If I were a Zionist, I'd be Z: How Generations of Jews have Abandoned their Children to Face the Reckoning Alone
If I were a Zionist, I’d be Z.
The character ‘Z’, described by Amos Oz in his short piece “The Tender Among You, and Very Delicate” is a not an appealing individual.[1] His unapologetic, avowedly eliminationist Zionism will shock the conscience of readers, especially the Jews that Z disdainfully calls “Zhids” – those who believe that only a humanistic, morally driven world view, accompanied by acts of conscience, can bring an end to the violence in Palestine and Israel.
But Z’s Zionism, liberated from the burden of morality and the self-inflicted contradictions that plague many of those who identify as ‘left’ or ‘centrist’ Zionists, has an integrity and consistency shared by few of the movement’s defenders. His repellent but unqualified honesty highlights the tragic flaw at the heart of almost all defences of Israel: the reliance on a creation fable at the core of which lies a vision of the Jews as The Innocents who came to Palestine with a solid moral claim to the land, had only the best intentions, made honorable choices at each fork in the road and yet were faced with irrational, intractable, antisemitic others who for no legitimate reason rejected their wishes to create a Jewish state in Palestine.
For a hundred years this tale has endured as sacred text – with all acts of Israeli aggression legitimized as self-defense against the original sin (and current manifestations) of Arab rejection.
Now, as the creation fable confronts its final unravelling, its chroniclers stand cemented on their Island of safety, claiming to be the Jewish people’s loyal guardians. Clinging with childlike blamelessness to their vision of a virtuous Israel, today’s Innocents declare their independence from the pain of reckoning, even as their children are dragged by a powerful undertow toward a tempestuous ocean, destined to assume the full weight of retribution and reparation.
In contrast to The Innocents, Z presents as an adult. Willing to be the anti-hero, he recognizes that saving the Jews from ever-recurring cycles of persecution requires his people voluntarily shapeshift from victim to perpetrator. He bids farewell to the wholesomeness that emerged from the untainted victimhood of history and rejects the many layers of self-deception required to uphold the story of Israel as a light unto the nations. He declares his debt to future generations by accepting judgment for the crimes he is prepared to commit and by confronting the reckoning head on, rather than transferring it to his children.
The Only Consistent Zionist
Z’s monologue is minimalist – as riveting as it is repulsive. And while his words and tone echo many Zionists from Vladimir Jabotinsky to those on the Israeli right today, he may be the only (albeit fictional) Zionist who has not tried to convince himself or the world that the conditions of Israel’s founding, or the choices it has made to justify and perpetuate the occupation, are justifiable on moral grounds.
Jews, Z argues, have been screwed by history, and they will be screwed again. Some well-meaning Israeli puritans and some naïve Diaspora Jews have either failed to realize that Israel is the only place they can survive, or waste their time trying to prove Israel’s virtues to an unresponsive Gentile world. The Jews’ choice, as Z sees it, it to save themselves at any cost – and Z’s ‘costs’ are not for the faint of heart: they include disproportionate violence, ethnic cleansing, possibly liquidation. Morality has no place in his world governed by necessity. “If anyone raises a hand against my children,” says Z, “I'll destroy him – and his children – with or without your vaunted 'purity of arms.'”
Z is not haunted by the knotty bind of victimhood that grips so many of The Innocents – Jews who are attached to a righteous vision of our people, addicted to “they hate us for who we are” and unable to see that “they also hate us for what we do, and we have done hateful things”. His mission to save the Jewish people does not require coatings of denial because Z believes Israel evolved from an historical necessity, not a moral imperative, and consequently he does not believe Jews do or should behave more purely than others. Unlike so many of The Innocents, Z acknowledges Arab claims to the land and believes Jews ‘won’ not because they had greater claims but because their predicament made them more determined. They had reached a point of no return – a place where they would choose either to be slaves to history and the ever-recurring rage of Gentiles, or take their fate into their own hands.
Z’s position is thus free of the logical hiccups that have led so many Zionists to believe that a Jewish state could be built on land inhabited by Arabs for over a millennium without encountering resistance, or brand that resistance as antisemitic without investigating the actual causes of The Original No; that a secular movement in a secular global order could claim the Bible as its deed to a land whose natives adhered to another holy text, and that this should pass without conflict; or that, in the face of a relentless, punitive and ever expanding occupation, the Palestinians would defy the logic of resistance and keep blood off the table.
Humanists and Survivalists
Z’s Zionism appears so different from that of The Innocents (mostly ‘liberal’ or ‘centrist’ Jews) because the latter emerges from the victimhood of the Holocaust. It is often accompanied by a narrative in which the Jews, while wounded and traumatized, are highly sensitized to and committed to addressing the suffering of others. In contrast, Z’s survivalist approach is focused only on ensuring the safety of other Jews, and arises from the shame and emasculation famously memorialized in Nahman Bialik’s piercing indictment of Jewish men – the “crouched husbands, bridegrooms, brothers, peering from the cracks” during the early 20th century pogroms, terrorized and passive as they watched their women raped and children killed.[2]. While nothing in Jewish history compares to the Holocaust’s scale and brutality, it was the response to these late 19th//early 20th century pogroms and the rejection of the Jews’ hopes for assimilation in Europe that led to the Original Never Again, and provided the catalyst for Zionism: never again would we put our fate in the hands of others, never again would we believe the world could evolve beyond antisemitism, never again would we mistake a moment of cultural enlightenment and specious integration for a point of arrival. Instead of fighting for a change in others, Zionism give birth to a liberation movement based on the notion of auto-emancipation – Jews would seize the reigns of fate and change the course of their own future.
For many however, Z included, the change required by auto-emancipation would not be realized only by creating a land-based safe haven for Jews. Zionism was also a movement that required an internal change within each Jew: from weak, parasitical, cosmopolitan, untethered, impotent and brutalized, to strong, territorialized, independent, laboring, muscular[3] and willing when necessary to be on the brutalizing side of the victim-perpetrator equation.
Because Z embraces all of the consequences that flow from these internal changes, he never finds himself begging the world to accept duplicity. He does not utter the lament of The Innocents, who wish to cherry-pick their ethics, insisting on being identified with virtue and victimization while for decades, both unwittingly and knowingly, supporting the policies of the survivalists. Z saw that nothing good would come from self-deception or camouflage, of rationalizing Israel’s behavior as honorable, or using the charge of antisemitism to silence those who believe that evidence should override blind faith in discussions around Palestine and Israel.
Far from denying or being ashamed of Jewish brutality, Z sees it as falling between inevitable and constructive: inevitable because he recognizes that the creation of a Jewish state on a land whose population was comprised of 90% Arabs could never have been peaceful and bloodless; and constructive because, in creating more anti-Jewish sentiment, Israel’s bad behavior (he was referring to events in Lebanon in the early 1980s), will terrify Diaspora Jews, disabusing them of the notion that they can survive abroad and send them flying, sobered and humbled, to Israel.
As for those who wanted Zionism to be good, the soft Left in particular, Z had nothing but disdain. Go out and win your humanitarian prize for virtue, he told his interviewer Amos Oz. I’m happy to be hated, while carrying the future of this country on my shoulders.
Z and October 7th
Given this worldview, Z’s reaction to October 7th and its aftermath would have been radically different from the rallying cry of The Innocents.
He would have considered the Hamas assault to be inevitable, its viciousness unsurprising and the Israeli response necessary, or likely too moderate.
He would have mocked the bone cracking moral contortions that The Innocents have engaged in to try and retain the moral high ground in the face of unconscionable mass slaughter and destruction in Gaza.
He would have scoffed at the Hamas-denouncing or ceasefire-denouncing petitions Jews were inflicting on their friends, for he would have openly admitted that he himself never stood up to denounce decades of Israeli brutality against Palestinians before October 7th and does not expect Palestinians to cry for their oppressors’ dead.
He would have known that the laments about “double standards for Israel” are farcical, given that it is often Israel and its Jewish supporters themselves that hold the country to a higher standard and thereby fan the flames of rage: claiming moral superiority as it exhibits ruthless inhumanity, identifying as a lone democratic heartland in middle of savage Arab world while making a mockery of democracy, or charging antisemitism when friends and enemies alike stare in disbelief at the unintelligible math of Israelis, who demand the world prioritize the tragedy of hundreds of hostages while they ignore, deny, rationalize or encourage the blood flowing from 40,000+ dead.
And he would have rolled his eyes at the deep slumber that lulled The Innocents into believing that Palestinians would remain docile while Israel tightened its chokehold; or that Israel could escape the natural laws of cause and effect to such an extent that one people can colonize, displace, expel, occupy, and oppress another with impunity for a hundred years, and no child would be savagely torn from its mother’s arms and massacred.
This last point is not a justification for violence, an indifference to the suffering of the Israeli hostages or their families, a choice to ‘blame the victim’ or a claim about the moral purity of Palestinians or their defenders. Dismissing it on those grounds is the laziest route to righteousness, a timeworn path that has led us to the predicament we find ourselves in now: with so many Jews miseducated about the history of the conflict and Israel’s role in its evolution, inclined to smother rather than promote crucial deliberations relevant to their own future as well as that of the Palestinians, bolstering the politics of revenge and morally implicated in its outcomes, and unwilling to hold themselves or their leaders accountable for their part in assembling the universe we are currently inhabit.
But Z Was Wrong…
I don’t of course endorse Z’s rationale for Zionism. And despite the title of this article, I could not be Z, even if I were a Zionist.
Not only because of his extreme, amoral and coldblooded position.
Not only because Z’s views appear to bolster the voices in Israel today that so closely echo his own, openly announcing their intensions to annihilate, starve, plague, cleanse, with a ruthlessness that is proud of itself.
And not only because it is implausible to endorse Z’s view in a world that (in theory, but as we have seen clearly not in practice) cannot sanction might-makes-right or ‘my Bible says so’ versions of self-determination and international law.
The other reason I can’t be Z is simply because Z was wrong: Israel could not, and can never, provide a safe haven for Jews.
Because while the Jews’ longing for a safe haven was genuine, the Zionist vision was captivating, the spiritual and historical connections to the land were profound, the need was urgent and the options for the Jews were limited, neither longing, vision, connection, need nor even urgency could ever have translated into rights for those whose own rights were being sacrificed in their name. And notwithstanding the chorus of blame The Innocents have relied on to sustain the edifice of the fable – the premise that Zionism was natural, right and good and was hampered only by uncompromising and cruel Arabs – there was no scenario in which the Palestinian Arabs (or any native population) could accept that they should pay the price for the horrors of European antisemitism, having to offer the Jews their homeland while those same Europeans (and the US) closed their doors to Jews.
There was no scenario in which religious and historical connections to a land could serve as justification for the right of return in the eyes of the Palestinian Arabs (or any a native population) – especially as they were witnessing the injurious effects of a secular, nationalistic political movement that came to Palestine, fully equipped with the menacing apparel that is embedded in the DNA of all national movements.
There was no scenario in which the Palestinian Arabs (or any a native population) would have acquiesced to the machinations of an Imperial power promising their land to another people, while those who had long lived there were neither recognized as a people nor consulted on how they wished to determine their fate, and were treated as inferior, expendable and their links to the land denied or considered immaterial.
And there was no scenario in which a few good Jews or a few good Arabs could have squared this circle.
Tragically for all, there was no path for a Jewish state on an Arab land that was not destined for bloodshed. If this sounds too deterministic and counter intuitive for many Jews, I would challenge them to deep dive into the history and hold the painful ambiguity that even the most genuine and urgent of needs do not and cannot translate seamlessly into rights. Holding the Palestinians accountable for declining to accept responsibility for solving the Jewish problem by embracing Zionism is the equivalent of asking one people to choose the well-being of strangers over their own. Just as seeing Oct 7thsimply as an act that confirms a century of Jewish assumptions about the barbarian, causeless, Jew-hating brutality of allPalestinians is the equivalent of reading only the last chapter of an epic saga and pronouncing a verdict on the whole book.
As long as Israel remains an exclusivist occupier, a raving belligerent demolishing human beings and lands at will, and a deviant democracy dedicated to securing rights only for its Jewish citizens, it can never fulfil its promise of being a safe haven for Jews or anyone else. The ruthless mass slaughter and exterminationist zeal in Gaza, and its justifications by an unholy alliance of Jews, conservative diehards, right-wing fanatics, evangelists, antisemites and conscience-free world leaders, has made Israel the least safe place on earth for Jews, and has put those in the Diaspora in greater danger than they have been in recent memory. Gaza has given birth to yet another generation of Palestinians who will be confirmed in their view of Israel as an implacable state that knows no language but force; and who will see Israelis and their brethren in the Diaspora as having embraced the very forms of dehumanization and culpable ignorance that their own people suffered from for centuries.
But despite it all, Z’s argument is illuminating. His refusal to see himself or Jews as better than their enemies casts a crystal-clear spotlight on the hypocrisy of his own acolytes in Israel, who echo his tone and act out his fantasies and yet still demand the world to see them as morally superior to those they slay: and on the misplaced righteousness of the Innocents, who are still trying to force feed their fable of Israel on a world that long ago graduated to hard facts and historical truths.
In contrast to The Innocents, Z was a victim choosing his fate, an active sinner in the service of his people. As such, he could avoid the most despicable of roles, the one that Jews suffered most from and so many are tragically inhabiting today – that of the bystander: those who refuse to see the humanity of their adversary because they cannot bear how it will reflect back on their own, who turn away from readily available information in order to preserve a story that aligns with their needs, their personal self-image, or their communal sense of belonging. Z was willing to witness realities on the ground rather than taking refuge in the fable, and to take responsibility for his actions or be judged as malicious so that his children would escape his fate. His values and actions were aligned.
And to the question that haunted so many of our dreams – what would we have done had we lived in a time like Nazi German? Would we have been the informer, the bystander, the perpetrator, the accomplice, a member of the resistance? – Z would have answered: I could not care less about being a virtuous member of any resistance or creating a more just world. I would have saved the Jews and trampled over any bodies that stood in my way.
How would The Innocents answer this question today?
Many would reject Z’s response, believing that the question had longer tentacles. From a more humanistic perspective, they might argue that the question was not only about helping fellow Jews but about fighting for a world in which no one (including Jews) would be subject to dehumanization, exclusivist nationalism, incitement, racism or bystander syndrome. It was about how Jews could make use of their sharply honed lens, bequeathed to them by the cruel lessons of history, to keep a watchful eye for the guileful way that cruelty and hypocrisy show up in the most unexpected of places, the most unpredictable of disguises. So many of The Innocents, in their work and daily lives, fight tirelessly for and support social causes, trying to align Jewish values and historical memory with their actions in the world and toward others. In their dreams they believed, they hoped, they would be the ones: the ones who would resist, the ones who would notice the deceptions woven into the tempting propaganda of belonging, the ones who would stand up for what is right in the face of heavy pressures and accusations of treachery from their own friends, family and neighbors.
And yet still now, in light of irrefutable evidence, a hundred-year-old historical record and common sense, when it comes to Palestine The Innocents choose wilful blindness, silence, and rationalization. And while most would fiercely reject the idea of inhabiting the same moral universe as Z, day after day they support and enable what he stands for.
The Abandonment of Generations: Refusing to Glimpse into our Children’s Future
Trauma is not a choice. No one can question the involuntary nature of what as Jews we felt in our bodies and spirits in response to the massacres of October 7th, or any event that so explicitly evokes the experiences of our parents, grandparents and ancestors, so unnervingly conjures the syntax of our family chronicles, so accurately mirrors the grotesque images that crowd our minds.
But even (sometimes especially) victims of trauma have a choice about what to do with a visceral reaction. Electing to see the entire history Palestine/Israel as well as the events of the past year exclusively through the lens of trauma and Innocence has been a choice with calamitous consequences for the Palestinians, on whom yet another round of fresh traumas and incalculable grief have been inflicted. The choice has also led to collateral damage for the Jews themselves – not to be compared with the material and physical annihilation of human beings in Gaza, but with vital relevance to their future as well as our own: relevant for the Palestinians because the longer The Innocents use victimhood as their shield against reality the more violence against Palestinians will be legitimatized. And relevant for the Jews because, by refusing to fathom the unrecognizable landscape their children will have to reckon with, The Innocents have abandoned these children to face the wrath of the future alone.
If The Innocents will not shift in their approach toward Palestine/Israel from a basic sense of humanity; if they are not driven by a wish to align their stated values with their actions and include Palestinians in their fight for democracy, dignity, human rights and a struggle for social justice: then perhaps only a more self-centered motivation will do – glimpsing into the future that our children will face and the minefield they have been bequeathed, thanks to the choices made by their parents.
The Future beyond the Fable
Our children will no longer inhabit the world we knew: one where in the West and especially in the US a certain philo-Semitism reigned, and where many harbored a disturbing fascination with our tales of slaughter and victimhood. A world where endless movies and documentaries were made to commemorate our heroism and our losses, museum recounted the threads of our martyrdom, universities created departments to study our culture and the historical causes of our persecution.
Our children will inhabit a world where Jewish history and stories of victimization will resonate less if at all, in great part because of how Jews have weaponized these to justify acts of violence since the advent of Zionism, and the silencing of legitimate debate today. In a world already weary of trying to reconcile the tension between Jews identifying as The Innocents while defending the indefensible, Israel has now cast the darkest shadow over the legacy of the Holocaust. Its reaction to October 7th, The Innocents’ support for the horror it has wrought and their swift acquiescence to the notion that there was no other way to respond, protect Israelis or fight for the hostages – these have all created a second Palestinian Nakba that will blight much of the remaining sympathy for the Jewish plight.
In the post-fable world the Palestinian struggle will no longer be represented in mainstream news through photos of inanimate rubble in Gaza, watered down headlines about occasional raids in the West Bank or acts of violence against Israelis. Rather, the life sagas of Palestinian human beings for over a century will finally enter the general public consciousness – a century of struggle, resistance, perseverance, survival, decimation and trauma – and take their rightful place in museums, archives, and academic departments. The films, books and documentaries that our children and their friends will see and read will not feature good Jews and evil Nazis; the protagonists will not be the sexy female Israeli soldier, the tough but fair-minded Mossad agent, the emaciated victim trying to survive the living hell of Auschwitz. They will be the messianic settlers inflicting pogroms on Palestinians. They will be young Israeli soldiers being pumped up by a jingoistic narrative, one that uses the same apparatus of dehumanization that our own persecutors used as they prepared to turn murder into a remorseless enterprise. They will be the political leaders who conspired to tell the world a fable they knew did not depict the truth. They will be the Israeli citizens, demonstrating with indignation against the threats to Jewish democracy while never raising a voice for the victims of Israeli oppression; or failing to notice the desecration of culture, erasure of history and denial of rights as hand me down crimes, learned from our own persecutors and passed to Israel’s victims. And worst of all, in these depictions Jews will be the bystanders, the implicated subjects: those who shuttered their windows to avoid seeing what lay across the border, who did not read beyond censored history for fear of destabilizing their lives, and who misled their flock or their children, depriving them of the knowledge, understanding and courage they needed in order to confront and help construct a post-fable world.
This will be the most mortifying of roles for our children to behold in their parents because of what we learned from our own history: that blaming the evil tyrant or the perverted government is not a path toward absolution because without the bystanders who turn away, acquiesce, deny, dehumanize or rationalize, no policy of mass violence, displacement, expulsion or extermination can prevail.
Our children, and our children’s children, and their children – they will be seeing these pictures, hearing these stories, living through that fundamental change in collective self-image.
And to the question posed by their friends – your parents turned a blind eye to that? They justified that? They celebratedthat? – those children will stand exposed and confused. Unlike their parents, they will not be able to cling to Innocence behind their mother’s skirt but will instead experience a swift transition to adulthood.
But to imagine our children will only be encountering a sense of identity displacement or crisis of conscience is to miss the bigger picture, the fact that Israel and its supporters will face a full reckoning: one that will not be possible to repress, deny or escape, one that will not leave Israel as a Jewish state intact, one that will see “ordinary people” brought to trial for their role in racist policies or war crimes that today The Innocents tell themselves are necessary acts of self-defensive, while the rest will face a collective social reckoning and that upends every aspect of their world.
Those who today will not look into this future or fathom what their children will encounter, who will only view the history of the conflict through the lens of trauma and Innocence, who proudly declare their wilful blindness to be loyalty to Israel: It is they who will be sending their children to sit unprotected on the witness stand, interrogated on the hotseats of truth commissions, answering for their parents’ refusal of accountability. It is they who, in order to remain shielded in the saferoom of blamelessness, are willing to leave their descendants alone to face to the inevitable cross-examinations of history.
How this abandonment of future generations has been construed as love of and loyalty to Jews is yet another of the calamitous deceptions the Jewish people has perpetrated on itself.
[1] “The Tender Among you, and Very Delicate” in Amos Oz, In the Land of Israel (Mariner Books” October, 1993)
[2] H.N. Bialik, “In The City of Slaughter”.
[3] Muscular Judaism or (muscular Jewry) is a term coined by Max Nordau in a speech at the Second Zionist Congress in 1898.