"It has been two years since the mass murder on 7 October 2023, an event that shook world Jewry more than any event since the creation of the state of Israel. For Jews it was shocking. For the state of Israel, it was deeply humiliating. The entire Zionist project was founded on the presumption that the Jewish state would prevent things like this from ever happening again. A response was inevitable. But the response Israel pursued the obliteration of Gaza, the killing and maiming of tens of thousands of civilians was a choice."
"And this choice complicated how many American Jews processed the attack that set it in motion, and it now complicates the community's commemoration of the day. How does one mourn and commemorate an atrocity against your people in the midst of an atrocity done to another people in your name? The complexity of mourning lies in the fact that there is no consensus as to what any of this means. In fact, for the American Jewish community, the last two years have seen the collapse of a half-century-old consensus on Zionism itself."
The 7 October 2023 mass murder shocked world Jewry and deeply humiliated the state of Israel. Israel's subsequent campaign in Gaza, which included mass civilian casualties, was a deliberate choice that complicated American Jewish responses. Mourning became fraught because commemorating an atrocity against Jewish people now occurs amid an atrocity carried out in their name. The episode exposed a collapse in a half-century Zionist consensus within American Jewry. Historical roots of that consensus trace to Louis Brandeis's 1915 essay and hardened after the 1967 war, replacing an earlier coexistence of Zionists, non-Zionists, and anti-Zionists.
Read at www.theguardian.com
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