I have been reading Susanne Heim’s Die Abschottung der Welt. Als Juden vor verschlossenen Grenzen standen 1933–1945, and what stays with me is not merely the horror of the past. It is the structure that repeats.

Heim does not paint a simple world of killers and rescuers. She reveals a world that perfected the art of refusal without raised voices: visas, quotas, financial guarantees, consular discretion, endless administrative delay, and the elegant language of “sovereign responsibility.” Jews were first driven out and robbed of everything. Then they were rejected because they arrived with too little. First plunder, then discomfort at the sight of the plundered. That was not chaos. It was policy.

The Évian Conference of 1938 remains the clearest emblem. Thirty-two nations expressed sympathy for Jewish refugees. Almost none opened their gates. Democratic states, no less than authoritarian ones, chose restriction and national interest when rescue threatened to become costly or unpopular. International refugee policy functioned less as a system of salvation than as an architecture of distance: keep the unwanted far from one’s own borders, one’s own electorate, one’s own conscience.

That is why Yom Ha’atzmaut cannot be read only as a celebration of statehood. It must also stand as a verdict on the world that left Jews dependent on other people’s permissions, other people’s moods, and other people’s calculations. Israel was not born solely from Zionist longing. It was born from the collapse of trust in the goodwill of others. It was the hard, unsentimental conclusion drawn from a world of closed gates.

Today the pattern feels bitterly familiar.

The State of Israel exists. It is formally recognized by most nations. Embassies operate, treaties are signed, alliances are formed. On paper, the question appears settled. Yet beneath that official recognition lies something colder: much of the world has still not made peace with Jews as a sovereign people.

Jews as victims are morally legible. Jews as memory and moral lesson are easier to absorb. Jews as a nation with power, borders, intelligence services, armed force, and the will to defend itself on its own terms — that remains deeply unsettling for many.

The dead Jew is easier for the world to honor than the self-defending Jew.

That single sentence explains more than most are willing to admit. The mourned Jew fits neatly into liberal conscience. The sovereign Jew disrupts it. One hears constantly that Israel “has a right to exist,” but the words are too often delivered with an unspoken qualification, as if Jewish sovereignty were a tolerated exception, permanently subject to review and special standards.

This is not mere rhetoric. It is the moral architecture of the contemporary problem.

For many in the modern West, Jews are still expected to carry historical suffering in ways that remain legible and convenient to others. They may remember. They may grieve. They may testify. But when they translate memory into political reality, when “never again” comes to mean power, vigilance, preemption, and unapologetic self-defense, the atmosphere shifts. Suspicion appears. Exceptional standards are applied. The old hesitation returns.

Too many still claim the right to decide when Jewish fear is legitimate, when Jewish force is excessive, and when Jewish sovereignty becomes inconvenient. In more polished language, the old lie endures: Jews may live, but their political form remains suspect. Jews may have a state, but not too confidently. They may invoke history, but not too effectively.

Jewish murders today expose this asymmetry with brutal clarity. The ritual that follows is now familiar: swift condemnations, statements of solidarity, promises of increased security, and then, too often, a return to the same climate that made the attack possible. Public sympathy for Jewish death still comes more readily than public respect for Jewish strength and survival.

That asymmetry should trouble any honest person.

Because it reveals that the deeper refusal never truly vanished. It only changed form. Heim described a world of literally closed borders. Ours is subtler. The gate is frequently left formally open, while the deeper no remains firmly in place. States may recognize Israel, but large parts of public opinion, elite culture, campuses, and moral discourse still treat Jewish sovereignty as something provisional and morally problematic.

When I think of Israeli independence, I do not think first of parades or ceremonies. I think of the end of a long humiliation. I think of the refusal to remain petitioners for safety at the mercy of others. I think of the moment when Jewish continuity stopped depending on the fluctuating benevolence of the world and became anchored in Jewish power and will.

That is why Yom Ha’atzmaut still matters far beyond commemoration.

It marks not only a founding, but a profound refusal: the refusal to entrust Jewish existence to declarations that collapse at the first real cost. The refusal to remain dependent on the polished conscience of others. The refusal, finally, to die in ways the world finds morally comfortable.

The State of Israel is recognized by many states.

But much of the world has still not said a full yes to Jewish sovereignty.

That is why Jewish independence remains as necessary today as it was in 1948.

Because the alternative is not trust.

The alternative is dependency.

Yochanan Schimmelpfennig

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)