Twenty-five years ago I first wrote an essay called "Proud to be a Zionist." I return to it every Yom Ha'atzmaut, updating it for the year that passed. This year I want to step back from the news cycle and say something more fundamental — something that explains not just why I am proud to be a Zionist today, but why Zionism is, at its core, one of the most morally serious ideas in the modern world.
It begins with memory. Jewish memory, specifically, is unlike anyone else's.
Most people live in a relatively short now — the span of their own experience, maybe their parents', maybe a grandparent's stories fading at the edges. The world before they were born is abstract, academic, other people's business. But Jews do not experience history that way. We carry it. The destruction of the First Temple is not an event in a textbook; it is a fast we keep in the summer, a corner of our homes left unfinished, a broken glass at a wedding. The exile in Babylon lives in our Psalms. The dazzling intellectual flowering of the Talmudists — men reasoning through every dimension of human obligation across centuries and continents — is still the living framework through which observant Jews think. The Crusades, the expulsions, the Inquisition, the pogroms: these are not medieval curiosities but family stories, preserved in liturgy, in communal trauma, in the specific geography of where our ancestors ended up after each wave of violence pushed them somewhere new.
And then the modern world confirmed everything the long memory had taught. The Holocaust was not a rupture in history. It was the culmination of a pattern that any Jew paying attention could have recognized, and that many did recognize — including Theodor Herzl, who watched the Dreyfus Affair and understood, decades before the gas chambers, that Jewish powerlessness was an existential problem, not merely a social inconvenience.
Our long memory also carries the lesson of what dependence on others costs. "Put not your trust in princes" is not paranoia — it is the condensed wisdom of three thousand years of experience with princes. We have lived among peoples who were genuinely hospitable, and we are grateful. But the same memory that preserves the hospitality also preserves the pattern: that goodwill is not a guarantee, that conditions change, and that Jews, when the politics of a given moment required a scapegoat, were reliably available.
We did not reason our way to this understanding. We bled our way to it.
This is why Zionism is a profoundly moral idea, grounded in real knowledge of the world. It arose from a people that understood — from within living memory, not from books — what persecution looked like, what displacement felt like, what it meant to be at the mercy of governments that had decided Jews were a problem to be managed or eliminated. And it proposed a solution that the same memory validated: the Jews needed their own land, their own army, their own capacity to act in their own defense rather than to petition, negotiate, or mourn.
Israel is not a new chapter in Jewish history. It is a continuous one — another entry in the long record, as the Temples and the Exile and the Talmud are entries, each shaped by the ones that came before. The miracles that have preserved us from extinction across the millennia are the same kind of miracle that has preserved a small, isolated state against enemies who have never stopped trying to destroy it. We recognize the pattern because we have seen it before.
And what do we see today? Jews being physically attacked in New York, London, Paris, and Melbourne. Jewish institutions maintained behind security that no other community treats as routine. On university campuses, organized campaigns of exclusion and intimidation against Jewish students. The language has been updated — "Zionist" has replaced older slurs, "colonialism" has replaced older charges — but the structure of the hatred is recognizable to anyone who knows what European Jews were reporting in the 1930s, when the dangers of Nazism were apparent and the world was composing careful statements of concern. The Holocaust happened without Hitler worrying about world opinion. We remember.
Golda Meir said it plainly: if we have to choose between being dead and pitied, and being alive with a bad image, we'll choose the second option, thank you. The contemporary progressive consensus — in which victimhood is righteousness, in which absorbing violence without response reads as moral virtue — is precisely inverted from what Jewish history teaches. We tried the path of suffering and hoping for sympathy. We know what it produced. "Never again" is not just a slogan.
Israel means it. It does not sit at the table of nations hoping to be treated with generosity. It acts on the understanding, purchased over centuries, that the only reliable guarantor of Jewish survival is Jewish power exercised with Jewish responsibility. There is nothing more moral than a people that knows, from its own memory, exactly what defenselessness costs — and refuses to be defenseless again.
The word "Zionist" is currently used as a slur, including by people who claim to be moderates. This tells us something about them, and nothing about us. Zionism means that Jewish lives are worth defending. It means that the lessons of history have been acted upon rather than merely commemorated. It means that Israel — messy, magnificent, maddening Israel, the same Israel that feels like home when I visit — is the living proof that the Jewish story did not end with any of the many catastrophes that were supposed to end it.
Our memory is long enough to know what we almost lost. It is also long enough to recognize what we have.
The word "Zionist" is a compliment. It has always been. And to the non-Jews who see clearly what is at stake and stand with us anyway — you are practicing something genuinely righteous, and we see you.
Am Yisrael Chai.
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