Sept. 13, 1993 was the day Israel’s ruling class abandoned Zionism. That day, when then prime minister Yitzhak Rabin stood in the White House Rose Garden and officially recognized the Palestine Liberation Organization—to the rapturous applause of his supporters back home—was the moment Israel’s elite collectively abandoned their attachment to their nation.
The PLO was many things. It was a terrorist organization. It was the architect of modern terrorism, including airline hijacking, kidnapping, the murder of families, the mass murder of children, the assassination of diplomats.Subscribe to The JNS Daily Syndicate by email and never miss our top storiesFree sign upBy signing up, you agree to receive emails from JNS and allied pro-Israel organizations.
The PLO trained everyone from Khomeini’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps to the Japanese Red Army, the Baader Meinhof Gang and the Black Panthers. It brought terrorists from every ideological line together and forged them into a revolutionary conglomerate united in their desire to destroy the United States, the West, the Jews and their state, Israel.
The PLO was a political warfare group. It brought genocidal Jew hatred to the West’s radical left. It used the media to romanticize barbarous acts of mass murder and brutal torture as it carried them out.
Through its Western lackies, barely 20 years after the Holocaust the PLO was able to reinstate Jew hatred as a tool for political mobilization and a major cultural force. Through its propaganda operations, the PLO convinced ignorant young people with guilty consciences that their Nazi parents were really victims. Zionism was demonized as a new Nazism—worse than the first one. And in 1975, 30 years after the liberation of Auschwitz, the U.N. General Assembly passed Resolution 3374, which designated Zionism a form of racism.
Zionism is often defined as the Jewish national liberation movement. And that is true enough, but that definition obfuscates more than it reveals. Zionism is simply Judaism.
Judaism has three foundations—the Torah, the nation of Israel and the land of Israel. There have been centuries of campaigns to forcibly convert the Jews to other faiths, replete with mass burnings of sacred books aimed at wiping out the Torah and annihilating Jews by physically destroying their sacred texts and spiritually capturing them through forced renunciation of their faith.
Campaigns to annihilate the Jewish people—whether through genocide, mass expulsions, the Napoleonic code or Communist dictates that required Jews to renounce their national attachment to one another—aimed at disappearing the Jews by either physically destroying them or forcing them to reject the relevance of their own identity.
Zionism predated both the Torah and the people of Israel. Judaism began the moment that God told Abraham to leave the land of his fathers and move to the land of Israel where he would become a nation, organized around the laws God prescribed. The Jewish nation was born in the land of Israel. And the faith of Israel was born there. Neither the law nor the people make sense without the land of Israel.
And that’s the thing—each of the three foundations of the Jews are inextricably linked to the others.
The PLO had three founders—Yasser Arafat, Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser and the KGB. For Arafat, the PLO was a means to inherit the mantle of the founder of Palestinian nationalism, Nazi agent Haj Amin el Husseini. Husseini spearheaded the modern jihad against the Jews and the British throughout the Arab world. And he used antisemitism as a means to persuade the British and others to support his efforts against the Jews even as he directed his followers to wage war against Britain.
With the help of his Soviet sponsors, Arafat carried out a similar political operation among Western radicals. And like Husseini, Arafat also sought to solidify pan-Arab support for the annihilation of Israel over the long term.
The PLO served Nasser’s purpose in two ways. When he founded the terror group in 1964, Nasser envisioned that the terror group would reinforce his position as the undisputed head of the Arab world. After his stunning defeat in the Six-Day War three years later, he viewed the PLO as a proxy force that would serve as the avant-garde of the pan-Arab war to annihilate Israel and keep it in the headlines while the Arabs rebuilt their forces and organized for a new round of war.
For the Soviets, the PLO was a means to undermine the U.S.-led West’s sense of the morality. The Jewish state was the paradigmatic foundation of the Western nation state. The U.S. founding fathers aspired to build a new Jerusalem in the New World, based on God’s law and a belief in man’s inherent fallibility.
The PLO, which asserted that Israel was a racist, colonialist outpost, was a tool to delegitimize Israel and through it the United States and the Western world. If Israel was born in sin, then the Bible was a lie and the United States itself had been founded on immoral belief in nothing more than racist, European supremacism.
As far as Israel was concerned, the PLO’s dual terrorism and political warfare operations were geared toward Balkanizing Israeli society. PLO surrogates and sympathizers assiduously courted first leftist American Jews and then leftist Israeli activists to peel them away from the vast majority of American Jews and Israelis who recognized the insidiousness of the PLO’s political actions and the pure evil of its terrorism. The idea was to convince them that “peace” would reign if Israel would simply accept the legitimacy of the PLO.
These activists in turn began campaigns in the American Jewish community, and within Israel, to demonize Israelis who rejected the PLO as atavistic warmongers. Over time, their efforts paid off. As the Israeli right rose to power for the first time in 1977 with the support of religious and working class, overwhelmingly Sephardic Israelis, legitimizing the PLO increasingly became the means to unify the left into a cohesive opposition and social class.
Given the nature, goal and modus operandi of the PLO, at its foundation, accepting the legitimacy of the PLO meant rejecting the legitimacy of Zionism, or of the state of the Jews. For Israelis and Jews in the Diaspora, that translated into social and political activism geared toward legitimizing hatred of the Israeli communities whose members refused to attenuate their attachment to Judaism. This was the case whether that attachment was to the traditional Judaism of the Sephardic Jews, the ultra-Orthodoxy of the haredim or the attachment to the land of Israel, particularly Judea and Samaria, of the national religious community in Israel.
Rabin’s decision to accept the legitimacy of the PLO at the White House on Sept. 13, 1993 transformed this hateful, anti-Jewish approach to the people of Israel and their national identity into the national strategy of the Israeli government.
In the event, it failed completely.
It failed completely for two reasons. First, the PLO’s goal was never peace. It was always the annihilation of Israel—all of Israel. So it could never be a true partner to any Israeli, no matter how far to the left, who wasn’t convinced that Israel should disappear completely. And even those had a problem. Because it turned out that the PLO was just a gateway drug to Hamas, which wouldn’t even pay lip service to the distinction between post-Zionist and Zionist Jews.
The second reason it failed is because the narrative of Israeli criminality and immorality was never true, and most Israelis never bought it. Most Israelis also never accepted the distinction between “good” and “bad” Jews. They never agreed that there was something morally depraved about Zionism, or the Torah or the people of Israel. No matter how hard the left tried, it could never get a majority of Israelis to agree with the fundamental principle that guided its policies and actions.
Sure, Israelis want peace. But they don’t think they are the reason peace has eluded the Jewish state and people. They refuse to blame themselves for the aggression and hatred directed against their people and country.
The problem with politics of hate is that hate is a hard habit to break. If you have been conditioned to believe that your future is dependent on defeating the object of your hate, the only way your opinion is likely to change is if you stop hating. Since 1993, the PLO proved over and over that it is Israel’s enemy, not its peace partner. But accepting the truth meant accepting that the left had brought disaster on the country, and the objects of its hatred—the Jews who refused to renounce any aspect of their identity—had been right all along.
In other words, accepting failure required them to either redefine their class identity or abandon it. The left opted to reinvent itself. It embraced the concept of “Start-Up Nation” as a way to secure its economic and cultural power while maintaining its detachment from the rest of society. By seizing control over the new elixir of high-tech, the left joined the global elite, with its capitals in Davos and Silicon Valley.
But you have to pay to enter the realm of the new globalist elite. The overlords aspire to a post-nationalist, internationalist form of governance. Their ideological roots are not American capitalism. Rather, schooled in elite universities drenched in Soviet-rooted anti-Westernism, the leaders of the new global ruling class are post-nationalist and fully on board with the Soviet view that Zionism, the apotheosis of nationalist aspirations, is illegitimate. To join their club, Israel’s tech titans have been required to disavow their allegiance to their “violent settler” and “ultra-Orthodox” countrymen.
In other words, even when they tried to walk away from the PLO elixir that brought about the disaster of the Palestinian terror state in Israel’s heartland, they were faced with the same choice.
It worked, more or less, until Oct. 7. On that day, two things happened. First, Palestinian terrorists, with their paragliders, Toyota pick-up trucks, RPGs and sadistic blood lust exploded the myth that technology will free Israel of our need to defend ourselves with the brothers the left desperately hoped to abandon. All the military applications of the Start-Up Nation—the high-tech sensors, signals intelligence, the smart fence, the air force—failed completely on Oct. 7. The only thing that worked that day was the raw heroism and patriotism of the Jews—civilian and security forces who rushed to the south unbidden to save the families and communities being overrun.
The second thing that happened is that the international jet set, the global elite, dropped all distinction between “good” and “bad” Jews. The photos of the hostages from Be’eri and Kfar Azza were torn down with the same hatred that had long been directed toward “violent settlers” or “identifiable Jews” alone. The Jew haters on campuses no longer felt the need to pretend that some Israelis were acceptable.
For the past 11 months, members of the post-Zionist sector have been struggling to get their heads around the shattering of their delusions. Their leaders are trying to double down. But their insistence that the problems lay with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, or the haredim, or messianic settlers, or imbecile yokels who get teary-eyed at songs about Am Yisrael, has fewer and fewer takers. Every protest fizzles after a few days. The thrill is gone. With no “peace” or “Start Up Nation” fig leaves to hide behind, the hatred is all that is left.
Thirty-one years since the left embraced the PLO and hate, it must finally abandon it. Israel’s survival depends on it.