Just finished Avi Shavit’s My Promised Land. My approach to Zionism is different than his. Shavit seeks to advance the Zionist project. He avers that secular Zionism rejected a perceived passive character of the Jewish people. I rather incline towards this characteristic myself, and am wary of the potential tendency of the Zionist rejection of such a character to lay at the feet of the Jewish people the blame for what befell it in Europe. I am rather inclined to critique anti-Zionism as echoing medieval anti-Jewish tropes (Jews/Israelis as demonic; Jews/Israelis as pursuing the massacre of innocent children as a result of a kind of internal compulsion) and facilely inverting the powerful/powerless narrative of Judaism in the Diaspora (Nazi/Jewish relations telescoped into Jewish/Palestinian relations) as a way of defending not Israelis per se, but Jews who find themselves in the Middle East surrounded by enemies who will not let them alone – who will not allow them to be, in a word, passive, which is the natural disposition of the Jews, steeped in centuries’ worth of deference to the sublimity of a fate of which they are not the authors. The fate of the Jews will be written by God, and we can only act with the tools at our disposal to deflect the challenges to our existence that fate poses. Chief among these tools is critique. Provocation of the Jews in the region only leads to wars, and those who take the Jews to be their enemies must rather reconcile themselves to their existence, which is ultimately benign. This is a theological view of what is ultimately a theological conflict, the solution of which (which solution will always be tenuous, evil being capable of being bracketed but never annihilated) depends on the acceptance of the Jews as the ultimate proprietors of the Christian and Muslim traditions, being the progenitors of monotheism and the scriptures held in common by all, and consequently the object of resentment as beneficiaries of the deference obligatorily paid to those scriptures by these two successor traditions. Hence the traditional anti-Semitic claims of those traditions, which any good Christian or Muslim is capable of bracketing, of having lost by breakage the old covenant with God. This enables the Jews to be portrayed as aliens to a world that no longer has for them a legitimate dwelling-place on earth, a portrayal key to the delegitimization of a Jewish right to occupy the land of Israel.