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he Israelis Have Nowhere Else to Go

(New York Times) Bret Stephens - The danger to Israel from moves at the ICC, or from campus protests, boycott and divestment efforts or various kinds of arms embargoes, are minimal. Contrary to some opinions, Israelis are not "settler-colonialists." Jews believe they are originally from the Land of Israel because they are. And Zionism, far from being a colonialist project, is the oldest anticolonialist struggle in history, starting during the Roman era, if not the Babylonian Captivity before it. The idea that Israeli Jews should return, like the Algerian French, to the lands of their forebears misses the point. The Israelis have nowhere else to go, a fact underscored by the waves of hatred now engulfing Jewish diasporic communities. They will not return to the lands of Russian pogroms, or Arab massacres, or the Holocaust. The more pressure is exerted on Israel to relent in the face of its enemies, the more Zionism it will generate. Nothing so crystallizes Jewish identity as the daily reminders of bigotry. Jews have the right to rule themselves as a sovereign state in their original homeland.
2024-05-23 00:00:00
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