Yavne: A Jewish Case for Equality in Israel-Palestine by Peter Beinart

Please TAKE ACTION RIGHT NOW and send your letter to the UN Office of the Special Adviser on the Prevention of Genocide and the International Criminal Court Prosecutor.

How did Zionism evolve from an ideology that encompassed alternatives to Jewish statehood into one that equates them with genocide? Part of the answer is that in the late 1920s and ’30s, under British colonial rule, increased Jewish immigration provoked increased violence between Palestinians and Jews, which led to the Peel Commission’s 1937 proposal to partition Palestine into two ethno-religious states, an idea many Zionists reluctantly embraced. But it was the Holocaust that fundamentally transformed Jewish thinking about sovereignty. In the 1940s, Shumsky notes, Zionists envisioned “a new contract” with the world: “In exchange for exterminating millions of European Jews and erasing the collective Jewish personality from the lands of the European diaspora, the Jews must be given a state that would express Jewish national identity alone.” 

Continue reading at https://jewishcurrents.org/yavne-a-jewish-case-for-equality-in-israel-palestine/