Sorry, I am still interested in talking about Zionism. It is an important topic. Did any of you marvelous people hear what Rabbi Yaakov had to say? I cannot help but see Zionism, which developed among secular Jewry in Europe, as (allow me to put it this way) a desperate survival strategy. The catastrophe in Europe — the loss of life, the loss of place, the intense existential insecurity, produced a sort of madness which had been developing for decades, but post-Emancipation: Never again would these Jews allow such a fate to befall Jewry. Jewish God be damned.
European Jews had no other option except to realize that God abandoned them. God betrayed them. And when they interiorized what had happened (Shoah has the same sense as Nakba) they really had few options: to come to see that this God Yahweh was either a merciless nut job or a figment of the imagination.
Who (among Jewry) could any longer sustain the notion of the Biblical, historical Jewish God? And also consider this: that this God teamed up with Nazis and a general European antipathy to Jews, Jewish will, Jewish tendency to get to the head of the class. If you read Jewish postwar literature the psychic rupture was shattering.
Zionism is, in this sense, a rebellion against Jewish history and Jewish fate. “We will take matters into our own hands” say the Zionist-atheists. And in that sense cease to be historical Jews.
What many Gentiles do not understand — why would they? — is that the United States represents for world-Jewry an opportunity that had never, ever been presented in history. Jews are highly historically conscious. They recognized the opportunity and seized it.
It is an unfortunate fact that Israel was predicted to be a huge mistake by (many) Jews themselves. Everything was foreseen.
The extreme violence unleashed against those who perpetrated the 7th of October had all the resonances of psychotic, paranoid, uncontrollable fear and extreme anxiety. The attacks on Gaza were genocide-like, but with destruction at that level how do you measure the will to retribution?
Israeli Jewry is in an existential trap. And how horrid, how utterly unlivable it is to feel at a fundamental level that your very existence is threatened. That there is no “ground” for you. That God Himself is in effect your enemy and the agent of your destruction.
Religious Jews have all sorts of mechanisms to quash or limit this ever-present anxiety. The structure of the faith is itself a fortress. Secular Jews are in a different situation. They are only quasi-religious and in this sense quasi-Jews. They will not sit by while their own flesh and blood is being attacked.
But Israel, established by conquest, was a deep
historical mistake. How this situation gets resolved now is anyone’s guess.
The best laid plans of mice and men …
"You shall betroth a wife, but another man will violate her; you shall build a house, but you will not live in it; you shall plant a vineyard, but you will not use its fruit. 31 Your ox shall be slaughtered before your eyes, but you will not eat of it; your donkey shall be torn away from you, and will not be restored to you; your sheep shall be given to your enemies, and you will have none to save you. 32 Your sons and your daughters shall be given to another people, while your eyes look on and yearn for them continually; but there will be nothing you can do. 33 A people whom you do not know shall eat up the produce of your ground and all your labors, and you will never be anything but oppressed and crushed continually. 34 You shall be driven mad by the sight of what you see." (Deut 28:30-34)