Sunday, May 20, 2024
I stopped journalling for three weeks before Dr. Ryzka put me on prednisone. I wondered during that period whether I would ever start again. I was a little surprised at how quickly I picked it up again when once I started the prednisone.
I let Lilly out (again) at 5 a.m. when I woke. It's a very beautiful predawn with a steady breeze NNW breeze moving the newly-leafed branches of birch trees and the magnificent deep red maple tree across the street. Even with the storm door closed as I wait for Lilly's return, I hear the cardinals calling. I'm too lazy to get up and give Merlin a listen to hear who else is up and sounding.
Prednisone, day 7. Last night was a disappointment. I worked up the courage to try sleeping in my bed, retiring at about 9:15. By 10, it was clear that I'm not ready, too much shoulder pain and discomfort - left, right, right, left. I was able to disentangle myself from the top sheet and quilt and to get out of the bed with some P&D, to get my heavy cotton robe on by myself, and moved back to the TV room and the recliner, where G was still awake, watching a streaming soap and then SNL. Lights out at midnight, pss at 2ish, 3:30, and lights back on at 5 for Lilly'as outing among the swaying tree limbs. I need to count my blessings. My blessed mother used to tell me that when we lived in considerable misery in the roachy basement apartment at 7303 S. Emerald. I sit here now 75, almost 80 years later, thinking of how much she endured in those years after WWII. Just thinking of it knocks me for a loop.
At 5:15, I turned off the slow cooker, planning to eat the overnight oatmeal around 6 when I take my 7th 20 mg. prednisone, hoping for more pain relief and lubricity this morning. I take the prednisone as planned but still have the shoulder/hands pain which causes me to send a Secure Message to Dr. Ryzka later in the morning. I do wonder whether I am misdiagnosed.
In recent years, however, Israel has been ruled by governments that turned their back on the moderate forms of Zionism. . . In its own words, the founding principle of the Netanyahu coalition is that “the Jewish people has an exclusive and inalienable right to all parts of Eretz Yisrael” — Eretz Yisrael is a Hebrew term referring to the entire territory between the Jordan and the Mediterranean. The Netanyahu coalition envisions a single state between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea, which would grant full rights only to Jewish citizens, partial rights to a limited number of Palestinian citizens and neither citizenship nor any rights to millions of oppressed Palestinian subjects. This is not just a vision. To a large extent, this is already the reality on the ground.
I have been wondering for months whether Zionism is Israel's Original Sin, that is to say, whether the whole idea of establishing a Jewish state in Palestine (or elsewhere for that matter) is intrinsically racist, or tribal, colonial, and exclusionary. Professor Harari writes:
Born in the late 19th century, modern Zionism is a national movement similar to the ones that arose during the same period among Greeks, Poles and many other peoples. The key idea of Zionism is that Jews constitute a nation, and as such they have not just individual human rights but also a national right to self-determination. (My emphasis added.)
Is it accurate that Jews constitute a nation with a national right to self-determination? I note first that the idea of a right implies its corollary, a duty, which is to say that since Jews have a national right to self-determination, others, i.e., non-Jews have a duty to respect that right. If I have a right to life, all others have a duty not to kill me. Questions that come to mind include: (1) In what sense were and are the Jews of the world a "nation" and in what sense are they not?, and (2) when, where, and how did this supposed right arise?
A nation is generally considered a group of people sharing many common characteristics like language, history, customs, values, religion, and usually geographical territory. Thus, it seems natural enough to speak of the Sioux people of America's Great Plains as the Sioux Nation and of the Kurdish people occupying contiguous land in Iran, Iraq, Syria, and Turkey as the Kurdish Nation. Can we reasonably say the same thing of the Jewish people spread across the world in Theodore Herzl's day when Zionism was developed? Some Jews lived in Palestine as a distinct minority among majority Muslim Arabs, but many more lived in Russia, in Eastern, Central, and Western Europe, throughout the Americas, in North Africa, in the Far East, seemingly everywhere, as a diaspora. They spoke many different languages and had many different customs. If they had anything holding them together it was their ethnic ancient history and their religion, but even in their religion(s), they were pluralistic, as they are today, witness the many atheistic or agnostic secular Jews in Israel itself vs. the ultra-orthodox and everybody in between How could it reasonably be said that a Jew with deep roots in Morocco, a Jew in Brooklyn, New York, and a Jew in Bialystok, Poland, were members of the same nation, each with a common right of national self-determination?
If there is or was such a right, in what is it based? Where does it spring from? Israel's settler class, her gush emunim, believe it comes from the Almighty, as in the lyrics to the theme from Exodus, sung by Pat Boone: "This land is mine. God gave this land to me. . . If I must fight, I'll fight to make this land our own, until I die, this land is mine." For those of us who don't accept the notion that God is the source of Israel's right of self-determination, where else shall we look? Perhaps the UN Partition Plan for the British Mandate of Palestine in 1947, but that plan was never put into effect. It prompted the Israel-Arab War of 1947-48 which established boundaries for the State of Israel very different from those specified in the Partition Plan. Did the right originate in Israel's Declaration of Independence in 1948 or Israel's recognition and acceptance into the United Nations in 1949? But the former is, as they say, a self-licking ice cream cone, and the latter is simply the recognition of a de facto state, a sovereign entity with monopoly control over the use of power within its own territory and by and on its own people, another self-licking ice cream cone.
It seems inescapable to me that the Jews of the world have not comprised a nation since the first century C.E. and that they had in Herzl's time and now no national right of self-determination. Zionism was made up out of whole cloth by Herzl in 1896, an invention, a pipedream brought on by the pernicious, ubiquitous, anti-semitism of European Christians. It also seems to me that an inherent characteristic of a Jewish state is a privileged status for Jews and, at best, a tolerated but less privileged status for non-Jews or, at worst, expulsion of non-Jews, which is what we have had throughout Israel's history. It has culminated, after the 1967 war and especially since the ascendency of Likud and related political parties, in a racist, indeed apartheid state.
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