Three important days

A succession of commemorations explain much about Jews and Israel.

The week just passed and the one beginning are packed with deeply resonant days in the Jewish calendar.

Three days of historical commemoration nearly collide in a way that is jarring and profoundly intentional.

Yom Hashoah (Holocaust Remembrance Day) took place last Tuesday. Yom Hazikaron (Israel’s Memorial Day for Fallen Soldiers and Victims of Terrorism) begins at sundown tonight. And Yom Ha’atzmaut (Israel’s Independence Day) starts at sundown tomorrow.

These three memorial days meld into a single moral narrative about Jewish vulnerability, sacrifice, and sovereignty.

They tell a story not just of a state, but of why that state must exist.

If we do not understand the historical significance of Jewish statelessness, we cannot appreciate the centrality of Israel for almost every Jewish person alive today.

The existence of a single country that embodies the Jewish capacity to defend themselves from genocidal threats – threats that are every bit as present in the world today as they have been throughout history – is not something that can be separated from Jewish identity.

Jewish people would have a right to national self-determination even if genocidal anti-Jewish prejudice did not exist.

But it does exist – and that makes Israel’s existence, and its security and survival, an existential need.

Some people believe they can advocate “antizionism” – the elimination of Jewish self-determination – and separate that from antisemitism. They cannot.

We are not talking about “criticism of Israel.”

Criticism of Israel is not antizionism and it is not antisemitism.

Calling for the destruction of the Jewish homeland, which implies ethnic cleansing of Jews at best and genocide of Jews at worst, is antisemitic.

That fundamental truth is evidenced in these three adjacent commemorations.

Yom Hashoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day, is not only a day of mourning for six million murdered Jews. It is a testament to the unbearable reality of Jewish powerlessness. It forces us to remember what it meant for Jews to live at the mercy of others—stateless, unprotected, dependent on the goodwill of societies that ultimately turned on them.

It commemorates the price of not having a state. It recalls a catastrophic time when Jews had nowhere to go, no army to defend them, no sovereignty to defend their right to live.

A week later comes Yom Hazikaron, Israel’s Memorial Day. If Yom Hashoah asks what happens in the absence of Jewish power, Yom Hazikaron asks what it costs to have it.

It is a day of piercing, intimate grief for soldiers and civilians who have died defending the state of Israel. Sirens sound, the country stands still, and the loss is felt not as abstraction but as personal rupture.

This is the price of sovereignty.

It commemorates the price of having a state, and defending it from those who seek to eradicate Jews – from the river to the sea.

And then, almost jarringly, comes Yom Ha’atzmaut—Israel’s Independence Day—beginning the moment on Monday night when Yom Hazikaron ends.

The shift is abrupt by design. Grief gives way to celebration, mourning to music, remembrance to fireworks.

Yom Ha’atzmaut is not a celebration despite the losses commemorated the day before. It is a celebration because of them. It is a recognition that independence has been possible only because of the unbearable sacrifices of so many families. It is the affirmation that those sacrifices were not in vain—that the Jewish people are no longer defenseless, no longer dependent on the fragile tolerance of others.

The sequence of these three days of commemoration should help all of us understand the centrality of Israel in the hearts of every Jewish person and why, if we claim to be allies to Jewish people and to oppose antisemitism, we must also be allies to Israel, and oppose antizionism.

This is the heart of the Upstanders mission.

Jewish people and Israel are indivisible. So are antisemitism and antizionism.

This is why, as Upstanders, we proudly and defiantly declare:

We believe that Jewish people have the right to live in peace and free from fear, everywhere in the world, including in Canada and in Israel.