Yes, correct. You can say you are a Zionist while not being in favour of Palestinian oppression.
There are so many forms of Zionism, but they all have at their root the belief in a Jewish homeland. Some Zionists will believe in the 2 state solution, others will say the Palestinians should be expelled from the whole of Israel.
I would think so. As a Zionist myself, I wish Palestinians would have accepted a two state solution instead of rejecting each offer. Israel is going nowhere.
@Fukfacewillie To understand a political movement, you must understand the historical soil out of which it grew.
When Herzl published The Jewish State in 1896, European antisemitism was rampant. As a correspondent in Paris, he had covered the Dreyfus affair, which reinforced his conviction that assimilation offered Jews no guarantee of security. For centuries, Jews were frequently reminded that they were outsiders in the countries where they lived, sometimes for generations. They could be told to "go back to Palestine" in Europe, yet be accused of having no legitimate connection to Palestine when they sought to return. The attached British newspaper clipping from 1920 illustrates that bitter irony.
Zionism emerged from that predicament, from the nineteenth-century movement toward national self-determination, and from the Jewish people's enduring historical attachment to Zion.
Also, Herzl did not have to manufacture a connection between Jews and the Levant. He inherited a religious and cultural tradition in which that connection had remained alive for centuries, and he gave it a modern political expression. For two thousand years in Europe and elsewhere, the ancient Hebrew language was the language of religious liturgy. At the Passover Seder, Jews in the diaspora say, "Next year in Jerusalem!"
Consider the circumstances. Palestine then had approximately 550,000 inhabitants spread across some 10,000 square miles. It was relatively sparsely populated, though certainly not empty. Nor was Palestine an independent nation-state. It was part of the Ottoman Empire. A distinct Palestinian national consciousness was still developing and would become more politically organized in the early twentieth century.
Herzl was therefore proposing a Jewish national homeland within territory governed by the Ottoman Empire, not the takeover of an existing sovereign Palestinian state. Also, In Herzl's time, the Arab inhabitants of Ottoman Palestine possessed established property rights, agricultural interests, communal attachments, and local identities, but these had not yet crystallized into a widely organized movement demanding sovereignty for a distinct Palestinian nation-state.
None of this negates the rights of the Arab inhabitants or excuses their subsequent dispossession. But those later developments should not be read backward into Herzl's original historical circumstances.
Herzl's Zionism was a modern political response to European antisemitism, grounded in an ancient national attachment and conceived within the political realities of the Ottoman Empire, European ideas about nationalism and national identity, as well as the social reality of fierce anti-semitism. Historical context matters.
To understand a historical movement, we must reconstruct the world as its founders encountered it, without allowing either our knowledge of its eventual consequences or our sympathy for its original aspirations to distort the historical record.
Albert Einstein is referring to the two Jewish terrorist organizations that targeted civilians and military led by two immigrants from poland who became prime ministers, Menachem Begin and Yitzhak Shamir . . . they assassinated peace advocate Count Folke Bernadote and years later the members of the same political group the Likud (Sharon and Netanyahu) inspired one of their followers to assassinate peace leader Yitzhak Rabin.
I want want to offer a thought experiment that intrigues me. What if there had never been a Zionist movement, let us say Herzl never agitated for a Jewish homeland in Palestine? Instead, there arose a movement among Indian Muslims to escape the Hindus in the late 19th century and re-settle in Palestine. This group would by Muslim, like the Arabs, but non-white and non-Arab. How would they have been greeted by the native Arabs -- as Muslim brothers, or as foreign invaders bent on stealing Arab land and dispossesing Arabs. How would the native Arabs have reacted to the Muslim Indians, would their reaction parallel the Arab reaction to the European Jewish settlers, motivated by Zionism? What would an answer to this question tell us about the present but longstanding Palestine-Jewish conflict?
@flipper1966 Kiiiiinda. There were Armenians in that region dating to the fourth century. But it was recognized as the Armenian Quarter during the nineteenth century. Part of that was because there was an influx of refugees escaping the Armenian Genocide, often moving into what would then be called the Armenian Quarter.
@flipper1966 Yeah, my take is that the Palestinians don't like that the Zionists stole their land, did the nakba, and created an apartheid state. That's why I think they'd be cool with Indians moving there, as long as they didn't try to take over.
One can unequivocally condemn the Nazis without attributing their crimes to every German. Likewise, one can condemn the policies of Netanyahu's government without attributing those policies to every Israeli or every Zionist.
Let's start with the first claim, The German public largely trusted Hitler's goals and supported reclaiming territories like Danzig. Who should we attribute the crimes that went unopposed in Germany? The Mexicans?
I'm sure that not every single German agreed, but Germany committed these crimes and the German people agree with this conclusion, otherwise, why did Germany agree to reparations.
Under the Luxembourg Agreement signed in September 1952, West Germany agreed to pay 3 billion Deutschmarks to the State of Israel and 450 million Deutschmarks to the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany. From 1945 through 2018, Germany paid over $86.8 billion in individual compensation, property restitution, and survivor pensions (including Hardship and Article 2 funds).
In addition the allies took all of Germany's plants and used them to replace their damaged industrial plants.
Currently, the majority of Israelis support expelling Gazans and also replacing West Bank people with settlers.
Who should be blamed? Mexicans?
As far as I know, Israel is a democracy and Netanyahu, elected by the people, with a majority support, rejects a 2-state solution, and wants to expel Palestinians. In fact, one of the reasons he did not see 9/07 coming, was that he had the IDF turned on the West Bank trying to harass people into leaving.
See the 60 minutes video. Or pretend none of this is happening.
@Northwest You're confusing state responsibility, political responsibility, and individual culpability.
Of course Germany was responsible for the crimes of the Nazi regime. That's why Germany paid reparations. But those reparations established the responsibility of the German state, not the personal criminal guilt of every German citizen. A German born in 1960 could contribute to reparations without having been responsible for the Holocaust.
Likewise, Israel can be held accountable for its government's actions, and individual Israelis who support oppressive policies can be criticized for doing so. I have never disputed either proposition.
And yes, polling reveals disturbing levels of support among Jewish Israelis for Palestinian displacement. I don't deny that.
But you're still confusing the conduct and beliefs of some—or even a majority—with the beliefs necessarily held by every member of a larger group.
If criticizing Israel does not necessarily make someone antisemitic, supporting Zionism does not necessarily make someone an advocate of Palestinian oppression.
The existence of antisemitic critics of Israel doesn't invalidate the first proposition. The existence of oppressive Zionists doesn't invalidate the second.
You can hold Israel responsible for governmental wrongdoing without assigning personal guilt to every Israeli or every Zionist.
That's the distinction I've been making from the beginning. Nothing you've said refutes it.
You're confusing state responsibility, political responsibility, and individual culpability.
No, I am not. "I did not vote for xxx" is not an excuse. I'm trying to point out to you, that this is irrelevant, because war is conducted on behalf of citizens and if they don't really like it, they can drop their nationality.
Something I wonder about: Would [i]some opponents of Zionism ever have regarded any conceivable exercise of Jewish national self-determination as legitimate?[/i]
If the Jews had settled on an uninhabited island, would they have been accused of ecological imperialism? If they had established a floating republic in international waters, would they have been denounced for dispossessing the fish? If they had colonized the moon, would someone have organized an international campaign for the liberation of lunar dust?
If Jews had set up a homeland in the Antarctic instead of Palestine, the antisemites would have cried, "Look how they treat the penguins!" or "This amounts to penguin genocide!" or "Why should Jews have their own country if it brings such suffering to the poor, dislocated penguins banned from living in their own home, the Antarctic?"
Never mind that there were no human inhabitants to conquer, no indigenous human civilization to overthrow, no villages to destroy, and no competing human national movement to suppress. The indictment would simply be revised to accommodate the available wildlife.
For the dedicated antisemite, the important thing is not the particular accusation. The important thing is that the Jews stand accused.
Throughout history, antisemitism has demonstrated an extraordinary capacity to reinvent its grievances. Jews have been condemned for being too separate and too assimilated, too wealthy and too poor, too cosmopolitan and too nationalistic, too weak to defend themselves and too powerful when they do.
They were once told to abandon their supposed clannishness and become ordinary citizens. When they sought national self-determination, they were condemned for wanting a country of their own.
The accusation changes; the defendant does not.
And that is the point of the Antarctic thought experiment. It is not that Palestinians are penguins, or that their historical suffering is imaginary. Palestinians are human beings with legitimate national aspirations, and their dispossession and suffering deserve serious moral consideration.
@Fukfacewillie You're confusing three distinct concepts: historical ancestry, individual property rights, and national self-determination.
I agree that Jewish ancestry does not entitle anyone to seize Palestinian property. But that doesn't mean Jews have no legitimate claim to national self-determination in their historic homeland.
Nor does the Irish identification with Palestinians settle the question. Historical analogies illuminate; they don't establish equivalence.
The UN partition proposal of 1947 explicitly contemplated both Jewish and Arab national self-determination. Supporting one need not entail denying the other.
And that's precisely my original point: Just as criticizing Israel does not necessarily mean endorsing antisemitism, supporting Zionism does not necessarily mean endorsing Palestinian oppression.
You can condemn particular Israeli policies without condemning every Zionist, just as you can condemn particular antisemitic critics of Israel without condemning every critic of Israel.
Why is that distinction acceptable in one direction but not the other?
@flipper1966 Okay, but I can’t answer then. I can tell you I used to consider myself a Zionist, but not any longer. That doesnt mean I want Israel to disappear, either, and become Palestine.
@Fukfacewillie I believe in the legal aims of Zionism. The occupation of the West Bank is illegal. The settlements are illegal. War crimes are illegal. Netanyahu is a war criminal and belongs in prison.
@flipper1966 I appreciate your points. I no longer believe it was worth the cost, and that the treatment of Palestinians is a blight on the history of Israel.
Criticizing Israel is not antisemitic. Saying Israel should not exist is.
For example, if I say that I have nothing against Irish people, but the country of Ireland should not exist and would be better off if it was under British rule, because the Irish don't deserve their own country, would you call that anti-Irish?
@LeopoldBloom I literally have a more valid claim to being "indigenous" to Scotland and throwing some random person in Perth off their land than half of the Europeans larping as Middle Easterners in Tel Aviv.
And even if that was not the case using a blood and soil justification for a far right ethno state and the genocide of an entire population is a disgusting choice.
the reason the Irish never had a problem with Jews is because they never allowed any Jews to live there. I
A claim not supported by actual history.
Following early mentions in the 11th century, small groups of Sephardic refugees arrived after the Spanish expulsion in 1492, and a formal Dublin community was re-established in the 17th century.But the core of the modern community formed during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when thousands of Eastern European Jews—predominantly from Lithuania—fled pogroms and czarist persecution, settling largely in Dublin’s Portobello neighborhood and Belfast.
There was no policy to discriminate against Jews.
Ireland mistakenly views itself in solidarity with the Palestinians as a reiteration of their conflict with the English.
Which is another fabrication, because both the Irish and Northern Irish are vocal about their support for Palestinian rights, which is a human rights issue, but AIPAC thinks that's a dangerous trend.
@LeopoldBloom “They are mistaken.” Oh, that is rich. They identify with Palestinians because that is the proper analogy of a historically oppressed people oppressed by a more powerful force. You are UDA, Pics is right.
Answer me this. Why is a theocratic ethno centric state in Iran called out as wrong and a problem.
But in Israel a theocratic ethno state based on very specific strains of Judaism and a racial hierarchy is suddenly something to be blindly supported and defended?
I guess it is magically ok if it is the right "race" and the right religion.
@PicturesOfABetterTomorrow Your comparison between Iran and Israel rests on a fundamental mischaracterization of their political systems.
Iran is a theocracy in which unelected religious authorities exercise ultimate political power. Its Supreme Leader stands above elected institutions, and its Guardian Council vets political candidates for ideological acceptability.
Israel is a parliamentary democracy with competitive elections, political opposition parties, and Arab citizens who vote and serve in the Knesset. Its laws and institutions have significant religious influences, and its Jewish national character raises legitimate questions about equality. But a state with a particular national identity is not automatically a theocracy.
Nor have I ever argued that Israel should be blindly supported. I have explicitly condemned Palestinian dispossession, settlement expansion, discrimination, and violations of international law. Your suggestion that I excuse abuses because of the supposedly correct "race" or religion is another position you have invented and attributed to me.
@flipper1966 No it is completely accurate. But you have spend all day making up justifications and excuses.
Those are great political talking points but they are factually wrong.
Dude. You you have spent all day blindly supporting and excusing all the atrocities of Israel.
And you play with semantics to deny that a theocracy is not a theocracy because of bureaucratic precedural differences.
A country that is defined by its religious "character" is by definition a theocracy particularly when only a single state sanctioned version of that religion dictates the entire society and dictates who has what rights based on race and religion.
Actually there is a difference, Being a Zionist by definition means supporting the oppression and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians.
Even Theodor Herzl wrote about that being part of the entire point. He defined it as a colonial project from day one and made it clear that he saw ethnic cleansing as necessary and had zero qualms about it.
@PicturesOfABetterTomorrow You repeatedly state that ethnic cleansing of non-Jews was, by definition, the entire purpose of Zionism.
How, then, do you account for Martin Buber and the Zionist movements Brit Shalom and Ihud, which advocated Jewish–Arab coexistence, equal national rights, and shared political power in Palestine?
You may argue that their vision failed or represented a minority within Zionism. But that is different from claiming their position was incompatible with Zionism by definition.
A historical movement can produce profoundly unjust consequences without every adherent endorsing injustice as its defining purpose.
Your categorical definition leaves no room for documented historical exceptions. How do you account for them?
@flipper1966 It is. It is explicitly part of the ideology. Whether that is something you are comfortable with or not is irrelevant.
Again this is just a whataboutism. The far right strain of Hertzl and Jabotinsky are the only movement that has any influence.
Brit Shalom has not been relevant in almost 100 years and it was never the prevailing position. So called "left" Zionism even in the 40s was a small fringe within the far left. It was never serious.
And it has zero bearing on the current day.
The only strain of Zionism that holds any influence and has any relevance is inherently hostile to non Jews. Playing games to deny that is running interference for their crimes.
Totally irrelevant historical anomalies change nothing. I don't consider them at all because they have been completely irrelevant for 80 years.
Just like there is a fringe offshoot of National Socialism called Strasserism. They advocated basically a Jim Crow style system instead of extermination of "lesser races". They are almost wiped out in the Night of the Long Knives.
If we follow your logic the Nazis are somehow less bad because they exist. Do you not see why that line of argumentation is insane?
@PicturesOfABetterTomorrow Your latest response illustrates precisely the distinction I've been asking you to recognize.
You originally asserted that Zionism, by definition, entails the oppression and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians. Now you acknowledge the existence of Zionist movements such as Brit Shalom that advocated Jewish–Arab coexistence and political equality, but dismiss them because they were historically marginal and politically unsuccessful.
That is a significant shift in your argument.
An ideology's historically dominant expression is not necessarily identical to the entirety of that ideology. The fact that a particular Zionist movement failed to achieve political dominance does not mean it never existed, was not genuinely Zionist, or endorsed the oppression it explicitly opposed.
Nor have I suggested that the existence of peaceful Zionists excuses atrocities committed by other Zionists. Your Strasserism analogy attacks an argument I never made. My point concerns logical necessity, not collective absolution.
You are entitled to argue that dominant Zionist movements have dispossessed Palestinians, that contemporary Israeli policies are oppressive, or that egalitarian Zionism has had insufficient political influence. Those are substantive arguments worth examining.
But none establishes your original categorical assertion that every person who supports Zionism necessarily endorses Palestinian oppression.
In fact, your acknowledgment of dissenting Zionist traditions raises precisely the difficulty your original definition sought to exclude.
You cannot establish that oppression is indispensable to Zionism merely by declaring that Zionists who rejected oppression don't count because they failed politically.
Historical predominance is not logical necessity. That is the distinction you continue to evade.
Israel in its present form is not compatible with liberal democracy or humanism, or the idea of equal rights regardless of ethnicity. Supporting Israel now is supporting a brutal regime.
@Ozymandias When you say "modern Zionism" I am afraid you really mean Netanyahu-ism. Netanyahu-ism is not Zionism, in my opinion, it is a fascistic perversion of Zionism.
Keep in mind, UN Resolution 181 requires of Israel: "No discrimination of any kind shall be made between the inhabitants on the ground of race, religion, language or sex." That is certainly not being honored by Netanyahu-ism.
UN resolution 181 has rarely if ever been honoured by Israel.
Lets not pretend all this horrendous stuff that Israel is guilty of started with Netanyahu. Lets keep things honest and avoid the white washing of history.
@LeopoldBloom And where did I say anything opposing Jewish self determination in their historic homeland? Much has been said and written regarding Zionism pro and con. Including the issue raised in my question. I do not know enough about Zionism to make that determination one way or another without reading more and asking others.
@LeopoldBloom So what would you say regarding comments on this thread in relation to modern day Israel and modern day Zionism? Comments such as present day Israel being incompatible with liberal democracy or humanism?
There is a reference to Israel as the ancient homeland of someone I presume is an Ashkenazi Jew, like myself. The Levant side of us left a millennium ago, and we are also of European heritage (hence the sunscreen). I find the argument specious, at best, that I am a refugee of Israel. I also claim no land rights to Minsk or Budapest.
@Fukfacewillie The Jewish people have been described as a people who have a religion. Judaism is not just a religion. Israel does give preferential treatment to Jewish immigration, just as Ireland, Italy, Japan, Armenia, Greece, and many other countries give preferential treatment to people from their respective diasporas who want to return to those countries.
@LeopoldBloom Israel is a country and can determine its rules about immigration. I am confused why you don’t move there if you feel such an ancient biblical connection.
No, because Zionism is Jewish Supremacy in the Middle East. So supporting Zionism involves oppressing all of the non-jewish populations in that region. You might have nothing against Arabs, but in order to do Zionism, most Arabs need to be oppressed.
@BohoBabe Right. No one is going to say they're "in favor" of oppressing people. But functionally, that is what happens when you support the existence of an ethno-state, and it's been born out by history. Otherwise we're getting into "true Zionism has never been tried" territory.
@Nate931 I'm even open to the idea of ethnostates if they're used to protect oppressed people. But Zionism is built on the idea of "Greater Israel" in a region that is 99% non-jewish. It's impossible to do that without apartheid and ethnic cleansing.
My suggestion is to not let yourself get bogged down in semantics and catch phrases.
The world is a much more complex than the media makes it, and allowing yourself to get limited to a binary choice of "for or against" is part of the ongoing problem in politics in general, and society at large.
Israel has a right to exist. So does Palestine, should they choose to actually become a real country and not the terrorist breeding ground for Hamas and Hezbollah. We don't have to choose one side or the other.
One commenter's repeated Nazi analogies and sweeping categorical characterizations of Zionism raise a legitimate concern about antisemitic rhetoric. Whether they establish that he personally harbors antisemitic prejudice remains an open question. Keep that in mind when reading his comments.
@flipper1966 It is factually true that ideologies that are both based on the premise that one group of people is superior to another is definitionally advocating the oppression of any lesser groups.
I also used American Manifest Destiny and white supremacy as an example of this too.
Claiming one group is by definition superior also by definition assumes everyone else is inferior. That is not a controversial statement.
@flipper1966 Wilhelm Marr also wanted the term to be strictly racial. Older forms of hatred towards Jews were based on the religion. Jews were able to convert to Christianity. Whereas with Nazism, the hatred was race-based. People who didn't even know they had Jewish ancestry, because their parents converted to Christianity, were arrested by the SS.
