zionism

Max Sawicky sawicky at bellatlantic.net
Fri Jul 13 17:13:26 PDT 2001


JB: So. OK. I'm a settler. I sit by my swimming pool and watch my kids frolick and I know that 1/2 mile away there are people who are native inhabitants who cannot get water to drink. When I drive to work, on the specially protected highways, whizzing past checkpoints which I know are a daily humiliation to Palestinians ( or worse), I'm probably not thinking about imperialism...I'm just hoping that these cockroaches will scuttle peacefully or just go away.... these "so called Palestinians" (to quote from Haaretz) who are absurdly getting in my way in my homeland. My "homeland" -- where I was probably not born and which would not exist without the direct and continued assistance of the biggest imperial power in the world.

What am I now? Maybe I'm not an imperialist, maybe I'm just a tool in the hands of imperialists. Please say more about the "big difference" Joanna B>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

What are you? You are a figment of imagination. In Israel, there are people that are part of an aggressive, vicious settlement movement who fit your description (minus the swimming pool, I would wager). Then there are those who live in cities or long-standing kibbutz's who are not actively seeking to dispossess Arabs of their land. I would not dispute that their property rests on some historic dispossession. So one big difference is between your caricature and reality. The one I referred to, however, was between colonial conspiracies and the desire to find a home.

In another post, you also said:

" . . . When you consider that the emancipation of the Jews did create the conditions under which Karl Marx, Freud, Einstein, Wittgenstein, etc could develop their thought and practice, you can see how some Jews were threatened not only by oppression, but by its opposite. The creation of the state of Israel is always said to have been necessary because of the oppression. It is equally true to say that it was necessary for the opposite reason: the emancipation of the jews put into question too many orthodoxies for the comfort of some."

This is one of the wackier explanations I've heard to account for zionism. You spoke of successive jewish liberations in different countries.

Fact is that zionism was nothing before Hitler. Hitler, not Herzl, made zionism. I've made too much of the diverse intellectual and cultural roots. The main motive was not colonialism or the exaltation of a bloodline, but survival.

mbs



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