oatmealIsrael is fully becoming the colonial project it was always intended to be. As I understand it, #Boyarin’s work is essential here: #Herzl’s obsession with the “feminized” diaspora Jew (the Galut body, bookish and unbounded) was itself a colonial desire, a wish to forge a “muscular Judaism” that could match European “imperial masculinity” at the precise moment settler colonialism was winding down. The tragedy is that Herzl succeeded aesthetically: The sabra (borrowed word) mythology, the soldier-farmer, while failing politically, because a century later Israel exists less as the sovereign project he imagined and more as a client state dependent on US military and diplomatic cover.
And who’s providing that cover? Largely Christian nationalists, whose support is not philo-Semitic but eschatological. Their theology DEMNADS Jewish sovereignty over biblical Israel as a precondition for the Second Coming, after which Jews either convert or are destroyed. This is Zionism-as-antisemitism in its starkest form: Jews instrumentalized as props in a Christian end-times drama, their survival irrelevant or actively undesired. Yet Israel is banking its future on an alliance with people who, in their own theological framework, have a death wish for Jewish continuity.
Herzl wanted to escape the contempt of Europe. He built a state that now depends on the rabid perverted sick eschatological fantasies of its successors.
I must qualify as I always forget, we’re talking about Eastern European and Ashkenazi jews. They form a part of and are not “the Jewish people”.