Independent and Alone: Yom Haatzmaut 2024
13 May 2024
Anat Vidor - President World WIZO
Atzmaut - Independence. Lihiot am chofshi…To be a free people …be artzenu - in our own land. What does that mean in 2024?
Today perhaps more than at any time in the 76 years since the modern state of Israel was established, the Jewish people stand alone. In the years leading up to the 1947 UN Partition Plan and in the years until 1949 when the new state was under attack from all its neighbors, we had the support of the free world both morally and materially, with weapons and ammunition.
But today while material support still comes from the United States, moral support is in very short supply. We understand ourselves to be the frontline of the civilized world’s war against barbarism and Islamist terror, but the moral confusion of the West blinds it to this reality.
It’s not only moral confusion but also willful ignorance that has brought so much of the world to this place where Israel stands alone. Willful ignorance of history, especially the history of Israel the country and Israel the people.
The first mention of a people called Israel is from the Iron Age, from the 13th Century BCE. It’s found on a piece of Egyptian stone and celebrates the victory of an Egyptian Pharoah over this tribe, who lived in the hill country of central Canaan – the area later known as Judea.
Our history in this land, our ancient and unbroken presence here, our two previous periods of independence here, all of these are forgotten, ignored or deliberately erased by others today. The lie is widespread that we are colonizers – white interlopers. But the truth is that we are indigenous people of this land. We were the VICTIMS of colonization: first by the ancient Assyrians, then by the Babylonians, Persians, Greeks, Romans, Byzantines, Mamaluks, Ottomans and British.
Our atzmaut, RE-established in 1948, is the world’s best example of DE-colonisation. We are an indigenous people who reclaimed our ancestral homeland; reclaimed our ancestral language, Hebrew; and gathered back home our tribe after they had been exiled by the colonizers. Jewish sovereignty was re-established in Israel because this is the place where it began and today’s Israel exists because it is right and just.
People in the West call for respect and land rights and justice for all the indigenous people THEY colonized, but these are empty words. No academic at Columbia University will actually give back his home to descendants of the native Lenape people of Manhattan. No Australian politician will hand back hers to the Aboriginal people she displaced. Instead they cast the people of Israel into the wilderness as the scapegoats of their white post-colonial guilt.
Ironically the viciousness of their attacks on us gives us another reason to need our independence: safe haven from their hatred and mastery of our own destiny in the face of those attacks. When Jews can no longer safely walk onto a university campus or pray in a suburban synagogue, where else can they go but to Israel?
Zionism is the answer to the Jewish condition in the world. It always has been, since the 6th Century BCE when we were exiled and we cried for Zion by the rivers of Babylon. 2,500 centuries of crying until the 19th Century, when we re-imagined our Zionism in the political terms of the modern world.
If that modern political Zionism had been realized earlier, we would not have lost 6 million Jews. The Shoah was the result of Jews NOT having independence and we will never allow ourselves to be in that place again.
When 11 Israeli athletes were taken hostage at the Munich Olympics in 1972 we depended on the German authorities to save them, and that was a tragic mistake. That was the last time Israel ever depended on others. Four years later, in 1976, we rescued our own hostages at Entebbe, and that event remains symbolic for millions of what we can and must always do.
Today, our hostages in Gaza are waiting for us to rescue them from the barbarians. No guilt-filled, hate-filled words from racists, ignoramuses or self-hating Jews will prevent us from exercising our independence to do so.
Today, as much as at any time in Jewish history, Am Israel needs its independence. We have it and we will continue to act.
Am Israel Chai!
Anat Shechter Vidor
President, World WIZO