Yom Ha'atzmaut

Ben Chorin, as he often does, has put some of my thoughts down in a manner far more articulate than I am capable of. His post about Mayberry and Yom Ha'azmaut gets right down to one of the concerns of my very ambivalent Zionism. Obviously, he is not as ambivalent as I am, but I think that he very clearly states at least one of my issues. The money quote: "I think all the ideological arguments are post facto rationalizations for a decision that is made at the gut level about one fundamental question: are we prepared to be the goyim?" That question is one that we have to ask ourselves whenever we see footage of Israelis bulldozing houses in Yesha. I'm not questioning their justification, the state absolutely has a right to defend itself. But the fact that Jews have the power to do this represents a fundemental change in the dynamic between Jews and Goyim. The Israeli historical narrative still wants to see the Jews, and Israel as the Jewish state, as small and oppressed by the rest of the world, and this simply not true. In Israel, the Jews are to the Goyim as the Goyim were once to the Jews, in the power we have over them, if not in the way that we treat them (and both sides of that question can be argued). The point is, we could treat them as we were treated. That was never an option for the Jews, and it changes everything. It's something that we need to think long and hard about, and that I'm not so comfortable with. I have other concerns with the Zionist project, as well as an aesthetic distaste for Israeli culture, so I am hardly in Ben Chorin's camp on Zionism in general, but in this particular case, I think he's spot on.