I pit Zionism

I come from a non-Zionist Orthodox Jewish family on my dad’s side, for a different perspective that is almost never heard these days.

The objection was never to Jews moving to historical Israel, or settling there. The objection was in using violence to set up an explicitly “Jewish state”. Their objection was rooted in part in theology - they believe the Messiah was to do that, not a bunch of ordinary people. But there was also a sense that forcibly imposing a Jewish state on people who had already been there for centuries was wrong. Even worse was displacing people from their land - a sense of why are Jews doing to these people what was done to us so long ago?

When I bring this up I frequently find I’m immediately countered with “you’re wrong” (hey, this is the viewpoint of someone else, not me personally) and/or “you don’t understand, you need to know [fill in the blank] or remember [name atrocity]”. Keep in mind this is the viewpoint of people living literally on the other side of the planet who fled to North America to escape (largely successfully) the constant fighting, killing, and conflict of the Old World. They viewed the US as the promised land, a place they could be openly Jewish, move all over the place and not be confined to a shtetl or ghetto, buy land, acquire a surname, conduct their business successfully with both Jew and Gentile, there were no progroms, their rights were protected, and they could send their children to higher education and greater prosperity. Why move somewhere else - even Israel - to fight in yet another war? They could visit the Holy Land - especially now that they had the financial success to afford to do so! - but they didn’t see a reason to move there and participate in a project they thought contrary to the will of G*d and believed would end, eventually, in disaster.

For this difference of opinion they were called traitors, self-loathing Jews, and antisemitic. Because Zionism went from a voluntary organization to one with guns that adopted a “you’re either with us or against us” attitude that persists to this day.

I don’t entirely share the views of my Orthodox relatives, either my grandparents or later generations. I do, however, identify as an American Jew, not an Israeli Jew. My family probably last lived in the Levant 1800 years ago. You know, if I tried to assert that I had claim to land once owned by my grandparents in (take your choice of country) Ireland, Germany, or Russia I’d be laughed out of the room and that was merely 100-150 years ago. Asserting a land claim 1800 years old? That is insane The Torah is not recognized as a legal deed to land.

But, because some people are trying to do just that it affects MY life half a world away. The current Israeli government insistence on ethnic cleansing and genocide is only making the situation worse for - at best - a temporary increase in safety in a very small place. Meanwhile, there is global blowback not just on Israelis but all Jews.

Thanks a lot. Your war of conquest is making my life less safe. I want no part of this war. At all. On either side. Yet I am being forced to deal with it. And you wonder that I object?

Oct 7 didn’t occur in a vacuum. Attempting to date the war from that point without discussion of the proceeding decades of conflict is bullshit. The history doesn’t justify what was done - nothing would justify it - but it goes a long way to explaining why it happened beyond a knee-jerk racist answer of “they hate us because Palestinians are evil bastards who want us dead, it’s in their DNA”.

You do understand that not ALL Palestinians by dint of descent are not murdering terrorists, right? Because if you don’t understand that you’re a bigot. Granted there are too many who fit that description these days, but failure to recognize an equal bloodthirst among some on the Israeli side is an equal failure of objectivity.

One of the problems here is that too many assume you can know a person’s viewpoints, politics, and morals by examining their family tree. Also a hefty dollop of collective ethnic guilt.

Until that stops there will be NO chance of peace in the region. Unless one side or the other conducts a successful genocide leaving no opposition alive, not even babies. The current Israeli administration is trying to cast itself in the role of Joshua and the Palestinians in the role of Amalek.

Currently, Jews have a “right of return” to the area - why wouldn’t the displaced Palestinians want the same?

Currently there are people in the Israel government who want the land to be Jewish “from the River to the Sea” (and a bit more, including parts of Syria and Lebannon) - why wouldn’t the Palestinians want the same?

Yeah, I get it - your country feels under threat and so do you, and you want to protect your country and yourself. But the way your government is doing that - ethnic cleansing, genocide, and atrocity - is going to result in Jews (because of the insistence of both sides of conflating “Jew” and “Israeli”) world-wide being pariahs.

That argument doesn’t work on me. I’m Jewish, too, whether or not I want to be. Even if many of the Orthodox Jews don’t think that, the 8 billion gentiles do, which means whatever shit is being imposed on Jews I get to “enjoy”, too.

So fuck all the warmongers, terrorists (on BOTH sides), bigots, and people who promote and cause the slaughter of innocents regardless of what flag they wave or what uniform they wear (or don’t). Fuck 'em all, to hell with them all, if there was justice they’d all die in slow agony trapped in their beds, unable to move as they slowly burn to death/are crushed by a collapsed building after not being able to find food for a week.

It would help if Israelis and the more rabid supporters of Israel’s current government both there and in the West didn’t keep insisting on trying to drag me into a conflict that, as a “Western Jew”, I want no part of.

There are plenty of different kinds of Zionists – I consider myself a Zionist, which means to me that, due to the near-unique history of repeated oppression against Jews, Jews must have a country of their own to prevent the existence of Jews from hanging on the whims of other, much larger groups.

This doesn’t conflict with deploring the actions of the current Israeli government in Gaza and the West Bank. IMO Netanyahu and his allies are functionally allies of Hamas in the “endless bloodshed” party of the region. IMO this Israeli government is as bad as Hamas, even if their motivations are less “we are a cult of death” like Hamas and more “we are a mix of cowardly, conscience-free opportunists, grifters, and bigoted supremacists”.

So when such early Zionists as Jobotinsky and Herzl outright called their efforts "colonization ", they were just making shit up?

And some Native Americans felt the same; their aspirations were just as hopeless.

And “October 7th” happened because Israel engineered something like it to happen, as yet another excuse to steal land and kill Palestinians. Just as America did the same with the Native Americans. Israel needs violence from the Palestinians to excuse their genocide, and it’s done its best to ensure it happens.

Sorry. I forgot I was talking to a crazy person.

Translation: “He’s obviously right, so I’ll insult him and hope everyone ignores it.”

This is one of the single most offensive threads I’ve ever read on this board. People who have consumed a sophisticated and deliberate misinformation campaign that has been going on for decades and are eating up with no question. People treating Jewish marginalization in ways that would never be tolerated by any other group.

Zionism is the most successful decolonization effort ever undertaken, returning a forcibly removed population to its indigenous homeland. A homeland we’ve been ethnically, religiously, culturally, historically connected to in the diaspora for 3,000 years, supported by archeological records, contemporaneous writings, oral and written histories, and shared traditions in the diaspora.

Jews are not allowed to exist anywhere else in the region (when my kids went to Israel their passports had to be stamped on separate papers lest they had a record of their travel and tried to enter Arabic counties), but in Israel Arab Israeli hold seats in the Knesset, have top leadership positions, are academics, and so on. No other country is held to the same standards of perfection and is expected to aid and give comfort to an enemy who has their destruction named as a goal in their charter.

The desire to return to Israel has been ever present in our history. The need for it became explicit during the progroms and reached a fever pitch post-Holocaust. To claim that we were given Israel as some “I’m sorry the world looked away are you were being exterminated” is so profoundly offensive by negating the history of self-determination it took to earn our country back, and is extraordinarily paternalistic.

Read Dara Horn- The Big Lie, The World Loves Dead Jews, and others she wrote. Hear our voices- the stories from the marginalized people, not the stories about us from the people who have not hidden their agenda to exterminate us.

Everyone worries where the conservatives or the LGBTQ posters have gone on this board. Watch while you lose the Jews, like me. I’ve all but stopped posting because of the deep seated antisemitism (I’m sorry- the morally acceptable “anti-Zionism”, as if it’s indistinguishable) on this board.

The utter lack of self awareness and critical thinking is mind boggling and utterly unsurprising. Useful fools, indeed.

@Alessan I don’t know how you engage and I don’t have your fortitude. I didn’t want you to be the lone voice and I worry for your safety and my friends and family’s safety in Israel, and my family and friends safety around the world. But I can’t anymore- I’ve lived with this in higher ed for too long now and I won’t put up with it here.

Am Israel Chai and a damn proud Zionist.

There is definitely a strain of antisemitism within many self proclaimed anti-Zionists. But there are many non bigoted anti Zionists. And, of course, many Zionists and anti Zionists with entirely legitimate criticism of the atrocious actions of this Israeli government.

First of all, setting up a colony does not necessarily mean taking over the entire country and driving out the local inhabitant. Sometimes it just means establishing a colony - a self-governed community established by outsiders.

Second of all, Herzl and Jabotinsky were European raised and saw things through a European prism; Herzl never immigrated and Jabotinsky, well, there’s a reason why he’s considered the founder of the Israeli right wing; his views and followers were always a minority during his lifetime. The actual founding of the country was mostly carried out by left-wing socialists.

No, it’s a highly successful colonization effort, with the standard genocide thrown in. It’s goal is to kill, displace and replace the local population, which it has largely done.

Do you think the Roma/Sinti should also get their own country, possibly by displacing some of the population of some nice part of Punjab?

I don’t have the fortitude either. I hate these threads, mainly because I take them too personally and have trouble calibrating my anger. It has something to do with my place on the spectrum, I suspect. I’ll probably be gone by the end of the day in order to preserve my mental health.

Yeah, seriously, I’m not sure why you’re even engaging in this poisoned-from-the-start thread.

ETA: Ha! I see I’m not the only one with this thought, including you.

Wrong! The radical religious right is a pure “Christian” phenomenon and has nothing to do with Judaism at all. It is far more akin to the radical religious right that produced the Spanish Inquisition than it is to Judaism.

The radical religious right in this country has become the “Christian” version of the Taliban.

This is wrong and stupid and ignorant of history. One can be critical of this awful Israeli government without spreading ignorance like this.

I don’t know enough about that history to comment, but I’d certainly be open to the argument.

Also, IMO the location is not critical. Jews need and deserve a country, but IMO it didn’t have to be in the ME. If the Roma deserve and need a country, it doesn’t need to be in India.

Strongly agree! This is pure anti-Semitism.

“Driving out”, not necessarily (if they make useful slaves, especially). But controlling the colonized area, most definitely. Which was the word you used. You can’t colonize what you can’t control.

Now you’re moving the goalposts about what “originally” means…

When have Israelis ever “enslaved” Arabs?

Funny, there are quite a few Jews here for all this supposed marginalization. Not a lot of Muslims, Blacks or trans women.

Don’t try and play Oppression Olympics when your side is the one committing the real genocide.

This is the single biggest piece of utter bullshit I’ve read on this board, bar none. And I’m including TimeCube guy in that list.

Where did I say they had? I was referring to how colonization in general doesn’t necessarily mean population replacement.