Zionists see Israel’s fight in Gaza as an existential battle for Jewish existence. And if you don’t support this fight, you’re against the Jews. That makes you irredeemable and not a Jew, even if you are legally Jewish by Israel’s maternal bloodline obsessed rabbinical court. That’s what I mean when I say Zionists want to act in the name of all Jews.

If the diaspora really wants to take a shot at making things “normal” in Israel, it has two paths: to either fully back genocide or give up on Zionism and push Israel towards reconciliation and integration. I know it’s useless to type all this out. I don’t have much faith in the second option happening. My Zionist diaspora isn’t into it at all.

The end of Soviet Ukraine and the collapse of Soviet ideology created an identity vacuum. As Yasha Levine explains, the only alternative identity that was organized enough and developed enough to offer a solution in the midst of post-Soviet identity confusion and crisis was one that was developed by Ukrainian nationalists.