Zionism is becoming an ideology for dumb people

Bomb-shelter nationalism is not groovy

Before we start, check out this video:

In this exchange from way back in October - in the glory days of war fever, when most Western countries were either on side or keeping their counsel, and before the IDF had even killed a bunch of aid workers and our own hostages - we have two Jews. On the right is James Schneider, Oxford grad, well-spoken and also kind of a dish. If he wasn’t a commie nutjob, then he would be a pretty good stand-in for the New Jew Zionism promised us. On the left, sitting next to his chanukkiah (in case you didn’t know he’s Jewish, I guess) is David Mencer. David is very much not a New Jew; in fact, he’s a pretty recognisable Jewish type. I’m not sure how precisely to explain this to my paypigs gentile subscribers, but he’s the type of guy that if you see him at a kiddush and there’s only one plate of smoked salmon and bridge rolls, you know you’re flat out of luck.

Now, I’m philosemitic, if only as an extension of my self-regard, and if I met David at that kiddush, I would exchange pleasantries for a few minutes, at least long enough to give my co-conspirators a chance to get to the herring. He’s part of the family, but he’s not the part of the family we want to represent ourselves to outsiders. I set the video above to start just before he loses the plot in his ‘epic’ final rant, but, if you can bear it, you should really listen to the whole thing. Start with his opening statement:

The Labour party finally has a leader who can stand up proud and represent this country on the world stage, in contrast to the former leader who could barely stand on his own allotment.

Try to put yourselves in the shoes of someone who practised his opening zinger for hours before appearing onscreen and coming up with that. Imagine, then, my horror when I opened up YouTube a few weeks ago and found this:

Yep, David Mencer (who definitely does not have dual loyalties, because that is an anti-Semitic trope) is now an official spokesman for the Israeli government.

There are multiple lessons here. Mencer replaced internet sensation Eylon Levy, who is also not a New Jew exactly (his hair is always all greasy for some reason - don’t they have shampoo for that?), but is at least an Oxford man, smart and articulate, though rhetorically hobbled by his fidelity to articulating an Israeli government policy that doesn’t even really exist. Levy was fired apparently because Bibi Netanyahu’s crazy bitch wife doesn’t like him for some reason (the reason, presumably, being that she’s a crazy bitch). That certainly doesn’t sound like a responsible way to run a country, and many people in the know have commented on how Israel’s affirmative action government has crippled PR efforts. However, while I certainly could (and likely will) write an article about the insane clown party that is the Li**d, this problem goes deeper.

Put simply, there is a consistent theme to those who represent Israel’s case in the media, a vibe, or, if you will, an aura, and that aura is dumb. Mencer is definitely my least favourite (start the video at 2:59 … yeesh), but it’s a systemic problem. Take for example, the JNS TV’s The Quad. This is an extremely clever name, because it sounds like the Squad, and also there are four of them. Four of whom, you ask? Four sassy and empowered Jewish ladies, who are not going to take Jew hatred lying down. How sassy? How empowered? Well, just look:

You don’t get sassier than that, and also interracial. Checkmate Zionism-is-Racism bros. Let’s look at another one:

I could go on, but it would be petty and small-minded. You can watch as many of their videos as you want. As you would expect, they are bad. When they are let loose and have to actually engage with anti-Zionists, or actually anyone who isn’t Zionist, it’s really bad. Like, really, really bad.

Now, there are people with decent rhetorical abilities willing to argue for Israel: they have names like Douglas Murray, Richard Hananiah, and Steven Borelli. Granted, gentiles can be Zionists, and probably Douglas Murray counts as one, but it says something that such a high burden of responsibility for defending Israel in the public sphere is borne by a YouTube streamer who happened to start taking Adderall before October 7th and just really likes debating stuff.

National indifference

The barely moving corpses that are legacy Jewish organisations fret about young Jews abandoning Israel as a function of going woke, concerned that subsidised trips to do blow in Tel Aviv are no longer enough in the face of the unparalleled intellectual force that is Ibram X Kendi. This is not completely untrue. There’s this guy Zach Foster who talks well enough and, by his own telling, used to be a Zionist of some description before he got pozzed. On the other hand, some of the guys that Zionism is losing to the successor ideology frankly don’t seem like they would have been that much of an asset.

This person is very mentally ill.

The real problem that Zionism has seems to me to be something more banal. Jews don’t figure as prominently in western intellectual life as they did 40 or 50 years ago, a function of dysgenic breeding patterns, intermarriage and brain drain, but there are still plenty of identifiable and, in most cases, identifying Jews who are, for better and for worse, shaping the public sphere. Scott Alexander, Noah Smith, Matt Yglesias, Mark Zuckerberg, Sam Altman, Rebecca Schoenkopf, Alex Berenson, Robert Reich, Nate Silver, Andy Borowitz, Seth Abramson, Paul Krugman, Dan Pfeiffer, Lawrence Freedman. I could go on, but that’s enough to wear out the (((parentheses keys))) on anyone’s keyboard.¹ With maybe one exception, none of the above names are woke. They aren’t anti-Zionists either. Most of them have opinions of some kind of opinion about Israel, because it’s a salient political issue, especially right now, but the overwhelming impression one gets is indifference. Israel for them is just another country. It might, depending on taste, be distinguished from random generic country by virtue of it being a U.S. ally, running a 57-year military occupation, being relatively a liberal Middle Eastern country, or currently fighting a war in which people are dying all over the place. They might criticise a little more, or a little less, but fundamentally they just don’t care very much.

On the other hand, Israel has certainly captured the imagination of noted idiot, Michael Rapaport. He might even vote Trump now.

Don’t worry guys, with this dude’s rhetorical powers at our disposal, the State of Israel has nothing to fear (don’t play that video at work, or at home for that matter).

Not cool

The question before us is why Zionism leaves smart Jews cold and fires up dumb, uncool Jews like nothing else. You might think this is just another example of the well-replicated finding that, among whites, liberals are consistently more intelligent than conservatives, and that’s probably part of it, but Rapaport shows us that even very partisan Democrats can still be passionate Zionists, on condition that they are morons.

So how did we go from Abba Eban to this? I think it’s pretty simple; just look at this picture:

For those who don’t understand Hebrew, that translates as ‘image of victory’, which is a nice consolation prize for an army that hasn’t won a war in 51 years, I suppose. The Hebrew at the top is Yediot Ahronot, Israel’s leading newspaper by circulation, and avatar of centrist opinion, and just to prove that I haven’t dredged up some unrepresentative pic, here’s another, taken from this moving ceremony.

I’m not fully au fait with Zionist semiotics, so don’t ask me about all the details - why is the guy on the top left facing away from the camera? - but the general gist of this symbolism is clear enough. We have an old man putting on tefilin, with no antisemites to give him a rough time because now we have an IDF. This is in contrast to the Holocaust when there was no IDF because in its first 50 years Zionism had principally succeeded in throwing incalculable resources into a black hole hence images like these:

And just to make the connection that little bit more explicit, here:

The obvious thing about all this is that it’s just really, really dumb. If you want a place where you can send zaidy to live out his years in comfort and safety, it already exists, and it’s called Florida. If nursing home prices in Miami are getting too steep, there then there are bunch of other safer places than Israel you can choose, like pretty much anywhere that isn’t in the third world. Sure, something might kick off in any of these countries, but things are actually kicking off in Israel right now. If you want to daven, you can just do it, no armed guards necessary.

However, this new Zionist mythology gets worse when you think about it. Imagine for a second that Israel actually was the safest place for an old man to put on tefillin, rather than one of the most dangerous, is that what this is all supposed to be about? Let’s compare with Revolutionary Zionist poet Shaul Tchernichovsky:

I will bow down to life, to courage and beauty
I will bow down to all desirable things
which those human carcasses, those corrupted rebels
against life plundered from Tzurri-Shaddai -
the wonderful god of the dessert,
the god of the gods of those who conquered Canaan
in a whirlwind - and bound him with straps of tefilin.

Now, I’m a religious Jew and I do not endorse this message. Actually, I find it offensive, but cool is cool, and that is cool. Standing around gramps in your weird face-tichels and sunnies while he puts on some boxes signifying allegiance to a religion that you don’t even believe in order to say In Your Face! to the Nazis is not.

The heart and the head

As we discussed in the last article, Zionism didn’t win out over its competitors by appealing to the rational faculties, but to the latent dreams and yearnings of the Jewish soul. While the Zionist mythology of today has dumped all of the concrete goals of spiritual and cultural renewal once promised (even labelling them anti-Semitic), it does maintain one aspect, the concept of Jewish pride. Whereas we were once led meekly to the slaughter, we now have Jews with military uniforms and big guns. Granted, we still get slaughtered, but at least we have our dignity about it.

I won’t deny that this updated version of the Zionist message has no emotional appeal at all, but I do assert that its emotional appeal is most strongly felt by dumb people. It is cool to see a Jew with a big gun when your national stereotype is Woody Allen, but it gets old pretty quickly, and if you are capable of thinking, you soon realise that this religion of safety isn’t keeping you safe. Probing minds, of course, are willing to accept danger in pursuit of a noble goal, but, except for the Kookians, Zionism doesn’t offer any of those anymore. It promises neither redemption, nor transcendence, nor even actual safety, but a camp facsimile of dignity. In place of the New Jew, it grants the old Jew his deepest desire: to feel both like an eternal victim, and a proud man.

In this respect, as in so many others, we have come to resemble no-one so much as the nemesis we summoned up from the deep, the Palestinians. Take this retard. His house is rubble, his family is dead, his resistance fighters have achieved nothing except some of them getting their rocks off before being blown to bits. But he’ll be damned if he won’t keep ‘resisting’. He’s got his pride.

What do you feel when you see that? I feel absolute and total contempt, and, if you don’t, then things might not work out between us. Palestinian resistance is fundamentally fake, a sort of limbic revolutionism with no objective function except giving dumb people dopamine hits while everything around them turns, once again, to s**t. Most of the smart people in that insane asylum society have already left and good for them. Right now, limbic militarism is the closest thing that the state of Israel has to a vision that can knit its society together and maintain the loyalty of Jews around the world. I don’t blame, exactly, the powers that be for using what they have to hand, but the reality is that if you appeal to dummies, you get dummies, and dummies do dumb things. If you don’t want to end up like the numbskulls on the other side of the Apartheid wall, eventually you’re going to have to try something else.

1. By my count 8 out of 25 of the top Substack Politics blogs for the US are Jewish.