[Previous entry: "Taliban threaten to kill aid workers as spies"] [Next entry: "Keeping the masses occupied with trivia"]

03/17/2009: ""Zionism is the Problem" ?"

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.

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.

[ It's surprising how quickly things changed, so that few Jews feel brave enough to voice their opposition to the Zionist agenda as they are accused of being "anti-semites". And it is ironic that nazis are inclined to defend Zionism in the sense that we approve of racial states, and yet we are called "anti-semites" because we don't like the way Jews interfere in other peoples' racial affairs. The pluralist government that this author advocates would lead to the end of the Jews, just as surely as the pluralist governments that Jews who are both Zionist and anti-Zionist insist European nations must have will wipe out their indigenous populations. ]

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-ehrenreich15-2009mar15,0,6684861.story