Richard Silverstein on the religious/literary angle:
It is the seventh night of Hanukah, and Sol Salbe tells me that the
military operation’s name, Solid Lead (or “Cast Lead”), derives from
Chaim Nachman Bialik’s children’s poem, For Hanukah:
Teacher bought a big top for me,
Solid lead, the finest known.
In whose honor, for whose glory?
For Hanukkah alone.
It is just like modern Israel and Zionism to appropriate Jewish
history, holiday and tradition to justify its own agenda. Quite
macabre also to think that the IDF has defiled a delightful children’s
poem by Bialik in order to convey the power of its onslaught against
Hamas (”solid lead”).
I have heard that a significant percentage of Jews are opposed to Zionism, but where is the opposition on issues like this where Jewish Zionists have appropriated cultural Judaism on behalf of Zionism and conflated Jewish culture with Zionist aggression? Why aren’t they making a bigger stink about it? Is their silence indicative that most Jews consider Zionism to be innately Jewish, to be a manifestation of Judaism, and thus NOT a misappropriation at all?
The only way that Zionism can ever plausibly be viewed as a misappropriation of Judaism would be if enough Jews were violently opposed to Zionism, and pursued that opposition to the extent that Judaism underwent an epochal, Reformation-like schism between the Jewish Zionists and the Jewish anti-Zionists. Until that happens, Zionism should be presumed to be a natural outgrowth of organized Judaism, as the Jewish Zionists have put the onus on Jewish anti-Zionists to make the break, to "call the bluff," and the Jewish anti-Zionists have failed to respond.
Their silence is deafening, and the failure of a schism to arise may be indicative of innate structural and moral failings of organized Jewry and Jewish doctrine. It may well be that rather than fight it out with the fanatics and the ideologues for control of the religion, decent Jews simply choose to walk away from the religion altogether, as perhaps in their minds there simply isn’t enough innate decency there worth fighting for. Over the course of generations, as the moralists are thinned out in a kind of Darwinian process, it's not hard to see how what's left is only the most callous and hard-core, and hence indifferent to actions like the Israelis' current undertaking in Gaza.
Anyone looking for moral refinement and enlightenment will certainly never find it in the country that is currently the world headquarters of organized Judaism, that’s for sure. Nor likely in any country that continues to harbor large Jewish populations, either. Or at least not until a critical mass of decent Jews gets up the courage to challenge their Zionist cousins — if such a critical mass even exists.