This post may well be a follow up to my post from February 14, 2020, "Zionism and its Discontents." But, I don't have the strength this morning to put in links to what I am saying. I am just saying, Trust me on this as I am either right or essentially right, anyway.
As the morning media are announcing, Benjamin Netanyahu, who I have called "Nutty Yahoo" for a decade or more, has triumphantly returned to power in what I also call "apartheid Israel," with the fascist oriented Religious Zionism Party possibly coming in third.
Between Nutty Yahoo winning and that Religious Zionism Party getting enough votes, it may be nearly enough to govern. Those American Jews who think they have strong commonalities with the majority of the Jewish Israeli electorate need to really look in the mirror. As John Lennon sang, "The dream is over/What can I say?" Israel is already an apartheid state per B'Tsalem, Amnesty International, and Human Rights Watch (all three; a trifecta). Israel is now set to become more so. I feel awful for liberal and Left Zionists in Israel. They are outnumbered, and the structure of Israeli political discourse keeps them from speaking with Arabs and Arab Parties. It should not at this point especially. It is time for Jews and non-Jewish Arabs to come together and form a multi-ethnic/multi-religious group of people who want to live with each other, and push for a secular single state. Nutty Yahoo and his predecessors, including Nutty Yahoo a few times, have so divided up the West Bank, and keep bombing Gaza (while Gaza hauls out home made rockets that mostly miss any targets) that they destroyed the two-state solution.
These are the realities of Israeli society. It is time for American Jews of my age or near by age, and older, to step back and reassess. Young American Jews have increasingly done so. Zionism was a rejection of religious doctrine, and the Reform Movement in the US used to be staunchly anti-Zionist until the mid 1930s. Zionism only became "popular" in the face of the Holocaust and the aftermath of the Holocaust. It was a nationalism that assumed the world will always be anti-Semitic, which I will be the first to admit we are reentering such an age of anti-Semitism. But, having us all run to Israel is no answer. It is what anti-Semites want so we can be bombed there in that relatively small geographical area.
The late Israeli novelist, AB Yehoshua, was a staunch liberal Zionist for most of his life. He would exhort people such as my wife and me (we did not know him, he spoke generally), "Come to Israel! Help us against the religious right and Zionist right!" We didn't go. More Jewish Israelis left and those who went to Israel were Jewish loons thinking about Cowboys and Indians, with Palestinians as Indians. And those Arab nation Jewish refugees to Israel often had the same "Us or Them" mindset of the Arab nations they left. So, mix well and shake. It is why, in Yehoshua's last years, he embraced the single state, secular solution because he found plenty of Arabs of non-Jewish backgrounds willing to live in peace and without mullah interference.
Another way is necessary. It is no longer accept the limits of the current time. That is feeding into more of what happens in the current time. Therefore, as a person of Jewish heritage, I say what I have said for some years now: End all aid, military and economic, to Israel. Jettison Israeli government involvement with our military and police. Stop using Israel as a rear flank of the US military-industrial complex. And don't protect Israel in the United Nations any longer. It will need to be shunned as fully as the apartheid South African governments. These particular Jewish people do not speak for the Jewish religion. In truth, they really never did. There was only a Venn Diagram overlap in the face of the European (Christian dominated) Holocaust and aftermath.
