An armed gang surrounds a family home, drunk on power and violence.
The police and the army stand by, waiting for orders from a man who made his career organizing and supporting armed gangs, and was welcomed into the government by a man who made his career inciting people against each other.
This, too, is Zionism.
When we are no longer an oppressed minority in a foreign land – what do we do? What do we tolerate? How do we act? Whom do we protect?
What do we do with our own broken men who seek validation of their stunted selves through the exercise of power over others, and have the means to achieve it?
Do we restrain them?
Do we valorize them?
Do we ignore them?
Our answer is our Zionism.
Just as the gang members’ violence is theirs.
This is all part of what it means to pick oneself up from the dust and arise, as a people; to have a society of the righteous and the wicked and everyone caught in between.
This is all part of what Zionism means and it means that Zionism is not dead or racist or genocidal or messianic but it is REAL – it is the reality of a human society in an unredeemed world and it is the reality of finally, after 2000 years, meriting to have to once again have the big question of society posed to us as a people:
“Here are strangers, here are enemies, here are brothers you no longer recognize – what will you do to them, for them, with them, now that YOU have the power?”
To condemn Zionism – to reduce it to the crimes committed in its unfolding – is to duck the question.
To defend Zionism – to whitewash the crimes and to silence the accusers – is to duck the question.
Zionism needs neither condemnation nor defense.
It needs an answer to the fcking question.