| SvennoJ said: There is a lot of that, however the mainstream media chooses to focus on conflict :/ |
There's a lot to respond to here, but the bottom line is that, rather than simply distancing yourself from straight-up anti-Israel politics, you seem to be creatively reimagining the definition of Zionism so you don't have to, and that says a lot to me.
Here you have reimagined "Zionism" as a term that means support for the particular government of Benjamin Netanyahu. That is not how proponents define it. Like when a Jewish student's path to class is blocked by protesters and they ask him or her if they're a "Zionist" before permitting passage, the Jewish student will not answer that question according to your definition of the term, they'll answer it according to the Anti-Defamation League's definition, as some variation or other thereon is embraced by basically every Jewish person in Israel regardless of their position on the left-right spectrum (including the anti-occupation peace activists) and by many living outside Israel as well.
Anti-Zionism is not a factor in Israeli Jewish politics. That position, which is understood as opposition to the existence of Israel as a Jewish state, has no appreciable uptake there amongst the Jewish population and is thus what I would consider an unserious position. Even the left wing newspapers in Israel like Haaretz do not respect anti-Zionist attitudes. That is because, as simply yet succinctly put by Joshua Leifer of Dissent magazine, Zionism is commonly understood by Jewish people to simply mean "support for the political self-determination of, and a sovereign state for, the Jewish people". It does not mean support for the current war, Netanyahu, Ben-Givr, or the settling by Jews of land seized by Israel in 1967. It means recognizing that a nation called Israel has the right to exist as a majority-Jewish country. The 50,000 or so Israelis you see protesting the Netanyahu government every weekend these days demanding that the government reach a deal for the release of hostages at pretty much any price (including an immediate conclusion to the war) perfectly illustrates this spectrum of opinion.
Anti-Zionist token Jews who are willing to debase themselves enough to chant along with slogans like "Burn Tel Aviv to the ground!" and applaud and cheer speakers defending "the heroic actions of October the 7th", by contrast, are not taken seriously by many Jewish people anywhere. Those are indeed objectively self-hating Jews, sorry, and I say that as an atheist and fellow opponent of this war myself.
I believe that we are fundamentally on the same side of the Israeli-Palestinian question in opposing this war and believing in a two-state solution recognizing both a nation of Israel and a nation of Palestine. I feel though that you're one more prone to getting wrapped up in the general aura of protests to the point that you can't think critically about the sum of their content, to which end you are here reflexively ignoring and justifying their more pernicious aspects in disingenuous ways. Another obvious example: in the OP, you layout your idea of the timeline of events leading up to this moment in Israeli-Palestinian relations. It's tough not to notice the partisan skew of the telling, such as the omission of a minor little event known as the Holocaust from your timeline. Considering that the Holocaust was the event that first popularized Zionism among Jewish people, one might've thought it worth mentioning. Glaring omissions like that don't occur by accident.
I'm trying not use the yes sometimes-overused term "anti-Semitism" here and I hope this doesn't come off as inappropriate tone policing in a context of slaughter and famine, but I can't help feeling like your general take on events, which is practically the only one represented on this thread, is not very sensitive to the typical perspectives and experience of Jewish people.
Last edited by Jaicee - on 02 May 2024
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