Demonizing ‘Zionists’ Allows Me To Engage In Classic Religious Behavior While Pretending Atheism

by Alex Dewitt, BDS Activist

New York, May 3 – Religion is such a primitive phenomenon. As a society we have, or at least should have, grown past it. This is what I assert to myself and my colleagues when relevant, which is whenever I have the sobering realization that my treatment of Israel, and of Jews in general, bears eerie similarity to the way my Christian upbringing treated the Devil, the personification of evil. As the veteran nun said to the novice in the convent laundry room, old habits die hard.

I’m not religious – I’d swear it on a sacred text if I could, but obviously I can’t. Please do not be misled by the teleological, theological, and classically eschatological sensibilities animating my political rhetoric. It’s just a coincidence that I assign what can only be described as supernatural powers to the Jewish nation-state. I’m not a believer.

I just *sound* religious. For example, I need you to accept that there’s objectively something morally outrageous about Zionism and the people who produced and pursue it – my politics depends on that. To do so, I must use language that perforce carries with it objective right and wrong – which could only come from an objective creator, since otherwise morality is arbitrary and undefined. And *my* definition of what’s moral, not to mention what’s factual, represents the higher truth. You can’t have higher truth in a godless universe, at least not in any inherently meaningful sense. I feel the justice of my cause, and I act upon it. But I’m not religious.

Listen, just because I cast Israel as the embodiment of everything malicious, corrupt, manipulative, and evil doesn’t mean I buy into the ontological reality of the notions malicious, corrupt, manipulative, or evil. I just need you to buy into them. I will concede that to me, that certainly feels right, and perhaps that’s what counts anyway. I know I’d be lost, metaphorically speaking, without the moral anchor of knowing Israel is wrong.

As an atheist I also pride myself on shedding the crutch of religion, because I’m strong enough to handle reality as it is. Also I need to paint everything Israel does, not matter how mundane or normal for any country to do, as uniquely evil, or my ideological worldview is threatened. I’m objective and a critical thinker who never resorts to special pleading – nationalism is bad, but Palestinian nationalism is good; decolonization is good, but decolonization by Jews is bad; sacred texts are an illegitimate source for any claim, but Islamic texts buttress the Palestinian claim to Palestine.

Do NOT call me religious.

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