As the human rights NGO B’Tselem reported in 2021, land is stolen “from Palestinian shepherding and farming communities in the West Bank through systemic, ongoing violence perpetrated by settlers living near them, with the full support of state authorities”. It’s a place where the monstrously over-funded military works hand in glove with religious lynch mobs to terrorise innocent shepherds away from their flocks. The same Israel that’s now one of the most unequal societies in the developed world, ranked equally with the United States in 2015 according to the OECD’s measure of economic inequality. It would transform Jews, its founders hoped, from persecuted paupers into happy, healthy, joyful citizens, finally at peace with themselves and the world. Israel was to be a society of equality and freedom, a peaceful land of brotherhood and plenty, where oppressed and impoverished people could come to build beautiful cities and lush farms in some forgotten scrap of nowhere that nobody was doing anything with-or nobody important, anyway. “We shall live at last as free men on our own soil, and die peacefully in our own homes. “A wondrous generation of Jews will spring into existence”, Theodore Herzl wrote in his 1896 pamphlet, The Jewish State. Not just a good idea, but a great historical breakthrough that would transform the world, and the Jewish people, for the better.
It’s hard to believe now, but some people once thought Israel was a good idea.
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