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February 20th, 2021 
Awake Goy 
Last week Dahlia Scheindlin analyzed polling data in Israel for Americans for Peace Now and concluded that the left is alive and well, though some of those “leftwing” Jewish voters will vote far-right, in order to oust Netanyahu. As for the “worrying” fact that young Jews exhibit hardline, rightwing attitudes, in Scheindlin’s estimation, that’s actually a long pattern in Israel going back to the ’50s and “has to do with the idea that the romantic spirit of the nation is militarist and nationalist.”
Dahlia Scheindlin’s saccharine and disingenuous optimism holds a bizarre sort of truth at its center. Indeed, for all of her talk about the “stability” of left wing voters (many of whom are Palestinian and therefore, discriminated against in broader society, including Jewish Left wing parties like Meretz, and whose Joint List is disincluded from governing coalitions), the crux of the matter of Zionism is the worst sort of inertia: that of an endless litany of ethnic cleansing, war crimes and- yes- apartheid committed ad nauseum, ad infinitum by the Zionist state.
The poetry of Scheindlin’s commentary is that it pushes a listener to the precise conclusion that Zionists of all stripes seek to ultimately avoid: the understanding that the irrational and violent contentment among Israeli society points to the absolute imperative of the BDS picket line.
Scheindlin wants to make much ado over the “resilience” of a paltry 12% of Jewish voters who identify with the left- and the bantustanization of Historic Palestine known as the “Two State Solution.” Yet she admits that out of the desire to rid themselves of Netanyahu, some of them will end up voting for rightwing parties (Avigdor Lieberman’s Yisrael Beteinu and Gideon Sa’ar’s New Hope) or for centrist parties whose politicians possess rightwing politics on the maintenance of the status quo of Apartheid- and annexation of much of the West Bank, both de jure and de facto. Furthermore, Netanyahu himself has won elections allowing him to maintain leadership of the state for 12 years straight, often with centrist and even “left” partners.
This is precisely why it is so important to focus on Israelis’ violent contentment. The voters know and approve of what their government has done, from the piles of 1,700 Palestinian civilians killed by the Israeli government in besieged Gaza in 2014, to the over 7,000,000 Palestinian refugees who have been denied the right to return to their homes because of their ethnicity for the past 70 years, to the undeniable reality dutifuly reported over the years by everyone from Jimmy Carter to Yesh Din, of a supremacist apartheid regime (which occupies every inch of land from the Jordan to the Mediterranean)
Considering that the likeliest threat to Netanyahu’s leadership now arises from politicians to his right, Scheindlin’s approval is very much like praising the “white moderates” as a source for hope in the Jim Crow South– those same white moderates excoriated by the great Martin Luther King Jr. because they said they approved his cause but didn’t like the tension and unrest of marches and sit-ins. Her comments show the lengths that liberal Zionists will go to prove that the apartheid project possesses some sort of fundamental decency. After all, it’s just the “romantic spirit of the nation… militarist and nationalist.”
Still, seeing that Scheindlin acknowledges a stability inherent in the occupation of Palestine, her analysis leads to a very simple conclusion. Since Israeli society is deeply invested in maintaining apartheid, with precious little in the way of domestic political dissent, and with the United States dedicated to arming it perpetually come hell or high waters, the overwhelmingly Palestinian-supported and -led BDS movement is the only way to achieve any justice in Historic Palestine.
As for Scheindlin’s search for a facsimile of hope amidst the grim reality of colonialism, that exposes a truly bitter pill. When given a choice between equality and perpetual Nakba, even left Zionists will choose the latter.
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