By Howie Silbiger
There was a time when Yom Ha’atzmaut felt light. You didn’t think too much about it, flags went up, music was loud, someone was burning meat somewhere. It was pride without the weight. Israel was there, strong, not really in question, not something you had to defend in every conversation.
That carefree feeling is gone.
Israel is at war, and the reaction to it has been instant and predictable. It defends itself; people scream. It hits back; people scream louder. The details don’t seem to matter much. The conclusion is already written before the facts even land. You can feel it, that shift where it stops being about what Israel does and starts being about what Israel is.
And outside of Israel, it’s not subtle anymore. You see crowds that don’t bother with the usual language. It’s not about policy, it’s not about governments, it’s not about persecution or occupation, it’s about Jews. Somehow it always ends up there. Unashamed people standing in the streets chanting things they wouldn’t have dared whispered, with nobody batting an eyebrow. Ivy League University presidents testifying in congress that chanting hateful slogans against Jews on campus is a “complicated issue”. With the world pretending that this is still within some kind of normal boundary, when it clearly isn’t.
Dress it up anyway you want, call it ‘freedom of speech’ call it ‘political speech’, for Jews, it’s an old and familiar refrain that is back in the open again.
What gets me is how fast people forget how this works. It never stays in its lane. It never limits itself to one country or one issue. It spreads. It picks targets. It decides who’s acceptable and who isn’t. You start with protests about Israel and before long synagogues have armies guarding them, Jews in Montreal, in New York, in London are being told to keep their heads down and to not look “noticeably Jewish’ because that will only make things ‘worse’.
Our institutions keep telling us that there is a hard stop and we are getting there through backdoor negotiations, but that’s not true, once the momentum gets going, it’s nearly impossible to stop. The truth is that nobody likes talking about where this can go, it’s scary, we’ve seen this movie before, but pretending it can’t go there is dangerous.
We don’t need goosestepping armband wearing soldiers to march down the street to understand that things are deteriorating. We just have to look at history and see how the events of today are following the same path. When the world normalizes it, excuses it and lets it sit and fester, that’s how the momentum builds…that’s how it always builds.
That’s the part that sits in the back of your head this year, not panic, not hysteria, just that awareness that things can turn faster than people expect, and when they do, Jews don’t get the benefit of the doubt.
So on Yom Haatzmaut this year, celebrating Israel’s independence, we understand the need for Israel and the desire of Jew haters to destroy it. We understand that Israel sits as a place that doesn’t want to wait for things to get bad everywhere else. It is a country that answers for itself. It’s a country that exists and is not asking for permission to stay.
So when people scream about Israel, when they try to isolate it, when they cross that line from criticism into something else, they’re not weakening it. They’re proving the case for it. Over and over again.
Yom Ha’atzmaut isn’t just a celebration. It’s a reminder of what happens when Jews don’t have a place to call home, and a reminder of what it takes to make sure they always do.
Howie Silbiger is the host of The Howie Silbiger Show on truetalkradio.com and Political Hitman on israelnewstalkradio.com. He is the Editor in Chief of The Montreal Jewish News.
