Israel’s Independence Day is no longer just for Israelis.

For Jews far beyond Israel’s borders, Yom Ha’atzmaut has become a reminder that, somewhere in the world, there is still a place which will welcome them in.

photo: Levi Meir Clancy/Unsplash

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This is a guest essay by Hen Mazzig, an Israeli writer, speaker, and social media influencer.

You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, YouTube, and Spotify.

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Last week, a stranger sent me a message with my name and my home address in it.

I didn’t tell my husband Marc until the morning because I wanted at least one of us to get some sleep.

This Wednesday is Yom Ha’atzmaut, Israel’s Independence Day. I’m supposed to be celebrating.

The essay I planned to write this week was going to be about the numbers. Israeli news ran a piece this weekend on how the country is on track for 20 million residents. Forty-five percent of world Jewry lives there. Within Israel is also a large Arab community, making up 20 percent of the population.

I was going to write something warm.

Then the message arrived, and I realized I had it backwards.

My grandmother Hela was born in Baghdad. What she saw there as a child is the reason she fled, and the reason she landed in a ma’abarah (refugee absorption camp) in a country that didn’t yet know what to do with the 850,000 Jews who had just been thrown out of the Arab world.

She rarely spoke about Iraq. But when she did, she spoke about the courtyard, the beautiful cafe where she spent her days.

For most of my life, I understood Yom Ha’atzmaut through her. Israel was the place that opened its door when every other door closed. I thought I understood.

The safest Jews in the world right now are the ones living in Israel. They have 177,000 babies a year. They post happy reels set to Hebrew songs.

The Jews who are not safe are in London and Paris — the ones with the mezuzah tucked behind the doorframe so it isn’t visible from the corridor, the ones who take their Star of David off before riding the tube.

Jews in Israel live in a country where people who try to kill them are mostly from the outside. Jews in the Diaspora live in countries where we are told, politely and then less politely, that our discomfort is our own fault for having the wrong opinions about the one Jewish state, four thousand kilometres away.

In Tel Aviv, you don’t apologize. You argue with the government in the morning and celebrate the country’s birthday at night. In London, you calculate. You calculate every time.

My grandmother fled Baghdad because living in the Diaspora had become deadly. She arrived to Israel, and the point of Israel was that it existed, so she would never have to do that calculation again.

Her grandson now does that calculation every day in London.

Yom Ha’atzmaut was supposed to be an Israeli holiday, with flags and barbecues. For 78 years, that is how it looked to me. I watched it on a screen from wherever I was living.

This year, it is a Diaspora holiday.

It is the holiday of every Jew outside Israel who has quietly realized in the last 30 months that the exit door being there matters more than we had let ourselves admit. It is the holiday of the student who got doxxed at his university and, for the first time in his life, looked up flight prices to Tel Aviv.

We used to mark Yom Ha’atzmaut to honour Israel. This year, we mark it because it is for us.

The people shouting “Zionist” at us in the street think they are isolating us. They think the word is doing work for them. But they have it inverted.

Before October 7th, you could be a comfortable Diaspora Jew with complicated, ambivalent feelings about the Jewish state. Most of my friends were. I was, on the noisier days.

Then the noisier days became every day. The word Zionist became a slur you learned to expect in public. Last week, in a message sent to my phone, my address was attached.

You cannot make “Zionist” into a slur and then be surprised when every Jew you know becomes one. They made the argument for me. I just had to show up.

On Wednesday, I will wear my Star of David necklace outside my shirt. I know what street I’ll be on when I feel like I have to tuck it back in. And that street will never be one in Israel.

Israel is far from perfect, that’s true. But when you have a place where you are safe, where your people are safe, a place connected to your very soul, then you realize that it doesn’t have to be perfect for you to love it. And loving it is why you will do everything in your power to make it perfect.

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