My cliche that rank and file are innocent of the higher designs of those manipulating them is what you responded to. Describing it as false consciousness does not do it justice, since there was an affirmative movement in question.
CC supplies an example of how bad politics follows from bad history. Judgements as to criminal guilt usually entail considerations of motive. Motives do not necessarily absolve guilt absolutely, but they do shape our view of it, including appropriate punishment.
What is the guilt of those who participate unwittingly in a colonial project? Suppose it had the power to do so. Should the new S.A. government immediately held criminal proceedings against all white settlers? What about mixed-race? What percent white blood (sic) confers guilt? What punishment? Obviously it is all absurd, and no less so re: the Jews.
What is the operational purpose of linking all settlers to a demonic, single-factor causal explanation for their movement? If it isn't to pronounce guilt in any literal sense, the only answer I can come up with is to affirm similarly indiscriminant Palestinian nationalism.
We could say the same thing about U.S. citizens, since Indians were dispossessed. We're all criminals, but if so, then none of us are really criminal because the word is sapped of any meaning.
It's a drive-them-into-the-sea posture, by implication. In the U.S. case, such a position is food for comedy. In the Middle East, it's not quite as funny, since there is a small but positive chance that the Jews of Israel could be driven into the sea.
Before Hitler, I think it is roughly accurate to categorize jews as either utterly divorced from secular politics (the Orthodox), or deeply engrossed in labor/socialist politics (the Bund). These populations were driven to zionism and never had a thought about colonialism along the way.
To reduce zionism to the status of a colonial project is just stupid. To note that colonialism adopted, fomented, exploited, and influenced zionism is not, but that's another matter.
mbs
" . . . with zionism we are supposed to believe that unless every individual explictly pronounced an understanding of imperialism they are not part of a larger colonial project. . . . "
" . . . This tends to be true of the general population of any criminal state -- Hitler's Germany, Mussolini's Italy, the ordinary Democratic voter in the U.S. But that is not in the least an excuse for the crime. Certainly it cannot be any excuse for the Settlers, everyone of whom deserves prison more than 95% of the U.S. prison population. Carrol"