War is terrible. If only because there will always be innocent victims on both sides. But sometimes war is inevitable, because war can be just. Nowhere is this clearer today than in the war Israel is waging against the powers that want to wipe not only the state of Israel but also the Jewish people of the face of the earth.
Last Tuesday, Iran fired 180 ballistic missiles at Israel. Wednesday, Hezbollah fired over 100 rockets into Israel from Lebanon. In order to neutralize the Hezbollah terrorists, the Israeli army has launched the first ground offensive in southern Lebanon since 2006.
The war in the Middle East is rapidly escalating. But it is clear who is to blame and it is equally clear which side we must back. We stand with Israel, because its enemies are evil and neutrality in the face of evil is evil.
The war began almost exactly one year ago, on the 7th of October 2023. This day will forever remain one of the most infamous days in the history of Israel and the free world. Everyone has seen the horrific pictures of the massacres at the Supernova music festival and in the Jewish villages near the border with Gaza. Hundreds of innocent people, including children, babies and elderly people, were killed, kidnapped and raped by the terrorists of Hamas.
Everyone remembers how the corpse of 22-year-old German Jewish Shani Louk was paraded in Gaza City in the back of a pickup truck, while people cheered and spat on it. And then there are the hostages – more than 250, of whom an estimated 100 perhaps are still alive in the dark tunnels beneath Gaza after 363 days of captivity.
What happened one year ago was a wake-up call for Israel, but it was also a wake-up call for us, reminding us of the deep hatred of Muhammed, the founder of Islam, towards the Jews. It can be found in his book, the Quran (e.g. Surah 4:47: “You who have been given the Book! Believe in what we have sent down… before we obliterate faces”), and in the Hadiths, the collections of Muhammed’s words and deeds written down by his contemporaries (e.g. Sahih Muslim 41-6985: “The Day of Judgement will not come about until Muslims fight the Jews, when the Jew will hide behind stones and trees. The stones and trees will say O Muslims, O Abdullah, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him”).
But almost as shocking as the events one year ago has been the hideous surge of anti-Semitism and moral cowardice in our own countries during the past twelve months.
Our cities have witnessed an orgy of Jew hatred. All over the West, university buildings have been occupied and vandalized by activists demanding that links with Israeli institutions be cut. Many universities cowardly gave in to this atrocious demand. In Amsterdam, London and elsewhere, people who condoned and applauded the rapists and murderers of the 7th of October have attacked Jewish protesters.
In the Netherlands, some police officers have indicated that they have “moral objections” against protecting Jewish objects and events. In Brussels, the municipal authorities annulled the Nations League football tournament between Belgium and Israel. And in France, in perhaps the worst incident of all, a 12-year-old Jewish girl was brutally raped by three Islamic boys of 12, 13 and 14 for no other reason than that she was Jewish.
Every day, Jewish schools, institutions, communities and individuals are the target of hatred, discrimination, verbal abuse and violence. We seem to have grown accustomed to it. Adding insult to injury, next Monday, exactly on the day of the anniversary of the Hamas atrocities, leftist groups are staging protest demonstrations against Israel in train stations all over the Netherlands.
No wonder, more and more Jews are considering leaving Western Europe and emigrating to Israel, the only place in the world where they still feel safe, despite the fact that Hamas, Hezbollah, and the thugs ruling Iran are plotting to strike Israel over and over.
Israel is hated by the left for the same reason that European patriots should support it: Because it shows us how vital it is for a people to have its own nation-state with strong and guarded borders.
Almost 130 years ago, Theodor Herzl, the father of Jewish Zionism, wrote in his book The Jewish State: “Some may say we ought not to bring up new differences between people; we ought not to raise new borders, we should rather make the old ones disappear. But men who think in this way are endearing dreamers.”
A Jewish nation-state, Herzl argued, was essential because only through a Jewish state with its own territory could the Jewish people express their culture freely, practice their religion without hindrance, and defend themselves. Without a nation-state, without self-governance, without self-determination there can be no security for a people nor preservation of its identity. This was the insight that led the Zionists to strive for the re-establishment of the state of Israel. And this is the insight that leads Israel to defend itself.
What we need today is Zionism for the nations of Europe. The Europeans should follow the example of the Jewish people and safeguard the sovereignty of their nation-states.
As David P. Goldman has pointed out, the state of Israel was the very first nation-state in history. The story of the Jewish people as recorded in the Old Testament is a long history of patriotism, from Gideon, Samson, and Judith to the Maccabees and the warriors of Masada.
“The nation,” writes Goldman, “is the bearer of our immortality. That is why young men leave their families and sacrifice themselves on the battlefield to preserve their nation. In human history the human hope for eternity has a specific embodiment, namely Israel, the eternal nation.” The European nation-states, originating in the early Middle Ages, were modelled on the old Davidic Kingdom of Israel.
Having been a nation without a country for 19 centuries and barely surviving the catastrophe of the 1940s, the Jewish people, better than the Europeans, understand the importance of a territorial state with sound borders for the survival of a nation.
This is why after the Second World War the Jewish people did the opposite of what the Europeans did. While Europe’s political elites began to abolish the European nation-states and dissolve them in a supranational institution, the Jewish nation proudly reasserted itself as a sovereign nation-state and vigourously defended its borders.
That is exactly what Israel is doing at this very moment. That is exactly why the Left hates it. Because it is the reborn nation-state. That is why we stand with Israel. Not just because it is the frontline against the totalitarian threat of Islam, not only because we support the Jewish homeland in their fight for existence, but also because it is a beacon for nations striving to maintain their national identity.
Geert Wilders MP is leader of the Party for Freedom (PVV), the largest party in the Netherlands and in the Dutch government coalition.
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