I’m not going to dwell here on the dual ironies of the government claiming Israel is a functioning democracy while denying entry to its critics, and the wailing from those who want to boycott an entire country and visit it at the same time. I’ve scant expectations of either side making any logical or moral sense. But the by-now-standard reaction from the opponents of every latest wheeze by the government still mystifies me. [...]
Their problem is with the latest racist law going through the Knesset, deportation of African asylum-seekers, discrimination against non-Jewish citizens and non-Orthodox Jews, the killing or arrest of a Palestinian teenager in the West Bank, the ongoing iniquities of the occupation and the gradual erosion of Israeli democracy. [...]
Many of those on the left who are now denying they are Zionists would probably approve wholeheartedly of the intellectuals of Brit Shalom who, in the 1920s, called for a bi-national Jewish-Arab state in Mandatory Palestine and accused the rest of the Zionist establishment of perverting Herzl's vision. The enlightened German-born professors who founded both Brit Shalom and the Hebrew University in Jerusalem claimed to be the "true Zionists." [...]
I'm Jewish and Israeli and believe we can fix Israel’s massive problems and injustices, but I’m not a Zionist, in the same way I'm not a Pharisee, a Roundhead or an Abolitionist. I may have been had I lived in the relevant period in history, but I can't belong to, or leave, a movement whose purpose ended long before I was born.
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