The following is an excerpt from the new foreword to the 2021 e-book, “The Zionist Conspiracy (and how to join it).”
I went back to Israel — twice — in the wake of the October 7 attack, mostly to write about the war, partly to show solidarity with Israel, and also partly because some of my Israeli peers, friends, and relatives had been called up for reserve duty. They had put their lives on hold to defend their country from what was a genocidal attack by an enemy determined to try again.
Telling their stories, and making their case, was the least I could do to contribute to the cause.
When I arrived in Israel, in just the second week after October 7, I was surprised how quiet the country was. Hundreds of thousands of men were away, at the front; their families were staying indoors, near the bomb shelters and safe from whatever terrorists still remained in the country. The first twenty-four hours felt mournful, though the flags and patriotic banners — “Together, we shall win” — that hung from almost every building showed a sense of grim determination.
I joined a group of journalists in a visit to Kibbutz Be’eri, near Gaza, where 100 residents — ten percent of the population — had been murdered on October 7. There were soldiers, medical personnel, and armored vehicles everywhere. The sound of explosions — tank shells, I later learned — was nearly constant.
We walked through the wreckage somberly. I picked up some spent bullet casings, still fresh on the ground from the battle to liberate Be’eri from Hamas.
I was in the first group of journalists to see the now-infamous 43-minute film of the atrocities committed by Hamas on October 7. Much of of the footage was taken by Hamas terrorists themselves on GoPro cameras and mobile phones, including the phones of the victims: in several cases, the murderers live-streamed the torture and death to friends and relatives of the deceased.
After the film, I left the auditorium and cried for several minutes before I could write.
Later, I was to visit one of the sites that appears in that film — a home in an Israeli moshav, or agricultural town, where a terrorist is seen throwing a grenade into a backyard bomb shelter, killing a father and wounding his two young boys, causing the elder brother to lose an eye. In a nightmarish sequence, his younger brother is seen lamenting the fact of his own survival.
That is the hell that Israelis lived through, and that many will live with for the rest of their lives.
I visited the Israeli military base where hundreds of corpses were brought for identification and kept in refrigerated trucks for days, even weeks on end. The smell of death was pervasive as the trucks were opened, and the frigid mist inside them spilled out into the autumn air.
Above us, the Iron Dome missile defense system intercepted Hamas rockets, which exploded in the sky with a percussive bang and a wisp of white smoke, saving the residents of nearby Tel Aviv.
I drove down dirt roads to reach a funeral at a remote rural cemetery, where a mother and her only two daughters, all murdered by Hamas, were being buried together. Her husband and his brother are, as of this writing, still captives in Gaza.
I visited the bereaved family of Lt. Col. Salman Habaka, a Druze Arab who had commanded an armored battalion and was one of the first IDF soldiers killed when the Israeli military went into northern Gaza. He died defending his country.
I met living heroes, too — like Nimrod Palmach, the CEO of a non-profit organization who said goodbye to his family and drove across the country on the morning of October 7, armed only with a pistol, to join the fight in the south. He picked up a machine gun from a fallen soldier, and borrowed body armor from a wounded comrade, before plunging into the fire with the IDF special forces, saving Kibbutz Alumim from a terrorist assault before joining the battle at Be’eri.
I joined a group of volunteers who braved rocket fire to travel to the fields around Gaza, which had been left empty when thousands of foreign agricultural workers fled the country after the war began. The volunteers — religious and secular, young and old, high-tech executives, filmmakers, retirees whose children were just across the border fighting in Gaza — worked to save the harvest and make sure that Israel’s fruits and vegetables could still make it to market.
I visited a high-end culinary institute in Tel Aviv whose kitchen had been re-purposed to supply 900 warm, kosher meals to disabled residents of Israel’s southern cities who could not easily be evacuated. I toured a soup kitchen in the working-class town of Ofakim, which normally fed 300 families per day, and had expanded to 1,000 when the war began. I met mothers who had organized schools for children in bomb shelters, since the regular schools had been closed.
I saw how the members of a fractious society, divided all year long by protests and counter-protests over the arcane constitutional issue of judicial independence, came together, setting political and cultural differences aside to unite in a struggle against unspeakable evil.
Hamas, and its Iranian sponsors, had underestimated the resilience of Israeli society. They had railed for so long against the “Zionists” that they never stopped to think what made Zionism work.
Zionism … is simply the belief that Jews have the right to establish a self-governing community in their historic spiritual and cultural homeland, the Land of Israel. The word “Zionism” can also refer to the political ideology and the social movement that was organized in the late nineteenth century to achieve that aim.
I believe that the term can have a broader, general definition, too: zionism, lower-case z, is self-transformation to achieve a goal.
Zion, or Jerusalem, has been central to the Jewish faith for 3,000 years. More than any other major religion, Judaism is connected to a particular place and a particular land. A Muslim faces Mecca to pray, as a Jew faces Jerusalem, but Muslims can live anywhere, making a pilgrimage to Mecca if possible. A Jew can be a patriotic citizen of whatever country he or she lives in, but a Jew cannot be fully Jewish without Israel. Today, if Israel were to be destroyed, so would we.
For centuries, Jews prayed, and waited, for our exile to end. But occasionally, some decided they were tired of waiting — or tired of persecution wherever they were living, and had no other place to go. They would migrate to join the Jewish communities that had persisted in the land of Israel, or to establish new ones.
So it was in the late nineteenth century, when Jews from the Pale of Settlement in Russia began moving to Israel and establishing new Jewish communities.
These Jews were Zionists before the word itself was invented. They took their destiny in their own hands, uprooted themselves, and began new lives, learning new skills and speaking new languages.
The word “Zionism” was not invented by Theodor Herzl, widely considered to be the founder of the Zionist political movement, but rather by a writer and pamphleteer named Nathan Birnbaum. It is no accident that Birnbaum called his publication “Self-emancipation.”
Self-emancipation is the essence of what Zionism achieved for Jews. Even before the State of Israel existed, the Zionist movement taught Jews that they were not doomed to discrimination and bigotry; that they could become farmers as well as intellectuals; that they could revive the holy language of the Old Testament and apply it to science, engineering, poetry, and politics; that they need not be history’s spectators, or victims, but historical actors on their own stage.
When Hamas attacked Israel on October 7, they justified their brutality in the same fashion that Palestinian terrorists have used ever since the abduction and murder of Israeli athletes at the 1972 Olympics in Munich: they claimed it was necessary to remind the world the Palestinian cause still existed.
But if the world had been indifferent in 1972, it was not by 2023. The world wants Palestinians to succeed. The problem is that, collectively, they have refused to try.
The pro-Palestinian activists who marched worldwide may not have explicitly backed Hamas — though few bothered to condemn the terrorists — but they shared the same rejection of the right of Israel to exist.
The attack of October 7 was not about “occupation,” which had not existed in Gaza since 2005. It was to be, Hamas said, the first of many such attacks until Israel had been destroyed (what it is to be replaced with is somehow never examined too closely).
For Hamas, as for the rest of the Palestinian movement, October 7 was a chance to rewind to 1948, the moment of Israel’s birth, and the failed Arab attempt to destroy it (rather than building the Arab state that the United Nations had also granted). They looked backward, their national vision never developing beyond the moment of the so-called “Nakba,” or catastrophe. (The war, displacing Gazan civilians, was said to be the second Nakba, and likewise self-inflicted.)
Israelis, and Jews, also looked to history — to the Holocaust, and to the hardship of the 1948 war, in which the IDF was not yet the mighty force it would become, and Israeli civilians were often butchered by Arab armies. But they also looked forward.
One of the most popular songs of the war is Yagel Oshri’s “Getting over Depression.” The chorus is: “Even in the darkest hours of the night/There will always be a star to illuminate/Yourself, and the way home.”
Notably, not one of the Arab nations that signed the Abraham Accords peace agreements with Israel withdrew from them — even if most were sharply critical of Israel’s attacks in Gaza. In December 2023, the Dubai port company even agreed to allow Israeli trucks to pick up cargo and transport it over land to Israel, thus avoiding a Red Sea shipping route threatened by the Houthis, another terrorist group that, like Hamas, was armed and funded by the Iranian regime.
From the ashes of October 7, a new Israel is being forged, reinventing itself yet again. That is the essence of zionism, small z. We, as human beings, cannot control our circumstances, be we can control how we respond. Our past informs who we are, but it does not determine whom we decide to be. When Palestinians imagine a future that transcends their past, then peace will be possible.
In the meantime, Israel’s victories — both internal, and external — inspire hope.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of the 2021 e-book, “The Zionist Conspiracy (and how to join it),” now updated with a new foreword. He is also the author of the recent e-book, Neither Free nor Fair: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
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