Zionism was supposed to make Jewish existence “normal;” very different than in a Diaspora peopled by goyim, but there is nothing ”normal” in the life and culture of Israel today—which has not lived in peace with its neighbors, much less let the Palestinians have elementary human rights in the lands in which they have lived for thousands of years. If war is the criteria of “normal” existence, then Zionism has become a failed nightmare. It was, when first conceptualized, not supposed to be this way.
Instead of the original dream of A. D. Gordon, Nachman Syrkin, Dov Ber Borochov, and those influenced by the anti-industrial scouting “wanderfogel” concept (which also played a role in Nazi ideology) or Tolstoy (who influenced some Zionist theorists), it turned out very differently. Israel today, the realization of the Zionist theory, bears little relationship to the original concept, which was much more attune to the fact that Palestine was peopled by Arabs and they were also human beings who deserved to have rights. In its own way, the original Zionist formulations, ignoring the fact there was also a contradiction in wanting to set up a homeland in an area the Jews had not lived for thousands of years and was scarcely Western—as they were themselves now—was much more realistic and fair about the rights of Arabs who were native to that country.
Instead, Israel today has become a danger to the region and to itself, so much so that it cannot exist much longer with its own contradictions and the evolving balance-of-power and the spread of advance technology to every nation with the money and will to use it. It cannot maintain a nuclear monopoly because any oil-rich state can make or buy nuclear bombs. It cannot go to war with every state in the region that has the money and capability to make nuclear weapons with risking its very existence, or without provoking an exodus out.
Many of the founders of the main branch of Zionism, socialist Zionism, those that built a Jewish presence in Palestine that eventually led to the creation of Israel, would be—if today they still believed what they wrote–in the opposition to what Israel is becoming: a warrior state that is a negation of everything they advocated originally. READ MORE
