mbs: Coming from a drafter of legal opinions, I'll take that as a compliment.
jks: In the first place, even on your own terms, you are assessing the evidence too narrowly. You accept only an express commitment to racial identity that uses the word "race."
mbs: Either the word means something or it doesn't. But all ethnicities are not races, nor are races understood the same way as ethnicities.
I'd say zionism is not even based on an ethnic identity. That would be too narrow. I remember reading a long time ago that when some Yemeni jews were being transported to Israel by plane, they tried to build a fire in the cabin for cooking or something.
The Ashkenazi/Sephardim split is the best demonstration that zionism is not self- conceived as a race. Originally these two were thought of as part of different races by Jews.
jks:
We don't even use that standard in law; if we we did, virtually no one could make a race discrimination claim out unless the employer said, I'm firing you because of your race," which they almost never do. We accept circumstantial evidence, and direct evidence from which racial motivations can be inferred.
mbs: you are glossing over my argument that racial animosity towards others is different than a self-conception of racial uniqueness. If Italians practice racism towards blacks, it doesn't mean they view Italians as a race. It means Italians are part of a different race. Most Jews may think of themselves as of a different race than Arabs, but from this standpoint THERE IS NO RACIAL BASIS FOR A JEWISH STATE. If Israel is merely a 'white' state, in fact, it had no rationale at all, since there are a wide variety of white states from which to choose.
jks: But second, the notion of race became extremely widespread in the second half of the 19th century, and there is no reason to think that Herzl, Weitzmann, etc, were immune to this, or thought differently than most people did at a time when onkly the most extreme and marginalized radicals (e.g., some Marxists, a few radical liberals like Boas, etc.) challenged the notion of race as a way of dividing up the human species. People used all kinds of different words--they weren't even euphemisms in those days--to refer to races. And there is no doubt that most people, including the Zionsits, thought of the Jews as a race, not mainly a religion. The Zionists were secular in them days, after all.
mbs: Statements about race from 100 years ago don't make the case, I think, that the zionist movement and Israeli state are founded on racial identity. Nation or people yes, race no.
jks: And third, if ethnic chauvinism, or whatever you want to call it, operates the same way as racism, leading to dividing, humiliating, oppressing, segregating, expelling, murdering the other because he's not "one of us," who the fuck cares if ethnic chauvinism is technically racism on some definition of race? Pardon my strong language, but (to vary the examples) if Serbs lynch Albanians or Hutus murder Tutsis out of ethnic chauvinism, is that better thanif they did it from racism? I mean, get real.
mbs: No doubt ethnic or national chauvinism can be as bad as anything you can imagine. Indeed, some of the objections to my argument seem premised on the intuition that if Zionism is not exactly a racial philosophy, then it is less bad then otherwise. But I never said it was less bad, or not odious. It could be more so. I never made that argument. Anybody who read it into the argument, which says more about them than the argument. I'd go as far as to say that pound for pound, Israel & Zionism have caused as much harm as any other type of chauvinism, except for the overtly genocidal ones (U.S. re: Africans and Indians; Nazism; Turks re: Armenia; Rwanda).
I'll tell you why I'm annoyed by the race argument. It's not simply because it is inaccurate. I ignore lots of arguments with which I don't agree.
First I do think there is a some selectivity bias in the anti-zionist critiques, as Leo said. This affects jewish leftists as much as anyone, since we participate in the common discussions. It doesn't necessarily reflect anti-semitism, but it does reflect a distortion of political judgement.
But mainly the Zionism as racial identity is an inversion of the correct understanding of Nazism as race-identity. It likens zionism to nazism. This is the international left's version of a political blood libel against Jews. As bad as Israel policy has ever been, it has never posed the same threat or caused as much harm to Arabs as Nazism did to Jews. It is lousy history and politics to suggest otherwise. The internationalism of fools, if you will.
cheers, max