"I find your use of the phrase "ideally shaped" interesting. Would you care to clarify it? Are you aware that the majority of Israelis are secular and support a 2 state solution? Or that a state can have a state religion and still fulfill a promise of equality and largely secular governance, like England or Denmark does?
Look, I'm a secular member of the Diaspora myself, and I identify as a Zionist. That is to say that I believe that the Jewish people have a right to self-determination as expressed through a sovereign national homeland. Moreover, I believe that right exists as a fact in 2014 because Israel exists and there is an 80/20 Jewish majority within her borders.
We can argue the Nakba, the placement of settlements (which don't expand outward, but rather grow denser within settlement blocs which are almost universally placed strategically on the borders of the Green Line), or the treatment of Palestinians within the Occupied Territories or the Gaza, but the fact is that this Zionist project has created a bulwark of actual democracy in the Middle East while also growing into a first world economy. This is to say nothing of the incredible historic persecution of Jews which continues to this day in France, Hungary, and as state policy throughout the Arab world.
The existence of a Jewish state is important because there is an Israel which is succeeding, because that state has saved Jews from the world over (look up Aliyah from Ethiopa or the Arab States in 1948) and offers a right to self-defense and self-determination, and this state has a right to exist like any other state does.
It's not a matter of pro-military or pro-Zionist (which just means that you support the existence of a Jewish sovereign nation state) in the abstract, but rather a question of whether or not you think that France should exist for the French, Australia for the Australians, or Israel for the Jews."
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