Zionism Is In. Get Used To It.

To understand the distance Israel has traveled since then, consider Tuesday night’s Memorial Day ceremony at Rabin Square in Tel Aviv. None of the performers attacked their fellow Israelis. And the best-received artist and song was Mosh Ben-Ari and his rendition of Psalm 121 – A Song of Ascent.

The psalm, which praises God as the eternal guardian of Israel, became the unofficial anthem of Operation Cast Lead in Gaza in 2008-2009. And Ben-Ari’s rendition of the song propelled the dreadlock bedecked, hoop earring wearing world music artist into super-stardom in Israel.
Caroline Glick

Caroline Glick has a great column pointing out the change in Israel that has practically passed unnoticed as Post-Zionism is so 1990s. It is a change that has taken place as Israelis have absorbed the reality of what has happened around them:

Israel’s return to its Zionist roots is the greatest cultural event of the past decade. It is also an event that occurred under the radar screen of the rest of the world. No one outside the country seems to have noticed at all.

The outside world’s failure to take note of Israel’s cultural shift owes to its failure to recognize the significance of the failure of the peace process with the Palestinians on the one hand and the failure of Israel’s withdrawal from Gaza on the other hand. The demise of the peace process at Camp David in July 2000 and the terror war that followed launched the Israeli public on its path away from its radical post-Zionist rebellion and back to its Zionist roots. The failure of the withdrawal from Gaza, and the international community’s response to Operation Cast Lead, marked the conclusion of the journey.

The Oslo peace process was based on the radical belief that it is possible to make peace by empowering terrorists and giving them land, political legitimacy, money and guns. To embrace this nonsense, the public had to be willing to tolerate the notion that there was something unjust about the Zionist revolution. Because if Zionism and the cause of Jewish national liberation are just, then it is impossible to justify empowering the PLO, a terrorist movement dedicated to the destruction of Israel and the delegitimization of Zionism.

By contrast, the West has not learned the lesson at all. Instead, the leaders of the West blindly insist that we were oh so close to peace through the Oslo accords--and the fact that they have obviously failed miserably with Abbas's refusal to sit down with Netanyahu and negotiate is merely a fluke.

Glick notes that this lesson about the lack of appreciation the West has for the unreciprocated steps Israel has taken for peace was evident when Israel disengaged from Gaza. Back then, any acknowledgement of Israel's sacrifice were soon replaced by demands that Israel support the new terrorist regime in Gaza--as if Israel were an occupying power.

The final kick in the behind of course was the Goldstone Report, where Israel was condemned and accused of war crimes for defending itself from attacks from the Hamas terrorists in Gaza.

The fact of the matter is that the "peace process" has failed--and that no one-sided unilateral concessions by Israel are going to save it.

The lesson that Israelis took from the failure of the peace process was that Israel has no Palestinian partner for peace.

Caroline Glick writes that as a result:

This open door policy for Israeli radicals was defensible in the 1990s when a significant portion of the Israeli public supported them. Now it constitutes nothing more than an anti-Israel propaganda campaign.

Time to call a spade a spade.

Hat tip: P. David Hornik

Technorati Tag: Israel and Zionism and Post Zionism.