Zionism is a form of religious fanaticism: interpreting holy scriptures literally and attempting to implement some kind of heaven on Earth. It’s a delusion, it’s confusing the world of the soul with the real world. It’s not so different from children who don’t distinguish clearly between fairytales and reality: “we would say that there would be a magic land that God promised to us, and we would say that nobody else can have it”…
Obviously, Judaism is not the only religion in which some people fall into extremism: Christians committed so many massacres in the name of God, from the Crusades to the Spanish Inquisition and the Wars of religion. Another notable and more recent example is the self-proclaimed Islamic Slate,1 opportunistically using the mess left by the wars in Syria and Iraq to impose a new caliphate.
Religious fanaticism originates from psychological compensation: people who are in a religious environment but feel inadequate, incomplete or powerless2 may project their negative emotions on a lack of religion, on a feeling of “not enough God”. As a consequence, they try to satisfy their craving of “stronger religion” by being and acting more visibly religious, setting higher standards for devotion, even creating new religious duties, all of this meant to fill their inner void. Of course, on the psychological level, it can never work: compensating an imaginary issue is bound to fail, the person should re-assess their feeling about the issue instead. But a lot of people try anyway, and in the case of religious fanaticism their obsession often meets other people’s obsessions (religion is like this), and then it becomes a political movement which can cause a whole lot of trouble for everybody else.
Sadly, the religious nuts are often so convinced of their own delusion, and they are so loud about it, that they end up being the de-facto representative of their religions, even though they are usually the least faithful to what their religion actually says. Typically, people who truly believe don’t feel the need to be loud and to fight about it; they also acknowledge their own doubts. Tragically, religious fanaticism tends to lead to violence against those who don’t adhere to the religion, or don’t adhere to the same level of higher standard required by the fanatics.3 This results in these supposedly very religious people killing other people, typically in perfect contradiction with one of the main rules of their religion: “Thou shalt not kill”.
Zionism belongs to this tradition of religious fanaticism which became a strong political movement, thanks to the colonialist atmosphere in which it was born, but also because Jews were often victims of antisemitism, another form of religious fanaticism. The Holocaust gave Zionism an unfortunate perfect justification: collectively, Jews have been the victims of the most horrible crime there can be and deserved so much compassion, help and reparations. But what they were given with the sucess of Zionism and the creation of Israel is the possibility to now use violence on another group of people, the Palestinians. And that’s precisely what they did, and the more the Arabs were fighting Israel to defend themselves, the more they were giving Israel reasons to feel victimized again, thus to feel that they must protect themselves more and more. Since “the best defense is a good offense”,4 every war the Arabs did against Israel was an opportunity for Israel to strengthen their domination on Palestinians, to take more land from them, and to justify the idea that Palestinians cannot be trusted with an independant country.
In principle, there was no reason to give an inhabited land to Zionists in the first place: it’s not because your holy book says it that it has to happen.5 It’s also a bad precedent: what if Pastafarians discover in their holy book that California is their holy land, are they allowed to take it and kick out current inhabitants too? But in the years after WW2, it certainly was much harder to reject Holocaust’s victims request. First, because many European Jews had their homes and property stolen, becoming refugees; second, because the white people who decided this at the time were naturally racist:6 they probably thought that kicking out a few Arabs from their homes, meh… it’s not great but it’s not such a big deal, at least not as big a deal as asking some white “civilized” people to move away.
The history of Israel is full of bigotry and violence. The general evolution of humankind and the world is in the opposite direction, slowly going towards more peace and tolerance. As a result, the intolerance that the state of Israel shows towards Palestinians is becoming anachronistic, and the country is losing support because the divergence widens: on the one hand, we have a decolonized world which has officially accepted diversity and universal human rights and tries to progress in this direction. On the other hand, a country which still sees itself as dominant and more worthy of the land that it claims, and dismisses indigeneous claims for justice. Sooner or later, the country will have to go through some kind of collective decompensation and this is unlikely to happen smoothly.
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Israel is also self-proclaimed. It defines itself as the nation of Jewish people, but it didn’t actually ask Jews in the world: some of them were anti-Zionist from the start; many of them were perfectly fine where they were living, including in Arab countries, until the violence of Israel caused their host country to become hostile. One may wonder if Israel did more to counter or to encourage antisemitism. The other similarity between IS and Israel is that they both started as terrorist movements. ↩︎
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These are very common negative emotions that any human may experience at some point, more or less intensely. In brief, psychologically healthy persons would tend to acknowledge these feelings and to embrace their own weaknesses as part of being human; other people choose to use some form of violence on themselves (e.g. shame) or others (e.g. “it’s their fault, they should be punished”; whoever is “they”). The compensation mechanism belongs to the latter category: an alleged solution to the negative emotion is adopted; obviously this solution never fixes fixes the issue (or only temporarily); the person feels that they must insist in this direction and make it stronger/harder, that is use violence. ↩︎
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For instance, “high-standard” Zionists don’t accept that other Israeli citizens criticize the massacre of Palestinians. ↩︎
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This idea is always used to justify violence: since it makes attacking a form of defence, it blurs the distinction between the two and therefore legitimates violence in general. You can kill thousands of children and pretend that it’s for the sake of security, for instance. ↩︎
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The idea that something holy for you should also be holy for everyone else is so misguided: you don’t consider the other religions’ holy books as holy, right? This is a clear sign of religious fanaticism when one tries to impose their beliefs on everybody else. ↩︎
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At the time in 1948, neither the US, the UK or France were giving all their inhabitants the same citizen rights. They were all apartheid states, but the concept didn’t exist yet. ↩︎