seven decades on, Israel is geopolitically embattled and the Jewish community is increasingly polarized around the issue of occupation. The Occupation — i.e. Israeli military control over the Palestinian West Bank and the borders of Gaza Strip — is five decades old. Entire generations of people have grown up without political or civil rights under the military jurisdiction of a “democratic” state, and some trace the problem to the very existence of the State of Israel. How did the Jewish struggle to free ourselves from antisemitism lead to this point?
Following the trauma of centuries of persecution culminating in the Shoah (Holocaust), many Jews looked to the Political Zionist goal of founding a Jewish State of Israel, in what was then British Palestine, as a guiding star in a time of profound darkness. Defending their new state against Arab Palestinians and neighboring countries in the 1948 “War of Independence,”...
