{This is dedicated to Shirlee of Jews Down Under fame. It was in conversation with her that I came up with the idea for this piece and she is currently recovering from some very serious spinal surgery, so please send good thoughts and prayers her way. - ML}
We no longer generally think of it in such terms because Zionism fulfilled itself in 1948 and over the decades Jewish supporters of Israel have lost that sense of solidarity - that movement sensibility - that made the reestablishment of Israel possible to begin with.
What I am calling the "Movement for Jewish Freedom" is an attempt to reengage Zionism as a political movement grounded in solidarity with other groups who share common interests.
I imagine it as a subset of the movement for indigenous rights which, itself, is a subset of the international movement for the maintenance of liberal-democracies.
The Movement for Jewish Freedom is highly individualistic, fiercely idiosyncratic, and entirely non-partisan. It includes people as diverse from one another as Pamela Geller is from Alan Dershowitz.
Because the ideal of liberal-democracy is, by necessity, at the core of the Movement for Jewish Freedom it must oppose Islamic jurisprudence (al-Sharia). The reason for that is because al-Sharia is non-democratic and, according to its central precepts, must strip women, Gay people, and Infidels (kuffar) of their most basic civil liberties... often in a grotesquely violent manner.
Jewish Freedom Under the Umbrella of Liberal-Democracy
and Indigenous Rights
Many people who come out of the progressive-wing of the movement will squirm at notions like the necessity to "maintain liberal-democracies throughout the world." It will resonate as right-wing in a sort-of vaguely amorphous manner for many people. The word "neo-con" will quickly come to mind for some.
When I poke around the alleys and byways of the pro-Israel movement, however, I do not see much desire to impose liberal-democracy onto parts of the world that do not want it. This is a matter of culture. Some cultures are open to liberal-democracy and some are not. Liberal-democracy cannot be imposed upon cultures that do not want it, because then it would no longer be liberal democracy, now would it?.
Nonetheless, under the larger umbrella of liberal-democracy stands the movement for indigenous rights.
The movement for Jewish rights, in our ancestral homeland, is just one part of the much larger series of indigenous struggles throughout the world. The movement for the maintenance of liberal-democracy is key to indigenous rights because it is only through liberal-democratic systems that indigenous rights can be pursued as a matter of social justice. While the wheels of justice may grind slowly in the liberal-democratic West, at least they grind. In non-democratic systems, such as those bowing to Islamic law, submission is enforced through state violence. You get no discussion under these terms.
What you get are cracked skulls, wretched prisons, and torture.
A rising star within the Movement for Jewish Freedom, and a stalwart defender of indigenous rights, is Ryan Bellerose. Bellerose, a Métis from Canada - and the lone, sole American-style football playing, Native-American Zionist in the history of the universe - makes the point that Jewish people who care about the well-being of Israel would do well to embrace our own sense of indigeneity because we are, in fact, the only people on the planet with anything resembling a claim to indigenous status in that tiny part of the world.
Indeed, our ancestors lived and built and fought and made families in the Land of Israel for at least 3,500 years.
Our presence there well precedes the development of formal history. Thus to refer to the Arab invaders, who marched upon Judea and Samaria millennia later, as "indigenous" is to spit in the face of history.
I would submit to you that in order for the Movement for Jewish Freedom to advance toward its goal of Jewish autonomy on historically Jewish land - free from perpetual jihadi harassment and the constant screeching for genocide that so often comes out of the mosques - then we need to embrace our own sense as an indigenous people, among other indigenous people, fighting for rights of autonomy upon our own land.
As Bellerose has written, and I paraphrase, it is not merely a matter of standing on our tippy-toes, waving our hands in the air, and saying, "Hey! We're indigenous, too!" Instead, we need to politically engage with other indigenous peoples in a direct manner.
This will be difficult for many pro-Jewish / pro-Israel advocates because we do not generally think of ourselves in such terms and because the Palestinian-Arabs have already claimed that slot. But they have done so in a demonstrably false manner and we need always be ready to point this out.
In short, we need to stand with other indigenous peoples struggling for autonomy within liberal-democratic systems.
Our political opponents often seem comfortable with non-democratic forms of government. We, however, cannot afford to be. Nor, from any ethical perspective, would we want to be.
Some Varieties of Zionist Experience
The Movement for Jewish Freedom is diverse.
It includes Democrats and Republicans and those unregistered with any political party, such as myself. It includes hard-right conservatives and even a few hard-left progressives. (Difficult to imagine, I know.)
We are across-the-board, politically, ethnically, and across religious identities. Most activists in the movement naturally tend to be Jewish people, but some movement activists are not Jewish. Bellerose is clearly not Jewish and neither is another great friend and activist within the movement, Chloe Valdary.
But those who are friendly toward the movement come from all religious backgrounds. The most prominent of these, of course, are American Evangelical Christians who are earnest about Genesis 12:2 and 12:3, which reads:
And I will make you a great nation, And I will bless you, And make your name great; And so you shall be a blessing; And I will bless those who bless you, And the one who curses you I will curse. And in you all the families of the earth will be blessed.There are also, of course, plenty of Catholics who believe in Jewish autonomy in the Land of Israel. Plenty of Hindus and Buddhists and Theosophists and Rastafarians and even the random Muslim, or two.
One of the reasons for pro-Israel diversity around the world is disapproval of the jihadi tendencies among some within the Muslim faith. Our friends and supporters often recognize that al-Sharia is not only non-democratic, but highly fascistic in its implementation, thereby creating at least some sympathy for the Jewish people in the Middle East.
Jews and Christians lived as second and third-class non-citizens under the imperial boot of Islamic rule for thirteen centuries until the demise of the Ottoman Empire during World War I. That, I think, was probably more than enough.
Furthermore, of course, al-Sharia is not some noxious, but irrelevant, relic from the past, but is the reality of life for hundreds of millions of people from North Africa to the Arab world, on the continent of Asia, all the way to Jakarta.
Throughout the world all sorts of people from all sorts of different faiths and backgrounds and politics recognize this and are potential allies because they, too, understand that there is something deeply sadistic about any religious legal tradition that advocates, for example, the chopping off of a hand and a foot, from opposite sides of the body, as a form of "justice."
There are also ex-Muslims, like Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who oppose Qur'anic law, not to mention self-identified practicing Muslim reformers who acknowledge that Sharia seriously impinges upon the civil liberties of women, Gay people, and all "unbelievers."
Those of us who actively promote the movement for Jewish rights or Jewish liberty or Jewish freedom (whatever you want to say) include academicians like Cary Nelson and Gabriel Noah Brahm who edited The Case Against Academic Boycotts of Israel, which, as an aside, includes a piece by Tammi Rossman-Benjamin, of the AMCHA Initiative, entitled, "Interrogating the Academic Boycotters of Israel on American Campuses" that I well recommend.
The movement also includes prominent bloggers, such as the Elder of Ziyon, who - when he isn't plotting with the other Elders to take over first the world and then the rest of the universe - can be found exposing media hypocrisy and the kind of general nonsense that usually swirls around coverage of the Long Arab War Against the Jews.
The movement includes prominent legal analysts, such as Eugene Kontorovich, and journalists, like the Jerusalem Post's Khaled Abu Toameh or Italian journalist Giulio Meotti, who is published in the Arutz Sheva and the Gatestone Institute, among numerous other venues.
It also includes artists and musicians, such as Matisyahu, and even much loved cartoonists, like Yaakov Kirschen, the creator of Dry Bones.
But, most importantly, it includes just regular Jews, and regular friends of regular Jews, who do not like the entirely unjust way that Israel is treated by the international community and who do not very much appreciate the kind of long-standing, Koranically-based, hatred and violence that gave us 9/11 and the recent destruction of the ancient city of Palmyra, by the Islamic State (IS), in Syria.
The Enemy
Diaspora Jews, particularly of the left-leaning variety and for perfectly understandable reasons, are deeply uncomfortable with even the notion of "enemy."
No normal people want enemies. Normal people do not want war or to be forced into a position where they must take action against another people.
Unfortunately, the Jewish people, generation upon generation, century upon century, faced grinding hostility by both Europeans and Arab-Muslims. Thankfully, the Christian peoples have moved beyond institutionalized Jew Hatred and today some of our best friends on the planet come out of the western churches.
Sadly, the same cannot be said of the mosques.
Our enemies include virtually every single Arab government and much (if not most) of their religious leadership.
Our enemies do not include Muslims, in general, but merely those who would subject the rest of us to the mercies of Islamic law.
Furthermore, much of the western-left, almost the entirety of the United Nations, the European Union and the Obama administration, have proven themselves consistently hostile to the well-being of the Jewish people through being consistently hostile to the well-being of the Jewish State.
This hostility is justified on the grounds that Israel is a racist, colonialist, imperialist, apartheid state that has pushed the innocent indigenous population off of their land, while refusing to allow them autonomy in a state of their own on that land.
And that is the "Palestinian Narrative" in a concise form.
In truth, Palestinian-Arab nationalism emerged out of the larger Arab nation as a weapon. At the very core of "Palestinian" identity is the cruel goal of eliminating the Jewish State of Israel. It is their very reason to be as an allegedly distinct people. Hostility toward Israel, and towards Jews, is the glue that binds them and allows them to claim a distinct ethnicity, of sorts.
Why?
Because Israel is the Dhimmi that Got Away and the Arabs don't like it.
Jewish sovereignty on the land of our ancestors is understood not only as a terrible humiliation to the entire Arab nation, but as a direct violation of the will of Allah. Thus Jihad is both obligatory and sacred.
The very existence of Israel flies in the face of Qur'anic imperatives to maintain and expand Dar al-Islam at the expense of all non-Muslims. The dhimmi is supposed to be humiliated upon paying the Jizya - they had to crawl - but it is Israeli Jews who have humiliated their former social superiors, through surviving and thriving in freedom from dhimmitude within the State of Israel.
Meanwhile almost the entire Muslim world wallows in poverty and ignorance, violence and genocide against Zoroastrians and Christians and Yazidis and the Ba'hai, and the constant intra-Muslim warfare between Shia and Sunni... and almost all of this they blame on the West or on the insidious, international "Zionist conspiracy."
The Arabs, "Palestinian" or otherwise, are not the victims of the Jews.
On the contrary, it is the Jewish minority in the Middle East who have been constantly persecuted by the great Muslim majority in that part of the world from the early 7th century until the present. It is not merely the Palestinian-Arabs, but virtually the entire Arab and Muslim worlds that are perpetually endeavoring to squeeze the Jews out of Israel, by any means necessary. These means include war and violence and intifada, lawfare, international diplomatic aggressions, the movement to Boycott, Divest from, and Sanction Israel (BDS), heritage theft and attempts at heritage obliteration, cognitive warfare (pdf) and Pallywood.
We can break down the contemporary phases of the Long Arab War Against the Jews as follows:
Phase 1, 1920 - 1947: Riots and Massacres
Phase 2, November 1947 - April 1948: The Civil War in Palestine
Phase 3, 1948 - 1973: Conventional Warfare
Phase 4, 1964 - Present: The Terror War
Phase 5, 1975 - Present: The Delegitimization Effort
There is a possibility that we can eventually overcome this perpetual hostility, but it will not come from Israeli concessions because those concessions are always pocketed by the Palestinian-Arabs and then used as the starting point for demands on further concessions.
Instead, we need solidarity among ourselves and among our allies within a political framework that benefits both.
And on that hopeful note, let's not forget to send some good thoughts and prayers to our friend Shirlee in Oz as she recovers from surgery.