The failure of Zionism and the triumph of the Israel lobby

DEAD BODY OF A 5-MONTH-OLD PALESTINIAN BABY NAMED MUHAMMAD HANI AL-ZAHAR, IS BROUGHT TO THE AL-AQSA MARTYRS HOSPITAL BY HIS MOTHER ASMAHAN ATTIA AL-ZAHAR AND GRANDFATHER ATTIA ABU AMRA AFTER THE ISRAELI AIRSTRIKES AT THE END OF THE HUMANITARIAN PAUSE IN DEIR AL-BALAH, GAZA ON DECEMBER 1, 2023. 32 PALESTINIANS WERE KILLED WITHIN 3 HOURS OF THE END OF THE HUMANITARIAN PAUSE IN GAZA. PHOTO BY OMAR ASHTAWY APAIMAGES

The purpose of Zionism was simple: The desire of Jews “to be a free people in our land.” The words are right there in the anthem.

We grew up being told that Israel was the great project of the Jewish people in the 20th century.
Because we were told we had an essential role to play in that project, to support Israel politically and diplomatically in the bosom of the superpower.

Judged by that goal, any reasonable person would conclude that Zionism has utterly failed. Today Jews feel less secure than ever in Israel, and they are fighting yet another in an endless series of wars, to try and gain the sense of security they have never had.

Today’s war is an “existential” war — the commentators on i24 say — and yet it is against the non-Jewish people among whom the Zionists live. And it is also vast and open-ended, threatening peace across the Middle East and even the world. Because Israel’s war with Iran is also “existential.” And the war against the boycott campaign is “existential.”

The Israelis are widely hated for their actions. “The world sees Israelis as monsters” — even a liberal American-Israeli Jew declares to Americans for Peace Now.

The reasons for that hatred are obvious. Zionists have denied the people who lived on the land when they arrived any rights, and they have never stopped resisting (as others surely would — including with terrorism against civilians.) Israel’s response is mass slaughter. The global community is justly angered and sickened by the endless reports on Al Jazeera of Palestinian children being operated on without anesthesia. Even PBS can’t ignore the reality.

Graphic on PBS News Hour to illustrate January 23, 2024 interview with Martin Griffiths, United Nations Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator.

The political lesson of October 7 is also obvious: Israel and its lapdog, the U.S., sought to extend the policy of bypassing Palestine and bribing Arab monarchies to overlook apartheid and normalize relations with Israel — and they got what some have called the worst war of Israel’s existence. The political lesson is: you can never take Palestinian serfdom for granted, even if you are a nuclear power and economic powerhouse with a European standard of living.

Today, the failure of Israel’s latest existential war is clear in reports from Israeli media: the goal was to get rid of Hamas, but oh, by the way, it is impossible to get rid of Hamas, and in the meantime, the hostages are dying anyway. And if the hostages are sacrificed to get rid of Hamas, “Israeli society will not be able to live with itself.”

Israel has had Zero Vision on this war from the first day. “The war that began as perhaps the most justified war in the history of the State of Israel continues without clear political goals,” a J Street official writes.

So, Israel is simply killing civilians and destroying cities. It has not even killed Hamas’s senior leaders (the New York Times buries this news), despite the bombing of an area the size of Philadelphia that makes Ukraine look like a walk in the park.

As readers here know, I care deeply about Jews, about American Jewish culture and its contribution to civilization. Jews are my ethnic community, for whom I have love and pride; and it is obvious today to any reasonable observer that Zionism is pure tragedy for Jewish people. The belief that you can set up a state for your own religion on lands where others live using overwhelming force is a murderous and racist delusion.

And yet Jewish life is wed to this delusion.

American Jews are overwhelmingly for this war that is so pointless and hateful, having killed 25,000 people, the great majority of them women and children.

Why are they wed to it? Because we grew up being told, Israel is the great project of the Jewish people in the 20th century. Because we were told, we had an essential role to play in that project, to support Israel politically and diplomatically in the bosom of the superpower.

American Jews and Jewish organizations played that role to the hilt. Since 1973, if not longer, they have acted with tremendous cohesion — right up to today, to the destruction of Palestinian hospitals and all the maimed Palestinian children being operated on without anesthesia in the eyes of the world. Just so Joe Biden sends more bombs.

American Jews have enabled war crimes because we are not on the front lines, so we are in no position to judge the Jews whose children are in uniform. And more importantly, because of a sense of minority corporate cohesion — we must stick together in the face of a hostile world — which became our ethos during the persecutions in Europe, and especially after the Holocaust. If we don’t look out for Jews, no one else will.

So today, the most privileged, highly-educated ethnic group in America is wed to a brutal failed project of religious nationalism out of a sense of ethnocentrism. And it must endlessly defend bombings that leave Palestinian children operated on without anesthesia. (Liberal Zionists included).

The Israel lobby had one guiding precept. There must never be any daylight between the Israeli government and the American government. The lobby won the day. Today, even liberal Zionist groups like J Street and New Israel Fund have signed off on the ethnic cleansing of Gaza under the order that the only way for a tiny minority of the U.S. population to exercise influence is to create common cause with other Jewish groups, including the rightwing frankly-racist Zionists.

There are just a few brave dissenters in the Jewish community: the courageous ceasefire groups IfNotNow and Jewish Voice for Peace. Everyone else is on board with mass slaughter out of blind ethnocentrism. (Wait, stop the presses — J Street just called for a ceasefire after 25,000 deaths).

This is a great tragedy. For Palestinians, of course. For the world and for Jews, too. Israeli society is today in a desperate and dangerous place because it painted itself into a racist supremacist corner, destroying repeated offers of partition, with American Jews preventing any criticism of its actions.

There have been warnings for years. American interest types warned us about the dangers of the Israel lobby to U.S. foreign policy independence. Palestinian solidarity groups repeatedly called for South Africa-style nonviolent boycott and divestment to end the Israeli occupation and stop the ethnic cleansing.

Both forces have been dismissed as antisemitic for standing up for democracy and human rights. J Street even called the noble BDS movement antisemitic.

As I often reflected at the fascistic Qalandiya checkpoint — there is a special place in hell for those who come here and witness apartheid, then go home and deny it.

The risks the Israel lobby has taken with others’ lives represent a historic moral collapse. Now, we must all pray for a miracle.