Nathan Newman wrote:
>To single out the migration ideology of the Jews as uniquely racist is not
>anti-Israel but anti-Jewish. It is the specific end-product of that
>migration, the Israeli state that deserves the criticism, so casual attacks
>on "Zionism" rather than the Israeli state just melds anti-semitism into
the
>criticism.
-Kind of a fine distinction, no? The "migration ideology" assumes that -because the putative ancestors of the Jews lived in that region -millennia ago, then they had every right to "return," and thereby -displace people who were already there.
The displacement part is exactly the part of "Zionism" that is not universal in the ideology, the old a "a land without a people for a people without a land" self-deceiving tripe still showing an appeal among many for the goal of finding empty land. Remember, chunks of the original Zionists had no particular loyalty to Palestine as a destination; Herzl was pretty anti-religious and folks considered a number of areas, although Israel was the obvious destination for all the historic and religious reasons.
But for over fifty years of Zionist ideology until 1948, there was little displacement of any kind. The socialist-oriented kibbutz went out of their way in general to pick unpopulated areas for a number of autarchic socialist reasons. Other Marxist-oriented Zionists worked with Palestinian unionists in a number of areas. Most of the early religious Jewish settlers in the region actively resisted the creation of an Israeli state as blashemy.
The point is that the creation of Israel in its particular state form is no more a reflection of Zionism than any nation-state in a particular form is the inevitable reflection of the broad nationalism of its people. So the crimes of the state are thereby attributed to the cultural DNA of the people who are its members, a pretty dangerous measure that goes beyond collective guilt to finding a people inherently criminal in its inherent nationalist intentions.
Israel is the product of a whole set of historical acts, decisions and persons made in this century, not the only possible realization of the wideranging set of aspirations that came under the term Zionism, or that come under the term "nationalism" in any context.
All forms of nationalism have an exclusionary element by their very nature that in state form may be realized, but that is true for almost every nation, including Arab nationalism and the whole sub-set of religious and ethnic hierarchies that exist around the world. But that is a general phenomena that, unless we are going to condemn all nationalisms in all senses, should confine human rights campaigns to its manifestations in particular states and leave the ethnic collective guilt to one side.
-- Nathan Newman