A Tale of Two Chosen Peoples: The Zionist Narrative Aimed at White Americans

Why it has worked and why it is falling apart now

I’m going to tell a story in dialogue form, a story that I have heard from Zionists since the 1970s, how it resonates with the stories generations of Americans descended from the earlier European settlers in the United States(especially those in the South), where stubborn facts divide the two, and where, finally and I think ironically, it stops working altogether.

I will present the Zionist part in block quotes in a way I hope illustrates its persuasive power with people like me, and my family, who are descended from those early settlers. I will use the plural “we” in how I, and many of my Christian, often Republican-voting, extended family might reasonably respond in normal text. Here goes.

We Israelis are a lot like you. Your people came to America to escape tyranny and persecution, to live without a “By your leave” to any lord, to find your own land and build your own free society.

There were already people living in America, but they were primitive, uncivilized savages, and in spite of your best efforts to civilize them, they would viciously attack you so you did what you had to do to make a home for yourselves.

You thought that surely only God could have sent you to this promised land, that you were an exceptional people chosen to found the greatest country the world has ever seen! And you were right! We Israelis also have a promised land. We are also an exceptional people who have seen much struggle and persecution, and only want what is rightly ours—to live free and at peace in our own land.

Yes, we get it. We pushed the Indians out, killed them in job lots, and forced them onto reservations. We’ve seen Little Big Man and I Will Fight No More Forever, we grew up hearing stories about being afraid of the summer nights with a full Comanche moon.

Now they call it ethnic cleansing. We know what ethnic cleansing looks like and why it is done.

And look at what you did! You turned a wilderness into a great civilization! You built homes and farms, factories and mills, towns and cities! We are the same. We built beautiful cities like Tel Aviv and we made the desert bloom! The Indians would never have done that, and the Arabs only herded goats and wanted to stay in the Middle Ages. Now Israel’s one of the most advanced countries in the world! See how much we’re alike?

Well, yeah, we see that. But what’s wrong with herding goats? Grandpa had goats.

Nothing! But that’s not the point. The point is that you made better use of the land, so it’s clear that you were the ones who had to keep control of it, or else it would just sit idle. Don’t you have a saying about idle hands being the Devil’s workshop? You work that land. You earned the right to keep it, and so have we.

All right, but there weren’t nearly as many Indians here then as there are Palestinian Arabs there now. And we made the Indians become Americans and some of them became our heroes. We’ve seen Windtalkers. We let them have their own land now. Well, where we can, we guess. You seem to be cramming the Palestinians into smaller and smaller areas, just like we did the Indians.

We made the Arabs who stayed in Israel Israelis, too! But there are so many of them and they breed so fast! We Israeli Jews need a nation of our own, just like you! We can’t just let them take us over by outvoting us! It’s not so much like your Indians, as it is your former slaves.

You once brought over African slaves and prospered because of them. Of course, slavery was wrong and you gave it up, but you couldn’t let all those people dominate you! You did what you had to do to make sure that didn’t happen. We have to do the same with the Arabs. We have no choice if we are to remain Jews in the land God promised to us.

So the Israeli Arabs are like the Blacks in the South after the Civil War and before the 1960s? All right. We guess we get that, though it makes us uncomfortable now. We know what Separate But Equal looks like. Um, we also got rid of that. That’s why Uncle Louis voted for LBJ, you know. He hated that segregation stuff, only he didn’t call it “stuff.” He called it bullshit.

And LBJ was a great friend to Israel! Why, we could never have won the 1967 war without his support, and we’re grateful. The same goes for Nixon in 1973.

Yeah, about that. We took the land from the Indians. We kept the Blacks in their place, OK we did. But we didn’t have to rely on the support of some great, powerful country on the other side of the Atlantic in order to do all that. In fact, we got all this Shining City on the Hill stuff going by defeating the British back in the day.

(Wagging finger) Yes, but that is completely different from where we Zionists come from. We were persecuted and had pogroms against us and then the Nazis exterminated six million of us! We had to have our own country, and the Holy Land was the only logical place! Truman knew this, this is why he supported the creation of Israel back in 1948.

OK. We get that, and we sympathize. We remember World War II. Uncle Justin flew in a bomber over places like Hamburg and Dresden. We know what bombing the shit out of civilians in cities looks like. Cousin Donald, though everyone called him Curly, was in the first platoon in Patton’s Third Army to reach Dachau.

We know what concentration camps look like. We know what genocide looks like—we stopped the genocide of the Jews, you know. Well, us and the Brits and the Russians. Cousin Donald remembered being so happy to see Russians on that river in Germany in ‘45. What was that?

Oy! The Elbe River. But yes! Exactly! After what the Nazis did, we had to make sure that it would never again happen to us! And we have, with your help. One Chosen People helping another. It’s a beautiful thing. God has surely brought us together to be friends and allies forever.

Yeah, those Nazis sure were nasty bastards, all right. Going around rounding people up and cramming them on trains and into camps, starving them and gassing them. Terrible. No wonder Uncle Justin and Cousin Donald always said Nazis are good only for killing.

Your uncle and cousin were right. And the Arabs want to finish the job on us that the Nazis started. That’s why you have to help us fight them, because if they finish us off, they’ll come for you next. Look at 9/11!

Yeah, about 9/11. We were in Afghanistan for 20 years because of that, and we were in Iraq a long time and killed a whole shitload of those people and it turns out that neither the Afghans nor the Iraqis had anything to do with it. Cousin Bill warned us about that—maybe he’s something of a Commie, but every family has one and he was right about that. What can we say?

Just like Aunt Thelma was always right about there being oil wherever we had to go defend somebody else’s freedom after World War II. Speaking of World War II and Nazis, they did ethnic cleansing, put people in camps, herded them into ghettoes where they wouldn’t let them leave, bombed the shit out of cities full of civilians…

Never again! That’s why you have to keep helping Israel, because if you don’t, you’re letting the Holocaust happen all over again!

Amen to Never Again, but this is the 21st Century, and things aren’t so good here. It’s not like 1967 at all! Some of us have done all right, but most of us have medical bills, student loans, really steep rents and mortgages, and we see homeless Americans and crumbling roads and bridges everywhere, all the schools suck, and the price of eggs! Christ! Some of us have a problem with spending all this money on other countries when we need help right here at home.

Plus we’ve seen ethnic cleansing in places like Bosnia, too, and we agree it’s wrong to do that now. Or do we? Isn’t that what you are doing to the Palestinians? Cramming them into ghettoes, bombing the ever living shit out of them, keeping their population down by—What do you call it? Mowing the grass?

Yes! Mowing the grass! We have to! You just said you understood that! You and us, we’re the same! And if you let the Muslims wipe us out, they’ll come for you next! Or are you anti-Semitic after all and not believers in your Holy Bible?

Some of us may be. Uncle Tony’s always going on about the Elders of Zion or the Rothschilds or something but he’s also crazy as a bedbug and says aliens stuck a probe up his ass once, so we don’t pay no nevermind to him.

Most of us aren’t, though. The Jews never did anything to us, but neither did the Arabs until we started going after all that oil so Uncle Bob’s Exxon stock could go up, at least that’s what our anarchist and Commie black sheep cousins say, and nobody’s proven ‘em wrong yet.

Say, do you have to wear a swastika to be a Nazi? Or do you have to just act like one?

We are starting to think that maybe you are anti-Semitic. Just why are you asking that question now?

My, aren’t you touchy today? We understand being upset over the Hamas attacks, we do, but the same people who run our government now—you know, the libs—have been telling us for 50 years that when the Indians killed the settlers, like when the Comanche caught great-Uncle Thomas and disemboweled him and staked him out on an ant bed, they were just defending themselves so we can’t hate them for it.

We’ve thought about that, and a lot of us have talked to some real, live Indians. We get it now and know we really can’t blame them for that so we don’t anymore. So, what’s the difference between Indian savages back in the day and Palestinian terrorists today? It was their land first, right?

NO!!! It was ours first! God promised it to us back when we were in bondage in Egypt! The Arabs never had any right to it! Besides, we need it to survive! You can’t just stand by and let them kill us!

We haven’t, though, have we? How long has our country been financing yours? And still is. We’re confused, though, and maybe you can help.

We’d be happy to.

OK. We ethnically cleansed the Indians. We enslaved the Africans. It happened. Ain’t nothing nobody can do to change any of that now. We saw what the Nazis did to you and about four million others that you always forget to mention for some strange reason.

Now we see that you have already driven the Palestinian Arabs off their land, be they Muslim or Christian, driven them out of what was Palestine altogether or confined them into smaller and smaller areas. Not judging, mind, just stating the facts. With us so far?

Yes, but you have to keep supporting Israel if you want to be morally consistent.

So you say, and that may be. Let’s finish since some of us have second jobs to get to. So, Palestinians into smaller and smaller areas, and they can’t leave without your permission if at all. We’ve seen that before, too. In South Africa. Them Dutch Bores or Boers or whatever called it apartheid. We know that when we see it.

Nope! Hold that thought. Aunt Thelma always said if it walks like a duck, and talks like a duck, then it’s a damned duck. We see you saying you have the right to ethnically cleanse these people, to segregate them, to bomb the shit out of them and slaughter them in great job lots just like we did to the Comanche after they killed great Uncle Thomas, and that we have the moral obligation to pay for you to do it to the Palestinians now. Is that right, yes or no?

Yes, it is! We knew you would understand.

Oh, we understand, all right. It just so happens that fewer and fewer of us agree anymore. You see, it’s 2023 now, not 1783 or 1833 or 1863 or even 1963 or 1983. We know that if it walks like a Nazi, talks like a Nazi, ethnically cleanses like a Nazi, and genocides like a Nazi, then it’s a goddamned Nazi.

Ukraine keeps reminding us of that on a daily basis. Wehrmacht crosses on their tanks. SS tattoos on their bodies. What were they thinking?

We say that because of that whole family tradition of Nazis are good only for killing thing. We think about a cousin serving on the USS Gerald R. Ford, soon to be in range of Hezbollah missiles that could probably sink the thing, just to show support for Israel, and ask ourselves if it is worth it. If it’s the right thing to do now.

We’re not the same people our ancestors were, you see. Part of the American promise was always that a man didn’t have to be what his father was, and that he had the liberty to disagree with his father on, well, everything. You’re telling us that we have to support you Israelis because you are doing similar things to an indigenous people today that our ancestors did to other peoples yesterday.

Yes! You do! Or you’re a Jew hater, an anti-Semite, a Nazi, and maybe a traitor to your own government!

LOL! We reckon a lot of us don’t like our own government very much; bunch of corrupt clowns, they are, so that’s not gonna help you. As for calling us Nazis, all that’s gonna do is to piss us off at you, which you say you don’t want. Our own people, and we now know that includes Indians and Blacks and gays and Asians and Latinos and what-have-you who are American, need that money spent here at home first.

Besides, we’ve learned that ethnic cleansing and genocide and bombing the crap out of cities and Forever War and concentration camps are Bad Things in and of themselves, and we really don’t think Jesus is going to damn us for opposing them now, even if it’s one group of Jews telling us that we should.

So no, we don’t cotton to that bit about supporting Israel no matter what anymore. We especially don’t want to keep paying you to do those bad things when so many of us are so damned broke ourselves. If you’re going to do a genocide, at least don’t ask us to pay for it, or for members of our family to die in support of it, or we might just start thinking of that family tradition about Nazis again.

Fascists! Nazis! White Supremacists! You are PURE EVIL!

Oh, bugger off and look in a mirror. We’re not evil. We’re just tired of war. But we’re starting to really wonder about you.

Thank you for reading and have a nice weekend.