Weekly Briefing: Dear Democrats– Zionism is not a liberal ideology
Just when you thought U.S. policy toward Palestinians could go no lower, Secretary of State Antony Blinken visited the region last week and offered “meaningless and empty gestures” about the violence being delivered to Palestinians while expressing great concern over the Netanyahu government’s plans to gut the powers of the Israeli judiciary.
Blinken’s concern is the damage to the Israel lobby: if Israel institutes these fascistic measures, the Biden administration will have a tougher time selling Israel as a democracy, and make “covering for its crimes harder and generally complicate efforts by Democrats to maintain their blind support for it,” as Mitchell Plitnick wrote at our site. Not to mention, give a headache to Biden’s reelection campaign!
The good news about the democracy crisis is that it exposes the fact that “the Jewish state” has never been a democracy for non-Jews. And if liberal Zionists are anguished about the latest government– well, sorry, but Zionism is not a liberal ideology.
The true crisis of Zionism is actually 75 years long– 75 years of Palestinian persecution, including 36 Palestinians killed just this year so as to preserve apartheid in the West Bank, 13 of them killed with a shot to the head.
Liberal Zionists ought to consider the will that one of those victims, 15-year-old Adam Ayyad, carried in his pocket the day he was shot. “There were a lot of things I wished I could do, but we live in a country where realizing your dreams is impossible,” he wrote.
How would American liberals feel if Jewish teenagers had such despairing views of their future? And if the despair passed from generation to generation?
Well, they would never stand for it. And neither will Palestinians. As a young father in Gaza said of Israel to our reporter, Tareq Hajjaj, this week: “This is a Zionist project… But they will never see it fulfilled.”
It’s too bad Antony Blinken– let alone the plane full of reporters he brought with him — didn’t meet those Palestinians!
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