What do we anti-Zionist Jews talk about when we talk about Zionism? |
Non-Zionist Jews lament the conflation of all Jewish life with a creed of bigotry, insularity and belligerence. They must call out Israel’s crimes against humanity and call for the dissolution of the Zionist state. Otherwise, antisemitic voices will continue to equate Judaism with Zionism.
In my youth, I was persuaded **– **with no countervailing assertion proffered **– **that Zionism was both a citadel of mind and of landscape, that as a Jew Israel was my true place of sanctuary in a world that might tolerate me on sight one moment and shove me into a deathcamp-bound cattle car next, and that this homicidal intent was partly true of Arabs, and the closer the proximity of said Arab – that is Palestinians – the greater the degree of homicidal intent.
In the small Appalachian industrial city of my birth, Birmingham, Alabama, the locals were given to throw pennies against the windows of my step-grandfather’s small, men’s clothing store. My father, in turn, was given to gather up the coinage, thank the assembled knuckle-dragging bigots, and use the proceeds to purchase bubble gum and penny candy for my sister and me.
Thus, from the precincts of our small world, the Holocaust still a fresh memory (my mother was a Kindertransport escapee), tales of the murderous aspirations of the gentile world aligned with fraught realities. Thus Israel’s ‘right to exist’ and defend herself seemed an immutable truth. My family and I were little David confronted with the cracker Goliath of the larger world.
‘The Arabs’ were viewed, in the most simplistic manner, as distant, exotic, irrational Jew-haters. I was warned at synagogue, Hebrew school and Jewish summer camp that ’the Arabs’ were a more dangerous menace than even classic Jew-haters such as Klansmen and Nazis. If Israel’s vigilance and will were to falter then Israeli Jews would be ‘driven into the sea by blood-lusting Arabs’; a new Holocaust would befall all........