For many Jews, Zionism signifies a connection to Israel. But a large number of student protesters see the violence in Gaza as a logical conclusion of the late 19th century ideology
Nationalism is almost always bad, why should Israeli Nationalism be any different?
Ask yourself: if it was any other country or ethnicity, would it be “good” nationalism? Would an American or Russian Nationalist worry you? How about a Rwandan or Serbian nationalist?
Chances are the answer is “yes” (unless you’re a fascist), so why does Israeli nationalism get a free pass?
Like religion, you have to look at the context of nationalism, it can be a liberatory force in the context of oppression; look at the Viet Minh and the IRA.
I’d be hard pressed to tell a Dakota Sioux that their nationalism is bad.
It’s not a slur any more than calling someone a Nazi is a slur. In both cases, the fascists chose the term for themselves and use it to self-identify. Leftists likewise use the terms with all the derision they deserve. Simple as. If I call a Nazi a Nazi, it’s not a slur just because I think Nazis are evil and disgusting and are in need of redacting. So too with Zionists.
If someone is using the term to describe themselves, but they (correctly) think that settler-colonialism is wrong and that the state of Israel is a genocidal ethnostate, then they are misusing the term, according to both the vast majority of Zionists as well as the people who oppose Zionism. As always, what is antisemitic is the equating of Zionism with Judaism, it is not antisemitic or saying a “slur” to accurately use the term Zionist as an epithet. It’s disgusting but unsurprising how the Zionists keep harping on this to try to make themselves out to be the ones being persecuted.
Gosh - who would’ve thought that people might have a negative view of an explicitly elitist and xenophobic ideology bent on the violent appropriation of land and the wholesale slaughter of any of the “filthy animals” currently living there who might dare to oppose them?
Zionism has always been highly controversial. It is a political movement but it’s proponents try and paint it as a central and indelible part of Jewish identity - trying to make it seem as if to attack zionism is to attack Judaism. This is of course utter bullshit.
It’s a common tactic of the zionist movement to try and equate anti-zionism with being anti-semetic. But zionism is a nationalist political ideology, not an ethnic identity.
It is not anti-semetic to attack zionism, just as it is not unamerican to attack the Republican Party.
Became? Always was… even at the end of WW2. Albert Einstein, who was Ashkenazi Jewish himself, even opposed it. Taking away a native populace’s land and giving it over to outsiders has always been, and always will be, controversial.
How was it not inclusive? I mean, sure, it could interpreted as uncivil or bait, but rule 4? Something I’ve learned is the more vague you are, the more you cover your own ass. Hell, you could probably wrap rule 4 and 5 under rule 3, that’d work perfectly.
Your comment could have been removed under multiple rules, but rule 4 was used, as there is no need to disparage a religion. I’m no scholar, but courts decided that Muhammad actions didn’t constitute a pedophilia.
You are welcome to express your opinion, no matter how popular or unpopular it might be. Just be nice.
The settlers that currently take land from Palestinians on the west bank, those specific people, not some group centuries ago that those people might share some part of their identity with, were not there before the specific currently living people that they are taking that land from. People living now matter more than some vague historical claims. If the area had been invaded by Islam and the land taken from Isreal within living memory, then sure, it would be just that it be returned to those it was taken from, but taking the land from people who have been there generations to give to people that have not been there for that time and had established lives elsewhere, results in people being uprooted and forced from their homes needlessly. Any history along the lines of what religion was where first is irrelevant to that fact.
Hamas is a different matter though, the post was talking about Zionism and the actions of Isreal more broadly. Hamas is a terrorist organization, sure, and a pretty intolerant one, but it exists largely as a response to those actions. The Palestinians were having their land taken before Hamas and are even in areas not controlled by Hamas, so Hamas isn’t the main problem so much as an excuse for Isreal to do what they have been doing for a long time to a faster or slower degree. Now, if Palestinian statehood and sovereignty were achieved, then sure, Hamas is not the kind of organization that one would want ruling the place, any more than the Taliban for example have been good for Afghanistan. But, one would have to deal with the situation that is pressing people in Gaza to join that kind organization first to truly solve that, because just blowing them up indiscriminately will just drive desperate and angry people into the same kind of group again. And at the moment, the thing pressuring people to join up with Hamas, is the conditions that Isreal has placed them under. Treat any group badly enough, and some of them will do horrible things in the name of resisting you.
It was quite deliberate on my part. You can partly undo things done to or by living people, not even close to all the way obviously, but you can return things taken, from those that have stolen them, and reasonably minimize collateral effects from that, because any uninvolved descendants of the guilty party either don’t yet exist, or can reasonably be assumed to have available whatever resources the perpetrating group had beforehand. When the original victims and perpetrators are dead, though, things become more ethically murky, because you can end up in a situation where it isn’t clear who specifically to return stolen properties to, those properties may no longer exist or no longer be useful in the way they once were, the people in possession of them now may both not be involved in the original atrocity and be dependent on them/have nowhere else to go, and the two groups may have had time for mixing to occur or new identities unique to the region to form. That isn’t to say that there’s nothing to be done about addressing historical atrocities of course, one can still try to offset the impact on the victims descendants, but that doesn’t really undo any of the impact on the victims themselves or punish anyone involved, because you can’t at that point, justice is time sensitive, it just helps a whole new set of people with negative circumstances that they were born into as a result of the atrocity.
My point was gating significant or actionable injustices to only those occurring recently means all sorts of past injustices are de facto tabled by that position. For example, should slavery from the civil war era, or the colonialism of North America still be discussed and addressed? No one alive witnessed that
I wasn’t so much talking about what should be addressed, but rather what can be addressed. You can, of course, try to break the cycle of poverty that the descendants of slaves face even today, by things like education scholarships or monetary reparations. But, we’d want to do this regardless of the source of that poverty being slavery, Id imagine, nobody deserves to be born into poverty after all. The relevance of slavery to the discussion there is primarily just as an explanation for why that poverty is so concentrated in African American communities, because if in some alternative universe in which civil war era slavery had never happened but somehow that poverty still existed, we’d still need to do something about it. What you can’t do though is bring relief to the slaves themselves (at least those of that era, modern slaves of course can be, but that’s still within living memory), or punish the people that enslaved them. Not because of any kind of moral argument, but just because those people are dead. Sure, I guess one could argue that this effectively locks in injustice that has occurred long enough ago, but well, that’s just part of the nastiness of things like colonialism, the impact it has on a people is something that simply cannot be truly undone.
Stealing people’s land from underneath them and giving it to another people (especially based on religion or ethnicity) is both a crime against humanity and a violation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (created 6 months after establishing the state of Israel), but the west just accepted Zionism because the majority of jews were white Europeans, the colonialists who dominated the league of nations didn’t consider brown people to be people, and none of them wanted to allocate any of their own land due to their own antisemitism.
Zionism has always been a crime. We were just lied to and told things were “complicated” by the same colonialist oligarchs who call the Islamic extremism their own historic crimes created and amplified “complicated”.
Not necessarily disagreeing with you, but there’s a reason why European Jews were in such ample supply. It’s hard to negatively judge early Jewish Zionism when many of the Jews in question were liberated from genocide and given their ancestral home back. The actions of the right wing government in Israel don’t speak towards the large number of Israelis that oppose the actions of the government or their particular view of Zionism. The term Zionism has been co-opted by various groups to the point where it no longer carries meaning but instead becomes caricature for a certain type of villain.
The presence of Jews in that area of the Middle East goes back over 3000 years until the expulsions. People don’t dispute that modern-day Palestinians lived there prior to the 1940s - but people conveniently set arbitrary time limits of settlement to allow for one genocide and decry the other.
Politics in the middle east is not a simple case of “Israel bad.” Both groups of people deserve a home and both are going to lose part of their national identity regardless of the outcome. A two state solution is the most prudent solution and arguing otherwise ignores reality.
I don’t know if you really believe that the whole world except jews remain in their birthplace without getting displaced. Palestine was the homeland of Jews 3000 years ago and guess what it’s not 3000 years ago anymore. If you read how israel is described and formed in it’s earliest stages you will see how zionists believe it is their homeland because their magical book said so. That’s not how it works mate. It’s an old habit of the British Kingdom giving away places they dont own to other parties.
Do you also think anyone can go and occupy nothern africa because humans originated from there? Where do you draw the line?
I guess the point wasn’t clear enough: Israelis and Palestinians both claim the land due to ancestry. Reasonable people understand the issue is complicated; displacement was a friendly replacement for massacred, forcibly removed, and slavery. You can clearly see that the intent of the creation of Israel was to redress a wrong perpetuated over millennia, regardless of the reality that it caused another migration of peoples.
Like you said, Zionism is just the belief in a divine ancestral claim (core, even, for Judaism) to the region. You can be flippant about it being based in religion and dismiss it from your position of privilege behind a keyboard, but there are radical religious people that believe the land is their birthright just as strongly as some Palestinians and are fighting over that. The religious extremists on both sides of the conflict frankly don’t care about your opinions. A two state solution offers the best course for peace in the area, but the extremists from both sides need to be isolated and dealt with. Most Israelis and Palestinians are good people such in the middle of a shitty situation.
Not too complicated. Zionism basically boils down to “Israel is Jew home country (for mythical reasons)” therefore “Jews should strive to achieve it”. It may have other connotations but I don’t think a lot of people are confused about this.
The headline raises eyebrows, but the article itself is ok.
Here’s a contention I have with it, however. I find it really difficult to argue for a substantial difference between “hardline zionists” and “liberal zionists” when the latter have been blocking efforts for the recognition of rights and self-determination of the Palestinian people for decades, and even now that Israel have been killing civilians left and right, they drag their feet before they finally admit: “Yes, the US should do whatever is in its hands to put a stop to this” - IF they even get to admit it. There might be “zionists” who argue that Israelis and Palestinians should both have the right to coexist in peace in the same land, but when the majority of people defending that aren’t zionists, does that opinion really qualify you to call yourself one?
“The painful truth is that the project to which liberal Zionists like myself have devoted ourselves for decades – a state for Palestinians separated from a state for Jews – has failed,” Peter Beinart wrote in 2020. “It is time for liberal Zionists to abandon the goal of Jewish–Palestinian separation and embrace the goal of Jewish–Palestinian equality.”
After reading this guy’s article it would be nice to see his current views given all that’s happened since 2020. I’m going to give him the benefit of the doubt that he was basing his views on the political reality in Israel at the time. It seems unfortunate that the Guardian felt the need to use an article from four years ago to assert what should be done now with the current political reality in Israel in 2024.
In his article from 2020, he seems to have come to the conclusion that a multi-ethnic/multi-racial/multi-cultural/secular nation state is how Palestinians and Jews would be safe. I would say this is true about any ethnic, racial, cultural, or religious group. Societies that include and protect the rights of all the people that live there is essential for the safety of all the people who live there. This is not in any way a zionist idea.
An inclusive, multi-ethnic state for Palestinians and Jews already living there should have been the goal from the beginning as opposed to an ethno-state for Jews. And colonization by foreign Jews should not have happened. In theory, the modern day Palestine and Israel could be one inclusive state or two separate inclusive states. The reason that we need two states right now, is that Israel is currently controlled by a far-right, fascist government. The current fascist government isn’t going to accept the current nation state of Israel being dissolved into a joint Palestinian-Israeli state.
In the absence of the ability to control Israel’s existence or actions, the UN needs to give Palestine full membership now. To make that happen, the US needs to stop waiting for Israel agree to allow Palestine to exist. The US needs to recognize Palestine’s current borders and stop using its veto to block the UN resolution. Israel is not negotiating in good faith right now and they will not do so as long as the government is controlled by fascists. The alternative is to allow the continued annexation of Gaza and the West Bank. Once annexation of a country is complete it becomes much easier for fascists to corral the out-group into death camps. At which point, only military intervention could help the Palestinians.
If people in Israel are motivated by the idea for a new joint Palestinian-Israeli state then by all means, encourage them to vote out the fascists in favor of candidates that will pursue this new nation state. However, I think the Palestinians deserve a solution now, that does not depend on Israelis wanting to dissolve their current nation state. Especially when Israelis voted in the current fascist government since he wrote his article and zionists still seem fixated on the notion that they need an ethno-state to be safe. Even as Israel is making all Jews less safe by committing genocide against the Palestinians. I think Palestinians gaining full control of their territory now, would not be a detriment to the creation of a joint state later. Palestinians shouldn’t have to wait for Israelis to embrace a joint state in order to enjoy human rights.
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Student protesters say that their criticisms of Zionism are rooted in the state of Israel’s displacement and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians. Pro-Israel activists have responded by defending the term
Defends the term, doesn’t deny the ethnic cleansing.
The Viennese journalist Theodor Herzl launched the First Zionist Congress in 1897. His project for a new homeland for Jews with self-rule came in reaction to the rampant, violent antisemitism in Europe and was shaped by political ideas of that time. He became committed to a Jewish state in Palestine, which he called “an outpost of civilization as opposed to barbarism”
uhh… The launcher of the First Zionist Congress just out and out being racist against the Palestinians right there.
Today, a generation of students emphasizes what they see as the settler-colonial nature of Herzl’s vision.
No, no… it literally was Herzl’s vision.
The shift in opinions on Zionism has been particularly confusing for many Jewish Americans… a small minority describe it as “privileging Jewish rights over non-Jewish rights in Israel” (10%).
Only 10% actually are correct.
Arguably for the first time, a Palestinian perspective on Zionism is taking center stage
No, its the Israeli AND the Palestinian perspective on Zionism.
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