Hat tip to Diana in Sunny Florida for this thoughful piece by Ben Ehrenreich in the Los Angeles Times on Sunday. Provocatively entitled "Zionism is the Problem" Ehrenreich suggests that the Zionist ideal of a Jewish state is keeping Israelis and Palestinians from living in peace."It's hard to imagine now, but in 1944, six years after Kristallnacht, Lessing J. Rosenwald, president of the American Council for Judaism, felt comfortable equating the Zionist ideal of Jewish statehood with "the concept of a racial state -- the Hitlerian concept." For most of the last century, a principled opposition to Zionism was a mainstream stance within American Judaism.
Even after the foundation of Israel, anti-Zionism was not a particularly heretical position. Assimilated Reform Jews like Rosenwald believed that Judaism should remain a matter of religious rather than political allegiance; the ultra-Orthodox saw Jewish statehood as an impious attempt to "push the hand of God"; and Marxist Jews -- my grandparents among them -- tended to see Zionism, and all nationalisms, as a distraction from the more essential struggle between classes..."
He concludes,
"... Meanwhile, the characterization of anti-Zionism as an "epidemic" more dangerous than anti-Semitism reveals only the unsustainability of the position into which Israel's apologists have been forced. Faced with international condemnation, they seek to limit the discourse, to erect walls that delineate what can and can't be said.
It's not working. Opposing Zionism is neither anti-Semitic nor particularly radical. It requires only that we take our own values seriously and no longer, as the book of Amos has it, "turn justice into wormwood and hurl righteousness to the ground."
Establishing a secular, pluralist, democratic government in Israel and Palestine would of course mean the abandonment of the Zionist dream. It might also mean the only salvation for the Jewish ideals of justice that date back to Jeremiah."
Read the rest of Ben Ehrenreich's article here
It won't be long before we know whether the new Netanyahu coalition of far right parties will favour the one state or two state solution. If the latter, it is very unlikely to resemble the US-EU-SU-UN sponsored Road-Map. Avigdor Lieberman has made it very clear that he wants one state for Jewish Israelis and one state for Arab Israelis and West Bank Palestinians.
The BBC reports, "Yisrael Beiteinu is a strong supporter of Israeli settlement activity in the occupied West Bank, seen as illegal under international law and a major obstacle to a peace deal. It also advocates a peace deal which jettisons Israeli land populated by Arab citizens and annexes settlements in the West Bank and Mr Lieberman has proposed that Arab citizens sign loyalty oaths or lose their citizenship."
Is that a choice?
