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The Case for Zionism: Jews Must Always Act to Defend Themselves
People stand next to flags on the day the bodies of deceased Israeli hostages, Oded Lifschitz, Shiri Bibas, and her two children Kfir and Ariel Bibas, who were kidnapped during the deadly Oct. 7, 2023, attack by Hamas, are handed over under the terms of a ceasefire between Hamas and Israel, in Tel Aviv, Israel, Feb. 20, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Ammar Awad
As Israel marks tonight the beginning of Holocaust Remembrance Day, I found myself returning to a question that is not abstract, not historical, but immediate: what did we learn — and what have we done with that lesson?
I started writing this column after listening to Matti Friedman’s interview by Haviv Rettig Gur about his compelling new book “Out of the Sky” — the story of a small group of young Jewish men and women, most in their twenties and thirties, who parachuted into Nazi-occupied Europe on missions that fused intelligence work with a near-impossible hope: to reach Jews already marked for annihilation.
What stays with you isn’t only their courage. It’s the indictment embedded in the setting. By then, the leading powers of the world knew what was being done to the Jews — not vaguely, not abstractly, but in sufficient detail to understand the scale and intent. And yet the Nazi annihilation machine continued to operate at full capacity. Priorities were elsewhere. Calculations were made. The Jews were not high enough on the list.
In the interview, Friedman describes Zionism as “a call to the heroic impulse of the Jewish people.” That beautifully captures the spirit of those who volunteered. But it does not fully capture the conditions that made such a call necessary. That necessity was forged over centuries in which Jews learned — repeatedly, across continents — that when they did not act on their own behalf, no one else reliably would.
By the time Zionism emerged as a political movement in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, this was not a new realization. It was the product of accumulated experience.
In Europe, Jews were expelled from England in 1290 and from Spain in 1492 — decisions made by sophisticated societies that had benefited from Jewish presence until it became politically or socially convenient to discard them. Across the continent, Jews were confined to ghettos, barred from numerous professions, subjected to forced conversions, and periodically massacred when rulers or mobs required a scapegoat. In Eastern Europe, pogroms were not aberrations; they were recurring events, often tolerated, sometimes encouraged, and routinely administered by authorities.
In the Middle East and North Africa, the legal framework differed, but the condition often did not. Jews lived under dhimmi status — protected, but explicitly inferior. That protection was conditional and revocable. Jewish communities in Fez, Granada, and elsewhere experienced massacres from the 7th through the 19th centuries. In the 20th century, that fragility fused with Nazi ideology and erupted in events like the 1941 Farhud in Baghdad — a pogrom in a modern Arab capital, not medieval Europe, where Jews were murdered in plain view.
The 19th century is often invoked as a European turning point for civilization — a narrative of emancipation and integration. But when it comes to the Jews, that narrative collapses under scrutiny. The Dreyfus Affair did not occur in a backward state. It unfolded in France, a republic that literally defined itself by liberty and equality. Yet the public degradation of a Jewish officer, falsely accused and convicted, revealed how quickly those ideals could be suspended when the subject was a Jew and the society was looking for a scapegoat.
In 19th century Eastern Europe, antisemitic violence intensified rather than receded.
The Holocaust is often framed as a rupture, a singular descent into madness disconnected from what came before. But that framing is wrong. The Holocaust represents continuity taken to its most efficient extreme: the same logic of exclusion, dehumanization, and disposability, now executed with industrial precision — and when the entire world refused to act.
This is the environment in which Friedman’s protagonists took action into their own hands. Figures like Hannah Senesh, 23, and Enzo Sereni, 39, parachuted into occupied Europe under British auspices. They were not naïve. They understood the constraints. They were explicitly made to understand by the British that saving Jews was not the mission’s priority.
They went anyway.
That choice — risking everything to reach other Jews marked for death, in a world that had already decided not to make that even a secondary priority — captures the essence of Zionism more clearly than any political manifesto. It is the refusal to accept passivity in the face of annihilation.
And even after the war ended, the lesson did not soften.
Roughly 250,000 Jewish Holocaust survivors remained in Displaced Persons camps across Europe for years. Not weeks — years. Stateless. Unwanted. Warehoused in the shadow of a continent that had just attempted to erase them. The world had seen the camps. It had documented the atrocities. It had declared “never again.”
And still, Jews were in DP camps. For years.
That changed only with the establishment of Israel — a state that, from its inception, absorbed those survivors and provided what no one else had: a place where Jewish life was not contingent on the tolerance of others.
This is the record behind Zionism.
The post-Zionist claim — that Jews were better off without sovereignty, that Israel somehow makes Jews less safe — requires the erasure of everything that came before. It requires ignoring expulsions, pogroms, legal subjugation, and ultimately industrialized extermination. It requires treating the Holocaust as a complete anomaly instead of a culmination. It requires believing that a world that refused to absorb Jewish refugees before, during, and after that catastrophe would somehow behave differently in the absence of a Jewish state.
Strip away the rhetoric, and the “post-Zionist” expectation is unmistakable. Jews are being asked — again — to place their survival in the hands of others.
History has already tested that proposition.
If Jews do not secure their own survival, no one else will do it for them.
And when they finally did — when a sovereign Jewish state took in 250,000 survivors who had nowhere else to go, when it replaced statelessness with citizenship and dependence with agency — that was not merely refuge.
It was justice.
Justice that had been denied for centuries — finally asserted.
Micha Danzig is an attorney, former IDF soldier, and former NYPD officer. He writes widely on Israel, Zionism, antisemitism, and Jewish history. He serves on the board of Herut North America.
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South Korean President’s Holocaust Remarks Spark Outcry From Israel, Controversy at Home
South Korean President Lee Jae Myung speaks during his new year press conference at the presidential Blue House in Seoul, South Korea, Wednesday, Jan. 21, 2026. Photo: Ahn Young-joon/Pool via REUTERS
South Korean President Lee Jae Myung has sparked a diplomatic row with Israel and criticism at home after comparing Israeli military actions against Palestinians to the Holocaust in a post on social media platform X.
The controversy began on Friday after Lee said “wartime killings” by the Israel Defense Forces were “no different from the Jewish massacre” by the Nazis in World War Two, and reposted footage with a caption that said it showed Israeli troops had tortured and thrown a Palestinian from the roof of a building.
Israel‘s Foreign Ministry said in a post on X on Saturday that Lee “for some strange reason, chose to dig up a story from 2024.” It said the incident occurred during an IDF operation against what it called “terrorists” and had been thoroughly investigated.
The ministry accused Lee, who had said that he needed to verify the footage, of the “trivialization of the massacre of Jews on the eve of Holocaust Remembrance Day in Israel,” saying his remarks were “unacceptable and warrant strong condemnation.”
Israel marks Yom HaShoah on Monday remembering the six million Jews murdered by the Nazis.
The Israeli military said in 2024 it was investigating the incident in the videos and described the actions as serious and not in keeping with its values.
Friday’s comments are a rare instance of Lee discussing international politics on social media and come as his government navigates a surge in energy prices following US and Israeli strikes against Iran. Tehran has closed the Strait of Hormuz to tanker traffic and South Korea is one of the world’s largest importers of oil and gas.
Lee did not mention the Iran war in his posts but said that South Koreans were today feeling “immense pain and national hardship.”
The president later on Saturday said it was “disappointing” that Israel criticized his comments and that it was natural to feel sorry if someone was suffering.
South Korea’s foreign ministry later said it was regrettable Israel “misunderstood” Lee’s remarks, which were about universal human rights.
Lee’s comments also proved controversial at home.
South Korea’s conservative party hit out at Lee for failing to speak more prudently and said he was showing double standards for his silence on human rights abuses in North Korea, while Lee’s Democratic Party praised him for speaking out on the universal value of human dignity.
The mainstream Joongang Ilbo newspaper said on Monday Lee would be well advised to recognize the weight of a president’s remarks and the risk of misunderstanding from unfiltered comments on social media, especially in sensitive global disputes.
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US Begins Blockade of Iran’s Ports, Tehran Threatens Retaliation
A billboard with a graphic design about the Strait of Hormuz on a building in Tehran, Iran, April 13, 2026. Photo: Majid Asgaripour/WANA (West Asia News Agency) via REUTERS
The US military began a blockade of ships leaving Iran’s ports on Monday, President Donald Trump said, and Tehran threatened to retaliate against its Gulf neighbors’ ports after weekend talks in Islamabad on ending the war broke down.
A US official said there was continued engagement with Iran, and forward motion on trying to get to an agreement. Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif also said efforts were still under way to resolve the conflict.
But oil prices climbed back over $100 per barrel, with no sign of a swift reopening of the Strait of Hormuz to ease the biggest ever disruption in supplies and broader concerns over the durability of a two-week ceasefire agreement reached last week.
Trump said Iran had been in touch on Monday and wanted to make a deal but that he would not sanction any agreement allowing Tehran to have a nuclear weapon.
“Iran will not have a nuclear weapon,” Trump told reporters at the White House. “We can’t let a country blackmail or extort the world.”
Since the United States and Israel began the war on Feb. 28, Iran effectively shut the Strait of Hormuz to all vessels except its own, saying passage would be permitted only under Iranian control and subject to a fee.
Trump has said Washington would block Iranian vessels and any ships that paid such tolls and that any Iranian “fast-attack” ships that went near the blockade would be eliminated.
Brigadier General Reza Talaei-Nik, a spokesperson for Iran’s Ministry of Defense, warned that foreign military efforts to police the strait would escalate the crisis and instability in global energy security.
NATO allies including Britain and France said they would not be drawn into the conflict by taking part in the blockade, stressing instead the need to reopen the waterway, through which about one-fifth of the world’s oil normally passes.
CEASEFIRE UNDER STRAIN
The ceasefire that halted six weeks of US and Israeli airstrikes looked in jeopardy, with only a week left to run. Washington said Tehran rejected its demands at weekend talks in Islamabad, the highest-level discussions between the two nations since Iran’s 1979 Islamic Revolution.
The US military’s Central Command said the blockade would be “enforced impartially against vessels of all nations” entering or leaving Iranian ports in the Gulf and Gulf of Oman.
“The blockade will not impede neutral transit passage through the Strait of Hormuz to or from non-Iranian destinations,” Central Command said in a note to seafarers seen by Reuters on Monday.
Two Iranian-linked tankers, the Aurora and New Future, left the strait laden with oil products on Monday before the deadline, according to LSEG data.
An Iranian military spokesperson called any US restrictions on international shipping “piracy,” warning that if Iranian ports were threatened, no port in the Gulf or Gulf of Oman would be secure. Any military vessels approaching the strait would violate the ceasefire, Iran’s Revolutionary Guards said.
Trump said Iran’s navy had been “completely obliterated” during the war, adding that only a small number of “fast-attack ships” remained.
“Warning: If any of these ships come anywhere close to our BLOCKADE, they will be immediately ELIMINATED, using the same system of kill that we use against the drug dealers on boats at Sea. It is quick and brutal,” Trump, much of whose communications are on social media, wrote on his Truth Social site.
He was apparently referring to the US strikes carried out against suspected drug boats in the Caribbean and Pacific. The strikes, which began in September, killed more than 160 people.
LEBANON FACES ATTACKS
Trump has also lashed out at US-born Pope Leo, who has spoken out against the war, denouncing him as “terrible” in a rare direct attack by a US president on a pontiff.
With rising energy prices causing political blowback, Trump paused the US-Israeli bombing campaign last week after threatening to destroy Iran’s “whole civilization” unless it reopened the strait.
Israel has continued to bombard Lebanon and on Monday Israeli troops launched an attack it said was intended to seize a key south Lebanon town from Iran-backed terrorist group Hezbollah. Israel and the US have said the campaign against Hezbollah was not part of the ceasefire, while Iran has insisted it is.
Iran has brought new demands, including recognition of its control of the waterway, lifting of sanctions, and the withdrawal of forces from US military bases across the Middle East.
Trump has declared victory, despite so far not fully achieving the objectives he set out at the start of the war: to eliminate Iran’s ability to strike its neighbors, end its nuclear program, and make it easier for Iranians to topple their government.
Benchmark oil prices, which had eased last week after the ceasefire was announced, traded around 6% higher on Monday, off the day’s peaks but still above $100 a barrel.
Traders say the main benchmarks – used to set prices for trillions of dollars’ worth of commodities worldwide – actually understate the severity of a disruption with no precedent in modern times.
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For Another Year, BU’s Conference on Jewish Left Only Platforms Anti-Zionism
Peter Beinart, a prominent anti-Israel writer, being interviewed in January 2025. Photo: Screenshot
Academic conferences should foster inquiry, test ideas, and widen intellectual horizons. The third annual “Jewish Conference on the Left” held at Boston University (BU) last month was certainly presented in those terms. However, as time went on, it became clear that something else was afoot: Anti-Zionism framed as academic exploration, and a social structure encouraging the marginalization of Jewish students who fail to conform to their narrow and bigoted politics.
The gathering took place on BU’s main campus, reinforcing the perception that the conference’s ideology sits comfortably within the university’s academic culture.
The conference, which I attended, was dominated by anti-Zionist speakers, such as Peter Beinart, Fadi Quran, Dove Kent, and Arielle Angel. Beinart advocates for the dissolution of a Jewish-majority state, insisting Jews revert to once again existing as a vulnerable minority everywhere. Quran associates with the BDS movement. Kent’s org “Diaspora Alliance” rejects the IHRA Working Definition of Antisemitism definition. Angel is an ardent anti-Zionist. These are not neutral voices. They are activists representing an ideology that is effectively hostile to the idea of Jewish civil rights in our ancestral homeland. Several statements during the conference illustrated this bait and switch from policy debate to brazen indoctrination.
Numerous statements were made attacking Zionism and any Jews who believe in Israel’s right to exist. Neither the crowd, nor any other panelists, bothered to push back. Their only response was applause. It felt more like a political rally than a serious discussion on scholarship.
Unsurprisingly, there were no pro-Zionist leftist perspectives, not even modest discussions about classic topics like two-state coexistence. There were no voices articulating how Jewish self-determination might co-exist with Palestinian statehood. There was only delegitimization, double standards, and dehumanization of Zionists and Israel masked by reasonable-sounding language and boilerplate euphemisms.
The organization fair held at BU only hosted radical left groups including Jewish Voices for Peace and IfNotNow. Tables included various infographics urging the IHRA definition be banned from schools, BDS graphics, comparisons between ICE and Nazi Germany, banning the ADL from schools, among others.
Clearly there was no room for dissenting views on the podium, and I observed the same mentality among its audience. At one point, I was berated by a stranger: “Shame on you for not clapping, you can’t even show respect for Fadi Quran.”
While I did not overtly present myself as a Zionist, I also did not mask my beliefs. Throughout my many conversations, I was repeatedly quizzed about my personal and professional background, as if my fellow attendees were actively looking for a reason to dismiss my position. Suspicion was immediate and hovered over every conversation whenever I questioned the status quo.
This is how ideological capture operates. It does not require formal censorship, all it needs is a couple of slogans and some bullies.
When a conference is promoted under the language of scholarly exploration to students and presents itself as an all-encompassing gathering of “Jewish left values,” the university’s association becomes part of the message.
For students who identify as both Progressive and Zionist, events like these reinforce the idea that there is no place for them. Many already navigate campus environments in which Zionism is treated as morally suspect. Student government resolutions single out Israel. Activist rhetoric regularly distorts Zionism into a kind of racism or colonialism. Institutional repetition normalizes and enables these intellectual boundary-breakers.
If Boston University intends to uphold its mission toward promoting intellectual diversity, it should clarify the distinction between providing space and conferring academic legitimacy. If organizers are truly acting in good faith, they should at least try to ensure that their conferences reflect the actual diversity within that tradition, or otherwise rebrand.
After three consecutive years of hosting this conference, the issue is no longer whether individual speakers have the right to present their views. They do. The question is whether a major university should repeatedly platform a singular ideological current while presenting it as representative of a broader intellectual tradition.
Melody Kaye is a Boston-based Campus Advisor for CAMERA.