
Long but a history that shows the historic division of Jews
Defenders of Israel’s brutal war on Gaza have attempted to conflate anti-Zionism with antisemitism. But since its beginning, different forms of Zionist ideology have competed with varied anti-Zionisms for Jewish allegiance.
Early Zionists repeatedly invoked seemingly antisemitic descriptions of so-called diasporic Jews as weak, sickly, excessively bookish, effeminized — a people whose spirit was crushed not only by non-Jewish political rulers, but also by the dead weight of rabbinical law. They contrasted this weak diasporic figure with a model of a strong new people, drawing inspiration from everything from the Ukrainian Cossack to Palestinian Bedouin.
If you say that a Jew in Tel Aviv is like a Jew in the Warsaw Ghetto, then Zionism has accomplished nothing.
The liberal Zionist perspective is certainly on the ropes. What does it mean for a person committed to liberalism to support an illiberal nation-state project?
I know it’s hard for people to get their head around, but there are many pro-Israel antisemites. Their pro-Israelism is part of their Christian dispensational ideology.
Source: Zionism’s History Is Also a History of Jewish Anti-Zionism
I have long been, and still am, critical of what I see as clear maltreatment of the general Palestinian people by the state of Israel [i.e. its government and security/defense agencies] and, with few exceptions, Western mainstream news-media’s seemingly intentional tokenistic (non)coverage of it. By doing so, that media, whether they realize it or not, have done a disservice to its own reputation and the Israeli/Jewish people themselves [the road to hell, after all, is also paved with good intentions]. Not as widely criticized thus publicized as the violence are the considerable fossil fuel reserves beneath long-held Palestinian land that are a plausible motivator for war.
Perhaps mostly because I have no Jewish heritage thus experience, I still never expected the level of anti-Semitic attacks in the West since the initial Hamas attack against Israelis. For one thing, the Jewish people in Israel and especially around the world must not be collectively vilified, let alone physically attacked, for the acts of Israel’s government and military, however one feels about the latter’s brutality in Gaza.
It’s blatantly wrong for them to be mistreated, if not terrorized, as though they were responsible for what is happening there. And it should be needless to say that diaspora Palestinians and Western Muslims similarly must not be collectively blamed and attacked for the acts of Hamas violence in Israel or Islamic extremist attacks outside the Middle East.
Also, incredible insensitivity was publicly shown towards Jews freshly mourning the 10/7 victims, especially when considering that young Israelis and Jews elsewhere may not be accustomed to such relatively large-scale carnage (at least not as much as is seen in other parts of the Middle East) in post-9/11 times.
But also concerning about all of the highly publicized two-way partisan exchanges of fury is: what will young diaspora Jewish and diaspora Palestinian children think and feel if/when they hear such misdirected vile hatred towards their fundamental identity? Scary is the real possibility that such public outpour of blind hatred may lead some young children to feel very misplaced shame in their heritage.
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