A 'Zio' comes 'home'
Every time I land at Ben-Gurion I get an emotion I cannot describe. A warmth infuses my soul, the non-existent hairs on my scalp do their phantom thing. It’s a homecoming like no other, even though I am not Israeli in the accepted normative construct of nationality.
Disembarking into the warm darkness at 03.30 am yesterday was accompanied by feelings almost alien in my everyday diasporic life - safety, acceptance, peace.
My whole DNA (apart from the inexplicable 17.5% Italian, of great maternal consternation!) activates my amygdala the moment the tyres hit the runway.
Yes, I was born in Dublin and have always been proud to be Irish (although the last 2 years has tested this to the limits) not least by the many on X who tell me I cannot be Irish - just tiny examples by my followers, from literally an hour ago) ⬇️
There is an irony that those who accuse me of not being a real Irishman, as my biblical Ashkenazi genetic code stems largely from the land of Israel (the Italian aberration aside) are the same people who tell me Israel never existed, that Jews were colonisers of what they call ‘Palestinian’ land (thousands of years before such a thing as a Palestinian Arab emerged).
The prevailing narrative of Israel as an ‘apartheid’ state is a complete falsehood. Launched relentlessly like missiles to imprint on the psychologically impressionable by those who have likely never set foot on the tarmac of Ben Gurion.
Shameful so-called politicians like Zarah Sultana, so-called journalists like Owen Jones, NHS so-called doctors like Dr Aladwan. The list of Irish narrators would take up too much space here.
Israel is wonderfully multi-ethnic; secular and orthdox; white and brown; Arab, Jew, Christian, Druze and other; LGBT (like myself) and not LGBT* (I refuse to list the other 50+ descriptors by the idenitity ideologues*).
There is equality of opportunity; healthcare, education. Where there is civil discord it is largely between secular and extreme orthodoxy, mainly in relation to IDF service exemption, and the financial burden upon those who work and pay taxes to help subsidise those who receive life-long funding for full-time exploration of the Torah.
The notion of ‘apartheid’, a term created to describe the horror of white supremacy over the majority black population of South Africa, in the description of modern day Israel is a clear libel used to denigrate and dehmanise the State of Israel.
In his powerful address to the World Jewish Congress yesterday, President Herzog faced down those who have replaced the ‘yid’ slur with ‘Zio’. Well he shoved this unceremoniously down the haters throats.
On behalf of us all he owned the slur and turned it on its head. The Israeli ‘Zios’ are proud, courageous, ambitious, brilliant - Jew and non Jew - and we in the Dispora are also (mostly) Zionists, or if as the haters want to call us, as an attempted insult, then fine, we are ‘Zios’… and fiercely proud to be so.
So this Zio here is home, even just for a few days, recharge the batteries snd be inspired and empowered to go home and keep fighting the good fight.
Am Yisrael Chai