Are You a Zionist? Everyone has to decide for themselves if they are a Zionist. If you believe that the Jews are a people, and support the right of the Jews to a national home, and you are willing to stand up for that right when it is challenged, then you can call yourself a Zionist, whether or not you belong to any organized Zionist group or accept any "official" definition, and whether or not you live in Israel or plan to live in Israel - and whether or not you are Jewish.
http://www.zionism-israel.com/zionism_de finitions.htm
1. Do I believe that the Jews are a people? This question is pretty loaded. I believe it's a religion and a cultural experience. Certainly all jews, secular or observant, have something in common. It's obviously a group. But if someone asked me if I believed that the catholics are a people, I wouldn't be sure what they were asking me. A recognizable group, yes. A "people" deserving of a dedicated homeland? Um, no. The catholic church was a big enough pain in the butt and powerful enough to secure its own plot of land to exercise sovereignty over, but nobody thinks of the Vatican as the homeland of the catholics.
2. Do I support the right of the Jews to a national home? Again, kind of loaded. I support the right of the Jews (and what's up with that definite article anyway?) to live freely. I welcome "the" Jews as my friends, neighbors and fellow citizens (and jewish men are proportionally completely over-represented on my list of admired individuals). I do not, and cannot, support the notion that there is something fundamentally just about an officially "jewish" state. I certainly sympathize with the aspiration. Jews are hardly the first group to appreciate the benefits of homogeniety. And practical reality requires immigration controls. But using the instruments of the state to promote and preserve a religious majority among the citizenry (in fact, denying first class citizenship to the minority) isn't something I'm comfortable with. I don't think it's a noble goal in general, and I sincerely believe it is unsustainable in Israel in particular.
3. Obviously I'm not going to stand up for the right to establish a "jewish" state. But I do stand up for the right to preserve the state of Israel. If people insist that Israel can't be Israel without being officially "jewish," well, I disagree. And if people insist that a refusal to support the notion of an officially "jewish" state is a refusal to support jewish people the world over, I strongly disagree.
If that isn't anti-zionist, what is it? If I don't agree that Israel has a right to exist as a "jewish" state, how can I fit under the umbrella of existing ideas of what zionism is today?
Do I support the right of the Jews to a national home? Again, kind of loaded. I support the right of the Jews (and what's up with that definite article anyway?) to live freely. I welcome "the" Jews as my friends, neighbors and fellow citizens (and jewish men are proportionally completely over-represented on my list of admired individuals). I do not, and cannot, support the notion that there is something fundamentally just about an officially "jewish" state. I certainly sympathize with the aspiration. Jews are hardly the first group to appreciate the benefits of homogeniety. And practical reality requires immigration controls. But using the instruments of the state to promote and preserve a religious majority among the citizenry (in fact, denying first class citizenship to the minority) isn't something I'm comfortable with.
People identify themselves as "cradle catholics," "recovering catholics," and "fallen away catholics." People retain a catholic identity long after they stop practicing and believing in the catholic faith. And catholics spent centuries fighting for the state to endorse and protect the catholic church and its interests. There are countries that are heavily associated with catholicism - Ireland being a great example. It would be odd for Ireland to stop being so catholic, but would it be an essential threat to being Irish? Only if you define "Irish" as being limited to one religion.
Catholicism is not an ethnicity.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethnoreligi ous
Assyrians, Nasranis, Yazidi and Mandaeans don't have their own countries. Next?
Neither do Palestinians, for that matter.
The point is, the Jewish community is the largest of these ethnoreligious groups, and they DO have a state already.
If you have specific problems with something Israel is doing, that would be worth discussing, but whether they are officially a Jewish state or just "de facto" like the US is a "de facto" Judeo Christian state is really pretty pointless to me.
At the end of the day, however, do I believe that there should be special provisions in Israel so that Jewish people from around the world should be able to return to a homeland where they can be protected? Yes.
Maybe you feel differently when there are 500 million or 3 billion of you Christians or Muslims or whatever - with plenty of your own states which are either de-jure or de-facto safe-havens, but when there are less than 20 million of you and nearly half of your European population was decimated the last century, you view these things a little differently.
Simply put you have taken an exceptionalist point of view that Jews should have the right to take land from another people, to ethnically cleanse Palestinians forcibly from their homes and property, essentially to colonize their lands if necessary. Well, actually that did and is happened. But I don't believe all Jews think that they are excepted from moral-ethical principles and actions toward anyone, that there is a you and us, and that different ethic or moral rules apply.
If that were true of Jews then it should certainly be true of other ethnic groups who feel excepted in order to redress past wrongs. Take the Serbs. Didn't the Turks invade and then take lands belonging to them. Wasn't that history the justification of the ethnic cleansing of the Bosnians less than a decade ago? Or is it that we have an exception among the exceptions, Israel only, and that the Serbs were not justified in their actions?
I think you are mis-reading the question. I would argue that the United States is in many ways a Judeo-Christian nation - there are many examples of this - whether it is federal holidays, prayers in public places, gifts of stadiums for use as mega-churches in the South, statements on our currency, crosses on our roadways, or what have you.
As a secular person, I can understand saying "I do not support the rights for a Christian national home". I think all vestiges of religion should be eliminated from government in any way possible. But, imagine instead "I support the rights for an American Indian national home". Hmm, that sounds better - because this is a historically persecuted group of people. The Jewish people and Israel is the same scenario - Zionism is the support of a people and a state that needs to exist because of historical oppression.
All citizens in Israel are equal before the law, just as in the US. Yes, the Palestinian problem exists, just as the US still has problems with rights for illegal immigrants and other refugees. Just as the US still has problems with equal rights for all of its citizens.
But do you support the right of the US to exist? I know I do. I just want to make it better.
I disagree that the state needs to exist because of historical oppression. I can understand why people believed that at the time of its formation, but I can't agree with it today. Jewish people can be safe in the modern world without the existence of an officially Jewish state.
The American Indian comparison is odd. The vestiges of american indian sovereignty exist because our forefathers lacked the stomach to commit genocide, so they kept resettling the "natives" into unwanted territory. No one has offered American Indians a "national home." Certainly not of the type that the zionists claim. We stole their land, pushed them around, and basically left them to rot on reservations. Those reservations continue to exist because of the recognition that we did kinda/sorta/maybe take their land and they deserved compensation, not because they "need to exist because of historical oppression."
And of course the US is a Judeo-Christian nation, but I'm violently opposed to any plan to make it officially a Judeo-Christian nation. And I'm a christian. De jure and de facto matter. The US is also a majority white nation. I no more support the instruments of state working directly to preserve the "judeo-christian" nature of our demographics than to preserve our "whiteness."
The American Indian analogy is rediculous. The Palestinian communities were stable and existed in many cases for over a thousand years, and consistent of homes and fmarlands and orchards, villages and towns, with all their assets like governments, school systems, and the rest.
A more direct comparison is provided by Lawrence of Cyberia: the South African Apartheid model in which white supremacy provided the basis, and justified the ethnic cleansing of 1948 and the one that has continued since 1967.
That's her point: Zionism means Jewish supremacy and rights that exclude nonJews from participating equally in Israeli society. She asks: Is it anti-Semitic to be against Zionism, if that is what it entails?
Again, I am not entirely opposed to what you are saying. But the cause that helped create Israel in 1948 was Zionism. You apparently sympathize with that cause, which created the current state of Israel.
Therefore, to proclaim oneself "anti-Zionist" is not helpful. That's really my main point. I think calling oneself anti-Zionist does have anti-Semitic and anti-Israel connotations. Why can someone not just be pro-equality, pro Palestinian, or some other more neutral term?
And before you say that the terms don't matter - I say yes they do - language and the history of words is important. Saying you are "anti civil-rights" or "anti American" would be similarly counter-productive.
I am open to ideas to help the Arab and Palestinian community achieve equal treatment within Israel. But I don't appreciate the term "anti-Zionist" and I don't think usage of it will help if you are trying to gain the help of the US, Israel, or the Jewish community - which are all important parties in order for any Palestinian gains to be achieved.
Also, some of the wording by the author of this diary - that Israel is an "occupier", is similarly unhelpful. The people who live in Israel today are inhabitants of a world created by their grandparents. This is no more helpful than calling present-day Germans "Nazis".
The question is, as in Iraq, not how we got into the situation, but "what now?" Name-calling and historical revisionism on each side is not the way forward.
A few points. Reading between the lines of your comments to this diary, I suspect I give Israel more credit for its own existence than you do. Israel exists not as reparations for the holocaust or as a gift from the UN. It came to be the old-fashioned way - by capture. It continues to exist within its current borders because it has continually proven the ability to control the land and defend it from invaders. That is what makes a nation.
Secondly, I understand your point about language. But I thought the linked articles (mostly the second one) did a good job of demonstrating that in our current way of discussing Israel there are certain viewpoints that can't be expressed because the "acceptable" language itself prevents it. Without repeating what I've written elsewhere in these comments, what is the acceptable way to express my belief that a majority jewish state isn't necessary for the continued existence of the jewish people?
I've purposefully avoided discussing the Palestinians in these comments. My belief about the safety of the jewish people in the absence of an officially jewish state isn't based on anything to do with the Palestinians. I would argue quite strenously that to the extent Israel is to be maintained as a majority jewish state, a thriving palestinian state is a necessary condition of that.
I haven't touched the arguments of where Israeli rights and Palestinian rights conflict and need to be resolved. I have addressed one of the basic premises of Israel - jews are not safe in the world without an officially jewish state. To put my position into "pro-palestinian" or "pro-equality" is to deny my position a place in the conversation at all. I understand that putting it under "anti-zionist" isn't the smoothest path to take (trust me, I've had this discussion with jewish friends) and I generally try to avoid labels all together. But everyone wants labels. How would you label me in a more neutral fashion? When it comes to the IP conflict, I generally label myself as pro-civilians who just want to live their lives and raise their families. From a human rights perspective, it's easy for me to consider the jews and the palestinians on an equal footing. From a personal standpoint, I'm far more culturally attached to the jews. Where's the label for me?
>>Without repeating what I've written elsewhere in these comments, what is the acceptable way to express my belief that a majority jewish state isn't necessary for the continued existence of the jewish people?
I think you can say you are a supporter of "secular democratic states", and fight for that not just in the context of Israel but in the US and in Arab countries that practice sharia or disenfranchise their citizens, or do not have representative democracies. To call yourself "anti-Zionist" makes it seem like you are looking only at one possible set of injustices when really you are opposed to something that is happening across the world. Why should Israel be forced to amend itself unilaterally?
Why should Jews feel safe in other countries when you are not talking about how these other countries need to reform as well?
>>Where's the label for me?
Well, if you are talking to a bunch of friends or experts on the subject and you are comfortable with using the term "anti-Zionist" in that context, by all means - go for it.
But on a board like MyDD, or DKos, or other liberal blogs, or in the context of the Democratic party, I think that label is likely to be confusing at best, and harmful at worst.
Also, from the second article, I think both the PLO and Israel should not let talks be impeded by whether Israel needs to be recognized as a "Jewish state" - they should just recognize Israel's right to exist. If I were negotiating on the Israeli side I would drop that demand. If I were negotiating on the Palestinian side, I would agree to that precondition in order to move on to more substantive negotiations - the best Palestinian bet is to seek incremental change.
To call yourself "anti-Zionist" makes it seem like you are looking only at one possible set of injustices when really you are opposed to something that is happening across the world. Why should Israel be forced to amend itself unilaterally?
Well, I am anti-sharia and pro-secular democracies in general. But that's not the conversation. I don't think it's fair to say that it looks like I'm ignoring injustices. That's like the wingnuts who claim feminists don't care about women in Afghanistan because they don't raise it in every conversation about feminism.
Your choice of language "amend itself unilaterally" is genuinely odd, like it's being asked to abandon a weapon that remains in the hands of its enemies. Countries progress unilaterally all the time. It's the only way progress happens.
If I were negotiating on the Israeli side I would drop that demand.
I agree. And I thought the point of the second article was that Israel will not do so. The PLO agreed to recognize Israel's right to exist, and it wasn't good enough.
I think we share a great deal in common here and I appreciate you expanding on your points.
Reading between the lines of your comments to this diary, I suspect I give Israel more credit for its own existence than you do. Israel exists not as reparations for the holocaust or as a gift from the UN. It came to be the old-fashioned way - by capture.
It continues to exist within its current borders because it has continually proven the ability to control the land and defend it from invaders. That is what makes a nation.
Without repeating what I've written elsewhere in these comments, what is the acceptable way to express my belief that a majority jewish state isn't necessary for the continued existence of the jewish people?
I have addressed one of the basic premises of Israel - jews are not safe in the world without an officially jewish state.
Only that country cannot be taken from another people who had been living there for more than a thousand years. This is of course the root of the Israei-Palestinian conflict, it is the root of the 1948 Israeli-Arab War, and the root of all subsequent strife in the region.
And it is not over: the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians continues today, as it has for 41 years, in the West Bank and East Jerusalem.
I also hear this alleged fact from time to time: that Jews in Palestine owned most of the land anyway. It was their already. The truth is that in 1948, Jews had managed to purchase only 7% of original Palestine. The remainder was held by Muslim Palestinians, and tiny portions by Druze and Christians and others.
Only that country cannot be taken from another people who had been living there for more than a thousand years.
You mean like the Jews who were living there before they were driven out by the Romans who were then driven out by the Arabs who then proceeded to live there for a thousand years?
Why is the Palestinian claim to the land legitimate, when it was stolen from the Jews, but the Jewish claim is illegitimate, when it was stolen from the Arabs?
Do you not see the double standard?
I keep harping on this because I want you to see the foolishness of the argument about who "rightfully" owns the land. Dozens of different peoples, including both the Palestinians and the Jews, have a legitimate claim to the land that Israel comprises. Egypt, Syria, Jordan, Turkey, Britain--these countries have all controlled the land at some point.
As long as you're arguing the double-standard that Israel does not have a legitimate claim to the land but the Palestinians do, you're not going to be taken seriously by anyone except those who already agree with you.
Not at all. History I am afraid does not flow backwards. The Palestinian have lived in the land for over a thousand year. At the same time, there were always at least a few thousand Jewish inhabitants, mainly living in Jerusalem. As side of spurious "place holding" theories, Jews were never prohibited from living in Palestine, but chose to live in a variety of other places. It was only with Zionist ambitions that the idea of a pure Jewish state came into being. That meant the necessity of dispossession of lands, villages and towns, belonging to the indigenous Palestinians, who had lived there for over a thousand years, something long hypothesized as necessary by the early Zionists. It eventually happened: two thirds of the Palestinian population were ethnically cleansed by force and fear in 1948, many dying along the way.
If you can really find some ethical-moral basis for such a plan or action, please provide it.
Well, let me give you an ethical-moral basis for resolving the issue that arose as Jewish population in Palestine grew. It was Martin Buber's proposal for a binational state, a single state that would encompass the political and social needs of both peoples having rights to the land. Buber offered his proposal to Ben Gurion, but it was brushed aside.
The Zionists had different plans and didn't need a philosopher and humanist telling them what was right or what to do. Forcible transfer of the Palestinian population, "the Arabs," was already in the cards.
All people have a right to a home. I don't believe there is a fundamental human right to a state devoted to preservation of a majority of your particular ethnicity. That's the problem with "homeland" in an ethnic sense. I believe that moving towards multi-ethnic tolerant societies is good for humanity. Preserving ethnic dominance is understandable and not necessarily bad, I just don't think it's worth taking extreme steps to achieve.
All people have a right to a home. I don't believe there is a fundamental human right to a state devoted to preservation of a majority of your particular ethnicity.
While I tend to agree with that in principle, it's relatively easy for us to say that when we're sitting in countries that already have a natural ethnic majority. The vast majority of people in France are French, the vast majority of people in Italy are Italian, etc. So "we" (speaking for most of the world at large, here) reap the benefits of an ethnic-majority society, if any, without having to make preservation of that ethnic majority part of our policy.
Some of that thin veneer of tolerance is starting to strip away from other countries as they find their own ethnic makeup inexorably changing. France is dealing with a glut of Muslim immigrants, the United States will likely be majority-Hispanic within a few decades, etc., and you're starting to see people get anxious about it and propose that we institute our own ethnic-majority-preserving policies.
I'm not seeking to particularly defend Israel in that, because I agree that we should be working toward a colorblind and more homogeneous world, not a more heterogeneous one, just saying that Israel by far isn't unique in desiring an ethnic-majority homeland, and should not be uniquely criticized for it.
In fact, what makes Israel unique is that they're one of the very few nations whose people survived expulsion from their homeland and long-term diaspora with their culture intact while another people moved into their former home. Ireland, for example, remained majority-Irish during its people's long diaspora, so after the people started returning there was no need for any policy specifically designed to restore and preserve the previously-existing ethnic majority.
Ethnocentricism (broadly defined to encompass ethnicity, race, or religion) can be a pernicious ethic, and was most certainly the source of American Eugenics, segregation, German and Italian Fascism, and Apartheid, and all of the other movements that attempted to put the rights of one people before another. Perhaps the last example we are familiar with was Serbian nationalism, and we know how that turned out.
It is seen in many other places today including Israel.
>>No one has offered American Indians a "national home.
And if the American Indians had wanted one? Israel did want one, and in 1948 their wish came true.
Like the "tit for tat" theory, the Jewish Nakba, so-called, which allegedly followed the ethnic cleansing of two thirds of the Palestinian population, and over 470 villages and towns, in 1948, the "American Indian" theory is also invalid. Palestine was a country of largely Arab people, the Palestinians, for over a thousand years. There are other theories less frequently offered to justify the ethnic cleansing, like the "place holder" theory, based on the fact that there were always at least a few thousands Jews living in Jerusalem, and the "Roman kicked us out so therefore..." theory, which is self-explanatory. There are probably others.
My point is, we could go around the world and recognize that the current states are all "unjust" in some form or another. Certainly the US itself was not created in a just manner - we killed off and expelled all of the Indians. Yet I don't here you voluntarily giving up your land to an American Indian. And what excuse do you have? That this happened a long time ago? Lame.
Israel is no more an unjust creation than the United States.
The current states are based on the victors of previous wars, genocides, ethnic conflicts, etc. The Israeli situation is not unique.
The "American Indian" theory used to justify the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in 1948 has nothing in common with the Palestinian situation. And everyone, even Bush, knows that. Hence, his call for the military occupation to stop and a severeign Palestinian state be created.
But let me ask you: do you really expect liberal Democrats who honed a new ethnic in 1964 to agree with you, that it is okay to steal another people's lands? What American agrees today with out treatment of Native Americans? It is a new world. We took down Apartheid South Africa twenty years ago. Now why should the white supremacists of South Africa not have their country? And just for a more recent episode of ethnic cleansing, why should the Serbs have been given the ability to build a "Serbian and democratic state" in all of original Surbia, which included Bosnia?
Frankly, I don't know where you are coming from. Get into the 20th century. We went to war twice to take down ethnic cleansers of another kind in Europe and the Far East just 60 years ago.
The absurdity of these justifications could go on and on.
But let me ask you: do you really expect liberal Democrats who honed a new ethnic in 1964 to agree with you, that it is okay to steal another people's lands? What American agrees today with out treatment of Native Americans?
That's not the point.
The point is, we are living on land that we stole from the Native Americans approximately 300-400 years ago. Some of us are living on land we stole from Mexico about 200 years ago. It was in fact stolen--it was conquered, occupied, subjugated, and absorbed, and its native inhabitants mostly driven out or killed.
So does that mean you believe the Native American nations would be within their rights to take back their land today? Would Mexico be within its rights to take back California and Texas? Should the United States be morally obligated to return it?
You may argue, well, the United States has been here for over 200 years now. We've been living on the land long enough now to call it ours even though we stole it in the first place.
Well, Israel has been there for 60 years.
So where is the magic line drawn?
How many years must a country exist on conquered/stolen land before it becomes the legitimate owner? Obviously it is somewhere longer than 60 years (because Israel doesn't qualify) but shorter than 200 (because America qualifies) and definitely shorter than 1000 (because Palestine qualifies) but has a statute of limitations of at most 1000 (because, again, Israel doesn't qualify).
Jewish people can be safe in the modern world without the existence of an officially Jewish state.
See, I simply don't understand this, though I see it all the time. "The Holocaust couldn't happen again! That was the 1930s and 1940s! That was like, FOREVER ago! We're all much more civilized now!"
Six million Jews were rounded up and exterminated, and this continued up until 63 years ago. There are people still alive today who survived through it, who saw it with their own eyes. That is "modern."
And Germany wasn't some scummy backwater country back then. Weimar Germany had serious economic problems, which contributed to the rise of National Socialism, but it was also one of the great cultural capitals of Europe, and by consequence, of the world. Germans in the early to mid 20th century were the pinnacle of "civilized people" in their time.
Don't fool yourself, it could very easily happen again.
Generically it has, many times while the world stood aside and today stands aside, as in the Darfur genocide.
Indeed so.
In my experience, this is what it comes down to. One of the impulses of the original zionist movement, made even more urgent by the holocaust, was the idea that jews could only be safe if they had their own country that they controlled (preferably by majority in a democracy). Although I certainly understand why people in the 19th century through WW2 believed that, I think history has disproven this point. Most of the jewish people who fled europe because of anti-semitism and nazism came to America. And they have been safe here. They included my great-grandmother and her family. All of her relatives that remained in europe did not survive WW2. My grandmother made a trip to Poland in the early 60s and there was literally no trace of the family. So it's not like I think of the holocaust as some remote event.
I don't need to argue that the holocaust could never happen again anywhere. Pogroms happened for a long time before german efficiency took it to the next level. To suggest that you'll always have people who agitate against jews isn't scandalous. But in the U.S., those agitators have no power. If Vegas took odds on the matter, the jews would fall pretty far down the list of minority groups likely to be targeted by the state in the US. Is it possible? In the sense that anything is possible. But it's highly improbable. Believing that jewish people can be safe in America (and other first world nations) certainly does effect my outlook on Israel. Once you believe that, you can see that maintaining a jewish majority in Israel is an understandable aspiration but not the key to the survival of the jewish people. When it's no longer the key to survival, you don't support more extreme measures to maintain it.
People who associate anti-zionism with anti-semitism are those people who think that opposition to (or at least unwillingness to actively support) Isreal being an officially "jewish" state is a willingness to see the jewish people disappear from the face of the earth. As I've tried to demonstrate here, it is possible to prize the continued existence of jewish people without supporting the zionist project. (There are more liberal versions of zionism that I support - mainly anything that promotes jewish culture, but they don't seem to be in play in the current discussions of Israel.)
In many ways, many could not help but agree with your appeal for a way to bring a halt to the many forms of antiSemitism that utlimately led to the Holocaust, or even earlier, the pogroms of Eastern Europe.
But the way to do that is not through Zionism in the form that led to the dispossession of another entire people of their lives and land. That's the point.
checking out shergald. The diary didn't really include much from him, I was responding to the cited material, which I think was well-expressed. And I think it's important for people like me to speak up in discussions like this to avoid the cartoon impression that everyone varying from the Likud line hates Israel.
Google as a zionist conspiracy, eh? Just one more reason to love the Jews!
Believe crap like this
Google as a zionist conspiracy
and you will surely not come back. However, I would suggest to people who conflate notions like Zionism and Jewishness or Likud and Jewishness, look up some of the left wing peace groups that had their origin in the likes of "Not In My Name," small organizations that eventually came together to become Jewish Voice for Peace. Look them up before you board the train that is taking Zionism into the land of extreme absurdity, and people who are willing to be your escort.
