The end has become the means

So said Norman Finkelstein, referring to Zionist militarism. (thanks to Montag) This says it all about the Zionist mentality. The Zionists were so intent on a Jewish state they didn't, it seems, think through what it actually meant. Yes, many acknowledged, early on, that the project would involve ethnic cleansing. Some admitted that anti-semitism would have to get worse before the Jews would be ready for idea. So it was clear to the leaders anyway that Zionism was relying on Jews being downtrodden and that people would be displaced in order to establish Jewish statehood. What seems not to have occurred to them is that the displaced and those who identify with them, would resist and that repression would be required. They also don't seem to have taken into account that Jews are not a nation. Jews come from many countries and cultures and speak many different laguages. What could forge such a society into a nation? Well, there was the establishment of reconstituted Hebrew as a language. PE teachers invented and taught "Israeli dancing" back in the 1920s. Music was copied from Greece; a "respectable" non-Muslim country, close to Palestine. The food is sometimes Yiddisher, sometimes Turkish or Arab. The latter two never acknowledged, the former one, only grudgingly so. Suppose these linguistic and cultural innovations into Jewish life were not enough to establish a nation. What makes a people gel? I remember we had to write an essay in English language class titled "Nothing unites people like a common enemy". It was reading for this that I discovered that Moshe Dayan had justified Israel's relentless aggression by reference to maintaining a "high degree of tension in the country".

So what means has Israel deployed to attain its end as a Jewish State in Palestine? What means could it use but military ones to expel the majority of Palestinians? And the same means towards any expellees who tried to return and military punishment against those states and/or communites who would harbour those who entertain the dream of return. And the end? Established Jewish nationhood? By way of a reconstituted language and some borrowed/stolen cultural trappings? Israeli society has some cohesion its true; but what is it based on? It appears to be based on the common enmity of those it dispossessed and those among whom, the expelled Palestinians now live. Israel is a Modern Hebrew speaking military base. The end has become the means. Or is it the other way around?