Minister Naftali Bennett, You Are Killing Zionism

An answer to the minister who has come this close to accusing me of treason.

Rogel Alpher Jul 17, 2016

Education and Diaspora Affairs Minister Naftali Bennett accuses me of undermining “the foundations of the Zionist enterprise,” and of “blatant subversion of the foundations of our existence here and the future of the Jewish people” (Haaretz July 12). From here it is a very short road to marking me as an enemy of the people. The phrase “blatant subversion of the foundations of our existence here and the future of the Jewish people” smacks of treason. Bennett is one of the government’s senior ministers and also a member of the security cabinet. If he saw fit to publish an article under his name accusing a journalist of treason, one might be permitted to fear that it would follow naturally for Bennett to try to shut that journalist up by restricting his freedom of expression. That would obviously follow, even necessarily follow, in order to protect “the foundations of our existence here” and “the future of the Jewish people.”

Naftali, you are killing Zionism. You killed the Jewish state. You and your settlements. You and your occupation. You and your apartheid. I am choking on the broth you cooked. You established a violent binational state in Israel, awash in terror, radical nationalism and fundamentalist religion. You are blatantly subverting the foundations of all of our existence here, Jews and Palestinians. You have left me no choice but to declare that I feel a sense of shared fate with the Palestinians in Israel and the territories. Because I am a democrat. And I believe in universal morality. I am not a fascist like you.

You claim that “The State of Israel is the state of the Jewish people…the nation is the starting point and securing its future is the goal and the means.” The continued control over millions of Palestinians without basic human rights in Judea and Samaria is not Zionism, Naftali. You are dispossessing them and excluding them, but they exist. They live there. That is their state too. And they are not Jews. And they are not Zionists. And your insistence on continuing to rule them has turned Israel into a state that is not Jewish and not democratic.

Naftali, because of you we are living in a binational state. That is the reality. Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion’s declaration that “a Jewish state has been established in the Land of Israel, which is the State of Israel,” is no longer relevant, I’m sorry to say. And therefore it is unacceptable to claim that Israel is the home of a Jewish baby born as an American citizen in Minneapolis as these lines are being written any more than it is the home of a Palestinian baby born at that same moment as a citizen of Israel in the town of Sakhnin. That is racism.

read more: http://www.haaretz.com/opinion/.premium-1.731346