Of course. Haaretz recently published an opinion piece by Ithamar Handelman-Smith titled “Some Say It’s the End of Zionism, and I Say That’s All Right.” And what impeccable timing: as Israel carries out a near-two-year campaign of siege, famine, and bombardment in Gaza — slaughtering families, burying aid workers with their ambulances, and literally starving children to death — someone in Israel finally whispers the unspeakable: maybe Zionism, that 20th-century project of “Jewish salvation,” has outlived its moral shelf life.
Bravo. The house is burning, bodies are scattered in the street, and the philosopher shows up with a garden hose.
Zionism: Success Story or Crime Scene?
Handelman-Smith argues that Zionism achieved its success: a Jewish state, a safe haven, a fortress against the ghosts of Europe’s crimes. But like every “success story” drenched in other people’s blood, it didn’t age well. What began as refuge turned into domination; what was called “liberation” became occupation; what was dressed up as “survival” has curdled into apartheid, ethnic cleansing, and open genocide.
And here’s the bitter irony: the very thing that was supposed to protect Jews from barbarism now justifies their state in becoming the barbarian. Gaza is proof. The safe haven has mutated into a killing field.
The Rotten Core Exposed
The author politely calls it “the corruption of the original idea.” How civilized. As if expelling Palestinians in 1948, bulldozing their villages, and ensuring they never return wasn’t already corruption at inception. But now, 75 years later, the mask has slipped. Settlements expand. Palestinians live as rightless subjects under permanent military law. The “Jewish and democratic” fairytale reveals itself as an impossible contradiction. You cannot have both — unless your democracy ends at the barrel of a tank.
Handelman-Smith suggests that this obsession with Jewish demographic supremacy has finally poisoned the very state it built. How right he is — but how late. The poison was already in the well; only now are Israelis complaining about the taste.
Post-Zionism, or Too Little Too Late?
The article dreams of a “post-Zionist” Israel — one that is truly democratic, a state for all its citizens, where Jewishness can remain cultural but not hegemonic. Sounds lovely. Almost utopian. But as Gaza’s children are emaciated into skeletons, as hospitals become morgues under rubble, and as the world pretends not to see, the timing is grotesque.
We are told, “Don’t mourn the end of Zionism, embrace it.” But tell that to the family digging their child’s body out from concrete. Tell that to the mother boiling weeds to keep her children alive. For them, Zionism isn’t ending — it’s roaring above in an F-16, flattening their neighborhood.
A Funeral Without Tears
Maybe it is the end of Zionism. Not in the philosophical salons of Tel Aviv, but in the ashes of Gaza, in the shattered moral credibility of Israel before the world, and in the global protests where millions chant what once was unthinkable.
Zionism is dying, yes — but it’s not a noble death. It’s a grotesque suicide, written in the blood of Palestinians, carried out live on every screen, and excused with every flimsy press release.
And when the obituary is written, it won’t read like Handelman-Smith’s soft eulogy. It will read like a crime report.
Final Note
So yes, Ithamar, you’re right: the end of Zionism is “all right.” But don’t dress it up as evolution, as progress. It’s collapse, it’s disgrace, it’s the inevitable implosion of an ideology that mistook supremacy for survival.
And in Gaza, amid famine and fire, the world is witnessing the last act — not of Jewish liberation, but of Jewish moral bankruptcy, played out on the bodies of those who were forced to pay the price from the very beginning.
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