I’m a proud exilic Jew. I’m an internationalist and a cosmopolitan. I’m also devoid of any relationship to my geographic birthplace, and “land” to me is just the dirt in which food grows and people are buried. It doesn’t have a single milligram of sanctity, and it isn’t worth even a single drop of blood....In our own day, we’ve learned that we owe our survival to being geographically dispersed rather than geographically concentrated. To diversity rather than unity. To communities rather than a state.We’re really terrible at being a “nation.” We very quickly become as stupid, violent and greedy as most of the other nations of the world, and within a short time we brought destruction and exile on ourselves. Only there, in exile, do we regain the sense we lost and resume being a people that survives.Apparently, being a majority doesn’t suit us – ruling, running an army and a state. We’re good at being a minority. Even a little persecution suits us. It brings out the best in us.And now, we’re once again playing at being a “nation.” Ostensibly, that’s our eternal answer to the Holocaust that befell us. But in reality, it’s the continuation of the Holocaust. Not, heaven forbid, the burning of our bodies, only the crushing of our souls.It’s the growth of another shoot from the Jewish tree that does harm to everyone around it. A rotten, poisonous brother of the Zealots, the Sicarii, Rabbi Akiva’s blind students and Simon bar Kochba’s foolish disciples. They ought to be called Jew-oids. They’re like Jews who took the trivial and wicked parts of Judaism and turned it into the essence.... Consequently, there’s no choice but to admit that Zionism was a naïve mistake and to go into exile again to regain our strength and refresh our values.
B. Michael is the pen name of Michael Bryzon, a screenwriter and satirist. At first glance this seems like satire, but there is no punchline - and people with no sense of humor like Judith Butler also believe that the Diaspora is where Jews properly belong.
But satire or not, Arab media is reporting heavily about this article without the slightest doubt it is meant seriously. Many Haaretz articles excite Palestinians, but this one is being reproduced all over.
It reminds me of the interview last month where Ehud Barak expressed his worries about Israel making it successfully past its eighth decade. Arabic articles are still being published about the "curse of the eighth decade."
There is nothing wrong with self criticism, but the Arab world always misinterprets anyone asserting Israel has made mistakes as an indication of the demise of the Jewish state, rather than an indication of a thriving, open society.
The anti-Israel Arab world, humiliated at their inability to destroy Israel in 1948., pathetically grab onto any Jews who says that Jews will destroy the state themselves.
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