Do American Jews Really Know What ‘Zionist’ Means?
JVL Introduction
It’s clear that American Jews who call themselves Zionist attach very different meanings to the term.
For most it is a vague, warm identification with an imaginary, relatively egalitarian, democratic Israel.
The moment people are asked if they support a Zionism that privileges Jewish rights over those of non-Jews support plummets: a full 69% of Jewish respondents said that if that’s what Zionism is they were probably or definitely not Zionists, as Mira Sucharov found.
Increasingly, support for Israel as a Jewish state is based on denying the reality of Israel as a Jewish state.
“Israel” as the glue has bound Jews together, as it has done so effectively since the 1967 war, is crumbling to dust.
So Israel is falling back more and more to demonising Palestinian resistance to endless occupation as “terrorism” as a diversion from the reality of Israel’s increasingly violent ethnonationalism which provokes that very resistance it then uses to garner support.
And for all its deploring antisemitism Israel is increasingly dependent on weaponising fears of antisemitism to bolster support for it as “the only Jewish state”. That’s why it is so busy generating the very hostility to its murderous occupation that it then deplores as antisemitic.
This article was originally published by Haaretz on Wed 26 Oct 2022. Read the original here.
Do American Jews Really Know What 'Zionist' Means?
From Trump’s slurs to campus controversies, the debate about how Jewish identity and Israel are connected is often frenzied. But do U.S. Jews have a fundamentally flawed idea about what constitutes Zionism?
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There is a terrible pain when an acknowledged devastation occurs and it is denied for its truth. The Palestinians must feel the same way or they would not be human. We need to address this issue, and to do so would show that the rest of us have developed maturity.