Next Year in Jerusalem

Passover 2025 begins on the evening of Saturday, April 12, and runs through Sunday, April 20. This is now the second Passover since Hamas brutally massacred 1,200 Israelis on October 7, 2023, and a massive propaganda campaign began to convince the world that Israel is a “settler colonialist” state that is illegally occupying land that belongs to the “Palestinians,” who are supposedly the indigenous people of the land.

And so as Jews around the world once again read the Passover Haggadah, which tells the foundational story of their liberation from slavery in Egypt, they will once again repeat the concluding statement of the Passover Seder, just as they have repeated it throughout the ages: “Next year in Jerusalem.”

This indelible phrase is a reminder to the world, if the world were interested in paying attention, of the fact that Zionism did not begin in 1948, with the founding of the modern state of Israel, or in the nineteenth century with the work of pioneering Zionist Theodor Herzl. No, Zionism, the aspiration of the Jews to return to their homeland, is many centuries older than either one, and older also than the “Palestinian people,” a KGB propaganda invention of the 1960s.

Zionism is older than the Ottoman Empire, the now-dead Islamic caliphate that did all it could to prevent the nineteenth-century Zionist movement from attaining its goals. It is older than the United States of America, on which today’s haters of Jews and Israel insist that the Jewish state now depends for its existence. It is older than the religion of Islam, on which, with its deeply rooted hatred of Jews, the “resistance” of the “Palestinian” people is actually based, although Western policymakers steadfastly ignore this fact.

Whose land is it? Well, which people has longed to return there for twenty centuries and more?

Yet as Passover begins once again, the voices insisting that Israel has no right to the land it inhabits, and that the Jews there are white supremacist, colonialist occupiers, are more insistent than ever. As Antisemitism: History and Myth shows, the October 7 jihad massacre was the occasion for a clearly carefully planned recrudescence of Jew-hatred, including the reappearance of ancient lies that most people thought had died in the ashes of Berlin in April 1945. But this antisemitism is, as always, based on lies.

Sometimes these lies come from Jews themselves who have exchanged their faith and traditions for the hysteria, self-righteousness, and mendacity of modern-day leftism. On Thursday, the organization Stop Antisemitism posted on X this shot across the bow to anti-Israel Jews: “It is impossible to have an anti-Zionist Passover. The Exodus from slavery in Egypt was a journey toward Zion – the land promised by G-d. Remove that, and you reduce yourself to a shallow dinner gathering led by the historically illiterate … a perfect description of every member of Jewish Voice for Peace! Just a reminder: the admins behind JVP are operating out of Lebanon. They are a complete fraud. Their goal isn’t peace, it’s the erasure of the Jewish state.”

To that, Zachary Foster, a far-left ideologue who calls himself a “historian of Palestine,” responded: “It is impossible to have a Zionist seder. You cannot celebrate freedom while supporting the enslavement of millions of Palestinians.” What? You didn’t know that Israel had enslaved millions of Palestinians? You’re not alone: this is a destructive falsehood without the slightest basis in reality, but that’s the sort of thing that plays on the left these days, and is a common feature, as Antisemitism: History and Myth illustrates, of antisemitic myths throughout the ages. In a follow-up post, Foster made another outlandish claim, saying that Israel was “the most genocidal state and society on planet earth.” It doesn’t matter how outlandish the claim is; if it makes Jews look bad, it will circulate, presented as the real truth that the Jewish elites don’t want the public to know.

Passover is a testimony to the resilience of the Jewish people throughout history in the face of such lies. People try to destroy them, and kill many, and yet they endure. They face murderous enemies and skillful propagandists spreading lies against them, and through it all, they persist. They maintain their cherished beliefs and traditions, and continue every year to look forward to the day that they will finally celebrate the feast in their own land: next year in Jerusalem.