A mythical paradise lost

Sometimes a little distance is necessary to see something clearly, like finding the right spot when viewing a painting in a gallery. Proximity is good for detail but not necessarily for context and milieu. One truly can get too close to things.

I left Israel last weekend and am now the beneficiary of peace, calm and normality in the Andalusian countryside of Spain. I had not been out of Israel since late summer last year, an interval during which Israel bombed Iran – and was hit by missiles in return – killed tens of thousands of Gazan civilians, thrust Gaza into famine, extended its range of targets to Doha in the United Arab Emirates, lied shamelessly about everything to everyone and launched its latest assault on the civilians of Gaza City.

There is nothing on the above list – which could easily go on and on without my repeating myself – that I didn’t know before I left. I was hyper-aware of Israel’s march of follies while living there and breathing the toxic air daily. But I was too close to the psychopathy of the place to make sense of it; all it did was depress the hell out of me, stupefy my thinking and cause me to dislike myself intensely due to the mere fact that my presence and taxes were keeping the madness going,

I needed distance and time to detox, which is literally the process that anyone of a progressive disposition needs to undergo on leaving Israel these days. I wouldn’t go as far as to say that Zionism (by which I mean the principles that motivate social and political life in Israel) is a drug, but it definitely resembles a cult: a psychological and social coccoon that ostensibly provides the sense of belonging and identity that damaged or needy people need, along with certainty, structure and personal significance.

And who on earth could be more needy than those who have been intentionally brought up to regard themselves as eternal victims – of the Holocaust, pogroms, antisemitism, terrorism and anyone wearing a keffiyah? The same people who, bizarrely, are also the Chosen. The metaphysics of that one are beyond me.

Obviously Zionism was not envisaged as a cult when initially defined in the late 19^th century and embarked on as a nationalist movement by Herzl and co. But, as Kobi Niv argued cogently in a couple of recent articles in Haaretz, ideologies are not judged by their initial intention but by how they turn out.

Like communism, Zionism may have sounded ideal when enunciated from a podium in Basel almost 130 years ago, but it has turned out to be no less reprehensible than the musings of Marx. Ideologies are not hewn in stone; they are nothing more than theories that need to be validated over the course of time and in the face of realities that are often unforeseen.

Communism, as we know, failed miserably. Zionism itself has been stress-tested over the past century-plus and its true face is now on display. It’s not a pretty picture.

The many successes that Zionism has notched up – high immigration (kindly assisted by Hitler, the Soviet Union and Zionist agents provocateur in Arab states), sturdy state building, a powerful army and an advanced and sophisticated economy – slink into triviality when compared to the country’s faults.

In arrogantly believing that they could manage – rather than resolve – the Palestinian issue, the Zionist leadership, from the early Yishuv onwards, guaranteed that an ethnic dispute that could have been settled equitably would spiral out of control until it contaminated every aspect of Israeli life, socially, politically and militarily. We may not like it, but contemporary Israel is defined by its conduct towards the Palestinians – nothing else.

Despite the hypocrisy and self-righteous anger on display whenever an international body dares to suggest that Zionism might not be the polar opposite of racism, recent events have shown conclusively that Zionism is indeed racism. That fact was already obvious before the nakba in 1948-49. It is shameful that the international community has only now woken up to it.

More than that, Zionism is the worst possible form of racism: a racism that not only despises its ethnic victims but actively attempts to rid itself of them, either by coercion, expulsion, destroying their means of existence or simply annihilating them. That, too, dates back to the nakba, if not earlier.

When, earlier this week, Netanyahu expressed satisfaction with the prospect of Israel being a super-Sparta, he was probably thinking of the autarkical and live-by-the-sword aspects of Spartan life. It may have slipped his mind that Sparta also subjugated and brutally oppressed its neighbours – they were called helots – a policy that was a major burden on the resources of the state and one of the contributory factors to Sparta’s eventual downfall.

That, too, will come to pass in the new Zionist Sparta.

Israel does not regard itself as bound by international treaties or codes of conduct. Rules and norms are for goyim, not for Jews. We answer to a higher authority, one which, entirely coincidentally, is happy with everything we do and instructs us to do more of it. Over the past two years, Israel has bombed or otherwise attacked seven countries or territories – and that does not include the West Bank where both settlers and soldiers continue to conduct a reign of terror.

Seven countries! Putin doesn’t even come close.

Public entreaties and behind-the-scenes pressure from the EU, the UK, the UN, the International Criminal Court and a slew of other entities for Israel to restrain itself have been ignored disdainfully by Israel. Who are they to tell us Jews what we can and can’t do? Genocide? How can we commit genocide when victimhood is ours by right?

Internally, too, the Jewish democracy of David Ben-Gurion and his Zionist successors is mutating into a theocratic police state, operating according to the biblical values of the tsadik Itamar Ben-Gvir. People are arrested for social media posts. The families of hostages are attacked by pro-Netanyahu thugs. Aged demonstrators are clubbed to the ground. The government orders military operations that are opposed not only by a majority of the public (according to the polls) but the army General Staff as well. God clearly prefers Netanyahu and his clique to the rest of us helots-in-waiting.

There is nothing that I or any similarly minded person can do about the catastrophe that Zionism has become. Contemporary Israel is not – and, in my view, never again will be – a fitting environment for secular and progressive people to live contented and fulfilled lives. The era of Zionist lies and obfuscation is over. Messianic coercion is at hand.

The only option is to leave Israel, which my wife and I are preparing to do. Leaving my kids behind breaks my heart, but they are adults and make their own decisions. I have absolutely no doubt that they, too, will leave, sooner or later. There will be no place for them in a Zionist Israel shorn of its myths and lies.