"Zionism"

Max Sawicky sawicky at bellatlantic.net
Thu Jul 19 06:09:22 PDT 2001


Response to M&M:

I'm aware of laws defining a Jew, but not of laws defining Jews as a race, and so far you haven't stipulated any.

Start with an arbitrarily selected group of people, and stipulate that their descendants are part of that group, and you still haven't established that group as a race.

Race means some kind of common biology. Blood is continuous in terms of latitude as well as longitude. Such understandings could well be rubbish in any scientific sense, but they are distinct in my view from ideas of the Jewish nation.

Jim Crow had explicit pretensions to being about "race." Are you translating Zionist doctrine as race, or are you arguing that it is tantamount to, very similar to, but not the same as race?

At its worst, legal establishment of race of course refers to Nazism. To allude to this by the casual ascription of race terminology to Zionism is slander. It is possible to slander bad people. If I said OJ murdered Chandra Levy, that would be slander. Lord knows there is enough substantive material with which to indict Zionism, but establishment of race is not part of it.

Mat's response below doesn't make the case either. References to blood don't fill the bill, as above. Miscellaneous zionists may have had pretensions to be a unique race, but the rest of Mat's post underlines the inherent infeasibility of understanding Jews or Israeli Jews as a race, even from a zionist point of view.

On a list where quotation is ubiquitous, nobody has cited any real zionist pretensions to establishing race.

A people are not a race. If all peoples were races, the meaning of race, such as it is, would be emptied. If we are each races, then none of us are. Neither is a nation a race, for the same reasons. Zionism is often racist, but zionists do not pretend to be a race.

mbs


>>>>>>>>>>>>>
No, a race in this case is something defined by law, Max. Israeli law and biblical law. . . .

To be fair, it's old fashioned and polemical to use the word race in this context. . . .

. . . The interchangeability of the terms race and legally defined descent was natural a hundred years ago. Most normal people don't talk that way today, either in Isarel or without.

Mat said: the fact is that many zionist writings are filled with references to 'blood', 'race', etc. but as i tried to convey earlier (in what max called 'intellectual sociobiology') identity and difference are extremely complicated in israel/palestine with overlapping and even contradictory, and extremely hierarchical categories of race, ethnicity, religion, nationality, citizenship, (not to mention gender, etc.)



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