In ‘Trump’s America, Netanyahu’s Israel,’ Adam Shatz encapsulates in a short and to-the-point article how the leaders of the free world are denigrating biblical Zionism into Pagan Zionism; and, states: “more remarkable still, few Israelis – or their supporters abroad, among Jews and Evangelicals – fret over this ‘fate’.”
Adam Shatz: “In 1948, Hannah Arendt … warned that after the Arab-Israeli war:
the ‘victorious’ Jews would live surrounded by a hostile Arab population, secluded inside ever-threatened borders, preoccupied by matters of defence to a degree that would submerge all other interests and activities . . . political thought would centre on military strategy; economic development would be determined exclusively by the needs of war. And all this would be the fate of a nation that – no matter how many immigrants it could still absorb and how far it extended its boundaries . . . – would still remain a very small people greatly outnumbered by hostile neighbours.”
Arendt’s warning that an expansionist Israel would never realize the dream of Herzl and the founders, and become a ‘normal’ state, has lost its charge because its abnormality is the new normal. Israel now looks more like a pioneer of illiberal, ethnocratic [ultra]nationalism …
Adam Shatz is a contributing editor at the London Review of Books and a former literary editor of The Nation. He has worked at The New York Times Book Review, Lingua Franca and The New Yorker. Shatz is the editor of Prophets Outcast: A Century of Dissident Jewish Writing About Zionism and Israel (Nation Books). He also edited Lingua Franca’s book reviews and has reported from Lebanon and Algeria for The New York Review of Books. Shatz has contributed numerous articles on politics, music and culture to The Nation, The New York Review of Books, the Village Voice, American Prospect and The New York Times.
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