1942 - 2023
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6 | NOVEMBER 2 • 2023 J
N
PURELY COMMENTARY
continued on page 7
D
uring his whirlwind
visit to Israel in the
wake of the attack
by Hamas on the Jewish
State, President Joe Biden
made a profound observation
which means a
lot to me. Biden
stated, “You
don’t have to be
Jewish to be a
Zionist.”
No words
could be more
true. My own
Zionist background dates
back to the Yom Kippur War
in 1973 (when I was 13 years
old). The leadership of Golda
Meir made an impression on
me. She remains my favorite
Israeli prime minister in
history.
But my Catholic boyhood
still shielded me from the
reality of antisemitism
(mitigated as anti-Zionism). It
was not until my years at
Wayne State University when
anti-Zionism/antisemitism
got my attention. Northern
Israel had been the object
for years of PLO shelling
and raids conducted from
Lebanon. When Israel invaded
Lebanon to rid the world of
the PLO menace in 1982, the
Jewish state was the object
of rebuke from all corners,
including from the Reagan
Administration.
Not that the situation should
have been a surprise. Israel
had destroyed Saddam
Hussein’s nuclear reactor in
1981, only to be condemned
by the late Jeanne Kirkpatrick,
Ronald Reagan’s Ambassador
to the United Nations. Israel
also received spurious blame
for the Christian Phalangists’
massacre of Palestinians in
the refugee camps of Sabra
and Shatilla during the war in
Lebanon.
Nowhere was the anti-
Israel vitriol more acute than
on the campus of Wayne
State University. In 1983, the
university was host to French
diplomat Charles Crettien,
who, on behalf of France,
chastised the Jewish State for
defending itself. My rebuttal
to Crettien, which appeared
in The South End (the student
newspaper at Wayne State
University), was greeted with
utter hostility. Friends could
only be found at the campus
John O’Neill
guest column
I, Too, Am a Zionist!