(A woman stands with an Israeli flag during a two-minute siren in memory of victims of the Holocaust, in Jerusalem, May 6. (Ohad Zwigenberg/AP)
Yuval Noah Harari is the author of “Sapiens,” “Homo Deus” and “Unstoppable Us” and a professor of history at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
Some Excerpts;
In recent years, however, Israel has been ruled by governments that turned their back on the moderate forms of Zionism. In particular, the coalition government established by Netanyahu in December 2022 has categorically rejected the two-state solution and the Palestinian right to self-determination, and instead embraced a bigoted one-state vision.
Like the anti-Israel demonstrators around the world, the Netanyahu coalition believes in the slogan “from the river to the sea.” In its own words, the founding principle of the Netanyahu coalition is that “the Jewish people has an exclusive and inalienable right to all parts of Eretz Yisrael” — Eretz Yisrael is a Hebrew term referring to the entire territory between the Jordan and the Mediterranean. The Netanyahu coalition envisions a single state between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea, which would grant full rights only to Jewish citizens, partial rights to a limited number of Palestinian citizens and neither citizenship nor any rights to millions of oppressed Palestinian subjects. This is not just a vision. To a large extent, this is already the reality on the ground.
Some people argue that the Netanyahu coalition’s extremism is the inevitable fruit of Zionism. Yet this is akin to arguing that patriotism inevitably leads to extremism, and that anyone who begins by displaying the national flag at home must end by fomenting hate and violence. Such historical determinism is empirically unfounded and politically dangerous, since it grants extremists a monopoly over people’s national feelings. Patriotism isn’t bigotry. Patriotism is a feeling of love for one’s compatriots, grounded in a deep connection to a national culture and its evolving traditions — which prompts citizens to take care of one another, for example, by paying taxes and financing welfare services. In contrast, bigotry is a feeling of hate for foreigners and minorities, grounded in the conviction that we are superior to them.
In the immediate Israeli context, failing to separate patriotism from bigotry plays into Netanyahu’s hands and implies that there is no political alternative to the Netanyahu coalition. If Israeli patriotism requires hatred and persecution of non-Jews, then Israeli patriots must go on voting for Netanyahu. Netanyahu himself has been arguing for years that Israeli patriots must support him, but Zionist opposition parties still have a chance to displace him and lead Israel in a more tolerant and peaceful direction.
There is a lot at stake here, not just for Israel, but for Jews all over the world. If Netanyahu and his political allies cement their hold over Israel, it would spell the end of the historical bond between the Jewish people and ideas of universal justice, human rights, democracy and humanism. Judaism would instead make a covenant with bigotry, discrimination and violence. Jews in London and New York might wish to argue that they have nothing to do with Israel, and that what happens in the Middle East doesn’t represent the true spirit of Judaism. But they would be in an analogous situation to British and American communists in the 20th century, who tried in vain to argue that what Joseph Stalin was doing in the Soviet Union wasn’t really communism.
The main problem for non-Zionist Jews is that, unlike Buddhism or Protestantism, Judaism is a collectivist rather than individualistic religion, and building the state of Israel has been the most important collective enterprise of the modern Jewish people. If Israel is conquered by bigotry, it would become the face of Judaism worldwide.
posted by f.sheikh