Diasporism

ce and emancipation from slavery – the story of Passover itself – and turns them into brutalist weapons of colonial land theft, roadmaps for ethnic cleansing and genocide.’

This is Diasporism—the view that the creation of the State of Israel, and the entire Zionist movement, was a ghastly mistake and that Jewish life is best led in exile. ‘Zionism has brought us to our present moment of cataclysm and it is time that we said clearly: it has always been leading us here,’ Klein wrote. It’s an important point: her objection is not to one policy or one leader; as she also wrote, ‘it’s not just Netanyahu, it’s the world he made and that made him – it’s Zionism.’ The only remedy is for Jews to separate from, as the Iranian regime calls it, the ‘Zionist entity.’

More than humanity in general, Jews in particular are born to suffer – so the anti-Zionist argument seems to go – and should function as permanent canaries in the coal mine, exemplifying and reminding the rest of us of the woes of this cruel world. Israel as a successful state just offends the Wandering Jew image.

In the deepest sense, the Leftist anti-Zionists are adopting the view of the Satmar and Neturei Karta: a Jewish State cannot exist until the Messianic Age arrives because the one we have, built by men and women, is not pure enough. As Andre Spokoiny rightly described their view, ‘By virtue of their powerlessness, Jews could become the conscience of the world, the ultimate parameter of the morality of a human society. By sustaining a romance with powerlessness, and an idealisation of the lack of agency that transforms tragedy into virtue, Jewish vulnerability in the Diaspora could be reimagined as the ultimate engine of Jewish moral and intellectual genius….’ The moral blindness inherent in this view is well depicted in this vignette Spokoiny recounted: ‘Imre Kertész, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, synthesised better the bargain that Jews needed to make. During a visit to Israel, a foreign journalist, aware of Kertész’s humanist and pacifist leanings, asked him, ‘How does it feel for you to see a Star of David on a tank?’ ‘Much better than seeing it on my concentration camp uniform,’ he answered.’

Worth a read.