There is a word that has been weaponized, twisted and deliberately stripped of its meaning. That word is Zionism.
Let me tell you what Zionism actually is. It is the belief that the Jewish people, like every other people on earth, have the right to self-determination in their ancestral homeland. That is it. Nothing more. It contains no hatred of Arabs, no contempt for Palestinians, no designs on the rights of anyone else. Zionism is the simple, uncontroversial idea that Jews deserve what every other nation takes for granted: a place to call home.
Those who call Zionism racist have it precisely backwards. The Jewish people are among the most persecuted in human history. We did not arrive in Israel to oppress anyone. We arrived because the world spent 2,000 years making clear that without a homeland of our own, we were always one demagogue away from disaster. The Holocaust did not happen in a vacuum. It happened because there was nowhere to run.
That is what Yom Ha’atzmaut, Israel’s Independence Day, is really about. Not the fireworks. Not the barbecues. It is about the end of a 2,000-year prayer finally being answered. Am Yisrael Chai: The Jewish people live. And now, they live on their own terms.
Jewish independence does not come at the expense of any other people’s dignity. It comes as the culmination of millennia of persecution, turning into deliverance. When God made a covenant with Abraham, He did not promise us land so that we could subjugate others. He promised us a place where we could be who we are, live by our values and bring light to the world. Israel, at 78 years old, is doing exactly that. It is imperfect, embattled and extraordinary, but more than anything, it is alive, and it is vibrant.
What we are seeing in our own lifetimes, right now, should shake every person out of complacency and into wonder.
For the first time in the history of the modern State of Israel, it did not stand alone in open conflict. When the United States and Israel struck together against Iran in a coordinated military operation, something shifted in the world. A regime that has spent decades financing terror—arming every proxy militia from Lebanon to Yemen, murdering its own citizens by the tens of thousands in the streets when they dared to protest—faced a reckoning. Israel stood shoulder to shoulder with the greatest military power on earth to bring an end to an existential threat to democracy and freedom.
Since the Hamas-led terrorist attacks in southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, the worst slaughter of Jewish life since the Holocaust, something has been unfolding that defies conventional military logic.
One by one, Israel’s enemies have been severely diminished. Hamas leadership—the architects of that murderous day and who have been attacking Israel since the day the terror group was founded—have been eliminated with surgical precision. Hezbollah, which once commanded more than 150,000 rockets pointed at Israel and was considered the most powerful non-state military force in the world—has been brought to its knees, with the Lebanese government in conversations about making peace with Jerusalem. The Iranian command structure that funded and directed these terrorist groups and others has been struck at its heart. The Assad regime in Syria—a declared enemy and aggressor to Israel since its creation, and which for decades served as Iran’s corridor to Hezbollah—has fallen. That is prophecy fulfilled in real time.
None of this was supposed to be possible. Military analysts around the world would have said three years ago that eliminating Hezbollah was a generational project. That the Iranian axis was too deeply entrenched to be dismantled. That Israel, surrounded by enemies, would continue to spend decades in a grinding war of attrition.
Instead, we are witnessing miracles.
I do not use that word lightly. I use it the way the late Rabbi Jonathan Sacks would have used it: with awe, with precision and with the knowledge that the Jewish people have a long history of confusing luck with God’s hand in history. What is happening right now is not luck. Missiles that should have killed thousands were intercepted. Operations that should have taken years happened in weeks or even days. Enemies that seemed invincible crumbled.
Those who stand with Israel have found themselves on the right side of history. Those who stood against her have been destroyed or have found their power collapsing.
God told Abraham: “I will bless those who bless you, and whoever curses you I will curse.” We are watching that promise play out on the world stage in our lifetimes.
For Jews in the Diaspora, this Israel Independence Day—Yom Ha’atzmaut—carries a meaning that goes beyond Israeli patriotism. It is the reason we can walk taller. It is the reason antisemites think twice. It is the reason that a Jewish student on a hostile campus, a Jewish employee facing discrimination and a Jewish family in a neighborhood where hatred has reared its head know there is somewhere in the world where Jewish sovereignty is non-negotiable.
Zionism gave us that. The State of Israel gave us that. And everything that has happened since Oct. 7 has reminded us, at enormous cost and with enormous pain, that the miracle is ongoing.
The men and women of the Israel Defense Forces, the hostage families who never stopped fighting, the rabbis and teachers and volunteers who kept Jewish life burning through the darkest two years in recent memory, are all part of the same story that began with Abraham, continued through the Exodus and found its modern chapter being written since 1948.
On this Yom Ha’atzmaut, we do not celebrate because everything is perfect. We celebrate because we are here. We celebrate because we are not alone in this world. We celebrate because the Almighty, who has never abandoned His people, is making that fact clearly visible and impossible to ignore.
