The folly of Zionism

In the age of late, too-late European settler colonialism, it was perhaps all but inevitable that Europe's Jews, victims of a renewed wave of often violent anti-Semitism, would seek escape through colonization abroad.

From the beginning the idea was dominant and quickly became exclusive that the Jews would of course remove to Palestine, partially displacing and in any case eventually outnumbering and dominating the hostile indigenous Muslim population and swiftly asserting sovereignty.

This destination was only chosen because the idea was ingrained in Jewish and Christian culture that God gave that land to the Jews for their homeland forever.

A moral idea of national ownership founded in a bronze age myth was absolutely the determining factor in this historic movement, a 19th Century adventure in settler colonialism wearing in Christian and Jewish eyes the robes of a second divinely ordained Conquest of Canaan, a sort of Jewish Jihad.

But Jews and Christians do not alone have long and biased historical memories of this region, deep-dyed in hues of religion.

The project was absolutely rejected by the Muslims from the beginning as a new Crusader outrage as unacceptable as the medieval Kingdom of Jerusalem.

All the same, after the unprecedented violence of the Holocaust, the idea became irresistible for American and European politicians, though many rejected any claim to divine gift and a claim to national ownership almost two millennia past its expiration date, and even more saw the Muslim occupancy of more than a thousand years and the Muslim resistance, as well, as not only practical but moral, and decisive moral objections.

But it happened anyway, and today the European settler state of Israel enjoys a moral legitimacy and a commitment to protection the Christian mother countries of Europe ultimately refused their own Christian daughters in the colonies they had birthed, beginning in the 19th Century, in Muslim and sub-Saharan Africa.

A commitment that for America, at least, would otherwise appear wholly inexplicable and even fatuous to realists, isolationists, and anti-interventionists but is the first and most irrevocable commitment of most American Jews and, at its most aggressive, of neoconservatives and Protestant Evangelicals, among whom Christian Zionism has come to flourish since their support shifted from the Democrats to the Republicans in the late 20th Century.

Here is the voice of a Jewish neoconservative Zionist Stentor.

Netanyahu's moment

He echoes the neocon Rudy Giuliani who says President Barack Obama does not love America but means he does not love Israel and says Netanyahu loves America but means he does love Israel.

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Frayed bipartisanship