That’s a big part of the problem. Ethnostates and theocracies are invariably oppressive towards any inhabitants who are not of the dominant ethnicity or religion. Israel is no exception and shouldn’t be treated as one.
the right of self determination for the Jewish people in the form of a democratic state
An Apartheid state, which a formalized ethnostate by definition is, is inherently anti democratic and opposed to the self determination of everyone except the ruling people. Self determination through oppression of others is never and will never be legitimate.
I hope you’re also against Palestinian nationalism then
That’s not comparable and you know it. Nationalism without a nation is an ambition. Ethno-nationalism while in control of a nation containing other peoples is oppression and, in extreme cases like the South Africa of the past and present day Israel, Apartheid.
But to answer the question you thought you asked: yes, I am against the violently theocratic government philosophy of Hamas.
Also compare the number of Arabs with Israeli citizenship to the number of Jews with PA citizenship.
Arab doesn’t equal Palestinian and Palestinian doesn’t equal Arab. To conflate the two is bigotry and ignorance.
Sure. I hope you’re also against Palestinian nationalism then.
“If you’re opposed to minority rule, then I hope you’re also opposed to majority rule.” What? Simply give everyone in the region equal voting rights, as is their right as human beings, and the resulting state would be a Palestinian one.
I’d definitely be against a hypothetical Palestinian ethnostate, but that doesn’t exist so it doesn’t really seem relevant. We’re discussing an ethnostate that actually does exist, which sucks. Can we keep on that topic?
I’m not sure I understand the question. Are you under the false impression that an ethnostate is a state in which only one group is allowed to exist and all others are killed on sight?
The 20% of non-Jewish citizens of Israel are second-class citizens living under the oppressive rule of an ethnostate which explicitly primarily serves the interests of their ethno-religious ruling class.
The problem is that Jewish nationalism (aka Zionism) is what brought us here in the first place. So yes, I am against Zionism. I am ok with a two states solution but Israel doesn’t want that.
And no, I won’t accept that the blame is only at Hamas for what they did in October, because that’s ignoring all the illegal occupation that Israel has been doing for several decades.
We are here because Arabs didn’t accept Jewish immigrants and refugees as their neighbors.
Settler spotted, the former ottoman empire was actually a relative safe haven for Jewish communities, for centuries. It wasn’t until the British decided to set up a ethnostate with a vested interest in attracting new settlers and stealing land that suddenly the neighbors started to have an issue. Israel itself foments antisemitism on purpose to make Israel a more compelling destination for Jewish people abroad.
You should probably include links to sources when saying stuff like Israel promotes antisemitism.
I agree that this happens, but it’s counterintuitive to the average liberal and so needs to be backed up by strong evidence. I’ll try to google some myself later
Israel is a genocidal settler-colonial apartheid state set up by the European and North American powers to colonize the middle east. Even early zionists like Theodor Herzl understood Israel in these explicitly settler-colonial terms. Here is Herzl speaking in the 1800s, when Palestine was still Ottoman territory:
If His Majesty the Sultan were to give us Palestine, we could offer to resolve Turkey’s finances. For Europe, we would form part of a bulwark against Asia there, we would serve as the advance post of civilisation against barbarism.
So Theodor Herzel felt not only that European people were entitled to Palestine over the people already living there (including Ottoman Jews), but that the presence of “civilized” Europeans in Israel would form a “bulwark” (forward operating base(offensive, not defensive)) against Asia, which entire continent Herzl racistly characterized as “barbaric.”
Herzl was born on May 2 nd , 1860 in Budapest, Hungary to a family of German speaking assimilated Jews. His father, Jakob, was a wealthy businessman and the young Theodor was expected to enter politics or engineering by his parents. In a sense, he did not disappoint, as Herzl was destined to become the father of political Zionism. While Herzl never saw his Jewish state during his lifetime, his ideology remains so influential that even today he is considered the father of Israel.
Herzl’s birthday is a holiday in Israel, his grave is a national monument, the organization he founded is still active today and the largest mountain in the country was re-named in his honor. It is not an exaggeration to say that Herzl and his ideology remain central to Zionism.
As a young man, Herzl was a fanatic Germanophile. He believed that if Jews simply tried hard enough, they could become “Germanized” and shake off what he called “shameful Jewish characteristics.” Herzl viewed German culture and language as inherently superior to that of the reviled working-class Yiddish speaking Jews. At first, he believed that Jews should be Germanized, arguing that Eastern European Jews were
so “savage” and backwards that they must learn the very concepts of beauty and nobility by studying the works of authors like Goethe and Shakespeare. He initially envisioned his Zion as a German colony, and waxed poetic about importing German culture to the orient. However, as time went on, Herzl increasingly started to believe that Jews could not and should not assimilate into Europe, and the only solution to the “Jewish question” was the complete removal of all Jews from Europe. If all of this sounds anti-Semitic, that is because it is. Herzl’s Zionism is fundamentally based in antisemitic notions about Jewish incompatibility with gentile society. Herzl dedicated the rest of his life to his goal of a Jewish state. In 1897, he founded the World Zionist Organization, a big tent coalition of Zionists dedicated to creating a Jewish state by any means necessary. As time went on, and the “Labor” Zionist wings were increasingly persecuted by Herzl, the organization moved farther and farther to the right. Given what Herzl believed in, this is understandable. Unlike the Zionists of today, who must pretend to have some respect for the charade known as international law, Herzl was quite open about his plans.
In the view of Herzl, Israel was explicitly a colonial project, and he toured the capitals of Europe trying to drum up support and funding for his cause. Herzl cast a wide net, he was not terribly concerned with who supported him, or why. He gladly worked with some of the most extreme antisemites on earth. After many attempts to get a meeting with Tsar Nicholas II by promising to solve Russia’s “Jewish problem”, Herzl finally got a letter saying Russia would support hisproposed deportation of the Jews. He kept it for the rest of his life, treating it as one of his most prized possessions.
At the same time, Tsarist forces were carrying out reactionary pogroms all throughout the so-called Pale of Settlement, the home of most of Europe’s Jews. In 1903, the same year Herzl was in correspondence with the Tsar, over seven hundred pogroms took place in Ukraine and Moldova alone resulting in the murder of thousands of Jews. In many cases, the pogroms were incited by the Tsar’s secret police and in others the guilty were simply granted clemency by the government. Herzl knew all of this, and his continued support of the Tsarist government was controversial even inside his own movement.
In the end, it was all for nothing. The Tsar did not keep his word and Herzl was perfectly willing to sacrifice thousands of Jews in exchange for empty promises. Sadly, the genocidal tendencies inside Zionism would only accelerate as the movement grew. The Tsar wasn’t the only one who used Herzl as a tool. Starting in 1896, Herzl actively worked with the Ottoman Sultan Abdul Hamid II. After a meeting with the Sultan’s advisors in the Levant to discuss strategy, Herzl threw his support behind the Armenian Genocide, a crime so vile it had cut off the Ottomans from European loans. Herzl believed that he could jump in to fill that gap, offering to pay off the empire’s increasing debts using funds raised from European Zionists in exchange for permission to start a colony in Palestine.
In 1901, Herzl finally got his long-awaited meeting with the Sultan, who rejected his proposal out of hand. Once again, Herzl was perfectly willing to sacrifice thousands of lives for words on paper. Today, Herzl’s “civilized” slaughter is viewed as an act of genocide by all credible historians and groups as diverse as the United Nations, the United States Government, the European Union, the Anti-Defamation League, and the World Jewish Congress, who specifically called it “the blueprint of the Holocaust.” With his options dwindling, Herzl even turned to Cecil Rhodes, the openly white supremacist founder of the unrecognized apartheid state of Rhodesia to ask for his advice and blessing to colonize Palestine. Although his efforts amounted to nothing, the ideological connections remained, and the state of Israel became a close ally of Rhodesia. At one point, Israel was one of the only countries willing to sell weapons and licenses to its fellow apartheid states. Israel even collaborated with apartheid South Africa on its nuclear program, a direct violation of international law which was never punished.
“You are being invited to help make history. It doesn’t involve Africa, but a piece of Asia Minor; not Englishmen but Jews… How, then, do I happen to turn to you since this is an out-of-the-way matter for you? How indeed? Because it is something colonial” - Herzl in a letter to Cecil Rhodes
At best, Herzl represents the sort of reactionary, callous “realpolitik” that the state of Israel still embraces today. At worst, he was a genocidal racist willing to support even the vilest crimes toadvance his movement. When the rest of his actions are considered, it appears the latter is much more likely. Herzl’s actions are those of a man who did not just sit idly by and watch genocide happen, but rather those of a man who viewed the genocide as a cornerstone of his ideology. The simple reality is Theodor Herzl was a reactionary antisemite who openly called for the extermination of the Jews of Europe while simultaneously calling for the colonization of Palestine by European Jews. He viewed both of these ends as codependent upon each other.
While this sounds contradictory, this is only because most people have simply accepted the historical premises of the Zionist movement without question due to decades of well-funded propaganda.
Herzl’s antisemitism was rooted first in a deep, intense classism. In order to understand this fully,
we need some historical background. Herzl was a German speaking assimilated Jew from a wealthy merchant family. He did not experience any of the hardship which defined the interaction between Jews and Gentiles in
Europe. Rather, Herzl’s family willingly sold out their fellow Jews for money and status, using the poor Yiddish speaking Jews as a sort of human shield to protect themselves from the predictions of their German allies. When it came time to create his “Jewish” state, Herzl sought to portray himself and his handful of wealthy allies as “the good ones” while the rest of the Jews were little more than vermin to be exterminated.
The vast majority of the Europe’s Jewry were Yiddish speaking workers and peasants who were restricted by law from entering most professions to keep them poor and easily exploited. The Yiddish Jews had been expelled from all their previous homes in Europe and were eventually chased into the eastern part of what was then the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, but today is part of seven countries, mostly Poland, Ukraine, and Belarus.
The commonwealth was much friendlier to Jews than most of its European counterparts, and so the region was quickly settled by Jews fleeing oppression elsewhere. After Poland was defeated and partitioned in 1791, most of this territory and the people living there came under the control of the violently antisemitic Russian Empire.
Tsarina Catherine’s regime had recently conquered former Ottoman territories in Crimea and the Black Sea region. These lands were combined with the recent acquisitions from Poland to form what became known as the Pale of Settlement. Jews were allowed to settle and do business in this land, but nowhere else in the empire. All other Russian Jews were violently expelled from their homes and sent to settle the Pale. The plan was that the Jews would serve as a buffer against Ottoman expansion while keeping them away from the Orthodox heartland of the Russian Empire.
Their lives were not easy, as the Pale of Settlement was more of a trap than a gift. Jews were not allowed to own land inside the Pale, meaning that to live and do business they had to rent fromgentiles. They were also kept at first from the major urban centers of Kiev, Sevastopol and Yalta, forcing them into agricultural work in rural areas. In practice, the system was slavery in all but name. Jews were often forced to buy or rent tools at usurious prices to work land that did not belong to them, thereby keeping them permanently bound in debt. This was the origin of the Kulak, a parasitic class of peasant landlords which emerged specifically to exploit Jews and siphon off their wealth into the coffers of the Tsar.
Despite all this, a strong Yiddish speaking Jewish culture existed in the Pale. They had a long, rich heritage, maintaining their own traditions and culture even in the face of centuries of violent repression. They refused to assimilate as Herzl’s family had, remaining proudly and defiantly Jewish. It was these people, the so-called “Ostjuden”, in whom Herzl saw all the lies of antisemites made flesh.
Herzl even borrowed their language. In 1897 he released an unhinged antisemitic rant entitled “Mauschel” (a German racial slur so vile I will not translate it), where he branded the long suffering Ostjuden with the same irons their tormentors had. To Herzl, the Mauschel was everything he was not. His type of Jew was the only real Jew, while the Mauschel was nothing more than vermin.
The Mauschel was simultaneously lazy and greedy. The (rich, assimilated) Jew was hard working and charitable. The Mauschel was stupid and backwards, while the Jew was educated and cultured. The Mauschel was “something unspeakably vile” while the Jew was upright and upstanding. Most importantly, the Mauschel was a weak and pathetic creature who had meekly gone to the slaughter, while Herzl’s Jew was a mighty warrior who would never submit.
The only problem is, Herzl’s new Jewish man was not real. The Ostjuden were, and at a population of around five million, they constituted 40% of the world’s Jews and around 80% of Europe’s. Therefore, to call for the extermination of the so-called Mauschel was to call for the extermination of the Jews. Herzl’s ideology assumes that everything antisemites said about Jews is true, and the only solution is their complete extermination. Just like the fascists that would come after him, he sought to create a new type of man, the so called “Israeli” from the ashes of the old.
Herzl particularly despised Yiddish, the diaspora language of the Ostjuden. At first, he favored its replacement with German, then the modern reconstructed Hebrew. Since Herzl was a classist first, he viewed Yiddish and its speakers as being inherently uncivilized and inferior, once again finding himself in alignment with his fellow antisemites.
Regardless of what antisemites believe, Yiddish was and is a vibrant, living language with a rich history tied intrinsically to the history of its many speakers. The history of Yiddish very much is the history of the Jews. For centuries, the Yiddish was the voice of the masses of Jews, rather than elites such as Herzl. It was in Yiddish, not Hebrew or German which the Jewish people recorded their hopes and dreams, reflected on their joy and sorrow and more importantly, resisted continued efforts from the European powers to break their culture via assimilation. Yiddish has a long history, a vast corpus of work and like the Jews themselves, it is no lesser for its roots.
How dare the Jewish people try to build a safe home for themselves after centuries of persecution and oppression.
Slaughtering civilians around you doesn’t build a safe home. It in fact makes your home more dangerous, because now people are motivated to attack you in return
Oh, so the Nakba was all fine?
Idk, I’m seeing here a second Nakba, but it might be my antisemitic brain…
And with illegal occupation I mean all the occupation Israel has been doing for decades. We all have seen the maps of what was Palestine pre-nakba and what it is today. The only reasons why we are ok with what Israel is doing are:
United States support
Palestine being an Arab country (and we all know how the west hates Arabs in general)
Fear of being called antisemitic after what Nazis did.
And tbf, right now I’m pretty sure the main reason is the first one. If that drops, I’m almost sure Israel is going to have a veeeeeeery tough time trying to find support in the international community to fend themselves against every enemy they have made.
See? This is the “with me or against me” rhetoric I was talking about in another post. I never said I want the destruction of Israel. I said that the only reasons why they are still being supported by the international community are those three points, being the most important the fact that the US supports them.
If that drops, they will have a hard time looking for allies because right now, nobody can in good faith say that they agree with what Israel is doing in Gaza, and if someone was to attack them and the US doesn’t step in, I’m not sure anyone else will.
That is not saying that I want the violent destruction of Israel, that is stating facts. You might not like them, but that’s how things are right now. Israel has no friends and that is entirely because of how they are behaving.
why do you want a theocracy or ethnostate? Also what one is it you are advocating for, or is it both, because Isreal is both of them under the status quo. and I find both of these types of nations moraly reprehensable
Zionism is a settler colonialism project was able to start with the support of British Imperialism. Zionism as a political movement started with Theodore Herzl in the 1880s as a ‘modern’ way to ‘solve’ the ‘Jewish Question’ of Europe.
Adi Callai, an Israeli, does a great analysis of how Antisemitism has been weaponized by Zionism during its history.
Since at least the 1860’s, Europe was increasingly antisemitic and hostile to Jewish people. Zionism was explicitly a Setter Colonialist movement and the native Palestinians were not considered People but Savages by the Europeans. While Zionist Colonization began before it, the Balfor Declaration is when Britain gave it’s backing of the movement in order to ‘solve’ the ‘Jewish Question’ while also creating a Colony in the newly conquered Middle East after WWI in order to exhibit military force in the region and extract natural resources.
That’s when Zionist immigration started to pick up, out of necessity for most as Europe became more hostile and antisemitic. That continued into and during WWII, European countries and even the US refused to expand immigration quotas for Jewish people seeking asylum. The idea that the creation of Israel is a reparation for Jewish people is an after-the-fact justification. While most Jewish immigrants had no choice and just wanted a place to live in peace, it was the Zionist Leadership that developed and implemented the forced transfer, ethnic cleansing, of the native population, Palestinians. Without any Occupation, Apartheid, and ethnic cleansing, there would not be any Palestinian resistance to it.
Herzl himself explicitly considered Zionism a Settler Colonialist project, Setter Colonialism is always violent. The difficulty in creating a democratic Jewish state in an area inhabited by people who are not Jewish, is that enough Palestinian people need to be ‘Transferred’ to have a demographic majority that is Jewish. Ben-Gurion explicitly rejected Secular Bi-national state solutions in favor of partition.
Quote
Zionism’s aims in Palestine, its deeply-held conviction
that the Land of Israel belonged exclusively to the Jewish people as a whole, and the idea of Palestine’s “civilizational barrenness" or “emptiness” against the background of European imperialist ideologies all converged in the logical conclusion that the native population should make way for thenewcomers.
The idea that the Palestinian Arabs must find a place for themselves elsewhere was articulated early on. Indeed, the founder of the movement, Theodor Herzl, provided an early reference to transfer even before he formally outlined his theory of Zionist rebirth in his Judenstat.
An 1895 entry in his diary provides in embryonic form many of the elements that were to be demonstrated repeatedly in the Zionist quest for solutions to the “Arab problem ”-the idea of dealing with state governments over the heads of the indigenous population, Jewish acquisition of property that would be inalienable, “Hebrew Land" and “Hebrew Labor,” and the removal of the native population.
Ok, it sounds like you don’t have an understanding of Settler Colonialism or the reality of Settler Violence and Ethnic Cleansing in the West Bank.
Settlements
Israel does justify the settlements and military bases in the West Bank in the name of Security. However, the reality of the settlements on-the-ground has been the cause of violent resistance and a significant obstacle to peace, as it has been for decades.
This type of settlement, where the native population gets ‘Transferred’ to make room for the settlers, is a long standing practice.
Further, declassified Israeli documents show that the Occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip were deliberately planned before being executed in 1967:
The settlements are maintained through a violent apartheid that routinely employs violence towards Palestinians and denies human rights like water access, civil rights, etc. This kind of control gives rise to violent resistance to the Apartheid occupation, jeopardizing the safety of Israeli civilians.
State violence – official and otherwise – is part and parcel of Israel’s apartheid regime, which aims to create a Jewish-only space between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. The regime treats land as a resource designed to serve the Jewish public, and accordingly uses it almost exclusively to develop and expand existing Jewish residential communities and to build new ones. At the same time, the regime fragments Palestinian space, dispossesses Palestinians of their land and relegates them to living in small, over-populated enclaves.
The apartheid regime is based on organized, systemic violence against Palestinians, which is carried out by numerous agents: the government, the military, the Civil Administration, the Supreme Court, the Israel Police, the Israel Security Agency, the Israel Prison Service, the Israel Nature and Parks Authority, and others. Settlers are another item on this list, and the state incorporates their violence into its own official acts of violence. Settler violence sometimes precedes instances of official violence by Israeli authorities, and at other times is incorporated into them. Like state violence, settler violence is organized, institutionalized, well-equipped and implemented in order to achieve a defined strategic goal.
The settlements represent land-grabbing, and land-grabbing and peace-making don’t go together, it is one or the other. By its actions, if not always in its rhetoric, Israel has opted for land-grabbing and as we speak Israel is expanding settlements. So, Israel has been systematically destroying the basis for a viable Palestinian state and this is the declared objective of the Likud and Netanyahu who used to pretend to accept a two-state solution. In the lead up to the last election, he said there will be no Palestinian state on his watch. The expansion of settlements and the wall mean that there cannot be a viable Palestinian state with territorial contiguity. The most that the Palestinians can hope for is Bantustans, a series of enclaves surrounded by Israeli settlements and Israeli military bases.
“my arbitrary numbers pulled from my ass say that my ethnostate is slightly more democratic than the people we’re actively exterminating with bombs and starvation, and have prevented from having a functioning society. You should support us as a result”
Do you honestly think that’s remotely convincing lmao
Usual propaganda from pro-genocide people: considering that Israel is the whole Jewish world so any kind of critics towards them can be tagged as antisemitism.
You’re right, it’s more like a genocide. After all, they’re just bombing everything indiscriminately, starving people to death, blocking humanitarian aid and occupying illegally territories that don’t belong to them.
Not to mention that they basically shot to kill everyone they find, be it an UN worker, a child or an US citizen protesting.
But hey, god forbid we criticise what those bastards do, we wouldn’t like to be called antisemitic…
Fuck Netanyahu, fuck his government and fuck everyone supporting what they are doing in Gaza.
I’m pretty sure that if we’re not seeing more deaths it is because the international community would have trouble trying to justify it. But not because Netanyahu doesn’t want it.
They abuse Palestinians in their jails, they kill children, they attack refugee camps… All because “Hamas was hiding there”. I’m sorry but no. There’s a limit to what you can do. And Israel is surpassing it by far. They are not only killing, they are razing cities, they are basically making Gaza uninhabitable and they are blocking humanitarian aid (when they’re not directly destroying it), so yeah, they are trying to starve people.
If you raze their towns making them effectively uninhabitable and then declare those zones “a war zone” while you also block any effort to reconstruct and allow people to occupy those territories, you’re expelling them from their land.
In Gaza there is only temporary evacuations forced displacement of civilians from dangerous areas their homes. This is not only illegal but required under international humanitarian law as a war crime
There, fixed it for you.
Gazans are not constantly expelled from their land
True, but not a good thing. The Israeli apartheid regime is basically moving Gazans around inside an open air prison in between the murder and the theft and destruction of those things necessary for people to live.
Israel is a sham democracy floated by endless US weapons, don’t worry I hate the US too, and pretty much every other state is slightly lower in my shit list because they’re not actively exterminating people for their settlers right now
Israel is a State, racism is towards people. The State of Israel doesn’t represent the opinion of all Jews, I’ve got no problem with Jews who don’t support the State of Israel, I’ve got a problem with Jews and anyone else who does.
By your logic most of the world was racist towards Americans from 2016 to 2020.
It’s the rhetoric used by those who want to be seen as victims. They pretend that you associate the state with the totality of the people forming it. That way it’s easier to control the narrative. And if you look closely, it’s the same they are trying to do with the “Palestine=Hamas” bullshit.
If you hate Israel, according to them, you hate the whole Jewish world. It’s easier that way to create the “with me or against me” rhetoric.
That’s like saying, “It’s fine to say that you just hate the government of Nazi Germany, but if that’s the only nation state you hate, it means you’re racist against Germans.” What?
I hate every apartheid state with equal intensity, however, since South Africa ended their system of apartheid, that just leaves Israel. I suppose if Israel’s system of apartheid was ended first and South Africa’s remained, it would mean I was racist against white people or something. Funny how who I’m “racist” towards is entirely dependant on who’s doing apartheid.
Hating a State doesn’t mean hating the people living under its rule or the people associated with its culture. Would you call me racist if I told you I hate the State of China for the genocides it’s committing?
Who called for Israelites to be displaced? It’s nowhere in the OP.
Who called for the destruction of Israel? It’s nowhere in the OP.
The OP is stating a fact, Israel is doing things in Gaza that other States wouldn’t be allowed to do to their neighbor without repercussions from first world countries. Stating that and saying that Israel needs to stop isn’t racism.
It’s not, if the state of Israel starts to displace people of a specific ethnic group to isolate them in order to more easily kill them isn’t it fair to make a comparison with any other group that did the same thing in the past?
Stop conflating the State and the people, that’s actually much more racist than criticizing the State because you’re basically saying that all Jews support what the State of Israel is doing.
Removed by mod
Being anti Zionists is not being antisemitic.
I’m ok with Jews, I’m not ok with Israel committing a genocide.
Removed by mod
That’s a big part of the problem. Ethnostates and theocracies are invariably oppressive towards any inhabitants who are not of the dominant ethnicity or religion. Israel is no exception and shouldn’t be treated as one.
An Apartheid state, which a formalized ethnostate by definition is, is inherently anti democratic and opposed to the self determination of everyone except the ruling people. Self determination through oppression of others is never and will never be legitimate.
Removed by mod
That’s not comparable and you know it. Nationalism without a nation is an ambition. Ethno-nationalism while in control of a nation containing other peoples is oppression and, in extreme cases like the South Africa of the past and present day Israel, Apartheid.
But to answer the question you thought you asked: yes, I am against the violently theocratic government philosophy of Hamas.
Arab doesn’t equal Palestinian and Palestinian doesn’t equal Arab. To conflate the two is bigotry and ignorance.
Removed by mod
That’s not true. Especially not when you count the settlers living on stolen land inside the West Bank and planning to do the same in Gaza.
Removed by mod
“If you’re opposed to minority rule, then I hope you’re also opposed to majority rule.” What? Simply give everyone in the region equal voting rights, as is their right as human beings, and the resulting state would be a Palestinian one.
Removed by mod
I’d definitely be against a hypothetical Palestinian ethnostate, but that doesn’t exist so it doesn’t really seem relevant. We’re discussing an ethnostate that actually does exist, which sucks. Can we keep on that topic?
Removed by mod
I’m not sure I understand the question. Are you under the false impression that an ethnostate is a state in which only one group is allowed to exist and all others are killed on sight?
The 20% of non-Jewish citizens of Israel are second-class citizens living under the oppressive rule of an ethnostate which explicitly primarily serves the interests of their ethno-religious ruling class.
Removed by mod
The problem is that Jewish nationalism (aka Zionism) is what brought us here in the first place. So yes, I am against Zionism. I am ok with a two states solution but Israel doesn’t want that.
And no, I won’t accept that the blame is only at Hamas for what they did in October, because that’s ignoring all the illegal occupation that Israel has been doing for several decades.
Removed by mod
Settler spotted, the former ottoman empire was actually a relative safe haven for Jewish communities, for centuries. It wasn’t until the British decided to set up a ethnostate with a vested interest in attracting new settlers and stealing land that suddenly the neighbors started to have an issue. Israel itself foments antisemitism on purpose to make Israel a more compelling destination for Jewish people abroad.
You should probably include links to sources when saying stuff like Israel promotes antisemitism.
I agree that this happens, but it’s counterintuitive to the average liberal and so needs to be backed up by strong evidence. I’ll try to google some myself later
That’s a fair point, can try to track down too when I’m not on my phone.
edit: taken from this paywalled substack:
Israel is a genocidal settler-colonial apartheid state set up by the European and North American powers to colonize the middle east. Even early zionists like Theodor Herzl understood Israel in these explicitly settler-colonial terms. Here is Herzl speaking in the 1800s, when Palestine was still Ottoman territory:
So Theodor Herzel felt not only that European people were entitled to Palestine over the people already living there (including Ottoman Jews), but that the presence of “civilized” Europeans in Israel would form a “bulwark” (forward operating base(offensive, not defensive)) against Asia, which entire continent Herzl racistly characterized as “barbaric.”
Herzl was born on May 2 nd , 1860 in Budapest, Hungary to a family of German speaking assimilated Jews. His father, Jakob, was a wealthy businessman and the young Theodor was expected to enter politics or engineering by his parents. In a sense, he did not disappoint, as Herzl was destined to become the father of political Zionism. While Herzl never saw his Jewish state during his lifetime, his ideology remains so influential that even today he is considered the father of Israel.
Herzl’s birthday is a holiday in Israel, his grave is a national monument, the organization he founded is still active today and the largest mountain in the country was re-named in his honor. It is not an exaggeration to say that Herzl and his ideology remain central to Zionism.
As a young man, Herzl was a fanatic Germanophile. He believed that if Jews simply tried hard enough, they could become “Germanized” and shake off what he called “shameful Jewish characteristics.” Herzl viewed German culture and language as inherently superior to that of the reviled working-class Yiddish speaking Jews. At first, he believed that Jews should be Germanized, arguing that Eastern European Jews were so “savage” and backwards that they must learn the very concepts of beauty and nobility by studying the works of authors like Goethe and Shakespeare. He initially envisioned his Zion as a German colony, and waxed poetic about importing German culture to the orient. However, as time went on, Herzl increasingly started to believe that Jews could not and should not assimilate into Europe, and the only solution to the “Jewish question” was the complete removal of all Jews from Europe. If all of this sounds anti-Semitic, that is because it is. Herzl’s Zionism is fundamentally based in antisemitic notions about Jewish incompatibility with gentile society. Herzl dedicated the rest of his life to his goal of a Jewish state. In 1897, he founded the World Zionist Organization, a big tent coalition of Zionists dedicated to creating a Jewish state by any means necessary. As time went on, and the “Labor” Zionist wings were increasingly persecuted by Herzl, the organization moved farther and farther to the right. Given what Herzl believed in, this is understandable. Unlike the Zionists of today, who must pretend to have some respect for the charade known as international law, Herzl was quite open about his plans.
In the view of Herzl, Israel was explicitly a colonial project, and he toured the capitals of Europe trying to drum up support and funding for his cause. Herzl cast a wide net, he was not terribly concerned with who supported him, or why. He gladly worked with some of the most extreme antisemites on earth. After many attempts to get a meeting with Tsar Nicholas II by promising to solve Russia’s “Jewish problem”, Herzl finally got a letter saying Russia would support hisproposed deportation of the Jews. He kept it for the rest of his life, treating it as one of his most prized possessions.
At the same time, Tsarist forces were carrying out reactionary pogroms all throughout the so-called Pale of Settlement, the home of most of Europe’s Jews. In 1903, the same year Herzl was in correspondence with the Tsar, over seven hundred pogroms took place in Ukraine and Moldova alone resulting in the murder of thousands of Jews. In many cases, the pogroms were incited by the Tsar’s secret police and in others the guilty were simply granted clemency by the government. Herzl knew all of this, and his continued support of the Tsarist government was controversial even inside his own movement.
In the end, it was all for nothing. The Tsar did not keep his word and Herzl was perfectly willing to sacrifice thousands of Jews in exchange for empty promises. Sadly, the genocidal tendencies inside Zionism would only accelerate as the movement grew. The Tsar wasn’t the only one who used Herzl as a tool. Starting in 1896, Herzl actively worked with the Ottoman Sultan Abdul Hamid II. After a meeting with the Sultan’s advisors in the Levant to discuss strategy, Herzl threw his support behind the Armenian Genocide, a crime so vile it had cut off the Ottomans from European loans. Herzl believed that he could jump in to fill that gap, offering to pay off the empire’s increasing debts using funds raised from European Zionists in exchange for permission to start a colony in Palestine.
Although he found almost no support even inside the World Zionist Council, Herzl spent 5 years touring Europe, speaking, raising funds and writing articles in support of Turkey’s extermination of the Armenian people. Herzl cast the crumbling empire as a historical ally of the Jews and one they should support. He called the Ottomans civilized and decent people, justified in their actions due to the allegedly backwards and violent ways of the subhuman Armenians. He was even awarded a medal by the Grand Vizier in Istanbul, in commemoration of his loyal service to the Ottoman Empire.
In 1901, Herzl finally got his long-awaited meeting with the Sultan, who rejected his proposal out of hand. Once again, Herzl was perfectly willing to sacrifice thousands of lives for words on paper. Today, Herzl’s “civilized” slaughter is viewed as an act of genocide by all credible historians and groups as diverse as the United Nations, the United States Government, the European Union, the Anti-Defamation League, and the World Jewish Congress, who specifically called it “the blueprint of the Holocaust.” With his options dwindling, Herzl even turned to Cecil Rhodes, the openly white supremacist founder of the unrecognized apartheid state of Rhodesia to ask for his advice and blessing to colonize Palestine. Although his efforts amounted to nothing, the ideological connections remained, and the state of Israel became a close ally of Rhodesia. At one point, Israel was one of the only countries willing to sell weapons and licenses to its fellow apartheid states. Israel even collaborated with apartheid South Africa on its nuclear program, a direct violation of international law which was never punished.
At best, Herzl represents the sort of reactionary, callous “realpolitik” that the state of Israel still embraces today. At worst, he was a genocidal racist willing to support even the vilest crimes toadvance his movement. When the rest of his actions are considered, it appears the latter is much more likely. Herzl’s actions are those of a man who did not just sit idly by and watch genocide happen, but rather those of a man who viewed the genocide as a cornerstone of his ideology. The simple reality is Theodor Herzl was a reactionary antisemite who openly called for the extermination of the Jews of Europe while simultaneously calling for the colonization of Palestine by European Jews. He viewed both of these ends as codependent upon each other.
While this sounds contradictory, this is only because most people have simply accepted the historical premises of the Zionist movement without question due to decades of well-funded propaganda.
Herzl’s antisemitism was rooted first in a deep, intense classism. In order to understand this fully, we need some historical background. Herzl was a German speaking assimilated Jew from a wealthy merchant family. He did not experience any of the hardship which defined the interaction between Jews and Gentiles in Europe. Rather, Herzl’s family willingly sold out their fellow Jews for money and status, using the poor Yiddish speaking Jews as a sort of human shield to protect themselves from the predictions of their German allies. When it came time to create his “Jewish” state, Herzl sought to portray himself and his handful of wealthy allies as “the good ones” while the rest of the Jews were little more than vermin to be exterminated.
The vast majority of the Europe’s Jewry were Yiddish speaking workers and peasants who were restricted by law from entering most professions to keep them poor and easily exploited. The Yiddish Jews had been expelled from all their previous homes in Europe and were eventually chased into the eastern part of what was then the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, but today is part of seven countries, mostly Poland, Ukraine, and Belarus.
The commonwealth was much friendlier to Jews than most of its European counterparts, and so the region was quickly settled by Jews fleeing oppression elsewhere. After Poland was defeated and partitioned in 1791, most of this territory and the people living there came under the control of the violently antisemitic Russian Empire.
Tsarina Catherine’s regime had recently conquered former Ottoman territories in Crimea and the Black Sea region. These lands were combined with the recent acquisitions from Poland to form what became known as the Pale of Settlement. Jews were allowed to settle and do business in this land, but nowhere else in the empire. All other Russian Jews were violently expelled from their homes and sent to settle the Pale. The plan was that the Jews would serve as a buffer against Ottoman expansion while keeping them away from the Orthodox heartland of the Russian Empire.
Their lives were not easy, as the Pale of Settlement was more of a trap than a gift. Jews were not allowed to own land inside the Pale, meaning that to live and do business they had to rent fromgentiles. They were also kept at first from the major urban centers of Kiev, Sevastopol and Yalta, forcing them into agricultural work in rural areas. In practice, the system was slavery in all but name. Jews were often forced to buy or rent tools at usurious prices to work land that did not belong to them, thereby keeping them permanently bound in debt. This was the origin of the Kulak, a parasitic class of peasant landlords which emerged specifically to exploit Jews and siphon off their wealth into the coffers of the Tsar.
Despite all this, a strong Yiddish speaking Jewish culture existed in the Pale. They had a long, rich heritage, maintaining their own traditions and culture even in the face of centuries of violent repression. They refused to assimilate as Herzl’s family had, remaining proudly and defiantly Jewish. It was these people, the so-called “Ostjuden”, in whom Herzl saw all the lies of antisemites made flesh.
Herzl even borrowed their language. In 1897 he released an unhinged antisemitic rant entitled “Mauschel” (a German racial slur so vile I will not translate it), where he branded the long suffering Ostjuden with the same irons their tormentors had. To Herzl, the Mauschel was everything he was not. His type of Jew was the only real Jew, while the Mauschel was nothing more than vermin.
The Mauschel was simultaneously lazy and greedy. The (rich, assimilated) Jew was hard working and charitable. The Mauschel was stupid and backwards, while the Jew was educated and cultured. The Mauschel was “something unspeakably vile” while the Jew was upright and upstanding. Most importantly, the Mauschel was a weak and pathetic creature who had meekly gone to the slaughter, while Herzl’s Jew was a mighty warrior who would never submit.
The only problem is, Herzl’s new Jewish man was not real. The Ostjuden were, and at a population of around five million, they constituted 40% of the world’s Jews and around 80% of Europe’s. Therefore, to call for the extermination of the so-called Mauschel was to call for the extermination of the Jews. Herzl’s ideology assumes that everything antisemites said about Jews is true, and the only solution is their complete extermination. Just like the fascists that would come after him, he sought to create a new type of man, the so called “Israeli” from the ashes of the old.
Herzl particularly despised Yiddish, the diaspora language of the Ostjuden. At first, he favored its replacement with German, then the modern reconstructed Hebrew. Since Herzl was a classist first, he viewed Yiddish and its speakers as being inherently uncivilized and inferior, once again finding himself in alignment with his fellow antisemites.
Regardless of what antisemites believe, Yiddish was and is a vibrant, living language with a rich history tied intrinsically to the history of its many speakers. The history of Yiddish very much is the history of the Jews. For centuries, the Yiddish was the voice of the masses of Jews, rather than elites such as Herzl. It was in Yiddish, not Hebrew or German which the Jewish people recorded their hopes and dreams, reflected on their joy and sorrow and more importantly, resisted continued efforts from the European powers to break their culture via assimilation. Yiddish has a long history, a vast corpus of work and like the Jews themselves, it is no lesser for its roots.
That was a lot of work, thank you for taking the time.
Removed by mod
You are the one conflating all Jews with the settler ethnostate you live in, officer
Slaughtering civilians around you doesn’t build a safe home. It in fact makes your home more dangerous, because now people are motivated to attack you in return
Removed by mod
This didn’t start in 2023.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israeli_war_crimes
This has been going on since 1948.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-54116567
A war to expand your territory is ok? So Palestinians attacking Israel to expand theirs should be ok to you too then.
Removed by mod
Which is why israeli ministers attended a “settle in Gaza” conference 7 months ago
Mate, are you for real?
Removed by mod
Why does the State encourage people to settle on Palestinian territory then?
Removed by mod
Oh, so the Nakba was all fine? Idk, I’m seeing here a second Nakba, but it might be my antisemitic brain… And with illegal occupation I mean all the occupation Israel has been doing for decades. We all have seen the maps of what was Palestine pre-nakba and what it is today. The only reasons why we are ok with what Israel is doing are:
And tbf, right now I’m pretty sure the main reason is the first one. If that drops, I’m almost sure Israel is going to have a veeeeeeery tough time trying to find support in the international community to fend themselves against every enemy they have made.
Removed by mod
See? This is the “with me or against me” rhetoric I was talking about in another post. I never said I want the destruction of Israel. I said that the only reasons why they are still being supported by the international community are those three points, being the most important the fact that the US supports them.
If that drops, they will have a hard time looking for allies because right now, nobody can in good faith say that they agree with what Israel is doing in Gaza, and if someone was to attack them and the US doesn’t step in, I’m not sure anyone else will.
That is not saying that I want the violent destruction of Israel, that is stating facts. You might not like them, but that’s how things are right now. Israel has no friends and that is entirely because of how they are behaving.
Removed by mod
why do you want a theocracy or ethnostate? Also what one is it you are advocating for, or is it both, because Isreal is both of them under the status quo. and I find both of these types of nations moraly reprehensable
Removed by mod
Zionism is a settler colonialism project was able to start with the support of British Imperialism. Zionism as a political movement started with Theodore Herzl in the 1880s as a ‘modern’ way to ‘solve’ the ‘Jewish Question’ of Europe.
Adi Callai, an Israeli, does a great analysis of how Antisemitism has been weaponized by Zionism during its history.
Since at least the 1860’s, Europe was increasingly antisemitic and hostile to Jewish people. Zionism was explicitly a Setter Colonialist movement and the native Palestinians were not considered People but Savages by the Europeans. While Zionist Colonization began before it, the Balfor Declaration is when Britain gave it’s backing of the movement in order to ‘solve’ the ‘Jewish Question’ while also creating a Colony in the newly conquered Middle East after WWI in order to exhibit military force in the region and extract natural resources.
That’s when Zionist immigration started to pick up, out of necessity for most as Europe became more hostile and antisemitic. That continued into and during WWII, European countries and even the US refused to expand immigration quotas for Jewish people seeking asylum. The idea that the creation of Israel is a reparation for Jewish people is an after-the-fact justification. While most Jewish immigrants had no choice and just wanted a place to live in peace, it was the Zionist Leadership that developed and implemented the forced transfer, ethnic cleansing, of the native population, Palestinians. Without any Occupation, Apartheid, and ethnic cleansing, there would not be any Palestinian resistance to it.
Herzl himself explicitly considered Zionism a Settler Colonialist project, Setter Colonialism is always violent. The difficulty in creating a democratic Jewish state in an area inhabited by people who are not Jewish, is that enough Palestinian people need to be ‘Transferred’ to have a demographic majority that is Jewish. Ben-Gurion explicitly rejected Secular Bi-national state solutions in favor of partition.
Quote
Page 8, The Concept of Transfer 1882-1948
10 myths of Israel by Ilan Pappe, summerized and full book
Transfer Committee and the JNF led to Forced Displacement of 100,000 Palestinians throughout the mandate.
Ethnic Cleansing
Removed by mod
Ok, it sounds like you don’t have an understanding of Settler Colonialism or the reality of Settler Violence and Ethnic Cleansing in the West Bank.
Settlements
Israel does justify the settlements and military bases in the West Bank in the name of Security. However, the reality of the settlements on-the-ground has been the cause of violent resistance and a significant obstacle to peace, as it has been for decades.
This type of settlement, where the native population gets ‘Transferred’ to make room for the settlers, is a long standing practice.
The mass ethnic cleansing campaign of 1948:
Further, declassified Israeli documents show that the Occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip were deliberately planned before being executed in 1967:
While the peace process was exploited to continue de-facto annexation of the West Bank via Settlements
The settlements are maintained through a violent apartheid that routinely employs violence towards Palestinians and denies human rights like water access, civil rights, etc. This kind of control gives rise to violent resistance to the Apartheid occupation, jeopardizing the safety of Israeli civilians.
How Avi Shlaim moved from two-state solution to one-state solution
‘One state is a game changer’: A conversation with Ilan Pappe
Removed by mod
Zionist reeeeeeeeeeeeee-
Would be cool to have one state with an actual democracy
Removed by mod
Israel is not a democracy, except as a propaganda implement lol
You are either the most gullible rube on the planet or pushing an agenda
Removed by mod
“my arbitrary numbers pulled from my ass say that my ethnostate is slightly more democratic than the people we’re actively exterminating with bombs and starvation, and have prevented from having a functioning society. You should support us as a result”
Do you honestly think that’s remotely convincing lmao
Removed by mod
Removed by mod
I mean… The USA is far from democratic so it’s not as if it was a great example to follow?
Removed by mod
Removed by mod
You know that’s not true. Zionism wants all the territory for the “correct” Jews.
Removed by mod
I read all the definitions of antisemitism on your link and am not seeing the issue?
Usual propaganda from pro-genocide people: considering that Israel is the whole Jewish world so any kind of critics towards them can be tagged as antisemitism.
Removed by mod
If you don’t like being compared to Nazis, maybe stop doing things that Nazis would do? Such as an ethnic cleansing?
Idk, just an idea…
Removed by mod
You’re right, it’s more like a genocide. After all, they’re just bombing everything indiscriminately, starving people to death, blocking humanitarian aid and occupying illegally territories that don’t belong to them.
Not to mention that they basically shot to kill everyone they find, be it an UN worker, a child or an US citizen protesting.
But hey, god forbid we criticise what those bastards do, we wouldn’t like to be called antisemitic…
Fuck Netanyahu, fuck his government and fuck everyone supporting what they are doing in Gaza.
Removed by mod
I’m pretty sure that if we’re not seeing more deaths it is because the international community would have trouble trying to justify it. But not because Netanyahu doesn’t want it.
They abuse Palestinians in their jails, they kill children, they attack refugee camps… All because “Hamas was hiding there”. I’m sorry but no. There’s a limit to what you can do. And Israel is surpassing it by far. They are not only killing, they are razing cities, they are basically making Gaza uninhabitable and they are blocking humanitarian aid (when they’re not directly destroying it), so yeah, they are trying to starve people.
Eh… Yes?
Removed by mod
If you raze their towns making them effectively uninhabitable and then declare those zones “a war zone” while you also block any effort to reconstruct and allow people to occupy those territories, you’re expelling them from their land.
Removed by mod
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/longform/2024/4/18/satellite-images-reveal-israeli-destruction-of-hospitals-in-gaza
Where and what do they return to after those temporary evacuations?
Removed by mod
There, fixed it for you.
In fact, almost all Palestinians in Gaza have been forcibly displaced
True, but not a good thing. The Israeli apartheid regime is basically moving Gazans around inside an open air prison in between the murder and the theft and destruction of those things necessary for people to live.
Removed by mod
Israel is a State, not people, you can hate it all you want, it doesn’t make you racist.
Removed by mod
Israel is a sham democracy floated by endless US weapons, don’t worry I hate the US too, and pretty much every other state is slightly lower in my shit list because they’re not actively exterminating people for their settlers right now
Israel is a State, racism is towards people. The State of Israel doesn’t represent the opinion of all Jews, I’ve got no problem with Jews who don’t support the State of Israel, I’ve got a problem with Jews and anyone else who does.
By your logic most of the world was racist towards Americans from 2016 to 2020.
It’s the rhetoric used by those who want to be seen as victims. They pretend that you associate the state with the totality of the people forming it. That way it’s easier to control the narrative. And if you look closely, it’s the same they are trying to do with the “Palestine=Hamas” bullshit.
If you hate Israel, according to them, you hate the whole Jewish world. It’s easier that way to create the “with me or against me” rhetoric.
Removed by mod
Yeah and clearly you assume that people do the former when they’re doing the latter, like in the OP
Removed by mod
That’s like saying, “It’s fine to say that you just hate the government of Nazi Germany, but if that’s the only nation state you hate, it means you’re racist against Germans.” What?
I hate every apartheid state with equal intensity, however, since South Africa ended their system of apartheid, that just leaves Israel. I suppose if Israel’s system of apartheid was ended first and South Africa’s remained, it would mean I was racist against white people or something. Funny how who I’m “racist” towards is entirely dependant on who’s doing apartheid.
Du scheinst ein sehr schwarz/weißes Weltbild zu haben
Removed by mod
This is russian state terrorist levels of stupid.
Hating a State doesn’t mean hating the people living under its rule or the people associated with its culture. Would you call me racist if I told you I hate the State of China for the genocides it’s committing?
Removed by mod
Who called for Israelites to be displaced? It’s nowhere in the OP.
Who called for the destruction of Israel? It’s nowhere in the OP.
The OP is stating a fact, Israel is doing things in Gaza that other States wouldn’t be allowed to do to their neighbor without repercussions from first world countries. Stating that and saying that Israel needs to stop isn’t racism.
Removed by mod
It’s actually not
Removed by mod
Do you realise that such a broad definition only is saying that Israel can’t be considered Nazi no matter what they do?
Removed by mod
It’s not, if the state of Israel starts to displace people of a specific ethnic group to isolate them in order to more easily kill them isn’t it fair to make a comparison with any other group that did the same thing in the past?
Stop conflating the State and the people, that’s actually much more racist than criticizing the State because you’re basically saying that all Jews support what the State of Israel is doing.
Removed by mod
A genocide is a genocide is a genocide.
Removed by mod
The word you’re looking for is ‘apropos’.
You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
Removed by mod