Zionism

It’s easy to condemn sexism, racism, homophobia, et cetera. The motivations are not complex.

When a people has been persecuted for 2,000 years and suffered the biggest intentional mass murder in Europe, it is hard to condemn that people (and I do not condemn that people). For decades that people has comforted itself with and told others the stories of its suffering but also its survival over terrible odds and the need never to let its suffering happen again. They were both victims and heroes.

As a result, many of them came to believe they could do no wrong, so when after World War II some of them felt the desire to take land and make non-Jews second-class citizens shunted into smaller and smaller reservations heavily policed, patrolled, and punished, they felt more than justified. Those Palestinians were, after all, part of the enemy team.

This is why it is harder to see and to end Zionism. It is based in historic injustice and victimhood. No one can argue with that. But if you point out that the right-wing government of Israel is acting in ways extremely similar to its past oppressors, you will be accused of anti-Jewish hatred and punished accordingly. Jews who oppose Israel’s abuses (and there are many of them) are called “self-hating”. Just yesterday I read of “the interconnectedness of Judaism and Zionism”. This shows they are not the same thing.

To Zionists, the Jews have a God-given right to a homeland, and they have a God-given right to do anything they feel is necessary to defend it, including shooting unarmed children in the street, firing missiles into residential neighborhoods, bombing hospitals and refugee camps — whether these actions actually help Israel or not, whether they are legal or moral or not.

From 1975 to 1991 the official position of the United Nations was that Zionism was equivalent to racism. The UN used and all others who equate the two are using the wrong word: it is ethnocentrism, a chauvinism designed to push culture not race. And all those who get in its way will be destroyed. (To this day that UN resolution is called “anti-Semitic”, when it is simply grasping for the right word for the evil.)

This is an important and overdue discussion. I hope the end result will be mutual respect of all parties and the acknowledgement that all parties are human beings who deserve to live in freedom.

Until then, we must condemn Zionism as the misguided force for harm that it is.