Idea of a Jewish State

The idea of a Jewish State never made sense to me. True, my parents had been anti-Zionist socialists, but I also learned, as did everyone growing up in the US, about the un-breachable values of democracy and the separation of church and state. Zionism never jived.

Seeing and hearing for myself, it’s all too clear that, from the start, quoting Dr. Mazin Qumsiyeh, a scholar I met with this morning in Bethlehem, “everyone knew from the beginning of the Zionist project, that the Palestinians must go”. The majority of Jews living on this land at the time of the Basel conference were anti-Zionists.

Over 600 Palestinian villages, like Lifta, of which we visited the ruins yesterday, were emptied of their inhabitants through a variety of violent and fear-based tactics. Many still sit lonely waiting for their families to return; most likely a settlement will arrive instead.

As a child of Holocaust refugees whose grandmother was murdered at Auschwitz, the brutal intentionality and planning of my Jewish Zionist kin tears at my soul. Our Bethlehem friend claims that Zionism has already lost - that they attempted this strategy too late in the development of democracy as a global value. From his lips to God’s ears.