennsylvania after outrage over congressional testimony in which she refused to say that calls for genocide violated her university’s speech code. That depended on the context, she explained.

So, death camps might or might not be a bad thing, depending on the context.

Stop the sophistry. Anti-Zionism is antisemitism. It’s a call for the annihilation of the Jewish people.

My maternal grandfather was a refugee from czarist Russia. He came to America to escape antisemitism and lived long enough to see the rebirth of the state of Israel. He would have had no doubts about the poison peddled by Carrie Prejean Boller, Candace Owens and the rest of their Cossack cohort.

• Don Feder is a columnist with The Washington Times.