![[…] The Zionist Left in Israel is in a limbo.
On the one hand, it is ostracized by Jewish society…](http://f600b3-9c.myshopify.com/cdn/shop/articles/1f3a669c81229c6a91a60f2dff6aaf9524bc9d94.png?v=1782855198&width=1100)
[…] The Zionist Left in Israel is in a limbo. On the one hand, it is ostracized by Jewish society…
![[Article from the Palestine Chronicles]
The Righteous Fury of the Israeli Left – Ilan Pappé
Published November 16, 2023.](https://64.media.tumblr.com/ec67cf29f164d1155e9d05e90f6c5f65/7a50c2486a40bc9b-a3/s640x960/1f3a669c81229c6a91a60f2dff6aaf9524bc9d94.png)
ALT[…] The Zionist Left in Israel is in a limbo.
On the one hand, it is ostracized by Jewish society as, at best, being naïve and, at worst, as being accused of betrayal. This is in reaction to their support for the two-state solution and the call to end the occupation. This alienation, of course, is now more acute after the events of October 7.
On the other hand, they are not considered, and rightly so, genuine allies of the Palestinian liberation struggle.
The Israeli Left’s biggest hope was that the Global Left, as they call it, would share the same language and attitude regarding the October 7 operation by Hamas; namely to be unconditionally behind Israel.
The Israeli Left was outraged that, in the eyes of the Global Left, the Hamas operation did not absolve Israel from its past criminal policies nor did it provide Israel with a green light for its genocidal policies in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.
To their great surprise, the Global Left in its entirety was galvanized behind the call to “Stop the War” and “Free Palestine”, rather than echoing their government’s repeated response of “We support Israel’s right to defend itself”.
What is most illuminating – in the dialogue the liberal Zionists have with themselves on the pages of Haaretz – is their vicious attack on any one associating colonialism with Israel.
For some reason, they chose Judith Butler as the main culprit, which would leave many of us disappointed, as we devoted our careers to frame Zionism as settler colonialism, probably going back to the 1960s.
In fact, today, the framing of Zionism and Israel as a settler-colonial project is a consensual issue among all the leading scholars on the Middle East, and it is rejected as an accurate paradigm only among mainstream Israeli academia.
The Global Left is guilty of two ‘sins’, in the eyes of the liberal Zionists: one, it refers to Israel as a settler-colonial state and two, it provides a context for the Hamas attack on October 7.
… continues at Palestine Chronicles (16 Nov., 2023)