Marty's thoughts

Prologue: A Vision in Exile

For nearly two thousand years, the Jewish people carried within them a dream. Scattered across Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East, they whispered to their children of a land once theirs — a land promised, lost, and longed for. Every festival ended with the same refrain: “Next year in Jerusalem.” This refrain was not mere nostalgia. It was a song of survival. Against pogroms, ghettos, and centuries of persecution, it gave hope that history could be redeemed.

This dream was beautiful. It was not born of conquest but of memory. It was an imagination of homecoming, a story of a people bound together across continents and centuries by nothing but words, prayers, and yearning.

Chapter I: Zion Reimagined

In the late 19th century, this hope became a project. Zionism, led by visionaries like Theodor Herzl, transformed longing into political will. “If you will it, it is no dream,” Herzl declared. The beauty of Zionism lay in its audacity: that a stateless people, often treated as outcasts, might find dignity again through self-determination.

The early pioneers arrived in Palestine with calloused hands and idealism in their hearts. They drained swamps, built kibbutzim, and spoke of equality and fraternity. For them, the land was a canvas on which to paint a utopia. To many, Israel was not just a nation-to-be, but a chance to redeem history itself.

Chapter II: The Promise and the Shadow

Yet from the very beginning, the dream cast a shadow. The land was not empty. Arabs — Muslim and Christian alike — had lived there for centuries, cultivating olive groves, tending markets, raising families. For them, the Jewish return was not a redemption but an intrusion.

The Balfour Declaration of 1917 captured this duality. It promised a “national home for the Jewish people,” but also pledged not to prejudice the rights of existing inhabitants. Two promises written in one sentence — a contradiction that would ignite decades of conflict.

The beauty of the dream began to fray. Zionism was still alive with hope, but its utopian sheen was already stained by displacement and mistrust.

Chapter III: Birth in Fire

The Holocaust gave the dream its urgency. Six million murdered made the longing for refuge unbearable. In 1948, when Israel declared independence, Jews danced in the streets. The world, still reeling from the horrors of Auschwitz, saw in Israel a miracle: the return of a people from the ashes to sovereignty.

But Israel’s birth was also Palestine’s catastrophe. The Nakba — the displacement of over 700,000 Palestinians — turned villages into ruins, fields into memories, families into refugees. What was for Jews a resurrection was for Palestinians a dispossession. The dream and the nightmare were born together, conjoined twins.

Chapter IV: From Nation to Power

Israel grew strong. It fought wars and survived against long odds. Each victory fed the story of chosenness, of destiny fulfilled. Technology bloomed, cities rose, the desert yielded fruit. To much of the world, Israel became a beacon of resilience.

Yet power changed the dream. The kibbutz gave way to settlements. Security became occupation. Refuge turned into militarization. The language of survival hardened into the language of domination. The victim of yesterday became the oppressor of today.

The beauty of origins — of longing, of return, of building a home — had curdled. The dream was no longer only about safety or dignity, but about control.

Chapter V: The Monster Revealed

Today, the monster shows itself. Blockades, bombings, walls, and checkpoints define the daily lives of Palestinians. Entire generations have grown up under occupation, their future circumscribed by another people’s security doctrine. Meanwhile, Israeli politics fractures, drifting toward zealotry, its leaders invoking ancient texts to justify modern dispossession.

The state imagined as a sanctuary has become, for millions, a prison. What was supposed to be a light unto nations is now condemned by many as a violator of international law. The dream of redemption has been deformed into a nightmare of endless conflict.

Epilogue: Between Beauty and Monster

Israel’s story is not simple. It began in beauty — a dream of survival, dignity, and return. But history has a cruel irony: in grasping for safety, Israel built its survival on the suffering of another people. The dream became real, but reality birthed a monster.

And yet, the possibility remains: that nations, like individuals, can look into the mirror of their own contradictions and choose differently. The same imagination that created Israel can still reimagine it — not as a fortress against the world, but as a shared home. Until then, the story of Israel remains suspended between its beautiful origins and its monstrous present.