Zionism
Zionism is a Jewish nationalist ideology and movement. Judaism itself has many Zionist aspects, but Zionism in its more recent and somewhat more secular form started in the nineteenth century, notably by Theodor Herzl, in order to establish an ethnically/racially Jewish nation state, succeeding with the creation of Israel in 1948.
Contents
History
In 1890, the writer Nathan Birnbaum, who lived in Theodor Herzl's neighborhood, first spoke of the idea of "Zionism" in his magazine Selbst-Emancipation. As a Gymnasium student he had already considered emigration to Palestine and propagated it in his school newspaper, but never put it into practice. He expressed his conviction that Jews were a separate nation by founding national groups. In 1884, he formulated his demands in an admonishing pamphlet, “The Assimilation Addiction.” In a psychological way, Birnbaum criticizes the adaptation to the non-Jewish environment and calls on his fellow believers to see themselves again as a nation that should fight for its own fatherland with Hebrew as the national language.
Even earlier, Rabbi Judah Alkalai called on him to return to Palestine. He, who grew up in Jerusalem and later worked in Semlin, Serbia, was involved in journalism and (association) politics in the spirit of Zionism since the 1940s. Unlike Herzl, he combined the acquisition of land with the demand for a revival of the Hebrew language and the founding of an army. Alkalai tried with great passion in Semlin, Paris and Jerusalem to lay the foundation for the rebirth of Israel. Shortly before the end of his life in 1878, he moved to Palestine with his wife and was buried on the Mount of Olives after his death.
A comrade of Alkalai's views was the Rabbi Zwi Hirsch Kalischer, who worked in Thorn, East Prussia. In 1862, he called for the colonization of Palestine in his publication “Drischat Zion” (Search for Zion). Like Alkalai, he saw the goal as compatible with the Jewish faith in the Messiah, and like Alkalai, he imagined being able to win the country through land purchase, agriculture, and military defense. Unlike Alkalai, who wanted to finance colonization by introducing a tax (tithe), Kalischer relied on donations.
Two other pioneers of Zionism were closer to Herzl's ideas: Moses Hess and Leon Pinsker. Hess, who grew up in an Orthodox family, was an early companion of Karl Marx and initially addressed the public with early socialist writings. In 1862, he surprised his like-minded people with the Zionist text “Rome and Jerusalem”. Like socialism, he saw Zionism as a way out of an oppressive, anti-Semitic society. Apart from this writing, which received little public attention, Hess was hardly active in the interests of the settlement of Palestine. Pinsker, a doctor from Odessa, responded to the pogroms that raged in the Tsarist Empire in 1882 with his work “Autoemancipation!” In it he declared emancipation to have failed and called for the Jews to be recognized as a nation and settled outside of Europe, but was initially not committed to Palestine. While Birnbaum was inspired by Pinsker's “Autoemancipation,” Herzl was unfamiliar with the writings of his predecessors.
Zionism is supported by the Israel lobby, Christian Zionists, and various form of Jewish influence more generally. With Israel being created by ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, critics include many Palestinians and their supporters, such as many Muslims. Some Haredi Jews may in theory be opposed to secular Zionism, but Israel is increasingly moving towards religious Judaic Zionism and theocracy. Some critics may not necessarily be opposed to some form of a Jewish nation state, but be critical of various related aspects, such as Zionists argued to use their influence to contribute to other countries making wars on perceived enemies of Israel.
Hypocrisy and double standards
Zionists individuals and organizations have frequently been criticized for hypocrisy and double standards, supporting Jewish nationalism and an ethnically/racially Jewish nation state in Israel, while at the same time opposing White nationalism and supporting mass immigration and multiculturalism elsewhere.
Anti-Zionism
Anti-zionism is opposition or criticism of Zionism. Similarly to the term anti-Semitism, politically correct definitions of the term, such as in Wikipedia, may involve dubious and straw men claims, such as implying that any kind of criticism of Zionism must also mean opposition to "the political movement of Jews to self-determination." Rabbi Yisroel Dovid Weiss stated:
- “Judaism does not permit us to oppress other people, steal their land, or in any manner being uncompassionate to the people.”[2]
This statement has been proved to be utterly false in Palestine.
Several anti-Zionist Jewish rabbis took part in the International Conference to Review the Global Vision of the Holocaust in Tehran, Iran in December 2006.
Debunking the myth that anti-Zionism is antisemitic
- On 16 February, members of France’s yellow vest protest movement hurled antisemitic insults at the distinguished French Jewish philosopher Alain Finkielkraut. On 19 February, swastikas were found on 80 gravestones in Alsace. Two days later, the French president, Emmanuel Macron, after announcing that Europe was “facing a resurgence of antisemitism unseen since World War II”, unveiled new measures to fight it. Among them was a new official definition of antisemitism. That definition, produced by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance in 2016, includes among its “contemporary examples” of antisemitism “denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination”. In other words, anti-Zionism is Jew hatred. In so doing, Macron joined Germany, Britain, the United States and roughly 30 other governments. And like them, he made a tragic mistake. Anti-Zionism is not inherently antisemitic – and claiming it is uses Jewish suffering to erase the Palestinian experience. Yes, antisemitism is growing. Yes, world leaders must fight it fiercely. But in the words of a great Zionist thinker, “This is not the way”. The argument that anti-Zionism is inherently antisemitic rests on three pillars. The first is that opposing Zionism is antisemitic because it denies to Jews what every other people enjoys: a state of its own. “The idea that all other peoples can seek and defend their right to self-determination but Jews cannot,” declared US Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer in 2017, “is antisemitism.” As David Harris, head of the American Jewish Committee, put it last year: “To deny the Jewish people, of all the peoples on earth, the right to self-determination surely is discriminatory.” All the peoples on earth? The Kurds don’t have their own state. Neither do the Basques, Catalans, Scots, Kashmiris, Tibetans, Abkhazians, Ossetians, Lombards, Igbo, Oromo, Uyghurs, Tamils and Québécois, nor dozens of other peoples who have created nationalist movements to seek self-determination but failed to achieve it. [...] You’d think Jewish leaders would understand this. You’d think they would understand it because many of the same Jewish leaders who call national self-determination a universal right are quite comfortable denying it to Palestinians. [...] Argument number two is a variation on this theme. Maybe it is not bigoted to oppose a people’s quest for statehood. But it is bigoted to take away that statehood once achieved. “It is one thing to argue, in the moot court of historical what-ifs, that Israel should not have come into being,” argued New York Times columnist Bret Stephens earlier this month. However, “Israel is now the home of nearly 9 million citizens, with an identity that is as distinctively and proudly Israeli as the Dutch are Dutch or the Danes Danish. Anti-Zionism proposes nothing less than the elimination of that identity and the political dispossession of those who cherish it.” But it is not bigoted to try to turn a state based on ethnic nationalism into one based on civic nationalism, in which no ethnic group enjoys special privileges. In the 19th century, Afrikaners created several countries designed to fulfil their quest for national self-determination, among them the Transvaal and the Orange Free State. Then, in 1909, those two Afrikaner states merged with two states dominated by English-speaking white people to become the Union of South Africa (later the Republic of South Africa), which offered a kind of national self-determination to white South Africans. The problem, of course, was that the versions of self-determination upheld by the Transvaal, the Orange Free State and apartheid South Africa excluded millions of black people living within their borders. This changed in 1994. By ending apartheid, South Africa replaced an Afrikaner ethnic nationalism and a white racial nationalism with a civic nationalism that encompassed people of all ethnicities and races. It inaugurated a constitution that guaranteed “the right of the South African people as a whole to self-determination”. That wasn’t bigotry, but its opposite.[3]
See also
- Balfour declaration
- Christian Zionism
- Israel
- Israel lobby
- Jewish supremacism
- Theodor Herzl
- Irgun and Lehi
- Jews and immigration
Further reading
- Barbour, Nevill, Nisi Dominus - A Survey of the Palestine Controversy, Geo G Harrap & Co., London, 1946, p.220 & 229.
- Sherman, A.J., Mandate Days, British Lives in Palestine 1918-1948, Thames & Hudson pubs., New York, 1998, pps:180-183, ISBN: 0-500-25116-9
- Magát, Marian, Židokracia, 2020
- Ravitsky, Dr. Aviezer, Ultra-Orthodox & Anti-Zionist
External links
- Zionist Extremism as Outcome of the Internal Dynamics of Judaism, Part 1 of5
- Zionist Extremism as Product of the Internal Dynamics of Judaism, Part 2: Hasidic Origins, and the Rise of Racial Zionism
- Zionist Extremism as Product of the Internal Dynamics of Judaism, Part 3: A Risky Strategy Becomes Mainstream
- Zionist Extremism as Product of the Internal Dynamics of Judaism, Part 4: Toward a “Greater Israel”
- Zionist Extremism as Product of the Internal Dynamics of Judaism: Conclusion
References
- ↑ Jewish hypocrisy on ethnonationalism in Israel versus the Diaspora: A picture is worth a thousand words http://www.theoccidentalobserver.net/2012/05/jewish-hypocrisy-on-ethnonationalism-in-israel-versus-the-diaspora-a-picture-is-worth-a-thousand-words/
- ↑ http://www.presstv.ir/detail/2014/03/23/355768/zionism-flies-in-face-of-judaism-rabbi/
- ↑ Debunking the myth that anti-Zionism is antisemitic, The Guardian, 2019