The genocidal massacre perpetrated by Hamas on Simchat Torah was not just a brutal physical attack but the spark for a coordinated global ideological offensive against the legitimacy of the State of Israel and, ultimately, Jewish sovereignty. While fighting a seven-front war against Iran and its proxies, Israel has also had to contend with a revisionist narrative that denies Israel a history, a right to defend itself, and even to exist. This anti-Zionist ideology paints Israel as a “settler-colonial” entity and Jews as foreign interlopers in Palestine. Just like Jews in medieval Christendom, the Jewish state is accused of the worst evils: apartheid, racism, and even genocide. In much of “enlightened” society, Israel is a state beyond the pale.
Historian Walter Laquer writes that “Zionism is the belief in the existence of a common past and a common future for the Jewish people… The basic aim of Zionism was twofold: to regain Jewish self-respect and dignity in the eyes of non-Jews; and to rebuild a Jewish national home, for Jews ‘to live as free men on their own soil, to die peacefully in their own homes’”. Zionism arose not simply as a response to antisemitism and persecution but as a reaffirmation of a millenarian Jewish national identity that Jews had been forced to renounce upon their entry into European society. In doing so, it restored Jews’ ability to express themselves not just as a religious community but as a full nation and political entity.
Modern Jewish history began with a Faustian bargain—gaining equal political and social rights at the cost of losing Jewish national identity. After the French Revolution, European countries started to redefine themselves as nation-states based on territory, promising equal citizenship regardless of religion. Jews, a distinct community with a unique blend of religious and national identity, created a challenge for this new model. This separate national existence came under sustained assault at the beginning of the modern period. In France, the Count of Clermont-Tonnerre made this explicit in a speech before the members of the National Assembly:
The Jews should be denied everything as a nation, but granted everything as individuals… if they do not want to do this, they must inform us and we shall then be compelled to expel them. The existence of a nation within a nation is unacceptable in our country.
To gain equal rights, Jews had to renounce their nationality. During the 1800s, Napoleon Bonaparte held a gathering of Jewish leaders to address the “Jewish Question.” The Sanhedrin answered that Jews had stopped being a nation and were ready to fully integrate as French citizens of the Jewish faith. The Russian Jewish poet JL Gordon advised his fellow Jews to “be a man on the street and a Jew at home.” For the newly emancipated Jews, Berlin became their new Zion, and cultural acceptance and integration marked their messianic era.
As Shlomo Avineri vividly describes, modernization led to the collapse of the traditional Jewish kehillah (community). Emancipation required Jews to find new ways to express their national and collective identities. In Avineri’s words:
“Thus, both liberalism and nationalism created in these Jews the beginning of a new self-awareness, no longer determined by any religious terms but coeval to the emergence of a modern, secular nationalism in Europe. The development of a modern Hebrew literature, that of Jewish Haskala (Enlightenment), was the first step in that direction. The political Zionism of Leo Pinsker, Theodore Herzl, and Max Nordau followed, and it is significant that in all these founders of modern Zionism, there appears again and again the same phenomenon: they did not come from a traditional, religious background. They were all products of European education, imbued with the current ideas of the European intelligentsia. Their plight was neither economic nor religious: they responded – just like black leaders in America a century later – to the challenge of their identity, looking for roots, acquiring self-respect in a society which had uprooted them from their traditional, religious background and had not provided them and their likes with adequate answers for this quest.”
Many Jews hoped that the soon-to-be eight decades of Jewish independence since 1948 had firmly settled “the Jewish Question”. Not only a physical refuge for persecuted Jews, in its 75 years of independence Israel has emerged as the central Jewish home worldwide. The Hebrew language, spoken by millions of Israeli citizens, is the most successful example of the resurrection of a language that had largely been confined to religious and written purposes.
Yet, the October 7th massacre was a throwback to the darkest days of Jewish history, one that most Jews believed the existence of the State of Israel had ended. During the Jewish holiday of Simchat Torah, highly-trained death squads from Gaza, followed by an incited mob of “regular civilians,” broke into twenty-two Jewish villages and cities in southern Israel. Over twelve hundred Jews were murdered, raped, mutilated, and tortured, and another two hundred and fifty were carried off into captivity in Gaza, including women, children, and the elderly. Many in Israel and worldwide could only describe the event as a “pogrom”, evoking images of Kishinev or the Farhud in Baghdad.
Furthermore, Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad are motivated by an antisemitic and Islamist ideology that rejects the presence of Jews in “Palestine”. Hamas, emerging from the Palestinian Muslim Brotherhood in the 1980s, embodies a Sunni Islamist ideology intertwined with Palestinian nationalism, committed to Israel’s destruction and the creation of an Islamic state across historical Palestine through jihad and violent struggle. This worldview frames the conflict not as a territorial dispute but as an existential religious war between Islam and Judaism, portraying Jews as eternal enemies of God, Islam, and humanity—often dehumanized as “sons of pigs and monkeys” in line with Islamic traditions. Hamas’s foundational 1988 Covenant invokes eschatological prophecies, such as the hadith where stones and trees call Muslims to kill hiding Jews, investing the annihilation of Jews with messianic significance to usher in a divine kingdom. Senior leaders, including Yahya Sinwar and Fathi Hammad, have repeatedly issued calls for global slaughter of Jews, destruction of Israel, and expulsion from the land, emphasizing that the struggle transcends borders to encompass an unbridgeable dichotomy of good versus evil. Official broadcasts and sermons reinforce these themes, with clerics and officials urging divine annihilation of Jews and framing their murder as a religious duty.
Neither is this wholesale rejection of Jewish statehood unique to Hamas. According to the Palestinian narrative, which is shared across the Palestinian political spectrum, the Jews are not a nation, but rather a religious group which never at any point exercised rightful political sovereignty in Palestine.
The PLO Charter, which has never been amended, states that “the claims of historic and spiritual ties between Jews and Palestine are not in agreement with the facts of history or with the true basis of sound statehood. Judaism, because it is a divine religion, is not a nationality with independent existence. Furthermore, the Jews are not one people with an independent personality, because they are citizens of the countries to which they belong.” One month before the October 7th massacre, Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas, at a speech at a Fatah conference, promoted a baseless theory that Ashkenazi Jews are actually descendants of a Turkish tribe that converted to Judaism in the Middle Ages. He also said that antisemitism, including the Nazi Holocaust, was a consequence of the Jews’ exploitative conduct, such as loaning money at interest. The Palestinian Authority and leading Palestinian thinkers continue to deny any Jewish historical ties to the land of Israel, claim that the Jewish Temple in Jerusalem never existed and misappropriate biblical and Jewish historical figures as Muslim, Arab or Palestinian.
The global Left repackages Palestinian ideology in progressive and “human rights” terms, all the while preserving its end goal of disenfranchising Jews. The anti-Zionist ideology portrays the State of Israel as a criminal enterprise from birth, based on acts of ethnic cleansing and apartheid. According to this view, Israel is an illegitimate state born out of the oppression and systematic destruction of the Palestinian people. Anti-Zionist rhetoric depicts the state as an aggressive “war machine” with an appetite for genocide and ethnic cleansing. The core argument is that Israel was established on the ruins of the Palestinian people, through the systematic destruction of homes, culture, and lands.
A central rhetorical strategy is the “Holocaust inversion,” which presents Israelis as the new Nazis and Palestinians as the new victims. This is a deliberate comparison that seeks to portray the state as a colonial force of evil, while completely demonizing Zionism and the Israeli enterprise. The deeper claim is that Jews, precisely because of their past as Holocaust victims, bear heightened moral responsibility. They are accused not only of actions, but of cynically exploiting the memory of the Holocaust as a political tool to justify violent acts. At the base of this perception lies a view of Jewish nationalism as distinct and more wicked than any other nationalism—as a total essence of evil, inherently seeking to exclude and oppress. This narrative is promoted and echoed by an incestuous cycle of NGOs, partisan academics, anti-Israel politicians and grassroots activists.
This global anti-Zionist wave has fueled a sharp rise in attacks on Jews worldwide, turning once-safe communities into targets of hatred and violence. After October 7, antisemitic incidents surged dramatically in countries like the United States, Canada, Australia, the United Kingdom, France, and Germany, with reports of physical assaults on streets, vandalism of synagogues and Jewish schools, and widespread harassment tied to anti-Israel protests. n Canada, for instance, hate crimes against Jews spiked by hundreds of percent, including threats in schools and public spaces, while Australia saw arson attacks on synagogues and a tripling of incidents. In the U.S. and Europe, campuses and cities became hotspots for intimidation, where chants and graffiti blurred the line between political criticism and outright Jew-hatred. In Canada, previously considered a safe haven, antisemitic incidents spiked by 670% between October 2023 and October 2024, including assaults on streets, vandalism of synagogues, and hate crimes in schools. From October to December 2023 alone, monthly averages of antisemitic hate crimes rose sharply, with nearly three-quarters occurring in major school boards like Toronto and Ottawa. Australia has faced a similar threefold surge in incidents since October 2023, with over 1,713 recorded in 2024 compared to 1,200 the previous year. In the United States, the Anti-Defamation League tallied over 10,000 incidents since October 7, 2023, with 8,873 in 2023 alone—a 140% increase—and record levels continuing into 2024, including campus harassment and physical assaults. Europe has seen even steeper rises, with some organizations reporting over 400% increases in antisemitic acts since October 2023, encompassing violent attacks in Germany, France, and the UK. This resurgence echoes historical pogroms, reminding Jews everywhere that the fight for safety and dignity is far from over.
Just as rising antisemitism in the 18th and 19th centuries prompted many Jews to reclaim their heritage and return to their roots, today’s challenges echo that call. Moses Hess, a contemporary of Karl Marx and an early Zionist thinker, wrote:
“After an estrangement of twenty years, I am back with my people. I have come to be one of them again, to participate in the celebration of the holy days, to share the memories and hopes of the nation, to take part in the spiritual and intellectual warfare going on within the House of Israel.
A thought which I believed to be forever buried in my heart, has been revived in me anew. It is the thought of my nationality, which is inseparably connected with the ancestral heritage and the memories of the Holy Land, the Eternal City, the birthplace of the belief in the divine unity of life, as well as the hope in the future brotherhood of men.”
This theme of return, spiritual— though not necessarily religious —in addition to physical, runs through the thought and writings of Zionist leaders.
. In Autoemancipation, Leo Pinsker called upon Jews to reclaim their national dignity and take their rightful place, as equals, among the nations. Theodor Herzl, turning to the deracinated Jews of Western Europe, declared: “We are a nation — one nation.” Assimilation had left Jews adrift and impoverished.
Similarly, many of the hostages who returned from Hamas’ captivity described an existential confrontation with their Jewish identity. Eli Sharabi, a traditional but non-religious Jew, recounted beginning every day by reciting the Shema, the Jewish declaration of faith and making Kiddush on water every Friday night. Freed lookout soldier Agam Berger held up a sign on the helicopter ride home saying “I chose a path of faith and faith brought me home” (בדרך אמונה בחרתי ובדרך אמונה שבתי). Keith Segal testified that he began saying blessings over food while in captivity.
The events of October 7 and their enduring aftermath serve as a poignant reminder to Jews in Israel and the Diaspora that the struggle for Jewish freedom is far from concluded. As a united nation, we must mobilize our collective resources and talents to bolster our communities and fortify our state. Yet, even as the world increasingly turns against us, this moment presents a profound opportunity to deepen our bonds with our ancient heritage and rediscover the resilience that has sustained us through millennia.
