As I sit here contemplating your words, the sunlight keeps piercing through the dark clouds of an unusually dreary day. I cannot help concur that light ultimately overwhelms darkness in its expansiveness. This is a brave and comprehensive piece, Noora. Your conclusion is inescapable, we have to reimagine our own future, or someone will imagine it for us.

I am starting to envision the world as an organism, one infected the by the ancient disease of violence that, like a cancer, multiplies from cell to cell. Our challenge as humanity is to contain and eliminate that primordial darkness without letting it use us as hosts for its multiplication. Zionism was a great failure in that regard, if its claim of redemption towards Holocaust victims warrants any merit. Victimhood never justifies further violence.

You will probably appreciate Mitri Raheb's excellent book, Decolonizing Palestine. There, he traces the roots of Zionist ideas to British Christian Zionists in the period 1840-1860, well before any of Herzl's works. The quote he cites from Shaftesbury (1839) is revealing, and follows the blueprint you retroactively gleaned from history:

"The soil and climate of Palestine are singularly adapted to the growth of produce required for the exigencies of Great Britain; … finest cotton … silk and madder … olive oil … the very fatness of the land. Capital and skill alone are required: the presence of a British officer … and the Jews … will probably return in greater numbers, and become once more the husbandmen of Judaea and Galilee."

The imperial interests are recounted first, then the implementation: British military power married to the anti-Semitism of moving Europe's Jews to Palestine. The renaming is par the course.

Among the pinheads you name, the trojan of consumerism is perhaps the easiest to reject - a goal that can further unite us with others around the world aghast at the empire's deeds.

Thank you for the mention. It's an honor.