Nathan Newman:
>Israeli nationalism as
>completely different from other kinds of nationalism. In a sense, all
>nationalism is a form of racism, but then that should be the issue, not
>Israel specifically.
-I agree that nationalism should be an issue, but Zionism is different -from other kinds of nationalism in that the claims of membership in -the nation are different from most. How is it that someone born in -Brooklyn can claim a piece of subsidized land in Israel based merely -on being Jewish? There are claims of common ancestry but they go back -so far as to be practically phantasmic.
There are all sorts of nationalisms of dispersed peoples, the Jews being an extreme example -- and only because their dispersal was so complete in its original source due to the Romans and so extensive because of periodic pograms.
But Germans many generations displaced from the German homeland get priority on return to that country through immigration, Greeks who had settled in eastern Turkey for tens of generations returned to the Greek homeland after they were driven out by the post-War I expulsions. How many generations would Palestinians have to live in Brooklyn before they forfeit their right of return?
Folks talk a lot about the Jews from Brooklyn but a large chunk of the Israeli population is from Arab countries, people who have been expelled from those countries in many cases. Why do formerly Iraqi, Algerian, Iranian, Moroccan, Yememi or Egyptian Jews have any less right to assert their nationalism than all the other nationalities of the old Ottoman Empire? Over 900,000 Jews lived in what are now Arab states before 1948?
-There's religion, but Zionists have historically been -mostly secular, and the religious are a minority in Israel. And how -many other nationalisms have centered their claims on religion? I -wouldn't say it's completely different - there are some -commonalities, and Zionism sprung up at the same time as a lot of -romantic, mostly reactionary, nationalisms in 19th century Europe - -but it is a pretty odd duck.
I won't disagree that Jewish nationalism has its oddity, but lots of countries have identified part of their nationalism with religion. The whole division between Serbia and Croatia -- who share basically the same racial ethnicity and language -- is based solely on the historic division between Orthodoxy and Catholicism in the region, just as the Bosnian "nationalist" divisions are often more religious than ethnic. Many historic nationalist divisions in Europe derive from religious splits from the past.
Nathan Newman