I watched the well spoken young man being interviewed on TV.  I think he was a student at UCLA, but I could be mistaken.  He was defending the protests, claiming to be a member of Jewish Voice for Peace, lending his heritage in support of a version of his own destruction.

Most of us recognize that organization for what it is: a leftist, self-hating group with dubious funding and no obvious desires to foster peace or even basic understanding.

Still, I might have been a proud parent or grandparent watching as he eloquently lent his Jewish voice to defending what I might view as his — and my — enemy.

Unfortunately, his obliviousness was breathtaking.  Why did he want to see the state of Israel replaced or eliminated?  “Because it’s the result of the failed experiment of seventy-five years of Zionism.”

Of course, Israel is the culmination of millennia of Jewish aspirations to live free in their historical homeland.  Some Jews never left.  What became known as Zionism was a political movement in response to the plight of Jews in the diaspora, mostly in Europe and in the Levant, which began to dominate Jewish thought in the 19th century.

Theodore Hertzl gave the movement voice and structure with his Jewish State, published in 1896, and the founding of the World Zionist Congress.

Around 1907, the future first prime minister, David Ben Gurion, arrived in Palestine.  Leaving after three years to go to Constantinople, to learn Turkish and law since the Turks were in control, he returned to Palestine to continue his efforts in the Jewish Brigade, founded in part by Ze’ev Jabotinsky, joining with Britian during World War 1.

His rival and himself a future prime minister, Menachem Begin took a different path to the land of Israel, escaping from the Holocaust and arriving in 1942.

In between, Albert Einstein helped create Hebrew University, which opened in 1925.  Countless other institutions like the Hadassah Medical Center were begun or expanded.  The Balfour Declaration in 1917 and, in 1920, the post-WW1 San Remo Agreement gave international approval and legitimacy to the to the nascent state.   

There were many people, including in America, who were opposed to the creation of a formal government.  Mostly they were religious objections, insisting that only God could create a state on the sacred land.

Eventually all but a few came to recognize the miraculous nature of Israel’s founding, including most Christians, who have their own connection to the land.

But what about the Palestinians, their rights, their “occupied territory”? our young Jewish man asks.  I respond to him that we have all been asking that same question.  From Camp David to Oslo, agreements have come and gone, with real little progress toward peace.  Yes, there have been advances in relations between Arabs and Israel, but usually they come when the Palestinians are not given veto power — clout they did not earn. 

It seems certain that animosity toward Jews is much more powerful than desires for any formal state.  In any case, it’s not the Zionist cause that has failed.

Image via Pxfuel.