By DAVID TURNERUpdated: MARCH 5, 2018 05:55
Jewry in the United States has completely lost touch with reality regarding Zionism which, after all, describes the reason we decided it was necessary to create a state for Diaspora Jewry! When our surroundings are relatively quiet, we escape into the fiction of security and "exceptionalism." And I am here not just describing our US community which, as I write, sees and experiences daily increasing antisemitism in those "relatively quiet" surroundings (talk of self-deception). Just eighty years ago as a community we inherited the word "exceptional" in describing our good fortune in “homeland” from our German community, believed Hitler and the Nazis would soon be thrown out of office by the cultured and sensible — the "Good Germans" among whom they lived!Unfortunately, that which is today true of our Diaspora is true also of the state Zionism that was created. Based on Israeli policy and political identity, partisanship in “the state of the Jews” has grown so deep between right and left, religious and secular, that Israel now appears hostile to the Diaspora that created it!News Flash: Israel is seventy years old. Zionism declared independence just three years after our few survivors were liberated from the camps; Auschwitz crematoria barely had time to cool. A sane and sensible assessment of the situation of the Diaspora (and in its current situation, I consider Israel just one more Diaspora community) should confirm that the Holocaust was not "exceptional," that two-thousand years of previous persecution confirms that Modernity not only has not reduced but has greatly increased the threat to Jews.Can we afford the luxury of “political” partisanship; of ideological fissures between "left" and "right"?Are we self-condemned? Are we doomed to remain complicit in our own tragedy?