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Why We Should All Be Zionists

(Jewish Insider) Einat Wilf interviewed by Tori Bergel - Former Knesset Member Einat Wilf's most recent book is We Should All Be Zionists: Essays on the Jewish State and the Path to Peace. The book "was the culmination of four years of writing essays that spoke about the importance of Zionism to Jews abroad [and] the importance of Zionism to the Arab world as a path to peace....It's a kind of revival of secular Zionism." "Zionism is essentially a constructive idea. It's an idea about imagining a future and then building that future, and it's all about construction, it's all about building. And this is why Zionism has been a remarkably powerful idea." "Anti-Zionism is a destructive idea by its very definition. It's an idea that sees something vibrant, something that was built, and believes that it shouldn't exist, that it must be destroyed." "As long as the Palestinian goal remains the same...that the goal was no Jewish state in any border whatsoever between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea; as long as their supreme goal is first and foremost that the Jews will not have their state in any part of the land, the problem is not whether they use BDS or whether they use demonstrations or whether they use terrorism, the problem is that regardless of the means that they try to pursue, they're pursuing a destructive goal which, as a result, will not succeed because destructive goals just do not have the energy that we can see that a constructive goal like classic Zionism has." "In the UNRWA schools and in the UNRWA refugee camps, a separate Palestinian national identity was forged....That in itself is not a problem, most of the world's national identities are fairly recent, but the problem is that the foundational ethos became one of return and revenge, and this remains the foundational ethos, not just of the Palestinian people, but the one that is taught at UNRWA schools. And Western nations that fund UNRWA to billions of dollars are essentially fueling the conflict." "[In] the American administration...they just think of it as cheap money to buy quiet....This was protection money. This was a bribe. 'Let's just give this money to buy another year of quiet,' but it actually doesn't buy quiet....It definitely does not buy quiet in the long term, because it feeds another generation of Palestinians who believe it is their most noble duty to rid the land of Zionism and of the Jewish state. And ultimately, the people who pay for that are not Americans...the people who pay for that are Israelis in blood and life."
2023-04-03 00:00:00
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