A case for Jewish and Zionist Engagement with the World

A recurrent theme in Israel’s diplomatic perception has been that first, Israel can do no right, and second, that anti-Jewish bias lies at the heart of nearly every foreign interaction with Israel. It is a sweeping generalisation but then, most prejudice is, just that, and it is usually based on malevolent (purposeful) ignorance.

David Ben Gurion’s legacy included this trite aphorism, “Oom Shmoom.” It was meant to show our contempt for an institution (the United Nations) that had not ever demonstrated equality of treatment in conflict or anything other than conditional and selective respect for global human rights. And yet, today, the UN stands as the world’s supreme political organisation. It consists of 193 member nations, every one which carries prejudiced baggage and its own biased agenda. Therefore, how else can it behave but in a way that ultimately destroys rather than builds?

The Jewish peoples mental conflict arises from a deeply held need to seek legitimacy from the global community while living with a history, both contemporary and historic, of rejection, fear, and violence, precipitated by age-old prejudice that seems immune to modern trends of tolerance and pluralism.

Oom Shmoom and our paradoxical need for acceptance in a political world that seems always to demand a Jewish blood sacrifice is at the heart of our internal conflict and it has dominated Israeli foreign policy almost from Independence. Too often the conclusion that we stand alone has been borne out by the hostility experienced by Israel when it defends itself against an implacable enemy . This enemy which includes most of the Muslim world is wed to violence and hate; colonisation and conquest is a theological as well as an historical need.

We often experience dilemmas few others face.

Until just after the Yom Kippur War, Israel had extensive relationships with many African nations. Through assistance programs, Israeli experts were ubiquitous in helping African nations overcome the toxic legacy of European colonial-era maladministration, poverty, starvation, and disease. And yet as soon as the Arab-Muslim world promised to throw money at the leadership of those same African nations they severed all ties with Israel. Of course, the promise of money was no more than cheap and worthless words, but that specific betrayal did not impact Africa’s ruling classes. It was, however, successful in destroying Israel’s largely philanthropic efforts in Africa. The corrupt and unethical nature of politics trumped any possibility of an early rapprochement. While Africa suffered a succession of calamities, both Iran and Hezbollah corruptly infiltrated Africa. They built terror networks across the continent. Destabilisation was good for their faith-based enterprise.

On the 30th of April 2025, I listened to two “Jewish” you-tubers battle it out on a podcast. Sam Seder (SS) and Ethan Klein (EK) – one anti-Zionist, the other, claiming to be in favour of the two-State solution. SS belligerently threw everything he had at Israel while EK attempted to react to his assault. Did EK know that the tunnels were built by, yes, you guessed it – the Zionists? Israel did build Gaza’s largest hospital (as it created Gaza’s universities). That hospital included underground facilities which may have included tunnel access. Translating that into a tunnel network that is greater in size than the London Underground is hilarious because Israeli bureaucracy has rarely if ever demonstrated anything but painful, slowly, grinding, ineptitude. The HAMAS tunnel network was none of those things. Sam Seder, by his deceit laden accusation, excused the child slave labour that built those tunnels for HAMAS as well as the many deaths in their construction that Hamas was responsible for.

SS displayed zero empathy for Jewish victims of mass-rape, mass torture, and mass murder. He dismissed any concern for the hostages tortured in the tunnels. The complete absence of empathy was a constant of his malicious assault on the truth. He behaved as the quintessential Uncle Tom behaves. And yet, we ignore people like him while potentially, millions of ordinary people view and actually think people such as Sam Seder bring something of value to the table. Which they don’t.

Without empathy, democracy loses the battle against fascism and its siblings within socialism and national socialism. Fascism spends so much time policing the range of permissible thoughts and activities it is incapable of providing anything but a bleak and joyless landscape.

But can Israel do better?

The Likud alliance that governs Israel lacks any empathy for our enemies, blinds them too, to the threats that their alliance creates for internal stability as well as strategic security. Our enemies have no such reservations. Their vision is pure. It is death. The global human rights community, women’s organisations, Jewish anti-Zionists, the radical Left and Muslim communities failed to empathise with Israelis and Jews on or after 10/7.

It is a lesson that will have been internalised by those people who might have wanted to come to our defence but were and are, afraid to do so and, it is a lesson that our enemies will similarly have noted. The war would not have lasted as long as it has if the world had reacted against HAMAS and its sponsors in Iran and Qatar. But HAMAS has learned its lessons from history.

Hitler and his regime noted the almost complete indifference and inaction that followed Ottoman Turkeys successive genocidal actions against its minorities (more than three and one half million Greeks, Armenians, and Assyrians were murdered between 1914 and 1923). The Nazis were encouraged because they saw how quickly the world forgot imperialist and post-imperial Turkey’s crimes against humanity. It is with this in mind that the statements of various HAMAS officials, that 10/7 was but the first of hundreds if not thousands of similar Aktions, can be understood. Hamas learnt it tactics from Nazi history. Those officials have not faced censure. Human Rights groups have been silent. The ICJ and ICC (courts of selective justice) have issued no indictments. It is why the difference between the Nazi Right and the Nazi Left seems irrelevant.

Under Benjamin Netanyahu, but not exclusively under him, Israeli foreign policy has been grossly negligent and embarrassingly impoverished, making it near to impossible for Israel to fight back, anywhere in the world, against global anti-Jewish and anti-Israel campaigns. Those campaigns are meant to delegitimise us. Their intent is to create fear, in Jewish communities everywhere.

Is Zionism fulfilled because the State of Israel exists? Or is a 2,600-year-old ideology of return (it’s all the fault of those Babylonians’) in need of structural realignment? The state exists. But it does not offer guidance to the Jewish Diaspora. Many secular Israelis have also forgotten the liturgy. But perhaps it is in the diaspora that need is greatest. “By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, yea, we wept, when we remembered Zion.” We have been returning to Zion, ever since. (Ezekiel, Psalm 137:1) and “If I forget you, O Jerusalem, may my right hand cease to function.” (Psalm 137:5)

Zionism, as a religious – spiritual force, is consistently, a force for good. But our enemies will shout at us that Zionism is a modern invention of secular colonialists. This, in order to hide their ignorance, or worse, their lies about their brutal, hateful, colonisation history.

What Israel does, always impacts the Diaspora. At least our educational goals should be aligned; our propaganda efforts, co-ordinated, and geared, in this instance, towards causing the maximum damage to our enemies.

Through their terrorism and their agitation against us, our enemies have made it abundantly clear that we have no safe spaces, nor do we have the fundamental human right to resist them. Freedom of speech is enshrined in law but only selectively applied, therefore and under these circumstances, there must be no safe spaces for our enemies. It is time we worked on de-platforming those who would commit crimes against us. We have no other defence. They have been silencing us for far too long with the excuse that when they de-platform us, it is a legitimate tactic.

But the government of the state of Israel is silent and we are nearly always helpless.

As a non-missionary religion, we are an anti-colonialist faith, and we will always be targeted for depredation. Too small to be a threat, large enough to be a visible target, we are the perfect patsy for those groups, religious and secular, which need the cover of someone else’s perceived guilt to excuse their own, actual guilt.

Numerically, the radical right-wing slogan that “they will not replace us” is often used as a club to beat prominent (visible) Jewish liberals for whom pluralism and multi-culturalism are badges of honour. And they are badges of honour because in principle and in past practice, they meant greater acceptance of Jewish participation in national life. Identitarianism and Xenophobia have always had their followers but the rad right uses the Jewish community as an example of a disruptive force to their “natural order.” It is a tactic that allows militant minorities to join in the hunt.

In the past, immigrants were meant to integrate and ideally, assimilate into the dominant culture. The fear that many immigrants reject, in absolute terms, any watering down of their identity has not been helped by totalitarian Islamist bigots such as President Erdogan of Turkey who publicly insisted that Turkish immigrants in Europe must not integrate into Christian culture (secular or religious).

Nor has Muslim violence and its appeasement helped with people’s unease with Islam’s unfamiliarity and its clear challenge to the established order. We may not be comfortable with such attitudes, but they are natural. For the political classes to dismiss such unruly or uncouth behaviour as primitive or bigoted is frankly, facile, and mindless Groupthink.

Prior to 10/7 the prevalent Palestinian narrative was that Israel must return to the pre-1967 borders, which, are even more indefensible than the Gaza border was, in hindsight on 10/7. Also on 10/7, miraculously, the global narrative changed, being backdated to 1948. What occurred on 10/7 was because of 1948 they uniformly explained. Such coordination must raise the question about how much Muslim groups and their allies on the extreme Left knew before the massacres, about the intent to commit ethnic cleansing and genocide? Because clearly, this was a coordinated response.

And still, Israel’s government spokespeople have been largely silent in this malevolent assault on our history.

On the day U.N. and Palestinian representatives at the International Court of Justice accused Israel of breaking international law by refusing to let aid into Gaza, the Palestinian representative stated that Palestine’s problems all began in 1947. This creeping backwards narrative stands without any response from Israel. How are Jewish groups supposed to respond when Israel is simply not bothering to attack disinformation? Israel’s governing classes are effectively, complicit in our delegitimization.

There were no Israeli diplomatic representatives present to challenge the allegations made that day. This creeping narrative of dissimulation and outright lies should have been challenged. It isn’t just about Israel. Israel’s absence emboldens our enemies everywhere. The global Jewish community needs Israel to guide it, whether we like this uncomfortable fact or not. When the lie is unchallenged it becomes truth, and any previous truth becomes an inconvenient irrelevance.

Our truth is lost in a dense fog of rewritten history, Islamic theological supremacy, and Western appeasement that amorally, deems all truth as relative. And that lesson is internalised by both our friends and our enemies.

“If I am not for myself, who will be for me, If I am only for myself, what am I? And if not now, when?” Hillel’s famous maxim is a damning indictment of Israel’s dangerous abdication of responsibility to defend Israel and the Jewish people. The diplomatic propaganda war is no less important than the war being fought with bullets and bombs.

We must attack (the best defence) those see it as their mission to negate our rights to either self-expression or self-defence. And crucially, we must demonstrate police failure to provide equal support to us, whenever they fail us.

We in the diaspora need Israel to lead in this information war. What we are receiving in its stead, is incompetence; puerile, often embarrassing engagement that leaves us all, reeling. An aggressive response to the ICJ and the Palestinian ambassadors drivel would at least have provided guidance, to us. Instead, we have a right-wing government that hides its face from the public. That suggests capitulation. Worse, silence equates to guilt.

And our enemies will always be more than willing to provide the appropriate lie to reinforce what is already a damning narrative.

Our apparent indifference: our refusal to fight fire with inferno is the legacy of Oom Shmoom. We must end this policy before it is too late.