I’ll put it this way: it’s not Ilhan Omar and her Somali American followers who are marching through Charlottesville saying “Jews will not replace us.” I think that’s the point that Krugman was trying to make, which is not to say that you can’t find antisemites among the left - I’m rather sure you can. But the right wing is much more likely to normalize antisemitism and antisemitic rhetoric and violence than the left. Want proof? Look at what happened in Pittsburgh. That wasn’t a lefty.
This is also why it’s really, really important for people to understand clearly the distinction between criticism of Israel and anti-Jewish sentiment. They are NOT the same. And to conflate these two things is dangerous because it makes it more difficult to have discussions based on facts and truth. When people can’t have discussions based on facts and truth, they end up not knowing what to believe, and they’re more likely to be influenced by things like lies and conspiracy theories – which put Jews, Zionist or not, in even greater danger. There should be room for nuanced, respectful criticism of Israel (and even Jewish nationalism, just as there should be of any kind of nationalism) without having to defend against charges of antisemitism.
This is bullshit. The vast majority of Zionists that I know recognize the reality that many people were harmed during the creation and early history of Isreal, and that it was not an “abandoned and uninhabited area”. In fact, I’m not sure if I know a single Zionist who believes this.
This is also bullshit. The Jews escaping Europe were looking for a safe place to live. That’s it. And they had very good reason to believe that the only possibility of a safe place to live was to create their own country. Why on Earth would they believe, after the Holocaust in Europe, America’s indifference during the Holocaust and continuing white supremacism, and the rest of the world’s pretty much open hostility to Jews, that they would be safe anywhere else?
So they went to where Jews escaping pogroms and oppression had been fleeing to for decades – the land that would become Israel.
This doesn’t excuse everything that was done in the creation and early history of Israel, but this is the history. The Jews who went to that land before, during, and after the Holocaust were a truly desperate people. And truly desperate people will sometimes do truly desperate things to survive and ensure their safety. That doesn’t justify everything done, but it’s still an accurate characterization.
You are lumping in all Zionists with a specific racist slice of Zionism. And this provides rhetorical aid and comfort to anti-semites, whatever your intentions.
Except that’s nonsense. You’ve not “pointed out the history of Zionism,” you’ve made a bunch of unsubstantiated claims about the meaning and history of Zionism. Your claims are factually incorrect, which is probably why you’ve not cited references for them.
What I said was that it’s a loser for non-members of an ethnic/religious/racial group to preach to members of those groups that they shouldn’t be offended by something that a large percentage of them clearly are.
One can believe that black people shouldn’t take something as racist, but they’re bound to react badly to finger-wagging from white people.
So by all means have an opinion, but better load up on really strong arguments in order to back your case and be prepared to take heat, especially if one’s leading argument is “Here’s a Jew/black guy/Muslim who isn’t offended, so there!”.
Who says Jews shouldn’t be offended by it? That’s a different argument from whether, for example, “All about the Benjamins” deliberately or accidentally ties into antisemitic stereotypes.
I certainly hope you’re not reading what I’ve written as anything close to this.
Remember that America wasn’t just indifferent to the Holocaust, there was a large contingent of Americans which was outright pro-Nazi. The American Nazi Party held a huge rally at Madison Square Garden at one point. (This was before the country entered the war, but still!) Many refugees trying to escape the Nazis were denied admission by America and sent back to Europe, where many ended up being killed.
No, it’s impossible to find fault with the notion that Jews needed their own country. Not just their own country but their own military also, since they couldn’t rely on the armies of the world powers to protect them.
People really do forget sometimes how recently the Holocaust actually happened, there are still people alive today who went through it. And it was the major catalyst for establishing a Jewish state. I think that the state was established in the wrong place; if it were up to me I’d have put it somewhere else; but it wasn’t up to me. Anyway, it exists where it is, now, and there’s never going to be peace until it’s officially recognized. But the Palestinians really need their own state too.
I don’t have the entire article, but at least one author makes reference to the “making the desert bloom” trope, which proposes the idea that the Palestinians only became interested in what is now Israel once Jewish settlers brought their technical know-how with them.
Shimon Peres is reported to have said in his book:
As I clearly said in my previous post, I fully acknowledge that there were horrific pogroms and acts of violence against Jews, beginning with the Russian pogroms in around 1882. There was antisemitism in Poland and throughout Europe. There was the Dreyfus Affair in France, which polarized France and arguably, irrevocably destroyed not only the safety of Jews but in many ways signaled a final symbolic end to liberalism on much of the Continent. I’m not for a moment denying any of that.’ Indeed, many, many Jewish migrants left because they did not feel safe, and upon reflection, I probably did a poor job emphasizing that part in my previous post.
Nevertheless, it is no less true that there were Jewish nationalists who from the beginning envisioned a Jewish state, and they had to know the kind of unrest that this was going to cause. You cannot expect me to take seriously the notion that you can just organize mass migration to a place with completely different culture and religion and expect there not to be conflict, particularly when the idea all along is to establish a “homeland” with completely different cultural traditions. The Zionists who ended up laying down the ideological and political foundation for modern day Israel did so over the objection of Ottomans, who legally ruled the territory at the time. It’s worth noting, however, that the Zionists, who were fleeing anti-Jewish persecution in Europe, stood by Turkey as it massacred Armenians in one of the worst genocides in human history - because they hoped to gain Ottoman agreement to a Jewish state. This is not conspiracy theory, but fact. It’s more than ironic considering what happened to Jews 20 years later.
I’m more than willing to be factually rectified. I’ve got no skin in the game and my ego isn’t so big that I’m not willing to admit that I’m wrong. I sure I probably am wrong about some of the specifics, and I’m happy to have my ignorance fought.
That being said, what specifically was factually incorrect in your estimation?
You say Zionism is imperialism. I am asking if you feel it always has been. Zionism existed for a long long time prior to the foundation of Israel. In your view was it Imperialist from the get go? If so, I want to see evidence to support this belief. If not I would like to know when you think it turned into an imperialist enterprise.
Imperialism is about a country turning itself into an empire, which has never been the goal of Zionism. Zionism is a form of nationalism plain and simple.
USS Liberty flew an American flag, as all USN ships do.
Aircraft armament was probably using whatever was available. I don’t know what anti-ship weapons they had anywhere.
Israel had no submarine that could be ‘sent’ in any reasonable time. They DID send torpedo boats. Which attacked. And scored a torpedo hit.
I do not pretend to know the whys and wherefores of why Israel deliberately attacked a USN ship.
I don’t know if I can answer that question, but what I can say (I think) is that Zionism before the late 19th Century was mostly an idea. Of course I can understand the motivations and justifications for the idea of Zionism, such as the perceived need to recover the dignity after being displaced and persecuted multiple times over many centuries. And the very real need to feel safe, particularly as liberalism broke down in 19th Century Europe.
After the establishment of political Zionism, however, Zionism was transformed from an idea into a political movement, with consequences. Again, the motives behind that movement are understandable, but what I’m pointing out is that this movement had very real consequences for both Jews and non-Jews alike. No matter how you slice it, the waves of Aliyahs displaced Palestinians. And what has occurred over the past century, particularly since the establishment of Israel the nation-state in 1948, is a pattern of propaganda that has been used by Zionists to justify their settlement, establishment, and expansion of a Jewish state on land that had previously been occupied by non-Jews. That’s not fiction; it’s fact.
True, but there were also periods of relative tolerance. Jews lived in Germany and were part of the German establishment in many cases right up through WWI. There were German Jews who were actively supporting the German cause during WWI because they believed (understandably) that Russia was the greatest nemesis of the Jews, not Germany. Adolf Hitler wouldn’t be on anyone’s radar until about 1921-23 or so. There’s this belief that Nazi Germany was the culmination of centuries of extreme German antipathy toward Jews, which is not really true. Nazism was a shock to German Jews as it was to everyone else.
Maybe imperialism wasn’t the best word choice; perhaps colonialism would have been more accurate. Nevertheless, the effects of displacement and subjugation of Arabs by Zionists have been remarkably similar to what people have experienced in other parts of the world (Asia, the Americas, etc) as a result of Western imperialism (colonialism).