There will be plenty of time to analyze this situation when we know more. Right now, all you can comment on is how it feels.
Right now it feels like the world is going to end. It feels like we're running out the clock until World War III and this is just the trial run for something that will happen writ much larger in the rest of the world. More on that another day. Of course it probably won't happen; not soon at least, but tonight, that's how it feels.
Every Jew's prepared themselves for war with Iran for a quarter century. At this point we can be forgiven for thinking this day will never come, but the day is now here.
There's no position in our time quite so pathetic as a Zionist liberal. Whatever country you're from, your society's deserted you and so has the world. It doesn't matter what side we hold on the Gaza war, on attacking Iran, on Jewish society itself. If you're a liberal Zionist, you have as few people capable of sympathy for you as a black Republican or a socialist soldier, but at least those two small groups can go elsewhere and be viewed differently. Even James Baldwin talked about how in Europe he was identified as an American before the color of his skin. A Zionist? Well, long as you don't tell anyone... but assuming you're Jewish you'd have to conceal your religion too, because when people find out your religion, they'll want to know what you think of Israel.
There is no place now for a liberal Zionist, either among other liberals or among other Zionists. The only company is the intuition we have in our bones: that Zionism without liberalism will make a country that backfires for Jews everywhere, while any kind of liberalism that can't accommodate Jewish self-determination can't accommodate anyone else before long. Everybody thinks their views are right and everybody else's are wrong, but any patriotism that can't accommodate liberalism falls into violent authoritarianism, and so does any solidarity movement that can't accommodate patriotism.
After October 7th, we all felt destroyed, but there were a lot of Israelis and Jews who believed that the Jewish people achieved a unity and purpose in those days that we'd lacked for fifty years. Even if no one else could be reliable for us, we could be reliable for each other. It seemed a given to so many that Netanyahu would fall, and even if the wider world didn't accept us in the war's aftermath, we could live functionally without them for a little while, because as Jews we had each other. I never thought any of that, but most Jews did. What a farce that hope now seems to everybody. We're at least as divided as on October 6th, descending ever further into division with no bottom in distant sight.
Our divisions are a microcosm of the Western world. We're further down the road, we always are, but so often, whatever happens to us happens to you next. Whether Israel and America are locked in a dysfunctional codependent relationship, the two countries come to resemble each other in a degree that frightens. The next while may or may not be the scariest period any Jew's experienced since 1945. But if it is, what does this portend about the wider world next? If it's Netanyahu vs. Iran, how hard is it to believe that soon may come Trump vs. China?
No comments:
Post a Comment