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Source: https://jewishjournal.com/commentary/opinion/385199/understanding-what-were-for-in-four-words/
Thanks to Zionism, We Won - and Will Continue Winning, while Teaching the West about Self-Defense, Self-Reliance, and Self-Respect
(Los Angeles Jewish Journal) Gil Troy - Americans are traditionally focused on their lives and, at best, domestic politics. That's why it's stunning to see how much coverage, fury, and focus there has been for two years on Israel in Gaza. Manipulative, well-funded networks have cultivated this Israel-obsession and Palestinian-romanticization. It is magnified mindlessly online. America seems filled with laptop warriors who never fired a gun and cannot tell friend from foe, arrogantly making long-distance military calls about IDF strategy. Meanwhile, armchair moralists throw lightning bolts of condemnation at Israel, having ignored their own country's behavior in Iraq and Afghanistan. Never forget: Hamas's Iranian-funded Oct. 7 massacre imposed this existential war for survival on Israel. Oct. 7 marks the latest, bloodiest, chapter in Palestinian exterminationists' decades-long war against Zionism. Read their charters, speeches, and sermons. They've framed their "struggle" as an all-or-nothing fight to eliminate the "Zionist entity." They're the ones who repeatedly rejected compromise since the 1940s, and keep improvising various ways to kill Jews. Zionism resets the conversation that puts Israel's supporters in a defensive crouch. It transcends the defensiveness, refuting the accusations in deeds not words, with joy not anguish, victories not defeatism. It accentuates the eternals: identity, history, community, continuity, survival. Zionism takes Israel off probation, celebrating Jews' historic commitment to one another, our people, state and land - our intertwined fate. Identity Zionism roots Jews in a centrifugal reality spinning around our tradition, our land, our people, our state. That superpower resists modern Western culture's forces, spinning toward fragmented affinities, and thereby undermining loyalties to others, to the collective. The writer, a Distinguished Scholar of North American History at McGill University, is a Senior Fellow in Zionist Thought at the Jewish People Policy Institute.