Christopher Hitchens on Zionism

“I find that no other question so much reminds me of F. Scott Fitzgerald and his aphorism about the necessity of living with flat-out contradiction. Do I sometimes wish that Theodor Herzl and Chaim Weizmann had never persuaded either the Jews or the gentiles to create a quasi-utopian farmer-and-worker state at the eastern end of the Mediterranean? Yes. Do I wish that the Israeli air force could find and destroy all the arsenals of Hezbollah and Hamas and Islamic Jihad? Yes. Do I think it ridiculous that Viennese and Russian and German scholars and doctors should have vibrated to the mad rhythms of ancient so-called prophecies rather than helping to secularize and reform their own societies? Definitely. Do I feel horror and disgust at the thought that a whole new generation of Arab Palestinians is being born into the dispossession and/or occupation already suffered by their grandparents and even great-grandparents? Absolutely, I do.”

“It’s somehow absurd and trivial to use the word Israel and the expression 60 th birthday in the same sentence or the same breath. (What is this, some candle-bedecked ceremony in Miami?) The questions before us are somewhat more antique, and also a little more pressingly and urgently modern, than that. Has Zionism made Jews more safe or less safe? Has it cured the age-old problem of anti-Semitism or not? Is it part of the tikkun olam—the mandate for the healing and repair of the human world—or is it another rent and tear in the fabric? Jewish people are on all sides of this argument, as always. There are Hasidic rabbis who declare the Jewish state to be a blasphemy, but only because there can be no such state until the arrival of the Messiah (who may yet tarry). There are Jewish leftists who feel shame that a settler state was erected on the ruins of so many Palestinian villages. There are also Jews who collaborate with extreme-conservative Christians in an effort to bring on the day of Armageddon, when all these other questions will necessarily become moot. And, of course, there are Jews who simply continue to live in, or to support from a distance, a nerve-racked and high-tech little state that absorbs a lot of violence and cruelty and that has also shown itself very capable of inflicting the same.”