Hey, I’m Noam Weissman and you’re listening to Unpacking Israeli History, the podcast that takes a deep dive into some of the most intense, historically fascinating and often misunderstood events and stories linked to Israeli history. This episode is sponsored by Andrea & Larry Gill. If you’re interested in sponsoring an episode of Unpacking Israeli History or even just saying what’s up, be in touch at noam@unpacked.media.
Ok. Yalla, let’s do this.
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This episode is going to be a little bit different than other episodes.
Earlier this week, the Times of Israel ran an article titled I’m tired of living through history. And as I’ve said once or twice or a hundred times before, there’s a reason that May you live in interesting times is considered a curse.
And listen. I get it. Living through history can be terrifying.
It means sitting in a bomb shelter for hours on end listening to the impact of ICBMs whistling through the air from nearly 1,000 miles away, sent by a regime that has no problem murdering its own people and even less problem murdering you.
It means turning on your phone after a Jewish holiday and seeing that all your worst nightmares have come to life, that the massive terrorist attack you heard about in synagogue that morning didn’t kill 10 people, or 30, or 100. That instead, more than a thousand Israelis are dead, that hundreds more have been dragged into captivity, and everything you knew about yourself and your Judaism and your Zionism has been shaken to the core.
Living through history means looking for the adult in the room to tell you what to do next, what this means, what’s gonna happen, and realizing there aren’t any adults in the room. Realizing that – to quote an amazing book title – this is real and you are completely unprepared, and any illusion you may have had of being in control is exactly that: an illusion.
Living through history, it turns out, mostly means being scared and confused.
So I get it. I get that headline.
Especially for Israelis.
Who wouldn’t be tired of living through history, if history means that you run into a bomb shelter every few hours, the toddlers in your arms screaming in confused exhaustion, your phone pinging endlessly with texts from well-meaning friends and family and colleagues asking R U OK?????
No, you’re not okay. You’re freakin’ exhausted.
The Jewish people are exhausted. Israelis are exhausted.
Living through history is exhausting.
And.
AND.
It is also exhilarating.
The Haggadah tells us that in every generation, each person must see themselves as though they are the ones liberated from Egypt. And I used to wonder, as a kid, what it would have been like to trod through the parted waters of the Red Sea, feet blistered and aching, as Pharaoh’s armies waited, snarling, on the shore, only to be swallowed as the walls of the sea rushed back together once all the Israelites were safely through.
But I think I know now what that was like. I think we all do. I think we’re living through it.
I imagine this is the sort of exhilaration that our ancestors felt, all those thousands of years ago, when instead of a genocide, the Jews of the Achaemenid Empire got a celebration, a national rebirth, days of feasting and dancing and laughing and joy. And when, just a couple of generations later, Cyrus the Great told those exiled Jews, hey, it’s chill. Go back to Jerusalem. Rebuild your temple. Do your thing.
We tell the same stories of Jewish liberation every year. That is the theme of holidays like Passover and Purim and Hanukkah.
And that’s what I want to talk about today.
This isn’t going to be your usual episode of Unpacking Israeli History, like I said. It’s going to be a lot more meditative, a lot more musing.
We’re still gonna give you context and facts and quotes from historians. I want you to hear them.
We’re still gonna unpack what the heck is happening right now as best we can, as reality is reconfigured around us, second by second.
And we’re still gonna respond to questions from listeners, many of whom have written in over the past couple of days asking us, yo, what’s going on? Why is this happening now? We’re still gonna address the misconceptions promulgated by the Candace Owens of the world, the Code Pinks and the Greta Thunbergs, the Dave Smiths and the Daryl Coopers, the Mehdi Hassans and Bassem Youssefs, as well as all the well-meaning but ignorant extreme leftists and extreme rightists who for some reason still listen to them.
I’d love to ignore that passel of bozos, by the way. I’d love to dispense with their deranged fantasies of what Zionism is by quoting David Ben Gurion’s epically dismissive adage: “it doesn’t matter what the non Jews say. It matters what the Jews will do.” And I believe that. In the sweep of history, deranged conspiracy theorists like the crack team of top minds I’ve just named are utterly irrelevant. Their words mean nothing. They will be swallowed by history and in a thousand years they will be less than a footnote in the epic history of the Jewish people and world history.
After all, we don’t remember the petty pundits of the Neo-Babylonian empire, nor the sassy political commentators of Rome, nor the average Nazi-sympathizing columnists of Der Sturmer. (And yes, in my version of history, the Assyrians and neo-Babylonians and Romans for SURE had the ancient world equivalent of so-called public intellectuals posting their antisemitic think pieces about how the JeWs have too much power and quashing their nation-state is a good idea, actually.)
But.
As tempted as I am not to engage with the Twitter crowd posting wild fantasies about how Israel is losing and Zionism is evil, they still somehow command the world’s attention.
And as the great American historian Carl Becker once wrote:
“The kind of history that has the most influence upon the life of the community and the course of events is the history that common people carry around in their heads.”
Whether we like it or not, the Mehdi Hassans and the Tucker Carlsons and various TikTok “historians,” in quotes, have helped to shape “the public discourse.” They helped to create the story that lives in people’s heads. The one that says I’m not effing dying for Israel. The one that says Zionism is racism and Nazism and expansionism and just all around evil. It’s neo-colonialism. It’s warmongering. It’s the reason innocent Palestinians and Lebanese and Syrians and now Iranians are suffering. Heck, some of the people that carry around that story have even left us charming reviews on Apple Podcasts. Dig around. You’ll find ‘em. I hope they give you a good chuckle, like they did for us.
But these people, and their misconceptions, also remind us of our purpose.
Our holy work.
And that is: to update the story that lives in people’s heads.
To add a layer to their thinking.
To deepen and enrich it with context and history and facts.
These things matter.
And so today, we’re not gonna give you a minute by minute update of what’s happening in this war. That’s not what we do here. There are a thousand podcasts that do that.
Instead, we’re gonna zoom out a little. We’re gonna go big picture. And we’re going to remember that the Jewish people are not just living through history.
We are writing it.
Which is the entire premise of Zionism.
To be a people in charge of our own destiny.
To be the subject and not the object of history.
I know we’re exhausted.
I know our heads are spinning and our attention span is shot.
I know the endless updates and the second-by-second changes and the constant uncertainty are all terrifying and confusing and often tragic.
But they are the price of writing our history, rather than having it be written for us. They are the price of being am hanetzach, the people of forever, the people of victory.
So yallah, am Yisrael and the entire Unpacking Israeli History community.
Lets.
Freaking.
Do this.
I’ve always wondered who comes up with the names of Israeli operations. With a few exceptions, they’re always epic. (Dishonorable mention to Operation Breaking Dawn of 2022, named after both a Twilight book and a really gross Israeli chocolate spread made mostly of super processed oils and a smidge of cacao.)
But this most recent operation, Am K’Lavi, aka Rising Lion?
Yeah, that name goes HARD.
Unsurprising, considering it’s from the Hebrew Bible, the same corpus that brought you the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, the Ten Plagues, the story of Job, the book of Esther… yeah, the Hebrew Bible is metal AF.
This is the verse that inspired the name of this operation. Numbers 23:24, aka BaMidbar kaf gimel kaf daled:
“Behold a people that rises like a lioness, and raises itself like a lion. It does not lie down until it eats its prey and drinks the blood of the slain.”* (Numbers 23:24)
הֶן־עָם֙ כְּלָבִ֣יא יָק֔וּם וְכַאֲרִ֖י יִתְנַשָּׂ֑א לֹ֤א יִשְׁכַּב֙ עַד־יֹ֣אכַל טֶ֔רֶף וְדַם־חֲלָלִ֖ים יִשְׁתֶּֽה׃
I mean.
Come on.
That’s some fierce stuff.
Like, Houthis? Take note, there’s still time to change your flag. “Death to Israel?” “A Curse on the Jews?” TIRED. “Behold the nation of lions that won’t rest til it drinks the blood of the slain?” WIRED.
And let’s be real. Let’s be real. Let’s be real folks.
There are reports right now, courtesy of the Wall Street Journal, that Tehran is sending urgent messages to the Americans.
Messages like yo, we’re ready to negotiate, can you call off Israel?
The headline reads: “A Battered Iran Signals It Wants to De-Escalate Hostilities With Israel and Negotiate.”
Israel’s response has been lol.
The ayatollah had time to negotiate. He did. Decades actually. He spent it tweeting things like
“The United States is a definite accomplice in the crimes of the Zionist regime” (5 June 2025) and “Based on a definite divine decree, the Zionist regime is collapsing” (June 4).
He likes the word definite, doesn’t he? 24 hours ago as of this writing he promised “life will definitely become bitter for the Zionists.”
Definitely, bro. We’re definitely shaking in our boots.
So, in one sense, that line about being a nation of lions that won’t rest til it drinks our enemies’ blood, well… it’s metaphorically feeling kinda true (though don’t @ me, antisemites, we don’t literally drink blood, it’s a metaphor deployed for effect.)
And yet, just a few verses before, in the very same chapter, the book of Bamidbar, or Numbers, describes the nation of lions like this, quote:
“The Jewish people is a nation that shall dwell alone, and shall not be reckoned among the nations.”
הֶן־עָם֙ לְבָדָ֣ד יִשְׁכֹּ֔ן וּבַגּוֹיִ֖ם לֹ֥א יִתְחַשָּֽׁב׃
So which is it?
Are we a nation of lions that writes history?
Or are we doomed to stand alone among the nations, a people forever apart?
Ask any Jew about Judaism’s most central phrase, its essence, and you’ll get a lot of different answers.
Some will say it’s shema Yisrael, Hear O Israel, the Lord is our God, the Lord is One. Judaism in a nutshell: there is one God, and that God is everything. Others will say it’s love your neighbor as yourself. Or in the image of God man was created.
And that’s legit.
Love a feel-good, positive version of Judaism.
But if you’re asking me, and so many other Zionist thinkers, the Biblical verse that most strongly defines what it means to be Jewish is that rather depressing one I just read. We are a nation that dwells alone.
For leaders like my main man Menachem Begin, this was just a fact.
Which makes sense.
His generation’s Zionism was shaped by the pogroms of eastern europe, the Farhud in Iraq, the Holocaust.
By the doors that slammed in our faces as we tried desperately to flee the Nazi inferno. By the ships bearing thousands of refugees and survivors, turned away from every port and barred from their homeland.
The world stood by during the Holocaust, watching as six million Jews went up in smoke. Just a few years later, it stood by and watched once again, as the newborn Jewish nation fought five countries, seven armies, with its back to the sea.
So yeah. For Begin, and for that first generation of Israelis, we were always fated to stand alone.
But two Jews, three opinions, right?
And so other thinkers disagreed completely.
Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, ob’m, warned us of the power of self-fulfilling prophecies.
He argued, if we define ourselves as a people fated to dwell alone, we will be.
And so our job in this world is to resist that conception of ourselves.
To reach out our hand to the rest of the world and say hey. No man is an island. Not even the Jew.
It takes courage to think that way.
For so much of history, we were alone.
And the world can be cruel.
To be alone is often to be powerless.
All you need to do is open a textbook, or heck, even scroll through our old episodes. We’ve talked about the price of our aloneness.
In episodes on the Holocaust.
On Kishinev.
On the Farhud.
We’ve talked about what it means to live in the city of slaughter.
What it was like to be a Jew in Ethiopia.
In Yemen.
In Poland.
In Iran.
Zionism was and is a rebellion against all of that.
The moment when Jewish people looked at that aloneness and said if I am not for me, then who will be for me?
The moment the Jewish people decided that we were no longer going to be powerless.
The moment the Jewish people understood aloneness as the best reason to be united and to be strong.
In the words of the incredible thinker and historian Walter Russell Mead, quote, “Zionism is not the triumph and battle cry of a victorious ethnic group, but a weird, crazy, desperate stab at survival.”
It’s a rebellion against powerlessness. It’s a promise that even when we’re alone, we will not be intimidated. We will not be cowed. We will not be prey.
Zionism has multiple strains. In the words of another historian, Daniel Gordis, quote: “Zionism was never a unified or monolithic movement, even among the passionate Europeans, deep schisms are more the rule than the exception. The problem is there is no such thing as Zionism, qua Zionism. There is such a thing as Zionisms.”
But no matter what version of Zionism you cling to, every single one rests on the fundamental premise that Jews, like all peoples, deserve to be in control of their own destiny.
Or, as brilliant Jewish thinker Moshe Halbertal put it, quote: “Zionism is a movement that aims to deliver the Jews from the historical disgrace of dependence on other entities to determine their fate.”
That doesn’t mean abusing others. It doesn’t mean displacing others, or being better than them, or taking anything from them. It means clawing our way back to an equal playing field. It means not relying on others to save us. It means not apologizing for our existence. It means thumbing our noses at a world that only likes Jews when we’re powerless or dead.
But too many people don’t understand that.
As Yuval Noah Harari says, quote: “If you think Zionism is racism, then you’re basically saying Jews don’t deserve to have national feelings. That Germans can, Turks can, Palestinians can — but Jews can’t.”
Sadly, as we know from prior episodes and from, you know – I’m currently gesturing vaguely at everything – too many people do believe Zionism is racism. According to my friends at Boundless, which bills itself as a “nonprofit reimaging Israel education,” 42% of young people aged 18-40 don’t really even understand what Zionism is. (Side note, love that I, a sprightly 39 year old, still count as a Young Person. Take that, creaking joints!)
So in case any of those Young People™ are listening, let’s break down the three pillars of Zionism.
- The Jews are a people.
- Like all peoples, they have a right to self-determination. And
- They have a historic, cultural, spiritual connection to the land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea.
That’s it. That’s the core.
Nothing about Palestinians.
Nothing about supremacy.
Nothing about racism.
Just: the Jewish people deserve self determination in our ancestral homeland. We deserve the dignity of independence.
The ability to say no, we decide what happens to us. Not you, Candace Owens or Dave Smith or Random Person Who Gave Me and My Jewish Star a Dirty Look the Other Day (yes, this happened).
We are no longer dependent on the goodwill of the world, which confuses self-defense with genocide.
That sees this preemptive strike on Iran as warmongering, instead of a bid for the Jewish people’s survival.
That tells us hey, don’t worry about that theocratic regime that’s constantly threatening to kill you and funding terror proxies to imperil your borders and target Jewish communities across the world.
Zionism means that when antisemites gaslight you by saying that throwing a brick with the words FREE PALESTINE into a kosher butcher shop, or throwing Molotov cocktails at a peaceful march for the hostages, or murdering two young Israeli embassy staffers outside a Jewish museum is not antisemitic actually, we can respond with sorry, can’t hear you over the sound of our enemies collapsing like dominos.
It means that where Diaspora Jews once hunched like question marks, we now stand like exclamation points. (Shoutout to Rabbi Haskel Lookstein for that KILLER phrase describing the aftermath of the Six Day War.)
It means that when well-meaning comfortable liberal Diaspora Jews like Jon Stewart say “listen, I think a world in which we need a nation state to protect a people is an unhealthy world,” we can agree – sure, maybe it’s unhealthy. But that’s the world we live in. And in that world, we need a nation state. We need self-determination. We need Zionism. We need not to be at the mercy of other empires.
Listen, there was a lot of beauty in the Diaspora.
Two thousand years of resilience and scholarship and poetry and refusal to disappear.
But that refusal is its own kind of strength.
We simply did not agree to be erased from the pages of history, no matter how hard others tried. When the Spanish immiserated us for a century, finally expelling us from Spain, we fled elsewhere and kept our traditions alive.
Do you know why Rambam, Maimonides, one of Judaism’s greatest sages, fled his birthplace of Cordoba, Spain, in 1148 CE? Because the Almohads, a Muslim sect, handed down a decree: convert or die. For ten years, he and his family wandered, eventually settling down in Morocco.
Which, by the way, had its own issues. Like the massacre of the entire Jewish community of Touat in 1492. Or the 18th century pogrom against the Jews of Tetuan, ordered by the same lunatic sultan who decreed that any Jews who violated the restrictions on dress and wore clothing only available to Muslims be punished by having an ear cut off.
And that was in the country that we consider to be one of the most tolerant and accepting towards its Jews. Even in the best historical circumstances, the Jewish people were still second-class citizens. The Islamic term for that is Dhimmi, “protected people.” Our survival was dependent on the whims and the grace of greater powers.
Zionism means we are never going back. It means we will never be dhimmi again. It means that if we must dwell alone, then we will do so like lions: as a small but powerful pride. (Pun SO intended.)
This moment is bigger than any one government. It’s bigger than Bibi and certainly bigger than Khamenei, who will go the way of Haman and Nebuchadnezzer and Sancherib and Titus and Vespasian and Hadrian.
I don’t welcome war.
I don’t want people to die or infrastructure to be destroyed or kids to spend their summer vacation in bomb shelters. It’s horrible.
But some wars are just. Some wars are the expression of a people exerting their right to self-determination. Saying we will never be the objects of history again. We will not wait for the mercy of others to save us. We will live by the dictates of our sacred text.
One of my colleagues who lives in Israel shared a story about how she has to wake up her daughter every night as ballistic missiles fly into Israel from Iran…Her daughter who is 4.5 year old, half asleep during the siren last night, Lia (4.5) gave me a thumbs up when she heard the booms and said החיילים שומרים עלינו, our soldiers are protecting us.
Then she fell asleep.
She fell asleep knowing that her people are protecting her.
Yes, throughout history there was a religious plea to have God watch over the Jewish people, to be a “shomer Yisrael,” and for many, many people, they feel that. It is real for them, but the advent of Zionism said, you know what, it is not just God who needs to watch over the Jewish people, and it won’t be other peoples or other governments. It will be the Jewish people who watch over the Jewish people.
That is the story of Zionism.