It is a kind of moral illness
Elliott batTzedek
April 2009

The [Jewish Israeli] public practices self-censorship and accepts the establishment version, out of an unwillingness to open up to alternative information – they don’t want to be confused with the facts. […] There is a close connection between the collective memory and the memory of “past persecutions of Jews” (“the whole world is against us,” and the Holocaust). The more significant the memory of persecution, the stronger the tendency to adopt Zionist narratives.  political psychologist Daniel Bar-Tal in his study “The Israeli-Jewish Collective Memory of the Israeli-Arab/Palestinian Conflict”

It is a kind of moral illness,
Zionism,
a political theory with a messiah complex,
a myth that history can be redeemed
by land and sweat,
a myth of pastoral sanctification,
a myth of empty land yearning for a Jewish re-population,
a theory with a scythe named
Never Again
that harvested blood,
then cut away the people that remained
from the land they made fertile,
from the land their sweat sustained.

It is a kind of megalomania,
that can stroll over a village
but see only trees,
a state that can not tolerate dissent,
bloated by a macabre pretense
of democracy,
where return is a birthright
except for those born there,
where a mass delusion proves only Jews
are the heirs. 
And who are you
to question their holy evidence
of a real estate covenant made fair and square?

It is a kind social dementia,
Zionism,
a zealot’s crusade of god and tribe,
a slow cultural suicide,
guardians of Shabbat
become guardians of a siege.
Gaza, Jenin, Deir Yassin
crimes necessary for their Jewish state
are crimes against my Jewish faith.

It is a kind of traumatic response,
a patterned nonchalance with truth, with intent,
with fact, with consequence.
A kind of violence
learned too often, too well,
from the inside of the cell.
And now the prisoner
is a guard, the son is a father,
and Europe’s feared, swarthy Other
is oh so white.

It is kind of rapacious lore,
monkey’s paw Zionism,
wish fulfillment come home to knock bloody at the door.
Old stories broken and put together wrong.
David weak, Goliath strong, but now
David is Goliath
and has depleted uranium in his Apache slingshot.
We were not taught that Shechem and Jericho
were also crimes necessary for a Jewish nation.
And Solomon’s famous adjudication
was a twisted implementation, yet brought justice.
But he kills the baby, this time.
And the baby
is Palestine.

Not with my faith, you won’t.
Not with my history, you don’t.
I am Elliott bat Tzedek,
and not in my name.
Not in my name.