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Yahoo
2 days ago
- Politics
- Yahoo
America's Anti-Jewish Assassins Are Making the Case for Zionism
The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here. The founding father of Zionism, the modern movement to create a Jewish state, had a Christmas tree. In 1895, Theodor Herzl, the Jewish journalist who would later convene the world's first Zionist Congress, was busy lighting the holiday ornament with his family when the chief rabbi of Vienna dropped in for a visit. The cleric was not amused—but the episode helps explain what Zionism is, why it came to be, and why it still finds adherents. Far from seeking to flee non-Jewish society, Herzl—like many European Jews of his era—ardently hoped to be accepted by it. He did not circumcise his son, and initially proposed that Jews evade anti-Semitism by converting en masse to Roman Catholicism. Only after such ill omens as the rise of Karl Lueger, the Vienna mayor who would serve as inspiration to Adolf Hitler, did Herzl reluctantly conclude that Jews would never be accepted in gentile society and pivot to pursuing Jewish statehood. Moving to a then-backwater in the Middle East was the last thing that Herzl wanted to do. It was also the last thing most Jews of his time wanted to do. Like Herzl, they simply sought to live in peace in the places they'd called home for centuries. And some, like Herzl, slowly realized that this was not going to be possible. As the historian Walter Russell Mead has put it, 'Zionism was not the triumphant battle cry of a victorious ethnic group,' but rather 'a weird, crazy, desperate stab at survival' made by those who foresaw their impending doom and despaired of other options. Seen in this context, Herzl's influential manifesto Der Judenstaat ('The Jewish State') was the 19th-century equivalent of Get Out for European Jews: a warning that well-intentioned liberalism would not save them, and that they needed to escape while they still could. Ever since, much of the world has worked to prove Herzl right. This past Sunday in Colorado, a man infiltrated a solidarity event for Israeli hostages in Gaza and began setting the Jews there on fire. The attack left 15 wounded, including an 88-year-old Holocaust survivor. The Boulder assault occurred just weeks after the execution of a young couple outside the Capital Jewish Museum in Washington, D.C., where a leftist extremist allegedly emptied his clip into one of the victims as she tried to crawl away. That shooting followed the attempted assassination of Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro on the second night of Passover. [Read: The deadly virus of anti-Semitic terrorism] The firebomber in Colorado was captured on video shouting 'end Zionists' during his rampage. The murderer in Washington produced a keffiyeh and reportedly declared, 'I did it for Gaza.' Shapiro's would-be killer told a 911 operator that he targeted the Jewish governor 'for what he wants to do to the Palestinian people.' Although these assailants all attacked American Jews, they clearly perceived themselves as Zionism's avengers. In reality, however, they have joined a long line of Zionism's inadvertent advocates. As in Herzl's time, the perpetrators of anti-Jewish acts do more than nearly anyone else to turn Jews who were once indifferent or even hostile to Israel's fate into reluctant appreciators of its necessity. Consider the Holocaust, the greatest anti-Jewish atrocity in modern memory. The Third Reich and its many collaborators exterminated two-thirds of Europe's Jews. At the same time, the enemies of the Nazis—including the United States and Canada—refused to let most desperate Jewish refugees into their countries. This inevitably funneled many people toward their destination of last resort: mandatory Palestine. The creation of Israel was the consequence less of Jewish choices than of all other Jewish choices being foreclosed by non-Jewish powers. In 1948, Israel declared independence and fought off the attempt of five invading Arab armies to strangle it in the cradle. Some 800,000 Palestinians fled or were expelled from their homeland. Wide swaths of the world promptly took out their displeasure at this outcome on the Jewish populations nearest at hand. In the years following Israel's founding, nearly 1 million Jews left their ancestral homes in the Arab and Muslim world. Many fled abuse in countries such as Iran, Iraq, Yemen, Libya, Syria, and Tunisia, where Jews were imprisoned, tortured, murdered, and stripped of their possessions, despite having lived in these places for millennia. At the time, few of these people were Zionists. They loved their home countries, which refused to love them back, and faced persecution when they arrived in Israel. Today, this Mizrahi community and its descendants comprise about half of Israel's population and form the backbone of Benjamin Netanyahu's right-wing base. The Soviet Union, despite presenting itself as the vanguard of universal brotherhood, also turned on its Jews. The Communist police state cast the community as subversive, institutionally discriminated against its members in higher education and the professions, and labeled countless Jews who had no interest in Israel as 'Zionists.' The state executed secular Jewish artists and intellectuals under false charges, repressed observance of the Jewish faith, and threw those who protested into Gulags. Eventually, after decades of international pressure, nearly 2 million Jews were allowed to leave. More than half moved to Israel, where they would become one of Israel's most reliably conservative constituencies. Simply put, Israel exists as it does today because of the repeated choices made by societies to reject their Jews. Had these societies made different choices, Jews would still live in them, and Israel likely would not exist—certainly not in its present form. Instead, Israel is a garrison state composed precisely of those Jews with the most reason to distrust the outside world and its appeals to international ideals, knowing that these did precisely nothing to help them when they needed it most. In this manner, decade after decade, anti-Semitism has created more Zionism. Put another way, the unwitting agents of Zionism throughout history have been those unwilling to tolerate Jews in their own countries. [Bruce Hoffman: The Boulder attack didn't come out of nowhere] Given this dynamic, a rational anti-Zionist movement would devote itself to making Jews feel welcome in every facet of life outside of Israel, ruthlessly rooting out any inkling of anti-Semitism in order to convince Jews that they have nothing to fear and certainly no need for a separate state. Such an anti-Zionist movement would overcome Zionism by making it obsolete. But that is not the anti-Zionist movement that currently exists. Instead, Israel's opposition around the globe—whether groups such as Hamas and Hezbollah or their international apologists and imitators—often seems determined to persuade those Jews who chose differently than Herzl did that he was right all along. Attacks such as those in Colorado, Washington, and Pennsylvania, not to mention the white-supremacist massacre at Pittsburgh's Tree of Life synagogue in 2018, have raised the costs of being Jewish in America. Synagogues, schools, and other Jewish institutions collectively pay millions of dollars to secure their premises, resulting in communities that are less open to the outside and attendees being forever reminded that they are not safe even in their places of worship. And now American Jews thinking of attending communal events must stop to consider whether would-be attackers will associate them with Israel and target them for death. America, at least, was not always this way. The country has long stood as the great counterexample to the Zionist project—proof that Jews could not just survive but thrive as equals in a pluralistic liberal democracy, without need for their own army or state. After Barbra Steinmetz, the 88-year-old Holocaust survivor in Boulder, was attacked, she had a message for the country. 'We're Americans,' she told NBC News. 'We are better than this.' That is what most American Jews and their allies believe, and the justification for that belief was evident in Colorado this week, where Jared Polis, the state's popular Jewish governor, forthrightly condemned the attack. But if the perpetrators and the cheerleaders of the incipient American intifada have their way, that spirit will be stifled. Such a victory, however, would be self-defeating. According to video captured at the scene, the Boulder attacker accidentally set himself on fire in the middle of his assault. It would be hard to script a better metaphor for the way such violence sabotages the cause it purports to advance. If the anti-Zionist assassins succeed in making Jewish life in the United States less livable, they will not have helped a single Palestinian, but they will have made their opponents' case for them. They will have proved the promise of America wrong, and the darkest premonitions of Zionism right. Article originally published at The Atlantic
Atlantic
2 days ago
- Politics
- Atlantic
America's Anti-Jewish Assassins Are Making the Case for Zionism
The founding father of Zionism, the modern movement to create a Jewish state, had a Christmas tree. In 1895, Theodor Herzl, the Jewish journalist who would later convene the world's first Zionist Congress, was busy lighting the holiday ornament with his family when the chief rabbi of Vienna dropped in for a visit. The cleric was not amused—but the episode helps explain what Zionism is, why it came to be, and why it still finds adherents. Far from seeking to flee non-Jewish society, Herzl—like many European Jews of his era—ardently hoped to be accepted by it. He did not circumcise his son, and initially proposed that Jews evade anti-Semitism by converting en masse to Roman Catholicism. Only after such ill omens as the rise of Karl Lueger, the Vienna mayor who would serve as inspiration to Adolf Hitler, did Herzl reluctantly conclude that Jews would never be accepted in gentile society and pivot to pursuing Jewish statehood. Moving to a then-backwater in the Middle East was the last thing that Herzl wanted to do. It was also the last thing most Jews of his time wanted to do. Like Herzl, they simply sought to live in peace in the places they'd called home for centuries. And some, like Herzl, slowly realized that this was not going to be possible. As the historian Walter Russell Mead has put it, 'Zionism was not the triumphant battle cry of a victorious ethnic group,' but rather 'a weird, crazy, desperate stab at survival' made by those who foresaw their impending doom and despaired of other options. Seen in this context, Herzl's influential manifesto Der Judenstaat ('The Jewish State') was the 19th-century equivalent of Get Out for European Jews: a warning that well-intentioned liberalism would not save them, and that they needed to escape while they still could. Ever since, much of the world has worked to prove Herzl right. This past Sunday in Colorado, a man infiltrated a solidarity event for Israeli hostages in Gaza and began setting the Jews there on fire. The attack left 15 wounded, including an 88-year-old Holocaust survivor. The Boulder assault occurred just weeks after the execution of a young couple outside the Capital Jewish Museum in Washington, D.C., where a leftist extremist allegedly emptied his clip into one of the victims as she tried to crawl away. That shooting followed the attempted assassination of Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro on the second night of Passover. The firebomber in Colorado was captured on video shouting 'end Zionists' during his rampage. The murderer in Washington produced a keffiyeh and reportedly declared, 'I did it for Gaza.' Shapiro's would-be killer told a 911 operator that he targeted the Jewish governor 'for what he wants to do to the Palestinian people.' Although these assailants all attacked American Jews, they clearly perceived themselves as Zionism's avengers. In reality, however, they have joined a long line of Zionism's inadvertent advocates. As in Herzl's time, the perpetrators of anti-Jewish acts do more than nearly anyone else to turn Jews who were once indifferent or even hostile to Israel's fate into reluctant appreciators of its necessity. Consider the Holocaust, the greatest anti-Jewish atrocity in modern memory. The Third Reich and its many collaborators exterminated two-thirds of Europe's Jews. At the same time, the enemies of the Nazis—including the United States and Canada—refused to let most desperate Jewish refugees into their countries. This inevitably funneled many people toward their destination of last resort: mandatory Palestine. The creation of Israel was the consequence less of Jewish choices than of all other Jewish choices being foreclosed by non-Jewish powers. In 1948, Israel declared independence and fought off the attempt of five invading Arab armies to strangle it in the cradle. Some 800,000 Palestinians fled or were expelled from their homeland. Wide swaths of the world promptly took out their displeasure at this outcome on the Jewish populations nearest at hand. In the years following Israel's founding, nearly 1 million Jews left their ancestral homes in the Arab and Muslim world. Many fled abuse in countries such as Iran, Iraq, Yemen, Libya, Syria, and Tunisia, where Jews were imprisoned, tortured, murdered, and stripped of their possessions, despite having lived in these places for millennia. At the time, few of these people were Zionists. They loved their home countries, which refused to love them back, and faced persecution when they arrived in Israel. Today, this Mizrahi community and its descendants comprise about half of Israel's population and form the backbone of Benjamin Netanyahu's right-wing base. The Soviet Union, despite presenting itself as the vanguard of universal brotherhood, also turned on its Jews. The Communist police state cast the community as subversive, institutionally discriminated against its members in higher education and the professions, and labeled countless Jews who had no interest in Israel as 'Zionists.' The state executed secular Jewish artists and intellectuals under false charges, repressed observance of the Jewish faith, and threw those who protested into Gulags. Eventually, after decades of international pressure, nearly 2 million Jews were allowed to leave. More than half moved to Israel, where they would become one of Israel's most reliably conservative constituencies. Simply put, Israel exists as it does today because of the repeated choices made by societies to reject their Jews. Had these societies made different choices, Jews would still live in them, and Israel likely would not exist—certainly not in its present form. Instead, Israel is a garrison state composed precisely of those Jews with the most reason to distrust the outside world and its appeals to international ideals, knowing that these did precisely nothing to help them when they needed it most. In this manner, decade after decade, anti-Semitism has created more Zionism. Put another way, the unwitting agents of Zionism throughout history have been those unwilling to tolerate Jews in their own countries. Bruce Hoffman: The Boulder attack didn't come out of nowhere Given this dynamic, a rational anti-Zionist movement would devote itself to making Jews feel welcome in every facet of life outside of Israel, ruthlessly rooting out any inkling of anti-Semitism in order to convince Jews that they have nothing to fear and certainly no need for a separate state. Such an anti-Zionist movement would overcome Zionism by making it obsolete. But that is not the anti-Zionist movement that currently exists. Instead, Israel's opposition around the globe—whether groups such as Hamas and Hezbollah or their international apologists and imitators —often seems determined to persuade those Jews who chose differently than Herzl did that he was right all along. Attacks such as those in Colorado, Washington, and Pennsylvania, not to mention the white-supremacist massacre at Pittsburgh's Tree of Life synagogue in 2018, have raised the costs of being Jewish in America. Synagogues, schools, and other Jewish institutions collectively pay millions of dollars to secure their premises, resulting in communities that are less open to the outside and attendees being forever reminded that they are not safe even in their places of worship. And now American Jews thinking of attending communal events must stop to consider whether would-be attackers will associate them with Israel and target them for death. America, at least, was not always this way. The country has long stood as the great counterexample to the Zionist project—proof that Jews could not just survive but thrive as equals in a pluralistic liberal democracy, without need for their own army or state. After Barbra Steinmetz, the 88-year-old Holocaust survivor in Boulder, was attacked, she had a message for the country. 'We're Americans,' she told NBC News. 'We are better than this.' That is what most American Jews and their allies believe, and the justification for that belief was evident in Colorado this week, where Jared Polis, the state's popular Jewish governor, forthrightly condemned the attack. But if the perpetrators and the cheerleaders of the incipient American intifada have their way, that spirit will be stifled. Such a victory, however, would be self-defeating. According to video captured at the scene, the Boulder attacker accidentally set himself on fire in the middle of his assault. It would be hard to script a better metaphor for the way such violence sabotages the cause it purports to advance. If the anti-Zionist assassins succeed in making Jewish life in the United States less livable, they will not have helped a single Palestinian, but they will have made their opponents' case for them. They will have proved the promise of America wrong, and the darkest premonitions of Zionism right.
Al Jazeera
3 days ago
- Politics
- Al Jazeera
Israel's strategic failure is now apparent
Since the mid-1960s, Israel has received significant military and diplomatic support from successive administrations in the United States. But never has it enjoyed such unconditional support as it has in the past eight years – under the first and second administrations of President Donald Trump and the administration of President Joe Biden. As a result, Israel has started openly pursuing its greatest Zionist dream: expanding state borders to achieve Greater Israel and accelerating the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people from their homeland. Although the Israeli state may appear more powerful than ever and overly confident that it will achieve regional dominance, its current position paradoxically reflects a strategic failure. The reality is that after nearly eight decades of existence, Israel has failed to achieve legitimacy in the eyes of the region's peoples and lasting security for itself. Its present resurgence will secure neither. And that is because its foreign, domestic and military policies are based on a settler-colonial logic which makes them untenable in the long run. Since its founding in 1948, Israel has sought to convince the world and its Jewish citizens that it was created 'on a land without a people'. While this narrative has successfully caught on – particularly among the younger generations of Israelis – the forefathers of the Israeli state openly spoke about 'colonisation' and settling a land with a hostile native population. Theodor Herzl, considered the father of modern Zionism, planned to reach out to well-known British colonialist Cecil Rhodes, who led the British colonisation of Southern Africa, for advice on and approval of his plan to colonise Palestine. Vladimir Jabotinsky, a revisionist Zionist who founded the far-right Zionist group Betar in Latvia, strategised in his writings on ways to address native resistance. In his 1923 essay The Iron Wall, he wrote: 'Every native population in the world resists colonists as long as it has the slightest hope of being able to rid itself of the danger of being colonised. That is what the Arabs in Palestine are doing.' This settler-colonial mentality played a central role in shaping the domestic, foreign and military policies of the newly founded Israel. Today, almost 80 years after the creation of the Israeli state, expansionism and aggressive military posturing continue to define the Israeli regional strategy. Despite official rhetoric about seeking peace and normalisation of relations in the region, the Israeli aspiration to achieve a Greater Israel – one that includes not only occupied Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem, but also parts of modern-day Egypt, Syria, Lebanon and Jordan – persists. That has been apparent in public discourse and government actions. Settler activists have openly talked about an Israel stretching from the Nile to the Euphrates river. Government advisers have penned articles about 'reconquering Sinai', 'dismembering Egypt' and precipitating the 'dissolution of Jordan'. Prime ministers have stood in front of the United Nations General Assembly, holding maps of Greater Israel. The idea of Greater Israel has been widely accepted across the Zionist political spectrum, both on the right and on the left. The primary differences have been in how and when to advance this vision, and whether it requires the expulsion of Palestinians or their segregation. Expansionist policies have been applied under all Israeli governments – from those led by left-wing Mapai Labor to those led by right-wing Likud. Since the 1949 armistice, Israel has occupied the West Bank, Gaza, East Jerusalem, the Golan Heights, Sinai (twice), southern Lebanon (twice) and now most recently, more parts of southern Syria. Meanwhile, its colonisation of the occupied Palestinian territories has proceeded at an accelerated pace. The number of Jewish colonial settlers in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, was approximately 250,000 in 1993; by October 7, 2023, this number had risen to 503,732 in the West Bank and 233,600 in East Jerusalem. Settlements in Gaza were dismantled in 2005, but plans are being made for recolonisation, as the current Israeli government eyes the full ethnic cleansing of the strip. Today, there is no major political force in Israel that looks beyond the direct application of naked military power to maintain and protect colonisation activities. This mindset is not limited to politicians but is also a widespread conviction among the Israeli public. A June 2024 survey found that 70 percent of Jewish Israelis think settlements either help national security or do not interfere with it; a March 2025 poll showed that 82 percent of Jewish Israelis support the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in Gaza. The settler-colonial mindset at the core of the Israeli state has precluded the emergence of a genuine drive for peace. As a result, successive Israeli governments have continued to pursue war, colonisation and expansion, even when seemingly embracing peace talks. In the 1990s, Israel had the opportunity to resolve the Arab-Israeli conflict by withdrawing from the territories occupied in 1967 and accepting the creation of an independent Palestinian state. Instead, it used the negotiations as a smokescreen to advance settler-colonial policies. Even leaders like Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, who was hailed as a peacemaker and assassinated for it by a Jewish extremist, did not really envision Israelis and Palestinians living side by side. Under his government and during the peace negotiations, the expansion of Jewish settlements continued at a steady pace, while plans for a segregation wall on occupied Palestinian land were pushed forward. Meanwhile, Rabin and other Israeli leaders involved in the peace negotiations focused primarily on normalising Israel's existence as it was, without addressing the root causes of the conflict. They sought to pacify Palestinian resistance, rather than establish durable peace. The absence of a peace camp is not only at the leadership level but also at the societal one. While the Israeli society has active movements for social causes, settlers' coalitions, and now a movement pushing for continuing the prisoner exchanges with Hamas, it lacks a genuine grassroots peace movement that recognises Palestinian rights. This is in sharp contrast to other settler-colonial societies, in which there was a push from within to end colonialism. During the French colonisation of Algeria, for example, an anti-colonial movement within France openly supported the Algerian armed resistance. During the apartheid era in South Africa, white activists joined the anti-apartheid struggle and helped sway domestic attitudes. In Israel, Jewish supporters of Palestinian rights are so few that they are easily ostracised and marginalised, facing death threats and often feeling compelled to leave the country. The absence of a genuine peace camp reflects the inherent flaw of settler-colonial Israel. It has no coherent political strategy to address broader issues, such as coexistence in the region, which requires acknowledging the interests of others, especially the national rights of the Palestinian people. This makes the settler colony incapable of peace. Historically, settler-colonies have always had to rely on outside support to sustain themselves. Israel is no different. For decades, it has enjoyed far-reaching support from Western Europe and the United States, which have provided it with a significant strategic edge. But this Israeli reliance on Western backing also poses a long-term strategic threat. It makes the country dependent and unable to function like a normal sovereign nation. Other countries in the region will continue to exist even if they lose support from their Western allies, with only their regimes potentially changing. But that is not the case for Israel. This unlimited and extravagant support for Israel, aimed at maintaining its dominance as the primary regional power, is likely to backfire. The growing imbalance of power is generating pressure not only on antagonist countries like Iran, but on other regional players such as Turkiye, Saudi Arabia and Egypt. They increasingly feel that the Western push to defend Israeli interests is infringing on their own. This situation is likely to push them to increasingly seek alliances beyond the Western bloc to counterbalance this influence. China offers a viable alternative, as it is not a strategic ally of Israel. A gradual opening to China can shift the political dynamics of the region in the coming years, beyond the capacity of Israel and its allies to control them. That will certainly undermine the Israeli plans to establish regional hegemony. But Israel faces not only the risk that Western dominance could be challenged from the East, but also that Western societies could pressure their governments to stop backing it. The Israeli genocidal policies, especially since October 7, 2023, have spurred a profound shift in public opinion across the world, including in Europe and North America. Israel stands accused of genocide at the International Court of Justice, its prime minister has an arrest warrant from the International Criminal Court and Israeli soldiers are facing charges in many countries around the world. As a result, the Israeli state has notably lost support among those on the left and centre of the political spectrum in the West. While it still manages to maintain backing in high-level European and American political and military circles, this support is becoming increasingly unreliable in the long term. This uncertainty is further aggravated by the rise of isolationism on the right in the US. If these trends continue, Israel may eventually run out of dependable supporters in the West and lose its financial and military advantage. The limits of the Israeli settler-colonial state strategy are increasingly becoming clear. The continued use of settler-colonial policies, characterised by excessive violence, along with the pursuit of regional hegemony, is pushing Israel into an untenable position. The Israeli leadership may be living in a fantasy world, thinking it can pull off a 'New World' model on Palestine and exterminate its population to fully colonise it; or to declare itself officially an apartheid state, seeking to make Palestinian subjugation legal. But in the historical and geopolitical context of the Middle East, neither of these fantasies is viable. Global pressure is coming to bear. The expulsion of the people of Gaza has been outright rejected. The Palestinian people, like any other nation that has survived brutal colonisation, will not leave their country and disappear, nor will they accept life under a colonial apartheid regime. Israeli leaders may do well to start imagining the very real possibility of sharing land and accepting equal rights, and start preparing the Israeli society for it. The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera's editorial stance.
National Post
03-06-2025
- General
- National Post
Iddo Moed: False narratives about Israel have violent consequences
I am the ambassador of a country that was built by unexpected leaders. Article content Article content The founders of the State of Israel were not aristocrats or members of a wealthy elite. They were refugees and immigrants — men and women who arrived with little more than determination and hope. They fled violence, persecution, and antisemitism from every corner of the world: pogroms in Europe and Asia, attacks by mobs and ultimately expulsion from Arab lands, and the unthinkable horrors of the Holocaust. Article content Article content While Jews have had a continuous presence in the Holy Land for millennia, modern Israel was forged in the crucible of exile and survival. Today, Israel is a thriving liberal democracy with a diverse and multicultural society, a dynamic economy, and a strong defence force. Article content Article content We are proud of these achievements. But we have never forgotten an important lesson from Jewish history: false narratives, when left unchallenged, have violent consequences. Article content One need not look far to understand why this lesson is so deeply ingrained in our psyche. Theodor Herzl, the father of modern political Zionism, was moved by what he witnessed during the infamous Dreyfus Affair in late 19th-century France. A Jewish army officer, Captain Alfred Dreyfus, was falsely accused and convicted of treason. The campaign against him was led by the virulently antisemitic press — particularly La Libre Parole, which pushed a dangerous narrative: that Jews were inherently disloyal. Article content Given our history, we are highly attuned to the moments these falsehoods begin to surface. That's why, when I woke up Sunday morning to headlines from nearly every major Canadian media outlet — except National Post — about an alleged incident at a Gaza Humanitarian Foundation aid hub in Rafah, I was immediately concerned. Article content This war has shown us, time and again, how Hamas manipulates facts on the ground, creating stories of atrocities that either didn't happen or happened in a very different way. The media often amplifies these claims uncritically, and by the time the truth emerges, the damage is done. Article content The most egregious example came just weeks after the October 7 massacre. The Hamas-run Palestinian Health Ministry claimed an Israeli airstrike had killed hundreds at Al-Ahli Hospital. Israel immediately launched an investigation — but the media didn't wait. The story exploded across front pages and screens around the world. Article content By the time the investigation revealed that the explosion was caused by a Palestinian rocket, which was confirmed by the Canadian Forces Intelligence Command, millions were misled. Worse, some politicians — including Canada's own foreign affairs minister at the time — rushed to condemn Israel before the facts were known.
Middle East Eye
23-05-2025
- Politics
- Middle East Eye
Israel's genocide in Gaza is a war on demographics
The ongoing genocide in Gaza, which has killed nearly 54,000 Palestinians, along with various plans to expel the remaining survivors, has one primary goal: to safeguard the Jewish settler-colony of Israel by restoring the lost Jewish demographic majority, which had been achieved through mass killings and expulsions since 1948. Zionists understood early on that the only chance their settler-colonial project had of survival was through the establishment of a Jewish majority by expelling the Palestinians. Theodor Herzl, the founder of the Zionist movement, outlined early plans for this in the 1890s, which the Zionist Organisation pursued from the 1920s. Expulsion, however, only became possible after the Zionist military conquest of Palestine. On the eve of the 1948 war, Palestine had a Jewish population of 608,000 (constituting 30 percent), most of whom had arrived in the country over the previous two decades, alongside 1,364,000 Palestinians. During the 1948 conquest, Zionist forces killed upwards of 13,000 Palestinians - one percent of the Palestinian population - and expelled around 760,000 Palestinians, or more than 80 percent of those who lived in the area that Israel would later declare a Jewish state. New MEE newsletter: Jerusalem Dispatch Sign up to get the latest insights and analysis on Israel-Palestine, alongside Turkey Unpacked and other MEE newsletters It was these killings and acts of ethnic cleansing that established Jewish demographic superiority in Israel between 1948 and 1967. Expulsion By November 1948, about 165,000 Palestinians remained in Israel, whose Jewish colonial population had risen to 716,000 people, increasing its percentage from 30 to 81 percent almost overnight. In 1961, the Jewish population had grown to 1,932,000 out of a total population of 2,179,000, raising the Jewish proportion to 89 percent. Israel's territorial expansion in 1967 undermined the Jewish demographic supremacy Zionists had worked to secure since 1948 On the eve of Israel's 1967 conquest of three Arab countries, its population numbered 2.7 million, 2.4 million of whom were Jewish colonists and their descendants, maintaining their 89 percent share of the total. The major demographic faux pas committed by the Jewish settler-colony was its 1967 conquest of the remainder of Palestine, along with the Golan Heights and the sparsely populated Egyptian Sinai. While Israel's voracious territorial appetite led to a conquest that tripled its geographic size, it also significantly undermined the Jewish demographic supremacy that Zionists had worked so hard to secure since 1948. Before the 1967 expulsion, the population of the West Bank was estimated to be between 845,000 and 900,000, while the Gaza Strip's population ranged between 385,000 and 400,000. Outright expulsion began during the Israeli conquest, with over 200,000 Palestinians forced to cross the River Jordan from the West to the East Bank, many of them 1948 refugees from what had become Israel. Demographic threat In Gaza, Israeli forces expelled 75,000 Palestinians by December 1968 and prevented a further 50,000, who had been working, studying, or travelling in Egypt or elsewhere, from returning home. After the expulsion, the Israeli census of September 1967 recorded the population of the West Bank at 661,700 and of Gaza at 354,700. The Palestinian population of East Jerusalem was 68,600. Altogether, this meant the combined Palestinian population of Israel, the West Bank and Gaza totalled 1,385,000, reducing the proportion of Jews in all territories controlled by Israel from 89 percent to 56 percent - excluding the few thousand Syrians and Egyptians who remained in the Golan Heights and the Sinai. In fact, from the Golan Heights, the Israelis expelled between 102,000 and 115,000 Syrians, leaving no more than 15,000 behind. While the population of Sinai at the time mostly comprised Bedouin and farmers, 38,000 of them became refugees. Israel also continued to deport Palestinians by the hundreds as the occupation progressed. This post-1967 demographic earthquake caused then Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir many a sleepless night in the 1970s, as she fretted over the number of Palestinians being conceived each night. The reduction in the Jewish colonial share of the population continued until 1990, amid growing anxiety among the Israelis. Soviet influx By 1990, the population of 1948 Israel had reached approximately 4.8 million, including 3.8 million Jews, and one million Palestinians, while the Palestinian population of the Gaza Strip stood at 622,016 and that of the West Bank at 1,075,531. The total number of Palestinians under Israeli control was 2,697,547, making Jews 58 percent of the population - a marginal increase from 56 percent in 1967. The collapse of the USSR and the ensuing economic crises in the post-Soviet republics led to mass emigration - especially among Jews, who had an easier time relocating, as Israel's Law of Return offered them an immediate destination without the complications of emigrating to western countries. This made Israel a very attractive proposition for Soviet Jews and a godsend for the Israeli state, as it helped forestall the feared Palestinian demographic "bomb", as the crisis came to be understood by the Israelis. However, it turned out that the one million Soviet Jews who immigrated to Israel between 1990 and 2000 - and significantly altered its demography by increasing both the Jewish and Ashkenazi population - were not all Jewish. The Jewishness of more than half of them was questioned by both Israel's rabbis, who insisted that a Jew is someone born to a Jewish mother, and by Zionist groups, including the Zionist Organisation of America (ZOA), as many of the new arrivals had, at best, one Jewish grandparent. They included spouses and other relatives who were not Jewish at all. Many of the post-Soviet immigrants refused to learn Hebrew and continued to speak Russian, leading to the publication of numerous Russian language newspapers in Israel to accommodate them. Some immigrant youths even formed neo-Nazi and skinhead groups that attacked Jews and synagogues across the country. This major wave of immigration, however, could not compete with the growth of the Palestinian population. Demographic panic By 2000, Israel's population had reached 6.4 million, including five million Jews and nearly 1.2 million Palestinians, while the population of the West Bank was recorded at 2.012 million and that of Gaza at 1.138 million - reducing the proportion of Jewish colonists and their descendants to no more than 52 percent of the total population. Realising that the few European settler-colonies to survive the global reversal of settler-colonialism were those with a white demographic majority, the Israeli government panicked Realising that the few European settler-colonies to survive the global reversal of settler-colonialism since the 1960s - including, ultimately, South Africa in 1994 - were those that maintained a massive white demographic majority, such as the US, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, the Israeli government panicked. By the end of that year, the restoration of Jewish demographic superiority had become a veritable obsession. That December, the Institute of Policy and Strategy at the Herzliya Interdisciplinary Centre in Israel held the first in a projected series of annual conferences focused on the strength and security of the state, especially with regard to maintaining its Jewish supremacist character. One of the "Main Points" identified in the 52-page conference report was the concern over the demographic numbers required to preserve Jewish supremacy in Israel: The high birthrate [of Israeli Arabs] brings into question the future of Israel as a Jewish state…The present demographic trends, should they continue, challenge the future of Israel as a Jewish state. Israel has two alternative strategies: adaptation or containment. The latter requires a long-term energetic Zionist demographic policy whose political, economic, and educational effects would guarantee the Jewish character of Israel. The report added affirmatively that "those who support the preservation of Israel's character as…a Jewish state for the Jewish nation…constitute a majority among the Jewish population in Israel." Maintaining superiority The conference was not a lonely effort. None other than Israel's then President Moshe Katsav welcomed the attendees. Reflecting the dominant Jewish supremacist views among Israeli Jews and pro-Israeli American Jewish organisations, the conference was co-sponsored by the American Jewish Committee, the Israel Center for Social and Economic Progress, The Israeli Defence Ministry, the Jewish Agency, the World Zionist Organization, the National Security Center at Haifa University, and the Israeli National Security Council within the Prime Minister's Office. The conference featured 50 speakers: senior government and military officials, including former and future prime ministers, university professors, business and media figures, as well as American Jewish academics and operatives of the US pro-Israel lobby. Follow Middle East Eye's live coverage of the Israel-Palestine war The Herzliya conference has been held annually ever since, where the demographic question is regularly discussed and strategies are proposed to safeguard Jewish demographic superiority. Former Israeli Prime Minister Shimon Peres - a key figure in the Israeli government since the 1950s - expressed concern in 2002 about the Palestinian demographic "danger", as the Green Line separating Israel from the West Bank was beginning to "disappear…which may lead to the linking of the futures of West Bank Palestinians with Israeli Arabs". He described the issue as a "demographic bomb" and hoped that the arrival of yet another 100,000 Jews in Israel would postpone this demographic "danger" for 10 more years. He stressed that "demography will defeat geography". Israeli expulsion plans are not new: They were first proposed in the 1930s Joseph Massad Read More » By 2010, Israel's population had reached 7.6 million, including 5.75 million Jews and 1.55 million Palestinians, while the population of the West Bank was 2.48 million and that of Gaza was 1.54 million. This rendered the Jewish population a minority of no more than 49 percent for the first time since the mass ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in 1948. This was intolerable for the apartheid state, and it was against this backdrop that the Israeli parliament passed a new "Basic Law: Israel as the Nation-State of the Jewish People" in July 2018, asserting that "the land of Israel is the historical homeland of the Jewish people, in which the state of Israel was established" and that "The right to exercise national self-determination in the State of Israel is unique to the Jewish people." The new law, affirmed by Israel's Supreme Court as constitutional despite its racist character, was a necessary declaration that Israel understood it was losing the demographic "war". It thus asserted that regardless of how many Jews remained in Israel or what proportion of the population they constituted, they would continue to hold unique racist and colonial privileges over the indigenous Palestinians. Supremacy codified In 2020, the population of Israel numbered 9.2 million, including 6.8 million Jews and 1.9 million Palestinians, while the population of the West Bank was 3.05 million and that of Gaza 2.047 million - further reducing the proportion of Jewish colonists and their descendants to 47 percent of the total population. The Palestinians, however, do not appear to be the only population viewed as a demographic "bomb" threatening Jewish demographic superiority. As recently as January 2023, Morton Klein, the national president of ZOA, issued a panicked statement concerning the impending "de-Judaisation" of the Jewish state. This time, the culprit turned out to be pseudo-Jews, those whom Israel's notorious and racist "Law of Return" allowed into the country. The law was amended in 1970 to permit anyone worldwide who has one Jewish grandparent - including the non-Jewish spouse, children and grandchildren of such a person, and their spouses - to become colonists in Israel and obtain Israeli citizenship. The ZOA statement declared with dismay that the 1970 amendment had allowed half a million "non-Jews" from the former Soviet Union (FSU) to settle in the Jewish state. Its concern was based on Israeli government data that "largely as a result of the grandparent clause, over 50 percent of all immigrants to the Jewish state last year were non-Jews, and 72 percent of immigrants from FSU countries into the Jewish state today are non-Jews". The Zionist group warned that "this is causing a significant drop in the percentage of Jews living in Israel, endangering Israel's continuity as the Jewish state". According to the ZOA statement, this appalling situation meant that "non-Jews will have even more influence on determining the Jewish state's leaders, laws and security decisions," and that "Diaspora Jews who need or who want to live in the Jewish homeland may be moving to a majority non-Jewish state in the future." The statement demanded the "elimination or modification/reform of the grandparent clause. We must do everything we can to ensure that the Jewish state remains Jewish." While it stopped short of explicitly calling for the expulsion of the half a million European "non-Jewish" settlers, as Israel had done with native Palestinians in 1948 and 1967, the implication was clear. If one accepts the ZOA's view that these formerly Soviet Jews in Israel today are not at all Jewish, then the proportion of Jews drops further to as low as 42 percent. Final phase It was in this context that Israel, its Supreme Court, and its Jewish settlers escalated their campaign to terrorise the Palestinians of East Jerusalem in May 2021, expelling 13 families - totalling 58 people - from their homes in the Shaykh Jarrah neighbourhood. An additional 1,000 Palestinians were being threatened with eviction by the settlers and the Israeli courts. The decision was seen internationally as further confirmation that Israel is an apartheid state. In January 2021, the Israeli human rights group B'Tselem had already issued a report identifying the Israeli regime as one of "Jewish supremacy" and describing Israel as an apartheid state. The desperate Israeli attempt to restore Jewish demographic supremacy is what propels the extermination and planned expulsion of the two million Palestinians in Gaza. In April, one month before the Supreme Court ruling, Human Rights Watch issued a report declaring Israel an apartheid state within both the 1948 borders and the 1967-occupied territories. Amnesty International followed suit in February 2022, also declaring Israel an apartheid state. It is in view of the minority status of Israel's Jewish colonists that the current genocide in Gaza is proceeding, alongside plans to expel the remaining Palestinian survivors outside the Strip. The desperate Israeli attempt to restore Jewish demographic supremacy is what propels the extermination and planned expulsion of the two million Palestinians in Gaza. In March 2025, the Israeli cabinet approved the creation of "a body to manage voluntary migration [of Palestinians] from Gaza". The US government, which has collaborated with Israel during the administrations of both Joe Biden and Donald Trump to find destinations for expelled Palestinian survivors of the genocide, is reported to be brokering yet another deal - this time with Libya's warlords - to take them in. With the exodus of anywhere between 100,000 and half a million Israeli Jews from the country since October 2023, continuing an earlier trend of emigration, it seems unlikely that even if Israel succeeds in its extermination and expulsion campaigns in Gaza, it could ever restore Jewish demographic supremacy. Its only remaining option would be to exterminate all Palestinians - not just those in Gaza. The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.
