Surveying the current condition of the Jewish state and the Jewish people, Yossi Klein Halevi puts forth some priorities for the coming years, beginning with the defense of the “Jewish story,” especially against the boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) movement:
The most insidious threat of BDS is not economic but ideological. On campuses around the world the very name “Zionism” is becoming tainted. Maddeningly, the more re-rooted we become as a people in our land, the more our indigenousness is being challenged. The growing counter-narrative to Zionism is that a Jewish state was forced on the Arab world by a guilty Europe—ignoring 4,000 years of Jewish connection to the land. Increasingly, then, the Holocaust is no longer a compelling argument for Jewish statehood but the opposite, an essential part of the anti-Zionist assault that defines Israel as a white European colonialist entity. . . .
The assault on our story must be treated as a threat to our very being. There is no Jewish people, no Judaism, without the Jewish story.
Read more on Times of Israel: http://blogs.timesofisrael.com/the-state-of-the-jewish-world-2016/