Ziontology 1. Introduction: The Most Successful Cult?
This is an adapted transcript of a podcast episode which can be heard here.
‘Never in the past have we had such a clear cut war of good versus evil, of people who are slaughtering babies versus people who are protecting their children in a shelter. Everyone saw the Israeli parents protecting their children in the shelters, and everyone saw the horrific footage of those beheaded babies.’
The quote above is of the Israeli Ambassador, talking about the recent incursion into Israel by Hamas, in which over twelve hundred, mostly civilians, were killed, with a further two hundred being taken hostage. At the time of recording, the Israeli response has killed at least eight thousand people in the Gaza Strip, where access to food, water, medicine and fuel is being denied.
With the United States deploying two aircraft carriers to the Middle East, and with one US Senator advocating for the ‘levelling’ of Gaza and airstrikes on Iran, it’s far from inconceivable this could break out into a wider war.
Whilst this is going on, cities across the Western World are witnessing pro-Palestinian marches unprecedented in their scale, with the media response dividing itself along predictable lines.
Of course, none of this is new, just the latest outpouring of violence in a conflict that’s gone on for around a hundred years. I’ve wanted to produce a series on it since before I started podcasting. I’d planned to get round to it one day, but recent events force me to conclude: if not now, when?
This is a situation that I think is both very clear cut, and extremely challenging to understand, as clarity is buried beneath layers of subterfuge. This subterfuge is sufficient to allow people to see whatever they want to see.
What I’m looking to produce is a relatively concise overview that gets beneath the illusions and propaganda. Unlike a lot of what I do, I'm not without my biases here. Whilst I will attempt to both justify and challenge them, I do see the Zionist project as being a catastrophe—even if it’s one that arose for some understandable reasons.
With that bias being confessed to; I’ll explain the particular angle I’m taking and why the series is called Ziontology.
Zion, originally refers to Mount Zion, a hill in Jerusalem where the Jewish Temples are believed to have stood. In a broader sense it refers to the land of Israel in totality. Zionism, in this context, is the political movement for the establishment and continuation of a homeland or state for the Jewish people.
I’ve blended this with a liberal use of the philosophical term ontology, to suggest a study of the most foundational level of a thing.
Beyond this, Ziontology—sounds like Scientology—the cult and frankly criminal enterprise based on the science fictional imaginings of L. Ron Hubbard.
The thought struck me after hearing Scientology described as one of the most successful cults of the 20th century: attracting tens of thousands of followers and accruing vast financial assets. Scientologists even had the audacity to infiltrate the US Government, taking on the dreaded IRS and coming out on top. Who does that? If you can cast morality aside for a moment, you would have to acknowledge this as being an incredible achievement.
Impressive as it is however, it’s nothing—absolutely nothing—as compared to the rise of Zion-tology.
At the turn of the 20th century Zionism was a fringe ideology, appealing to a tiny number of people. Its adherents stood basically no chance of bringing their audacious goal—that of founding a nation state for the Jewish people—into being. Within fifty years, they had maneuvered the world’s two greatest empires and a newly created international body into establishing that nation state for them. Forget about donors, they acquired a tax base. Tens of thousands of members?, try tens of millions. Infiltrate the IRS?, try leading the US Government round by the nose whilst extracting an annual tribute. As for public relations: Scientology may have Tom Cruise, but Ziontology influences the media the world over. Oh, and how many nuclear missiles does the Sea Org have? Yeah, I didn’t think so.
The question is then: Is Ziontology actually the most successful cult of the past hundred and twenty years?
As with Scientology, is it not underpinned by some fantasyful stories? For the Christian Zionists these involve a deity promising a specific patch of land to a particular man and his descendants; which all has something to do with the return of a god-man and the battle of Armageddon. Granted, Jewish Zionism has always been a substantially secular movement, but here too there is a story—which might be a little bit tall—of a people with an unbroken genetic line, coming home to land that was taken from them nearly two thousand years ago.
When I initially had the idea for this series, my intention was not to single Israel out as being unique in its cultishness, giving all other states a clean bill of health by contrast. Rather, through exploring the extremity of the Zionist State, I intended to make the cultish nature of statism in general more apparent.
As I sit here now with scenes of utter horror emerging from Gaza, not to mention the pathological indifference of Israeli Government spokespeople, I must confess, that broader anarchic goal feels less of a priority.
There are a lot of fantastic writers and filmmakers with on the ground experience who have dedicated their lives to exposing Zion. I haven’t walked the streets of Gaza or the West Bank and certainly not in their league. I have had the concept for this series on my mind for the past ten years however, and I hope I can make this a valuable resource. In some ways it represents my own protest, my own venting of moral outrage at what is going on.
I’ll conclude this introductory article here. In the next one I’ll examine that tall story I mentioned, of modern Jews connection to and expulsion from the ancient land of Judea.
This is an adapted transcript of a podcast episode which can be heard here.