!Yes, Judaism. No zionism.
 --- 
agk's diary 
25 February 2026 @ 06:20 UTC
 --- 
written on GPD MicroPC
beside a sleeping Evy, after waking with a cough
 --- 
A guy who taught me a lot over the years, especially
about geopolitical and military entanglement in
Syria and Ukraine, has not been able to get his head
around Israel's genocidal, expansionist rampage of
the last two and a half years. He's just horrified,
and silenced by his horror. Epstein revelations are
also a bridge too far for him: again silence, then
minimization.

I couldn't understand why he couldn't understand.
Why his astute insights gained from military and
political service, and long political commitments,
were lost in the last few years' current affairs.
What was unspeakable to him?

This week it dawned on me---he's German. The horizon
of his understanding is defined by Israel's
extortionate manipulation of German national guilt,
and a Jewish population that has remained too small
since the Nazi period to act as an effective
counterweight. Like young American Jews, young
German Jews are antizionist. But there are so few
he has likely only encountered them in media
reports.

He can't consider questions connected with Zionist
belligerence and espionage with the objectivity and
insight I came to expect from him. He's afraid of
the risk of antisemitism.

Yet, silence is inexcusable. His country's Thyssen
provides submarines, Rheinmetall provides munitions,
diplomats and leaders provide cover, the treasury
provides enormous sums to a racist colonial outpost
crazier than Rhodesia or French Indochina at their
worst.

All yesterday's antisemitic libel threatens to
infect analysis of zionist genocide, aggression,
espionage, and influence.

Yet, IDF soldiers do kill children for sport, and
violate every tenet of international law. The
Israeli public has made the right to rape prisoners
to death a popular and successful cause.

Israel's highest figures and the US Ambassador to
Israel do consistently assert it will annex and
depopulate Lebanon, Jordan, Syria, and parts of
Egypt, Iraq, and Saudi Arabia. Israeli influence
networks do purchase and blackmail political,
business, cultural, and academic leaders throughout
the world.

More than a third of the world's biggest naval and
air force is reluctantly parked by Iran with a
mission to replace Iran's government with one Israel
likes better, as the governments of Iraq, Syria, 
Libya, and other countries have been replaced.

The only antidote I know to the hazards of trying to
understand zionism is long, respectful, acquaintance
with a great variety of Jewish people, Jewish
thought, Jewish religious observance, and Jewish
secular custom.

Unlike my German interlocutor, I live in a country
with as much as half the world's Jewish people, six
to seven and a half million persons. My dad reads
Hebrew, as does my current pastor. Since childhood,
I've been a guest in the homes and schuls of Jewish
neighbors, schoolmates, teachers and mentors,
friends, comrades, lovers, and family for meals,
holidays, and spirited conversation.

My thinking and worldview is deeply informed by 
Jewish thinkers, from Rashi and Rambam to Rahel 
Levin Varnhagen, Gershom Scholem, Walter Benjamin,
Abraham Heschel, Hannah Arendt, and many others.

Israel is the authentic heir of a Jewish tradition,
and has by many means held ordinarily independent-
minded, outspoken American Jews hostage to its
project, however depraved, since at least 1973.

But there are a great variety of living Jewish trad-
itions (not least that two Jews in a room will have
three opinions between them). In many ways, Israel
is the betrayal and desecration of Ashkenazi herit-
age, and the history of Judaism is the history of
renewal. There is evil like Israel in every epoch,
and good that survives it.

The end of Israel will not be the end of Judaism,
and certainly won't be the end of the world. The end
of Israel will, instead, free Judaism from the yoke
of zionist evil. The exile in Babylon ended the time
of kings and freed the people of the former kingdom
of Judah from Jehoiakim's evil and decadence---and
their own. The destruction of the second temple in
70 AD freed communities gathered around Torah and
communion, communities which ultimately became
rabbinical Judaism and Christianity.

I'm Christian. Like Jews, we too have traditions of
sadism, genocide, conspiracy, and aggression, as
well as mutual aid, solidarity, integrity among
others, protecting difference, critical thought, and
renewing, observing, and proclaiming God's truth as
entrusted to us.

Zionism and antisemitism are racialist diseases.
Zionism needs and encourages antisemitism to hold
decent Jews hostage to its disgusting worldview and
project.

Today antizionists are persecuted, as proto-Rabbin-
ical and proto-Christian communities were in the
last days of the second temple. Israel and the
Epstein class are our temples which must fall for
moral salvation of Jews, Christians, and the world
in our time.