Linda Dayan sees Israeli society’s moral unease over settler violence as a last chance to save Israel. But what if the violence is not a betrayal of Israel , but an expression of the underlying logic of Zionism? If the problem is the ideology itself, rather than its latest excesses, then perhaps the question is not how to save Zionism and Israel, but what must replace them.
In a recent Haaretz newsletter, Linda Dayan laments the Zionist colony’s probable demise, prompted by the relentless, vicious attacks by fascist Jewish supremacists on Palestinians in eastern occupied Palestine (aka the West Bank).
She notes that a majority of Israelis are uncomfortable over the violence, “tut-tut[ting] over each attack at the dinner table”, partly out of empathy with Palestinians – so she believes – and partly out of the realisation this brutish violence will doom them as a “country and as a people with humanity”.
“Therefore,” she concludes, “it is the majority that tut-tuts over each attack at the dinner table that must stand up and fight this if we wish to survive – as a country and as people with humanity. We must save our Palestinian neighbors from our Jewish brothers, or we are doomed.”
The unfortunate truth for Dayan is that the Zionist colony was doomed already, from way back in 1897. Namely, that Zionism conceived of establishing a Jewish state in a land already overwhelmingly inhabited by another people
Zionism is its own pathogen. Restoration of Palestine is the cure. Only then can these people claim their humanity and contemplate a future in that land that does not involve Palestinians resisting them and the world despising them.
Dayan should therefore note: there is a way out of this, and it involves justice rather than domination. Stopping Jewish settler violence, even were that possible (which one can doubt), would not resolve the dire condition of Palestinians or guarantee their rights.
All forms of domination must end.