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Zionism

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Hillel Halkin moved to Israel from the U.S. 50 years ago because he believed in the Zionist vision. Now the author confesses that the project failed because it could not deal with the central question, Palestinian demands, and he was naive when anti-Zionists made that argument to him years ago. Today the country is going off a rightwing-religious “cliff” — a quarter of all nonreligious Israelis between ages 18-24, and half of all religious ones, think Israel’s Palestinian citizens should be stripped of the right to vote!

The racial profiling is rampant before your eyes. I sauntered through Damascus Gate at midnight. The young Palestinian just behind me got stopped by soldiers demanding his i.d. card. Abuse and invective are normal here. Just look at the picture the racist Israeli politician Itamar Ben-Gvir posted of the Palestinian politician Ahmad Tibi wheeling a suitcase in Ben Gurion airport. “Great news. Leave and don’t come back.” 

Zionism—the ideology Itamar Ben-Gvir and Benjamin Netanyahu embody, one of Jewish supremacy in the Jewish land– is at last becoming problematic for American Jews. They are up to their chins in that discriminatory ideology, and so we begin a war over Zionism that will bring down the Israel lobby in the next ten years. Because Zionism destroys everything in its path.

The Israeli latest polls suggest that Benjamin Netanyahu could become prime minister with the help of the overtly racist politician Itamar Ben Gvir of the fascist Jewish Power party. This is causing great consternation for liberal Zionists. For them, the problem is not that Jewish Power is antithetical to Zionism but rather that it is quintessentially Zionist (and giving Zionism a bad name).

“My north star is maintaining a democratic Jewish state. That is the single most important thing I believe that I can do as American ambassador” –US ambassador to Israel Tom Nides on his job description. And that means praising the Israeli military repeatedly despite the fact that it killed a Palestinian-American journalist, Shireen Abu Akleh. Nides justified the killing by saying Abu Akleh had gone into a “dangerous place.”