I am still a Zionist. “If you will it, it is no dream,” Theodor Herzl, the founder of modern Zionism, said. But with Israel’s gradual yet effective turn toward the Revisionist over the past 40 or so years, the thought enters my mind that Herzl's dream has become a nightmare.
Zionism was and remains a movement with a worthy ultimate goal. Namely, the political, economic and cultural reintegration of the Jewish people in its native region with all the national dignity it deserves.
By now, Israel has grown into a walled garrison state, verging on an apartheid society. Under governments dominated by the Likud Party and its right wing offshoots and satellites, Israel has more recently cultivated alliances with resurgent nationalist and unrepentant fascist regimes in Hungary, India and the Philippines -- even joining the chorus of antisemitic tropes leveled against Open Society Foundation's George Soros by Hungary's Viktor Orban and US President Donald Trump.
While European fascism reaps populist gains demonizing refugees from Syria and elsewhere across an unstable Middle East, Netanyahu's Likud Party won its most recent opportunity to lead the Israeli government on an eleventh-hour Election Day warning that "Arab voters are heading to the polling stations in droves."
If Arabs in general, and Palestinians in particular, are as hopelessly committed to the destruction of Jewish national self-determination, as advertised by the Israeli right wing and diaspora lobbyists like AIPAC, then what was the point in setting up shop in the old neighborhood to begin with?
