As soon as you accept that Israel must exist as a “Jewish state” no matter what, you are accepting that there will never be peace in the middle east. Because Israel cannot exist as it is without nonstop violence.
Show a Zionist a map where Israel does not exist as a Jewish state and a map where the entire middle east is on fire except for Israel, and then ask them to pick a future, and they’ll pick the second one every time.
That’s the worldview that’s baked into Zionism. The worldview you’re not supposed to bring up in mainstream discourse about the Zionist ideology. You’re not supposed to mention the demented murderousness inherent in the premise that Israel must exist as a Jewish ethnonationalist state no matter how many people need to be killed in order to make that happen.
But that’s the reality.
It’s a simple matter of historical record that Israel cannot exist without continuous violence and abuse. That’s not my opinion, that’s historical fact. There has never been a modern state of Israel which does not constantly kill and abuse its native population and the inhabitants of neighboring countries.
And of course the typical Zionist response to such criticisms is to blame everyone but themselves. It’s the fault of the Palestinians, the Arab nations, the Iranians etc, because they refused to tolerate the west’s imposition of a brand new ethnostate dropped on top of a pre-existing population who became victims of mass displacement and apartheid as soon as it was created.
But nobody has ever been able to provide me with a convincing argument why the original inhabitants of the region ever should have accepted this arrangement. They’ve never been able to put me in the shoes of a Palestinian in the 1940s and lay out a reason why I should have been fine with the things that were happening to me and my people. Nobody has ever been able to provide me with a convincing argument why the Muslims of west Asia should not have stood in solidarity with the Palestinians and their plight. The only solid argument they’ve ever given me is “They should have laid down and submitted, because that’s what was required in order for the Israelis to stop killing and abusing them.”
And that’s still the only argument they’ve got to this very day: that the Palestinians and their neighbors should lie down and submit to the existence of this genocidal apartheid state that was inserted into their homeland like a glass shard into a foot.
But the fact of the matter is that they did not lie down and submit. Many Arabs did out of sheer self-preservation, but many did not. You can tell me they should have given up and submitted, but that’s just arguing with reality. That’s not a solution, it’s just whining about the inevitable.
And this is where that leaves us today. Israel and its allies butchering human beings throughout the middle east, creating countless war orphans who are naturally going to grow up desiring violent retribution. Generation after generation Israel creates the violence it pretends to be defending itself from, all because it was decided that there must be a “Jewish state” in historic Palestine no matter what needs to be done in order to accomplish this.
And Zionists are fine with this. They don’t care if the entire middle east is turned into an ocean of fire so long as the Israelis are still dancing to their electronic music in the middle of it.
That’s what this slogan “Israel has a right to exist” really means. It means Israel and its allies have a right to keep the middle east in a nonstop state of war, and the strongest argument for why this must be the case is that some dead guys made some stuff up and put it in a book thousands of years ago.
At a certain point you need to admit that this is a psychopathic status quo which cannot be allowed to stand, and that anyone who supports it is complicit in the bloodshed.
The ethnonationalist apartheid state of Israel must be dismantled. People’s various religious objections to this statement must be disregarded as infantile tantrums made by adults who believe silly fairy tales. A wildly different status quo needs to be established from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea. Because the alternative is a middle east that exists in a permanent state of nonstop violence and chaos.
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Caitlin Johnstone 