This is a very long, but sobering, article by Nathan Thrall in the NYRB about the Palestine-Israel, and how we got here. It is also the story of a family who lost their 5 year old son in a tragic bus-truck accident.
My only quibble with the history is that Zionism may have been corrupted from the beginning as a colonial enterprise, but that does not change the fact that it only grew because of European/Christian anti-Semitism combined with European nationalism. Support from my critique is in the article, where the Jewish-American writer says nearly 90% of Jews leaving Russia/Russian territories (Lithuania, etc.), including my grandmother and her mother, went to the US, not to Palestine, in the period from 1882-1914. When Moses Hess wrote the earliest Zionist tract, "Rome and Jerusalem," in 1862, he was talking about Jews leaving because of growing violent anti-Semitism in Christian Europe, based within the rising nationalism. Most Jews in Russia and Europe, however, were not interested in colonization of Palestine, and most would have rather stayed in Europe. Also, we know the American Reform Jewish denomination was adamantly anti-Zionist up through the 1930s. What changed was the rise of German Nazis and the overwhelming anti-Semitism directed against the European Jewish communities across all of Europe.
The writer Thrall also quotes some nasty colonialist stuff from Herzl from Herzl's earliest days, which shifts my view somewhat of Herzl. However, Thrall doesn't take into account the bi-national state Herzl envisioned in the first decade of the 20th Century in Herzl's "New Old Land" novel that posits an Arab-Euro Jewish bi-national state. Still, the information provided in the history is so damning, I don't see how any American Jew who stands with Likud, or any liberal American Jew who believes in the two-state solution, can maintain the positions they may have. As I have been saying for at least a decade, what has happened in Israel is the very definition of Judaism inside Israel has returned to its land-based roots, and American Jews refuse to acknowledge that we were raised in a rabbinic tradition of a universalist, non-state or non-land based Judaism. Our sense of Judaism is therefore in conflict with the land-based Judaism, and our moral sense arising from our universalist Judaism should be repelled by the land-based (and therefore nationalist) Judaism that Israeli society, politics, and culture promotes.
For me, to paraphrase John Lennon from a different context, "The dream is over." Israel is a state that is now institutionally structured for apartheid, and the quotes from current Israeli political figures in the long article proves that point. It is why I now oppose all military and economic aid to Israel. I believe the US military-industrial interests are merely supporting Israel as it is now firmly part of the American Empire. And I believe the American Evangelical Christians support Israel as part of their messianic delusions and as part of their promotion of white Euro-heritage supremacy. On the other hand, I continue to believe Herzl would be appalled, but now have to say later Herzl would be appalled, and there was a basis for millions of Jews around the world to support Zionism in the period of the 1930s through 1960s. That the support was itself misplaced to the extent there was always a colonialist element driving Israel's growth, but the anti-Semitism in the 1930s and 1940s was so outrageously violent, with the "Final Solution," that European Jewry, and even Jewry around the world, was on the line if the US had not intervened in World War II against the Axis Powers.
Meanwhile, I am completing my shiva for Israel when I purchase and complete AB Yehoshua's newly translated into English novel, The Tunnel.
UPDATE: March 22, 2021: Mark Braverman in Tikkun lays out something highly similar, opening with Thrall's London Review of Books article about Israel, which I missed.
