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.
Herzl had an interesting plan for the destruction of the Jews, he wanted to sell them out to antisemites to fund his operations. Not only would this liquidate the property of the Jews of Europe, but their deaths could then be used as propaganda for the Zionist movement. This would, of course, constitute an act of genocide, but for Herzl that was a small price to pay to create his promised land. This strategy of collaboration to fan the flames of antisemitism and thereby spur immigration to Israel has remained a cornerstone of Israeli policy, as has the violent hatred of any Jews who do not conform to Herzl’s particular idea of what an “Israelite” should be. Herzl said, quote:
It would be excellent idea to call in respectable, accredited anti-Semites as liquidators of property. To the people they would vouch for the fact that we do not want to bring about the impoverishment of the countries we leave. The anti-Semites will become our most dependable friends, the anti-Semitic countries our allies.
While Herzl died in 1904, his antisemitism outlived him. The state founded with his ideology has remained a violently anti-semetic state. The Zionists who came after Herzl took his antisemitic ideology to it’s logical extreme. One of the greatest ironies of the Zionist movement is that despite basing their entire existence on the Holocaust, the Zionists of the time were enthusiastic supporters of Adolf Hitler and his final solution to the same Ostjuden “problem” Herzl decried.
When the Nazis came to power in Germany and began their long planned and promised extermination of the Jews, in full view of the world and it’s people, Zionists the world over viewed the Nazi regime as the vindication of their ideology. Now, there was finally a European leader who preached the same vile antisemitic doctrine as Herzl. As their goals regarding the extermination of the Ostjuden were aligned, most Zionists actively supported the Nazis. Even the “mainstream” Haganah movement actively collaborated with Adolf Eichmann, the architect of the Holocaust. Not only did they negotiate with Hitler to achieve Herzl’s dream of deporting the Jews, but some of them also even took up arms in support of the Reich.
One of the largest of such groups was a Zionist terrorist organization called “Lehi”, which was split from the slightly less radical Irgun by Avraham Stern in 1940. The split was caused byStern’s support of Hitler over the British, who ruled the mandate of Palestine at the time. Stern’s reasoning was simple. Hitler was an enemy of the “Mauschel”, not the Israelis. Lehi contacted the Nazis almost immediately after their formation. The two sides met in Beirut, where Lehi delivered a letter from Stern outlining his plans. He proposed that Lehi actively enter the war on the side of the Axis, saying “the German worldview and the true national aspirations of the Jewish people” were closely aligned.
“The establishment of the historical Jewish state on a totalitarian national basis, in an alliance relationship with the German Reich, is compatible with the preservation of German power.”-Avraham Stern
The Nazis ignored the letter, but that was not enough to dissuade either Lehi or Stern. Even with nothing in return, they still took up arms in support of the Reich, hoping that they could prove themselves worthy to their fellow fascists through propaganda of the deed.
Lehi embarked on a years long terrorist campaign, marked not only by assassinations and bombings (including a letter bombing campaign targeting the British government) but also the brutal depopulation of dozens of Palestinian settlements, perhaps an intentional echo to the violence their Nazi heroes inflicted on the Ostjuden in Europe. Although Stern died fighting for Hitler in 1942, the gang was not snuffed out until 1948. Despite the Israeli government’s public condemnation, most of Lehi was rolled into the security structures of the new state, where they formed the nucleus of the Mossad. One of Lehi’s senior commanders Yizhak Shamir would even serve as Israel’s 7th prime minister. It seems that Lehi’s ideology was not a problem for the mainstream Zionists, only their targets.
Sadly, the Israeli government’s violence towards Jews did not end there. With the fascists deputized into brutal secret police force to rival their heroes in the Gestapo, the so-called Jewish state still violently oppresses any Jew who does not fit their very particular ideal of what an “Israeli” should be.
As Zionists began to settle Palestine, they encountered an unexpected problem that threatened to derail their entire project. Namely, there were already Jews living there. The bedrock of the Zionist ideology is the idea that after the destruction of the Second Temple of Jerusalem in 70 CE, all the Jews either left or were expelled from the Levant, leading to over a millennium of wandering Europe in search of a new home. The reality is not so simple. While there was a mass expulsion of Jews, many of them remained in the Middle East. Of those, a great deal remained Jewish while others converted to different religions, such as Christianity or Islam, ironically making them Palestinian in the eyes of the fascist Israeli state.
When the Europeans began to settle Palestine, these so called “Mizrahi” Jews (a racial slur created by the antisemitic Zionists to describe them, while they referred to themselves simply as Jews) posed both a practical and an ideological problem for the fascists. Not only did they have land that the European settlers wanted, but their very existence was proof that Zionism was based on mythology rather than reality.
The response from the settlers was about what you would expect. Just like their idols in Germany, the Zionists put Jews into ghettos. This time, however, the Zionists were inspired not just by Herzl and Hitler, but by the antisemites who came before them.
The strategy regarding the Mizrahi is virtually identical to the strategy used by the Tsar to oppress and rob the Ostjuden with Herzl’s support. After the Palestinians were murdered or expelled, the fascists used Mizrahi as their shock troops, settling them by force into the newly stolen land. However, the Mizrahi were not allowed to own the land, only to live there. They were considered squatters under the euphemistic “Abandoned Property Law” and could therefore be extorted and evicted at will. This created a system wherein the European settlers could exploit a permanent Jewish underclass, thereby creating almost the same dynamics as existed inside the Pale of Settlement. While all of this was going on, the Europeans also embarked on policies of cultural genocide against their fellow Jews, stealing Mizrahi children to be raised by “civilized” Europeans. Despite the Zionist entity openly admitting to this policy, no action has been taken whatsoever.
None of this was accidental, it was simply the logical conclusion of an inherently antisemitic ideology. Policies of systematic discrimination towards the so-called Mizrahi Jews continue to this day. The racism against the original Jews by European settlers is so severe that Israeli schools were segregated by law until 2010.
These policies have not changed, even today the Zionists are openly carrying out yet another genocide in Gaza. As always, they make no effort to hide their crimes, rather they brag and bluster endlessly about them. Today, rather than seeking the support of Adolf Hitler and Cecil Rhodes, their patrons are men like Joe Biden and Rishi Sunak. The core ideology of Zionism has not changed, only the language used to justify their crimes. Zionism has been a fascist ideology since it was invented by Theodor Herzl, and it remains one today.
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
What an amazing story full of facts and evidence. Maybe you could send an email to the International Court of Justice explaining them they made a small mistake two months ago:
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.
Simple: We just stop sending them weapons.
They are digging their own grave by doubling down in this war and in poking other nations. And they do it because they know that “Daddy US” will cover their asses in case things turn ugly.
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.
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.
Herzl had an interesting plan for the destruction of the Jews, he wanted to sell them out to antisemites to fund his operations. Not only would this liquidate the property of the Jews of Europe, but their deaths could then be used as propaganda for the Zionist movement. This would, of course, constitute an act of genocide, but for Herzl that was a small price to pay to create his promised land. This strategy of collaboration to fan the flames of antisemitism and thereby spur immigration to Israel has remained a cornerstone of Israeli policy, as has the violent hatred of any Jews who do not conform to Herzl’s particular idea of what an “Israelite” should be. Herzl said, quote:
While Herzl died in 1904, his antisemitism outlived him. The state founded with his ideology has remained a violently anti-semetic state. The Zionists who came after Herzl took his antisemitic ideology to it’s logical extreme. One of the greatest ironies of the Zionist movement is that despite basing their entire existence on the Holocaust, the Zionists of the time were enthusiastic supporters of Adolf Hitler and his final solution to the same Ostjuden “problem” Herzl decried.
When the Nazis came to power in Germany and began their long planned and promised extermination of the Jews, in full view of the world and it’s people, Zionists the world over viewed the Nazi regime as the vindication of their ideology. Now, there was finally a European leader who preached the same vile antisemitic doctrine as Herzl. As their goals regarding the extermination of the Ostjuden were aligned, most Zionists actively supported the Nazis. Even the “mainstream” Haganah movement actively collaborated with Adolf Eichmann, the architect of the Holocaust. Not only did they negotiate with Hitler to achieve Herzl’s dream of deporting the Jews, but some of them also even took up arms in support of the Reich.
One of the largest of such groups was a Zionist terrorist organization called “Lehi”, which was split from the slightly less radical Irgun by Avraham Stern in 1940. The split was caused byStern’s support of Hitler over the British, who ruled the mandate of Palestine at the time. Stern’s reasoning was simple. Hitler was an enemy of the “Mauschel”, not the Israelis. Lehi contacted the Nazis almost immediately after their formation. The two sides met in Beirut, where Lehi delivered a letter from Stern outlining his plans. He proposed that Lehi actively enter the war on the side of the Axis, saying “the German worldview and the true national aspirations of the Jewish people” were closely aligned.
The Nazis ignored the letter, but that was not enough to dissuade either Lehi or Stern. Even with nothing in return, they still took up arms in support of the Reich, hoping that they could prove themselves worthy to their fellow fascists through propaganda of the deed.
Lehi embarked on a years long terrorist campaign, marked not only by assassinations and bombings (including a letter bombing campaign targeting the British government) but also the brutal depopulation of dozens of Palestinian settlements, perhaps an intentional echo to the violence their Nazi heroes inflicted on the Ostjuden in Europe. Although Stern died fighting for Hitler in 1942, the gang was not snuffed out until 1948. Despite the Israeli government’s public condemnation, most of Lehi was rolled into the security structures of the new state, where they formed the nucleus of the Mossad. One of Lehi’s senior commanders Yizhak Shamir would even serve as Israel’s 7th prime minister. It seems that Lehi’s ideology was not a problem for the mainstream Zionists, only their targets.
Sadly, the Israeli government’s violence towards Jews did not end there. With the fascists deputized into brutal secret police force to rival their heroes in the Gestapo, the so-called Jewish state still violently oppresses any Jew who does not fit their very particular ideal of what an “Israeli” should be.
As Zionists began to settle Palestine, they encountered an unexpected problem that threatened to derail their entire project. Namely, there were already Jews living there. The bedrock of the Zionist ideology is the idea that after the destruction of the Second Temple of Jerusalem in 70 CE, all the Jews either left or were expelled from the Levant, leading to over a millennium of wandering Europe in search of a new home. The reality is not so simple. While there was a mass expulsion of Jews, many of them remained in the Middle East. Of those, a great deal remained Jewish while others converted to different religions, such as Christianity or Islam, ironically making them Palestinian in the eyes of the fascist Israeli state.
When the Europeans began to settle Palestine, these so called “Mizrahi” Jews (a racial slur created by the antisemitic Zionists to describe them, while they referred to themselves simply as Jews) posed both a practical and an ideological problem for the fascists. Not only did they have land that the European settlers wanted, but their very existence was proof that Zionism was based on mythology rather than reality.
The response from the settlers was about what you would expect. Just like their idols in Germany, the Zionists put Jews into ghettos. This time, however, the Zionists were inspired not just by Herzl and Hitler, but by the antisemites who came before them.
The strategy regarding the Mizrahi is virtually identical to the strategy used by the Tsar to oppress and rob the Ostjuden with Herzl’s support. After the Palestinians were murdered or expelled, the fascists used Mizrahi as their shock troops, settling them by force into the newly stolen land. However, the Mizrahi were not allowed to own the land, only to live there. They were considered squatters under the euphemistic “Abandoned Property Law” and could therefore be extorted and evicted at will. This created a system wherein the European settlers could exploit a permanent Jewish underclass, thereby creating almost the same dynamics as existed inside the Pale of Settlement. While all of this was going on, the Europeans also embarked on policies of cultural genocide against their fellow Jews, stealing Mizrahi children to be raised by “civilized” Europeans. Despite the Zionist entity openly admitting to this policy, no action has been taken whatsoever.
None of this was accidental, it was simply the logical conclusion of an inherently antisemitic ideology. Policies of systematic discrimination towards the so-called Mizrahi Jews continue to this day. The racism against the original Jews by European settlers is so severe that Israeli schools were segregated by law until 2010.
As we can see, the Zionists are masters of projection. When they accuse their enemies of a crime, it is likely because they are doing the same thing, and simply assume their enemies are as brutal and racist as they are. Even when they accuse Hamas of supporting ISIS, they are speaking as a country who openly supported the Islamic state.
These policies have not changed, even today the Zionists are openly carrying out yet another genocide in Gaza. As always, they make no effort to hide their crimes, rather they brag and bluster endlessly about them. Today, rather than seeking the support of Adolf Hitler and Cecil Rhodes, their patrons are men like Joe Biden and Rishi Sunak. The core ideology of Zionism has not changed, only the language used to justify their crimes. Zionism has been a fascist ideology since it was invented by Theodor Herzl, and it remains one today.
Crazy how they didn’t respond to this part of the thread.
That was a lot of work, thank you for taking the time.
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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
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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.
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Which is why israeli ministers attended a “settle in Gaza” conference 7 months ago
Mate, are you for real?
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What an amazing story full of facts and evidence. Maybe you could send an email to the International Court of Justice explaining them they made a small mistake two months ago:
Jul 19, 2024: Top UN court says Israel’s presence in occupied Palestinian territories is ‘illegal’ and should end as ‘rapidly as possible’
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Why does the State encourage people to settle on Palestinian territory then?
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https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/29/world/middleeast/israel-west-bank-settlements-expansion.html
Edit: Funny how they never replied to that
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.
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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.
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Simple: We just stop sending them weapons. They are digging their own grave by doubling down in this war and in poking other nations. And they do it because they know that “Daddy US” will cover their asses in case things turn ugly.
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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
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If it isn’t an ethnostate, then why did you call it the only Jewish nation of the world?
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Bullshit
https://www.hrw.org/report/2021/04/27/threshold-crossed/israeli-authorities-and-crimes-apartheid-and-persecution
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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
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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
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Zionist reeeeeeeeeeeeee-