Ziononism is racism. Not really. If anything its a form of self-hatred that denies any element of the spiritual within the individual. Like the art critic Clement Greenberg, who acknowledged his own Jewish self hatred and said the spiritual in art is simply a byproduct of form. So we come back to form, formal innovation, a collapsing of tradition, the shock of the new, disruption, and a vulgar grotesque transition into modernism. This of course, meant a certain demonizing of the past; of caricaturing tradition as the conniving of superstitious old men in mud huts of the shetl lacking any modicum of sophistication reading old texts completely negated by “progress.”
The bottom line, actually,of Zinoism is to deny, nihilistically, that the Torah is capable of saying anything it really intends to say, and by extension, to grant credibility, validity, only to what is accepted by the well heeled, white liberal liberal establishment of major Western cities; the legacies of Darwin, John Stuart Mill and its dark underside of Galton and H.G. Wells.
It is interesting, and telling, that the most stinging critiques of Zonism come from the profoundly socialist, deeply secular left, who have a natural affinity, a kinship of sharing the same ideological habitat at zionism; Zionism is just a variant of Western secular liberalism, equally adept at creating its own dogmatisms and engaging in the same acts of self-preservation:
( Zizek): “Zionism itself has paradoxically come to adopt some antisemitic logic in its hatred of Jews who do not fully identify with the politics of the state of Israel. Their target, the figure of the Jew who doubts the Zionist project, is constructed in the same way as the European antisemites constructed the figures of the Jew – he is dangerous because he lives among us, but is not really one of us.”
Zionism is a natural extension of Western, liberal enlightenment; the question of legality, entitlement and rights aside, there is no doubt, it has served as an unfortunate creation, putting the rest of the world, particularly the West who cannot wash their hands of complicity in this; as well as Jews themselves, to deal with this existing problem. Unfortunately, that means a strong Army and not packing up the tent even if the prohibition against creating a state came directly from the talmud in unequivocal terms. According to the Torah, jews are in exile until the messiah comes. Until Beckett’s waiting for Godot arrives at the bus stop, whether one is in Petawawa, Trois Pistoles or Tel Aviv, the symptom of exile is identical.
The message in all this is fairly transparent: The only reason that Jews need a place of refuge in the world, the so-called insurance policy, is that the Zionists made sure, through acts of terrorism,or not condoning it, and bullying, that no nation would want to take in Jews when as the logic goes, Israel could just take them in. Most of European Jewry were moving to Israel for lack of other recourse; in the years leading up to and just after nationhood, these pioneer Zionists engaged in a campaign of indoctrination. They recognized, that Zionism and Judaism could not mix. Religious zionism makes no sense, its a marketing creation. So the Zionists sought to negate and ridicule the Torah, so that Zionism, could establish superiority.
Ben-Gurion et al. apparently claimed that each Jew that died in the Holocaust was another propaganda, another piece of evidence, the corpse, for them to use to advocate for a secular state. There were leaders of the Zionist movement, during WW2, who apparently refused to help Jews escape when they knew that doing so would undermine Zionist objectives. Zionists complicit in the holocaust?
ADDENDUM:
According to Hitchens, the widely held delusion that the Jews are a people with the same rights as any other is a direct result of the deleterious influence of Judaism itself. As he puts it: “The only actual justification offered” for Zionism “is that God awarded the land to one tribe a good many years ago, and of course this appalling racist and messianic delusion . . . only makes a terrible situation even worse.” In reality, one is constrained to point out, there is a bit more than God involved, such as the existence of a Jewish nation in the land of Israel for centuries, its sovereignty ended only by genocide at the hands of Roman legions; the centrality of Israel and especially Jerusalem to Jewish thought and culture; the fact that only the land of Israel has ever been regarded as the Jewish homeland by both Jews and non-Jews (including Muslims); and various other significant and notably secular historical facts.
Many of Hitchens’s claims against Zionism go far beyond simple distortion. About Theodor Herzl, for example, he tells us: “If I could rewind the tape, I would stop Herzl from telling the initial demagogic lie (actually two lies) that a land without a people needs a people without a land.” In fact, Herzl never wrote this. Hitchens’s claim otherwise is no less false than his subsequent assertion that “If you give the most cursory attention to the writings of Herzl and [Max] Nordau and other founders of the Zionist movement, or if you read the memoirs of Yitzhak Rabin closer to our own day, you will notice at once that . . . they wanted [the Arabs'] land, and wanted it without its inhabitants.” Herzl, in fact, hoped that the Arabs would be integrated as equal citizens in a future Jewish state, as did most of the “other founders of the Zionist movement,” and Yitzhak Rabin never advocated an Israel emptied of its Arab citizens but publicly denounced such sentiments. One is not permitted to “lie about history,” Hitchens once lectured a supporter of Israel, a rule that appears to be forgotten when it comes to Hitchens himself.
One likely reason behind Hitchens’s hatred of Zionism is the (to him) irritating fact that the movement succeeded despite the opposition to it of many of the “non-Jewish” Jews he so admires. “One of the advantages of a Marxist and internationalist training,” he has stated in an interview, “is that it exposes one to the early writings of those Jewish cosmopolitans who warned from the first day that Zionism would be a false messiah for the Jews and an injustice to the Arabs. Nothing suggests to me that they were wrong on these crucial points.” This assertion is either tragic or absurd, considering that the Jewish cosmopolitanism glorified by Hitchens ended in the Auschwitz gas chambers, while the despised Zionists went on to found a relatively strong, prosperous, and culturally vibrant nation-state.
To a great extent, such violent hostility appears to be driven not by the delusions of Zionism but by the delusions of Christopher Hitchens. In a remarkable piece of bluster, he once wrote that “if anti-Jewish fascism comes again to the Christian world—or more probably comes at us via the Muslim world,” he would not repair to Israel because “I already consider it an obligation to resist it wherever I live. I would detest myself if I fled from it in any direction.” The obvious truth behind this swaggering fantasy is that if “anti-Jewish fascism” were to rise again, Hitchens would most likely share the fate of almost everyone who followed his recommended course the last time such a dilemma presented itself. His complacent formula for permanent Jewish victimization calls to mind something his hero George Orwell once wrote about pacifism: that it “is only possible to people who have money and guns between them and reality.” Much the same, and worse, appears to be true of Hitchens and his anti-Zionism. Read More:http://www.jewishideasdaily.com/content/module/2011/12/16/main-feature/1/the-trouble-with-hitchens