It never occurred to me when I became a teenage Zionist in the mid-1960s that the Jewish state would someday defend its interests – and by extension mine, or so I was taught at the time – by becoming the biggest bully on the block. By the late 1960s, when I envisioned living in Israel for the rest of my life, I still thought a binational state of equals would have been preferable to a Jewish-defined state. The left-humanist Israelis who were most influential in my political and moral development hoped that American Jews like me who immigrated to Israel would help set things back on the right track.
Within just a few years it was clear to me that the right track had been dismantled. There was no going back. In hindsight, Israel’s internal contradictions were already fatal even before my Zionist immersion — the pulls between democracy and Jewish identity, the inability to sort out what “Jewish state” might actually mean, the blindness to the common danger that victimization might lead to victimizing others. All of these tensions escalated beyond repair once Israel became an occupying power, a transition that inevitably destroyed any pretense that Israel would someday become a light unto the nations or even, in Zionism’s alternative, more realistic vision, a nation just like every other.
What nags at me as I read today’s reports, as I read the horrendous stories of children killed, bodies destroyed, hopes betrayed, as endless emails arrive with one or another petition, one or another appeal, is Israel’s rationale for its actions and its methods. Aside from the ever-present electoral calculations, it’s mind-boggling that Israel optimized its destructiveness to teach Hamas a lesson, to regain its deterrent capability, to make it clear to all Palestinians – to all Arabs, all Muslims, everyone – that Israel is a crazed beast willing to destroy everything and everyone. Acknowledging this goal — boasting of it smugly — clarifies that Israel will forever refuse to imagine life as an equal.
Maximizing destruction, justifying phosphorous bombs and other horrendous weapons on legal technicalities, counting every adult male a terrorist, rejecting any responsibility for hundreds of dead children who were in the wrong place at the wrong time — all this and more may damper Palestinian resistance for a time, but Israeli planners know that resistance will someday escalate once again, and the Israeli bully will have another tantrum.
Israeli professor Neve Gordon notes in How to sell ‘ethical warfare’ that
Ultimately, the moral claims the Israeli government uses to support its actions during this war are empty. They actually reveal Israel’s unwillingness to confront the original source of the current violence, which is not Hamas, but rather the occupation of the Gaza Strip, West Bank and East Jerusalem. My student, R, and the other Israeli protesters seem to have understood this truism; in order to stop them from voicing it, Israel has stomped on their civil liberties by arresting them.
I’ve noted before that most of my Israeli friends and colleagues are much more opposed to Israeli policy than Israelis as a whole. This includes native-born Israelis such as Gordon, but also immigrants, including friends from my 1960s Zionism years. Had I remained in Israel, I imagine I too would be as demoralized as some of them, after putting down roots in a country that bears so little resemblance to what we imagined together four decades ago. The attack on Gaza can only add to their dismay about what went wrong, as it does to mine.
Your article speaks to my experience beginning in the late 60’s, making aliyah ten years later and leaving a changed, demoralized and confused Zionist after military service including Lebanon 1. The events of the last two wars – Lebanon 2 and Gaza – plus Israel’s continued behavior in the occupied West Bank undermine almost to a fatal degree whatever foundation was left of any affinity for my Zionist feelings. I no longer know how to justify to myself, let alone to others, the purpose of it all. Thanks for the piece.