Our Eternal Battle for Zion

by Phyllis Chesler

I’m a Jew, a feminist, an author, and an academic. I believe in universal human rights. I am not a multi-cultural relativist. I do not respect the postcolonial academy, which brought about the palestinianization of intellectual reality, and which projected Islam’s apartheid practices onto Israel. I oppose the consequent worship of victim status, identity politics and the balkanization of identity.

From the time I was eight years old in 1948, I can’t remember a time when Israel was not central to my imagination both as a model for heroism and as a transcendent, miraculous, reality. From childhood on, Zionism was an ever-evolving example of political, theological, historical, and personal liberation.

I cannot keep quiet about the extraordinary rise—a tsunami, really—in Jew-hatred and the demonization of Israel.

I was called to fight in a cognitive war, and I must tell you that we’ve lost that battle, or at least we’ve lost this round, partly because Jews, including Israeli Jews, failed to understand how important this war really is, and partly because the forces of hatred were even greater than we could imagine.

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