After the single most violent day against the Jewish people since the Holocaust, the world should have stood in solidarity with the people of Israel. October 7th saw 1200 people slaughtered by Hamas. Many of them were tortured and raped. 251 people were taken hostage. As of October 7th 2024, 97 hostages still remain unaccounted for.
Instead of showing even the slightest sympathy, the knee jerk reaction of the South African government, many civic and religious organisations, and many libelous pundits in the media and academia was to condemn Israel. To ignore the brutality they had faced, and to accuse Israel of genocide and colonialism.
These anti-Israel pundits and organisations spread blatantly antisemitic, stereotypes straight out of the fallacious and racist antisemitic textbook, Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Accusations that Jews own the media and the financial system. That Jews slaughter innocents. That Jews killed Jesus. Tirades of ahistorical, fallacious nonsense that nevertheless gets published in the mainstream media.
Yet, when condemned for their hatred, they hide behind the lie that they are not anti-Jew. They are anti-Zionism.
This statement is nonsensical. Because you cannot be accepting or even tolerant of the Jews’ right to exist without accepting Zionism.
Jews have been under threat for millennia
Zionism is not some bogeyman ideology seeking to advance Western imperialism. If anything, it is the opposite. Zionism is simply the recognition of the right of Jewish people to have a nation-state which defends their right to life.
This is not some petty luxury. It is a necessity. And history has proven this again and again. When the Jewish people were forced into a diaspora, after the conquering of their homeland in the Levant by imperialist powers, they have been victims of repeated assaults throughout history.
In Medieval Europe, Jews were considered second class citizens. The Catholic Church denied them the right to enter many professions, forcing them to become moneylenders to fulfil a so-called sinful, but necessary role in the economy. Catholic monarchs would then rob these moneylenders and exile them from their countries.
The Islamic world pretends to have been more enlightened but were little better. Jews were considered Dhimmi and taxed excessively. Many of these Jews were considered less than second class citizens in the homeland in which their people had inhabited for thousands of years.
Fast-forwarding to the 19th century, Russian Jews faced pogroms and extermination, pushing many of them into Europe and towards the Middle East. Europe became an even direr place to be Jewish, when the rise of Nazism in the 20th century saw six million Jews exterminated in industrialised death camps. Even the Allies in World War Two knew that the Holocaust was happening. Jews attempted to flee, but many of the so-called good nations rejected them. It is safe to assume that if Hitler had not threatened the interests of Britain, then no one would have stopped Hitler from killing even more Jews. The world population of Jews has still not recovered after this brutal genocide.
Even before the establishment of the state of Israel, there was an intense desire by many of the Arabs of Mandatory Palestine to exterminate the Jewish people. In 1929, Arabs slaughtered over sixty Jews in historically Jewish Hebron. Synagogues and homes were ransacked. Even today, Jews have not returned to Hebron, which now lies in the Palestinian West Bank.
The Grand Mufti of Palestine Amin al-Husseini advocated for the extermination of Jews. He was on friendly terms with Hitler and visited death camps in Europe. He wholeheartedly supported Nazism. This was before the establishment of the state of Israel. After Israel seized its independence from the British Empire, al-Husseini became an influential anti-Zionist and advocate of violence against Jews.
It hasn’t stopped…
It is undeniable that throughout history, Jews have been used as scapegoats by tyrants and are pariahs in the faiths of many. Before the establishment of Israel in 1948, safety for Jews was transient. A matter of convenience by governments who could flip their decision if they needed to target a minority to appease the electorate.
And that hasn’t changed. After October 7th, before Israel retaliated with a single shot, the streets of what should be democratic and decent countries were flooded with vitriolic protests calling for the destruction of Israel.
Earlier in 2023, PAGAD and other local organisations threatened violence against the Holocaust Museum in Cape Town. Synagogues and Jewish schools are repeated targets of hateful attacks by people hiding behind being anti-Zionist.
Recently in Amsterdam, Jewish football fans were attacked en masse, with many being stabbed or pursued by automobiles. This is just another footnote in a history of ignorant, hateful groups targeting Jews.
Israel defends Jews
Israel needs to exist because it is the only country, the only government, in this world that defends the Jewish people as a rule. Not as a matter of convenience. Not as an after-thought to a flimsy dedication to human rights.
Israel will always stand to defend Jews. It will set precedent that the Holocaust will never be allowed to happen again. That October 7th will never be allowed to happen again.
Christian Europe and America stood to defend Christians and secularism. The countless Muslim states stand to defend Islam. Israel alone stands to defend the Jewish people in a homeland that they have not truly abandoned for thousands of years.
Zionism is inseparable from the survival of the Jewish people. Opposing it is to tacitly support the Jewish faith and its people being under constant attack.
This is not to say that most people who oppose Israel are antisemitic. But their ideology is. It is bred from ignorance and hatred. And the best thing that everyone who opposes Israel can do is to interrogate the propaganda that they’ve been force fed, and to embrace proper history, logic and reason.
Nicholas Woode-Smith is a political analyst, economic historian and author of over twenty novels.
