Well, That's Over - Hate Mail

I KNOW HE won't read it but here is a good introduction to the character of zionism beyond the PR lies by Alice Rothchild,   Zionism’s uneasy relationship with antisemitism,  that lists the blatant hatred of Jews by zionists from Herzel to well into the Israeli establishment after 1948.  She quotes most of the biggest figures in zionism, all of them I'm familiar with were atheists (since making that point has his pinafore in a twist) and I suspect the ones I am not as familiar with were hardly religiously observant.  She talks about having been sold a bill of goods in her introductory paragraph:

I grew up with a deep love for Israel, the redemptive, out-of the-ashes, kibbutz-loving, feisty little country that could do no wrong, fighting for its life in a sea of hateful Arabs and Jew-haters. I learned that Jews were a people dedicated to worship and the study of Torah and this identity kept us alive during the centuries of antisemitism in Europe. If I was not able to dedicate myself to the religiosity of my davening grandfather, tfillin and all, I understood that as a people, we were deeply committed to healing the world and working for social justice, an equally virtuous and inherently Jewish task. After all, we were naturally good, or as my mother explained, Jews bore the responsibility of being chosen for a uniquely positive role in this world.

That last sentence pretty much what I said this morning. 

You didn't have to be Jewish to have been brought up with that view of Israel. Growing up in the post-WWII decades by parents who had both been in the military in WWII, having been brought up with a knowledge of the Shoah and knowing that bigotry of all kinds was a serious sin, that's how I thought of Israel until well into my adulthood.  Her next paragraph deals only with the relationship of zionism and hatred of Jews, something I didn't know much about until the past year as I heard and read various anti-zionist Rabbis and scholars.  My disillusionment with Israel was based in its non-stop aggression and displacement of Palestinians and the theft of their land.   As I've mentioned one of the landmarks in my understanding of that came from reading the Jewish-Argentinian journalist Jacobo Timmerman and his criticism of the Israeli government, especially his statement that most of the anti-Jewish violence and acts were motivated by the actions and nature of the state of Israel.

As the decades passed, this mythology shattered against the hard rocks of reality.  One of the most difficult contradictions I now face is understanding the perverse relationship between Zionism and antisemitism. I was sold the story that political Zionism developed as a response to antisemitism and as a modern, liberating movement in the backward Middle East. But in 1897 as modern Zionism was born, it adopted the trope of the diaspora Jew as a pale, flaccid, yeshiva bocher, a parasite, an eternal alien, a nebbish. That Zionism embraced the idea that this pathetic weakling (who was often to be blamed for antisemitism) needed to be Aryanized into the bronzed, muscular Hebrew farmer/warrior tilling the soil in the Galilee is a chilling realization.  The evolution of Jews as a people who lived by Torah and its commandments into a biological race with distinct characteristics, (the money Jew, the ghetto Jew, the swarthy, hook-nosed Jew) mirrors the worst canards of antisemites, European fascists, and white supremacists. 

As she notes, that is part of the heritage and culture of those who rule Israel and have since its founding.   Added to that is some of the most racist hatred of, particularly, Palestinians and Arabs in general as well as the rampant white, European Israeli Jewish racism against Middle-Eastern and African Jews.  

I've learned almost everything I know about zionism and the reality of what Israel is and how its government and military have really acted from Jews, many of them from Israel.   It is a racist, apartheid-democracy, a violently imperialist state which has had a long-standing policy of land acquisition that is indistinguishable in result from the theory of Lebensruam. 

I will guide your attention to the excellent short critique of the United States contained within her article as a means of understanding the terrible reality of what Israel is in reality instead of the old Abba Eban style PR:

This is the combative voice of the new Jew, the Hebrew reborn in the fight to colonize and create Israel from Palestine. It is not a voice interested in negotiation, tolerance, democracy, or respect for other narratives or backgrounds. Political history creates the social and cultural norms we see today. The U.S. is facing a national conversation about the contradictions between our mythology – the American dream of justice, equality, and freedom for all – and the fact that our national heroes were slaveholders and actually only had dreams for white, landholding men.  Their lived experience and attitudes were the foundations for the cultural norms that characterized the most shameful aspects of U.S. history: destroying native peoples, enslaving Africans, owning their children, Jim Crow, redlining, discrimination in opportunities from the GI Bill to employment, anti-miscegenation laws, white nationalism, and the persistent bigotry and institutional racism that is still a major challenge in the 21st century. This kind of honest, painful discourse is critical if we are to turn our so-called democracy in a more positive direction. I would suggest that Israelis need to be having their own national origin conversation and mostly, they are not. This does not bode well.

Along with the words that need some serious consideration for adoption I will include "apartheid-democracy" because I'm always hearing apologists for Israel - as I recall hearing for apartheid era South Africa -  say that they have elections.  Well, they had elections in Alabama and Mississippi all during the lynch-law period.   We just had one which may well cement in the reinstallation of Roberts-Court anointed American apartheid.  As you will know I've been facing the facts about America's liberal democracy which has been coexistent with our own version of apartheid administered and kept in place by our own, indigenous form of fascism, white supremacy, for the entire time America's so-called democracy has been in place.  And that's not to mention the many wars of aggression, from those which stole the continent, including that with Mexico, Spain, etc. Including the disastrous Netanyahu encouraged invasion of Iraq.  

Slavery and apartheid was embedded in our Constitution from the start and its vestiges are still there, ready to be used by white supremacists under the permission of a white-supremacist Court such as the Roberts Court is.  Contrary to popularly believed faith, it survived the Civil War and the Civil War Amendments.    An apartheid democracy is not a legitimate government, no government that keeps any percentage of its citizens in legal second and lower class status is a legitimate government. 

There is no "right" for any state to exist, I've been over that many times.  If you declare that "Israel has a 'right' to exist, you cannot claim that any other government does not have the same "right,"  including the Nazi regime, the Stalin regime, that of Mao or Pol Pot or the Kim dynasty in North Korea.   States have no rights, they exist only as illegitimate despotisms or apartheid states or they exist legitimaty with the just consent of those who are governed WITH THE PROTECTION OF THE RIGHTS OF THOSE IN THE MINORITY.   Israel has no right to exist,  I've recently heard an expert in international law point out that there is no such thing in international law as  a state having a "right to exist,"    That is a smokescreen to shield the Israeli government from the same kinds and levels of criticism that is made against any other country.   Israel certainly doesn't have the right to be protected from criticism of its crimes and criminal policies and its genocide against Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank.  

What you're upset about, Simps, is that increasingly Israel is being given equal treatment instead of the special treatment the American, couch dwelling, petty zionists who will never set foot in the place demand.   Well, that's over.   It's entirely over.