(JNS) Less than three weeks before the Oct. 7 massacre, the Israeli daily Haaretz announced its break with the Zionist creed. Its editor-in-chief, Aluf Benn, penned a piece just before Yom Kippur eve, entitled “Jewish and Democratic? It’s Time to Erase the Word Jewish."
The paper’s regular Hebrew readers were probably not all that surprised. After all, many variations on this theme have appeared in the periodical’s opinion pages, and its aversion to nationalism and religion, as well as its infatuation with the local version of globalist ideology-the idea of a non-national, so-called “state of all its citizens"-were well known. But never before had the editor himself announced the paper’s desire to dismantle the Jewish state and put an end to the Zionist enterprise.
The editorial board must have thought that an international audience was not yet ready for the revelation, and so the English edition softened the title, cloaking Benn’s declaration in some warm Yiddishkeit. It read: “On Yom Kippur, Facing the Question: Where Is Israel Headed?"
