Zionism has fractured or branched (depending on which way you look at it) from its practical inception in the 19th century. Zionism is a secular idea at heart (and originally, a beautiful one verging (IMO) on a poetic concept of sorts. But there have always been strong religious overtones, latent or willfully unrecognized initially. Revisionist Zionism (or the melding of
Revisionist Zionism with
Religious Zionism, again, depending on how you view things) is responsible for what I define as a ZionCon- a Zionist NeoCon. A ZionCon represents not just the merging but the conceptual
evolution over the last 20 or so years of the original Revisionist or Revisionist/Religious Zionist dogma into
something much more aggressive and desperate than even NeoCons, currently. An easy test to determine if you're looking at the actions of a ZionCon: a ZionCon will, without hesitation, call another Jew self-loathing because they disagree with that Jew's (more moderate or left-leaning) political ideas or opinion. There is more than a whiff of racial superiority in the ZionCon mind- they feel free and even obliged to be the determiners of who is a "real" Jew and who is an anti-Semite. BTW, if you know who he is, not even
Kahane would make such proclamations, to the best of my understanding. To give you a good example of a ZionCon, I present the
Rabbi Ovadia Yosef.
Working claw in claw there is
nothing these two groups will not do to achieve their goals.
By the way, did I mention Rabbi Yosef's political party,
Shas currently holds 10% of the seats in the Israeli Knesset? And don't go thinking that it jumps from him to something alot more reasonable: Right-wing conservatism un an unthinkable (and unthinking) scale is very popular in Israel at the moment. Without constant U.S. military aid and praise, that might change. But
AIPAC will make sure that doesn't happen.
Not that AIPAC necessarily agrees with them, but they don't have to: AIPAC exists to continue to bring money, good PR and US policy favorable twoard Israel, nomatter what political hat it wears at the moment.
PB