What’s in a name?

When I was growing up, my dad (who was nominally Jewish) told me that our family name was German and meant Iron Mountain. I only learned decades later that both of his parents were Jewish immigrants from Ukraine. At the time my paternal grandfather arrived in New York as a child, the name was spelled “Aizenberg.” He grew up in Argentina, and when he returned to the US, had the name spelled in its current form, doubling the s to capture the soft s sound.

Because my mom was Roman Catholic, my parents had to agree to raise their kids Roman Catholic in ordered to be married in the Church. Which is why I’ve had five of the seven RCC sacraments, how I came to be an altar boy at St. Mary Catholic Church, why the boy scout troop I was in was sponsored by the Knights of Columbus, and how the first date for my wife and I was an ice skating party sponsored by the CYO. While I no longer identify as Catholic, I also don’t identify as Jewish, even though Israel would consider me Jewish for the right of return.

As I posted previously, my piano teacher was Israeli, and I performed at a couple of Youth Aliyah fund-raisers with her encouragement. I also attended a Bar Mitzvah and a Bat Mitzvah of classmates at the local synagogue. That said, I was late to the table when it came to the history of Israel and Zionism.

Over the past 35 years, I’ve read five histories that covered the Zionist project in the Middle East, beginning with David Fromkin’s Pulitzer Prize-winning 1989 history “A peace to end all peace.” These books, and many articles I read concurrently, have made me recognize the uncomfortable parallels between the Zionist drivers of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and Manifest Destiny of 18^th and 19^th century America as drivers of the Native American ethnic cleansing in what became the continental US.

This particular post was occasioned by the Israeli bombing of a Jewish synagogue in Tehran during Passover 2026. Normally, bombing of synagogues is something we associate with antisemitism. But this sort of terrorism by Zionists against Jews is apparently not new:

“The bombing of the Tehran synagogue was not the first antisemitic act committed by Israel. In January 1951, Israeli agents threw a grenade into a synagogue in Baghdad. This was one of a series of acts designed to encourage Jews to leave Iraq and relocate to Israel. Similar provocations against local Jews were organized in Egypt and Morocco. The new Zionist state, which had expelled hundreds of thousands of Palestinian Arabs, needed Jews to fill empty houses and villages. Avi Shlaim, who was five years old when he left Iraq, recalls his mother telling him, “Zionism is an Ashkenazi thing.” Indeed, Jews in Muslim lands, who lived in far greater peace than their counterparts in Europe, played no part in the emergence of the Zionist movement in the late nineteenth century. To force them to relocate to Israel, antisemitic acts were deemed a convenient tool—staged for political ends.”

Why?

“Theodor Herzl, the founder of political Zionism, recognized that antisemitism could be harnessed to Zionist purposes, since both Zionism and antisemitism sought to rid Europe of its Jews. He wrote in his diary: “The antisemites will become our most loyal friends, the antisemitic nations will become our allies.” His words proved prophetic. The first instance of imperial support for Zionist colonization of Palestine came in November 1917 from Arthur Balfour, a British politician who a decade earlier had opposed the admission of Russian Jews to his country. It was therefore logical that Edwin Montagu, the only Jew in the British cabinet, denounced Balfour’s support for Zionism as antisemitic:

 

“I wish to place on record my view that the policy of His Majesty’s Government is antisememic in result and will prove a rallying ground for antisemites in every country in the world. … Zionism has always seemed to me to be a mischievous political creed, untenable by any patriotic citizen of the United Kingdom. … When the Jews are told that Palestine is their national home … you will find a population in Palestine driving out its present inhabitants, taking all the best in the country…”

 

“Like Herzl, Montagu uttered prescient words. In the interwar period, Zionists across Europe established cooperation with antisemitic authorities eager to rid their countries of Jews. These included Nazi officials, who treated Zionist organizations in Germany exceptionally well compared to other Jewish institutions.”

And there’s more.

“In 1938, following Kristallnacht, which unleashed physical violence against German Jews, Ben-Gurion said:

 

“If I knew that it was possible to save all the children of Germany by transporting them to England, and only half by transferring them to the Land of Israel, I would choose the latter, for before us lies not only the numbers of these children but the historical reckoning of the people of Israel.”

 

“This view of people as “human material” to be used for the benefit of the Zionist state also explains the antisemitic acts that Zionists committed in Muslim countries in their effort to Judaize Palestine.”

There’s nothing unique about the Israeli government project to impose suffering on their own people for political ends. Stalin did it in Ukraine during The Holodomor. Mao did it during The Great Leap Forward and again during The Cultural Revolution. 

But the ends don’t justify the means. Unlike the final solution for the Native American problem in North America, Israel is outnumbered by Muslims in the Middle East. While Netanyahu’s government seeks to achieve peace by being the region’s sole hegemon, that project is doomed demographically. The best they can hope for is to divide Arabs from Iranians and Sunnis from Shia.

I’m not enough of an historian or scholar to say what the alternative would look like, but it’s obvious that the current project is failing. Insanity is doing the same thing over and over, expecting a different result.

https://www.juancole.com/2026/04/iranian-synagogue-passover.html