The Wolf at the Door: The Campaign to Convince Jews of Israel’s Illegitimacy

Fairy tales are full of wolves who never break the door down by force. Instead, they whisper, cajole, disguise themselves, and coax their prey into stepping outside on their own. It is a story about deception—about tricking the vulnerable into abandoning the only place of safety they have.

So it is with the Jews today. After centuries of persecution, expulsion, and genocide, the Jewish people rebuilt sovereignty in their ancestral homeland. That homeland, destroyed by the Roman Empire in a classic case of colonialism, saw as many as one million of its inhabitants murdered, and the rest ethnically cleansed from their land.

The disguise of this particular wolf is the phrase “settler-colonial.” The label’s intent is not analysis but exorcism — the banishing of Jewish sovereignty from the realm of the legitimate. By this logic, a Jewish state built on a sliver of land once belonging to the vast Arab empire is colonialism, while the Islamization of North Africa and the entire Middle East by sword is natural history. The inversion is so brazen it would be comic were it not for the deep hatred it reveals, demanding that Jews alone must believe that their self-determination is an injustice.

Jews, more than most, know the perils of stepping outside. Spain’s Jews thrived until 1492, when tolerance abruptly curdled into expulsion and forced conversion.  England expelled its Jews, as did France and Austria. German Jews were loyal, assimilated, indispensable — until the doors of modernity slammed shut at Auschwitz.

That is why the Jewish return to statehood after the Holocaust was not an act of colonialism but of emancipation — emancipation from perpetual dependency on the unreliable goodwill of others.  We witness, in Europe even today, the perilous unfolding of such dependency.

To deny the Jewish people that emancipation while extending the principle of self-determination to every other nation is not coincidence. It is malice. It takes remarkable ideological aerobatics to claim that justice or anti-colonialism demands replacing the world’s one Jewish state with a twenty-third Arab one. If the Jews were any other indigenous people, their right to emancipation—costly as it has been—would be self-evident.

This is not to dismiss Palestinian aspirations nor to deny their tragedy. Palestinians deserve dignity and statehood. Their right to self-determination is real. Palestinians deserve an independent nation, and the logical framework for that remains a Palestinian state alongside Israel, in the West Bank and Gaza that will abut the already Palestinian-majority state of Jordan, a nation three times the size of Israel and 70% Palestinian. But history records that such offers have been made and rejected: the 1947 UN partition, the Clinton-Barak framework at Camp David in 2000, the Olmert proposal of 2008. Each time the answer was “no” in the form of war or suicide bombings, And not because the map was intolerable but because Israel was. For many of the ideologues now dressing up annihilation as justice, the offense is not borders but the very existence of Jewish sovereignty.

The fairy-tale wolf always cloaks malice in charm. So here. Anti-Zionism parades in borrowed robes of human rights. It claims to speak for peace while demanding that Jews dismantle the only citadel they have ever built for themselves. The demand is not for compromise but for erasure.
To accept that demand would be to reenact, in modern costume, every betrayal that punctuates Jewish history: to trust that this time, uniquely, the world will mean well. That is an invitation not to peace but to suicide.

Israel, like any nation, is imperfect, sometimes gravely so. The current government defiles Israel’s moral foundations. But Israel’s imperfection does not erase its necessity. The wolf’s invitation is as old as it is lethal. Jews would be wise, as ever, to stay inside.