It's never been harder to be both a conscientious liberal and a Zionist than it is right now. Particularly in the United States, where Zionism has been reduced to "there is no such thing as bad Israeli policy," and where it's easy to conclude that only the neo-cons think that Israel should do anything to defend itself, the tension between liberal values and Zionist values is, quite frankly, enough to make me bang my head against the wall.
It wasn't always this way. Zionism was once flat-out socialist; indeed, there was a time when Israel was more aligned with the Soviet Union than the United States (-ish; most of the Middle East alliances during the '50's have a certain amount of "-ish" to them; you can also argue that the Soviets were backing pan-Arabism and be just as right). It was once easy to be both Zionist and left. No more.
Rather than wade into the trenches of "who did what to whom" and the round and round of the flotilla incident (which in the best possible interpretation is an example of Israeli leadership seriously blowing the call, possibly worse than Jim Joyce), I decided I would throw out a few thoughts about things that probably aren't the best phrases to toss around in the conversation.
