There is no existential threat to Israel or to the Jewish people or to Judaism. There is, however, as there should be, a very real threat to political Zionism. Its time is done.
Judaism is a faith, a religion, a way of life, and it is to be respected, honoured, and protected. Political Zionism is a colonial project with an ugly, brutal, bloody history of heartless occupation, ethnic cleansing, and systematic oppression of an entire people. It deserves no respect, no honour. It needs to end once and for all and to be replaced with a new paradigm of equality, free of the ugly dichotomy of occupier and occupied.
This is no longer something the Palestinians need to ask the Western powers for. They have experienced decades of western obfuscation, vetos of UN declarations, protection of Zionist crimes. They know western assistance is a mirage, a delusion, a con game used to repeatedly mislead and to delay and prevent the end of Israeli apartheid.
For Israel to maintain and continue their unconscionable apartheid project they are compelled to deny the reality of history, to cast as unreal the aspirations and the suffering of the Palestinian people, and to be obstinately blind to their own misdeeds.
Today, we see an openly racist discourse, promulgated by the Israeli government, supported openly by Zionists of every stripe, backed by the U.S. and other western nations, amplified by the western media, and echoed in the halls of power and commerce. Humanistic ideals such as tolerance, equality, enlightenment, and the rule of law are simply a disguise, a mask, a front. Like Dorian Gray, these pretend ideals are merely a pretty picture, a portrait concealing a monstrous reality, a corruption so deep and malignant that genocide is a mere trifling matter undertaken and supported without compunction.
No moral, ethical, historical, or social constraints restrain those infected with the virus of Zionism as they inexorably move forward toward their aim of annexing all of Palestine and “cleansing” it of its inhabitants. They believe themselves a world entire unto themselves and not subject to any paradigms or rules that attempt to come between them and their ultimate aim. The map, devoid of Palestinian territory, that Netanyahu displayed at the UN General Assembly made this clear. And the ongoing firebombing of Gaza and its civilian population by a government devoid of humanity, makes clear that they will attempt to achieve this end, no matter the human cost.
Zionists have a particular very narrow narrative by which they live. The world has to bend to their narrative and they apparently have no interest in fitting into a larger shared human story. Theirs is a narrative of exceptionalism in which there is no place for Palestinians and their attachment to Palestine. Palestine is outside the boundaries of a Zionist narrative and so it has no legitimacy, no place within the “true” reality espoused by Zionism and backed and enforced by the West.
The West adheres to its own narrative of Western exceptionalism, an approach which allows it to impose rules and limits on others while violating those rules and limits itself. It, like Israel, sees no contradiction in this behaviour, since it views itself as the ultimate end and fulfillment of the movement of history, as witnessed by the U.S. president’s declaration that “America is not just the greatest country in the world, but the greatest nation in the entire history of the world.”
The grandiosity with which the U.S. and Israel view themselves presages a kind of delusional narcissism that is a danger to their own selves and an even greater danger to the rest of the nations, who are trapped, in this shrinking world, with these unstable, untrustworthy, and somewhat deranged inmates. Inmates who are heavily armed and who view themselves as wardens, self-appointed to monitor, limit, restrict, and exploit their charges. At a time of crisis, like the world is currently experiencing, the dangerous incompetence of these delusional wardens is laid bare for all to see.