Israel's War on Zionism - How Post-Zionism became Anti-Zionism

Nature abhors a vacuum and so it was always inevitable that Post-Zionism would mutate into Anti-Zionism.

Labor Zionism had already embraced Post-Judaism, substituting socialism for religion and framing it in a national context in recognition of the reality that Jews would not be able to participate as equals in any other nation’s socialist system. In the Post-Zionism era, socialism gave way to capitalism, the old boys network still existed but it was now geared to business and investment. Israel's left did not actually embrace the free market as Netanyahu wanted, instead like Russia or China they embraced a limited oligarchic grip on the free market by those in power and those willing to bribe them.

It is only fitting that today Shimon Peres, the first post-Zionist Prime Minister of Israel now serves as President. Peres' vision of a New Middle East was meant to toss away national identity along with religious identity in favor of technocratic capitalism. This was the Post-Zionism that Israel's Labor and business elites embraced, Israel as another European country devoid of nationalism or patriotism or religion, reduced to a marketplace and a vacation paradise. Come for the business and stay for the beaches.

The problem with Peres’ Post-Zionism is that it required the willing cooperation of Israel's neighbors to tear down the walls, open up markets and create a Mini-EU in the Middle East. And Israel's totalitarian Arab neighbors had no intention of doing that.

Instead of opening up the Middle East, Post-Zionism ran headlong into the realities of the Middle East, that a vision can only stand up if it is backed by force. With its dream deferred, Post-Zionism turned on Zionism and became Anti-Zionism. The political and business leadership that had invested so much of their prestige and money into a Post-Zionist vision of Israel were not prepared to surrender it or accept responsibility for the tremendous failure on their hands. Nor were they prepared to defy the United States and the world community still pressuring them to continue the farce of negotiations with the Palestinian Authority.

The new narrative held that it was the "extremists" who were holding back the progress of peace. The radical lunatics who believed that Israel should be a country rather than a highway, a Jewish state rather than a beach resort and a place to raise families rather than a collection of holding companies. And the extremists were of course the Religious Zionists who combined both Judaism and Zionism to form together the cornerstone of the nation, made up of the two things that the left had discarded and had now come to hate the most.

In Tehilim 118, the verse states, The Stone that the Builders Despised became the Head Corner Stone. The unity of Judaism and Jewish nationhood as one is the cornerstone despised by the builders, discarded by both the secular left and the haredi establishment, is the stone that persists in being the cornerstone that holds up the nation. And it is the stone that is rejected, despised and hated all the more for it.

When Post-Zionism sent the lads of the secular left out of the army and straight to the Riviera, it was the despised Zionists who took their place. Post-Zionism commanded a retreat from Israel's borders and the Zionists insisted on settling them instead. And so it was war and as in the days of the Hellenistic kings of Bayit Sheni, a wave of persecution was unleashed against those dangerous extremists, the Zionists.

If they set up camps, they were torn down. If they built houses, they were demolished. If they protested, they were beaten and imprisoned. If they were complained, they were arrested for incitement. If they tried to broadcast on the radio, they were shut down. If they planted crops, Arabs were encouraged to come and destroy them and the police were sent to arrest not the Arab thieves, but those who had committed the unspeakable Zionist crime of planting the crops in the Land of Israel. Entire towns were destroyed, their residents dragged away, men, women and children, homes were gutted, synagogues burned by the Arab terrorist allies of Israel's Post-Zionism government.

Day after day the media carried new stories of how these Zionists were violent, threatening and dangerous. And to prove it, their children were locked away for months without trial, their possessions down to their household goods were seized for years without recompense, they were beaten and tortured, their skulls were cracked, horses stomped them into the dirt and all of it only went to prove how dangerous those Zionists with their encampments and many children were in the first place. After all if they were not so very dangerous, why did the government have to use such tactics to break them down?

Each failure of Post-Zionism to break through to the Arab world and create its imaginary business and bikinis paradise that Livni, Kadima's next Prime Minister, tried to sell in Israel's latest ad campaign, only further deepened its Anti-Zionism. Each setback only made the Post-Zionists more eager to cut a deal and more fevrent to suppress the Religious Zionists who remained as the only real ideological opposition and alternative to their perversity. And the only reminder of their abysmal failure.

Where Arab Anti-Zionism is nationalistic, Jewish Anti-Zionism is Anti-Nationalistic, the rejection of a single cornerstone, a unitary Jewish identity based on a single people living in a single land. Israeli Anti-Zionism fits into the same category, but is motivated as much by greed as by secularism. Post-Zionism promised a Sugar Candy Mountain in which life would be easy, war would be over if you wanted it and you could drive from Morocco to Syria uninterrupted, do business in their capitals and party in their nightclubs.

No purely Anti-Zionist vision could have been as compelling in convincing a secular generation to reject Zionism, as Peres' New Middle East was. For the first time Israelis were promised that they could live just like the Americans and Europeans who had become their idea of a good life. All they had to do was agree to negotiate and give up some territories no one except a few crazy Zionists wanted anyway. And then a few more. And then a few more. And then there was war, and it wouldn't go away just because you wanted it to. No matter how many songs you sang about it.

Someone had misled a generation. Someone had told them that they wouldn't have to fight anymore. Someone had promised that we were living in a new age. There would have to be an accounting for that, unless a scapegoat could be found. And so fed by left wing politics Post-Zionism absorbed the hatred that had always been churning in its own left wing and fed it out again to become Anti-Zionism. Under the plaster statue of Rabin the Martyr, murdered by the wicked Zionists to deprive us of our promised peace, the war on Zionism by the Israeli media, the Israeli government and academia has continued with only brief interruptions for a decade and a half.

Even as the cornerstone which the builders had rejected has become the cornerstone holding the nation together, the Anti-Zionists continue their war against it, seizing, arrests, beating, imprisoning and inciting hate and violence in the name of the same hate that their Arab terrorist allies do. The hatred of a Jewish nation in a Jewish state.