From Steven Pinker in a guest column on his Jewishness and related issues concerning the war in Gaza:
“And I am not a Zionist in the sense of seeing a Jewish state as the natural aspiration of the Jews. I believe a state should be based on a social contract that secures its citizens the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, not the embodiment of religious or ethnic yearnings.”
Me to someone on this:
On the precise point of Pinker’s disclaiming Zionism even as it’s oddly defined by him, and as you note, it’s the uniquely tragic confluence of events ancient, historical and modern, circa the the second quarter of the 20th Century, that make Pinker’s rejection of ethnic and religious aspiration in favour of a kind deracinated liberalism and polity in the making of Israel seem puerile to me.
Israel exists as a Jewish state and Zionism at this point is nothing but holding that she should/must continue to exist as that. Stripping the country of the glue of Jewish ethnicity and religion too is to render her what? Something I say she will always reject.
So I ask again what the hell is he talking about when he disclaims being a certain kind of Zionist, which he defines in an airy way that is apart from what she is both on the ground and as an idea?
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