The Israel we knew is gone forever

Like most every kid who came up in a Christian home in the middle decades of the last century, I was raised to have a profound respect for the Jewish people and their long overdue homeland. With the creation of the state of Israel, a land without people for a people without land, biblical prophecies were coming true all over the place! The Six Day War cemented our bond. The hand of God alone permitted the Chosen People to prevail when their massed enemies unleashed a sneak attack on them! In ‘73 we doubled down. Back in the day, Israel was a destination for many idealistic young people who wanted to demonstrate solidarity by spending some time on a kibbutz. Today the idealistic young people prefer to demonstrate solidarity with the Palestinians. What changed? One thing that changed is that my generation outgrew the Sunday School propaganda we had marinated in throughout our childhoods. We learned that the land without people actually had people after all. We learned those people had been displaced. The realization slowly dawned on us they remained displaced decades after the fact. The resistance of the displaced people against their displacers began to get serious attention by the late ‘60s. The “terrorism” of the PLO led, in the fullness of time, to the negotiation of the fabled “two-state solution.” The Oslo Accords were to be the first step on the way to that solution. In 1994 PM Yitzak Rabin and PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat shared the Nobel Peace Prize for the Oslo Accords. The following year, Rabin was murdered by a right-wing Jewish religious nutter. The two-state solution died with Yitzak Rabin. The people who killed him now steer the ship of state. There will be no peace. There will be no two-state solution. As progressive Israelis abandon ship, as they have been doing for years and will do with increasing urgency going forward, the land we once idealized will become the preserve of Jewish supremacists determined to cleanse the land of the “Children of Darkness.” Yes, they talk like that. And the greatest democracy in history, the ultimate redoubt of human rights, the City on a Hill shining freedom’s light into the darkness of creeping authoritarianism, the United States of America, with the most powerful military in the history of history, backs up Israel’s genocide in Gaza 100%.