The Miracle of Jewish Independence Today

The word “Zionism” has been weaponized, twisted, and deliberately stripped of its meaning.

Zionism is the belief that the Jewish people, like every other people on earth, have the right to self-determination in their ancestral homeland. That’s 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.

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 two thousand 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. It’s 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 right now should shake every person out of complacency and into wonder.

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, that regime 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 October 7th, the worst day in 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 they were founded, have been eliminated with surgical precision. Hezbollah, which once commanded over 150,000 rockets 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 Israel. 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.

None of this was supposed to be possible. Military analysts around the world would have told you three years ago that eliminating Hezbollah was a generational project. That the Iranian axis was too deeply entrenched to dismantle. 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 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.

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 carries a meaning that goes beyond Israeli patriotism. It is a reason antisemites think twice. It is a reason a Jewish student on a hostile campus, a Jewish employee facing discrimination, a Jewish family in a neighborhood where hatred has reared its head, knows that there is somewhere in the world where Jewish sovereignty is non-negotiable.

Zionism gave us that. And everything that has happened since October 7th has reminded us, at enormous cost and with enormous pain, that the miracle is ongoing.

The men and women of the IDF, the families of the hostages who never stopped fighting, the rabbis and teachers and volunteers who kept Jewish life burning through the darkest year in recent memory, they 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.