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The Zionist dream has become a nightmare
By Yvonne Ridley
October 05, 2020 "Information
Clearing House" - The future of
Israel is hanging in the balance as the number
of immigrants has dropped by more than a third,
according to the latest statistics. While the
coronavirus pandemic is being blamed for this,
stories of a broken economy and general decline
in living standards are thought to be behind the
decrease.
Figures released by the Jewish Agency between
January and April show that 6,368 immigrants
arrived in Israel, which represents a drop of 36
per cent on the same period last year. April
alone saw a record low influx of immigrants for
any month, just 350 people, down a staggering 86
per cent from April 2019.
Popular British-born blogger Yoni Leviatan, who
moved to Israel in 2009 after spending most of
his life in America, believes that Israel could
be in decline and is urging “a million American
Jews” to follow him and move in order to salvage
the Zionist dream. “Israel is teetering,” he
says in his latest blog. “The societal walls are
crumbling along with the economy.”
Leviatan describes himself as an
American-Israeli musician, producer and
marketer. He is also critical of what he
describes as a US obsession with the Palestinian
conflict.
“What American Jews seem most interested in when
discussing Israel is the Palestinians, the
Palestinians and the Palestinians. Few seem
aware that Israelis rarely see the occupation
unless they’re doing army service or actually
live in the West Bank. Even the topic of
annexation, which captivated American Jews to
the point they wrote Op-Eds in Israeli news
sites begging for it not to happen, polled at
only 4 per cent in importance to Israelis.”
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His blog urges US Jews to join him in the
face of the plight of the Zionist State and save
it. “If 20 per cent of American Jewry, just over
a million American Jews, would give up trying to
fix a country with 330 million citizens and
choose to move to Israel with all their
political and economic might, they could tip the
coalition any way they wanted.” This was a
reference to the fact that all recent Israeli
governments have depended on coalitions, which
are easier to influence by their very nature.
“If you convinced a big group of your fellow
American Jews to make Aliyah [the migration to
Israel], you could separate all matters of
religion from state. You could bring equality to
the [Western/Buraq Wall], recognise every type
of marriage, and give whatever you wanted to the
Palestinians you can’t stop talking about.”
While concrete statistics show that the desire
to move to Israel is diminishing, there was
actually a flurry of American Jews expressing an
interest in moving there earlier this month when
US President Donald Trump echoed previous
comments that Jews in America think of
themselves as Israelis first when he invoked the
“loyalty trope”.
Of course, such scare tactics have been used
before by the Zionist lobby which is desperate
to impose a Jewish population on stolen
Palestinian land. This was exposed in the
historic book by Naeim Giladi called
Ben-Gurion’s Scandals: How the Haganah and the
Mossad Eliminated Jews.
It is shocking that Leviatan and his Zionist
mates can not only dismiss the presence of the
Palestinians in their own land so easily, but
also the ongoing conflict. Perhaps if they tried
to engage positively with the Palestinians in
the Gaza Strip and the occupied West Bank they
might begin to understand why their Zionist
project is failing.
Using scare tactics against the Jewish people,
whether you are Donald Trump using anti-Semitic
tropes and rhetoric or a fanatic drawing
parallels with 1930s Germany, is simply wrong.
Fuelling fear and violence in Jewish communities
simply to populate Israel, a state which
enforces a brutal occupation using fear and
violence, is bound to fail and the Jewish
Agency’s statistics support that.
If the Israeli government and its Zionist
institutions — including the Jewish Agency, by
the way — are really genuine about wanting to
populate the land, there is a very simple,
guaranteed solution to the problem: allow the
millions of Palestinian refugees to exercise
their legitimate right to return to their land
from which they and their families have been
driven by Zionist militias and the Israel
Defence Forces since 1948.
If allowing Palestinians to go back to their
land is seen as a threat to the Zionist
character of the state of Israel, then doesn’t
that tell us in no uncertain terms what a
pernicious and racist ideology Zionism is?
Perhaps that’s the real reason why so many
American Jews are ignoring the pleas of Leviatan
and his ilk. Their scare tactics suggest that
the Zionist dream has become a nightmare.
- British journalist and author Yvonne Ridley
provides political analysis on affairs related
to the Middle East, Asia and the Global War on
Terror. Her work has appeared in numerous
publications around the world. Her article
appeared in MEMO. - "Source"
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