Blood mixed with soil, then.

October 30, 2024 7:30 AM

A sweeping historical-theoretical overview of the ideology of Zionism. Jake Romm: Elements of Anti-Semitism - The limits of Zionism (Parapraxis Magazine) : "David Ben-Gurion before him, the father of the nation, said: “Call me an antisemite, but I have to say it …We are choked with shame from what is going on in Germany, Poland, and America, that Jews do not dare fight back. Can we not be brave anywhere in the world?…We do not belong to that Jewish people. We do not want to be that sort of Jew.”

And so the Zionist, like the European antisemites before them, ideologically fashions the Palestinians into a rootless population at the same time as the Zionist war machine expels them from their land. The destruction of Palestinian grave sites and archeological sites must be seen in this light: as a material destruction of evidence of rootedness in the land.

Interview with the author in the Politics Theory Other podcast: Zionism as a form of anti-semitism w/ Jake Romm

Zionism, and the project of ethnic cleansing and colonial settlement in historic Palestine, is often rightly compared to other projects of European colonialism. But in a recent essay for Parapraxis, my guest Jake Romm argues that Zionism not only has been influenced by the European imperial project, but that it has also been massively shaped by anti-semitism, and that in its recapitulation of anti-semitic stereotypes, and even anti-semitic practice, it makes sense to view Zionism as a species of anti-semitism itself.

posted by kmt (22 comments total)

i recoiled from the association with the Nazi notion of blood and soil, but the title comes from the article and, despite my gut churn (even as an anti-Zionist Jew, the childhood programming runs deep), it is absolutely appropriate to the Shoah constellation described in the article.
posted by kokaku at 9:17 AM on October 30, 2024 [7 favorites]

Zionism started with an empirical observation of European anti-semitism. It is fantastically dishonest to make any more of it than that: an empirical and well borne out observation of European antisemitism.
posted by ocschwar at 9:19 AM on October 30, 2024 [5 favorites]

This is, if anything, more appropriate these days then it was when this was written in 1948:

Among the most disturbing political phenomena of our times is the emergence in the newly created state of Israel of the "Freedom Party" (Tnuat Haherut) [what is now the modern Likud], a political party closely akin in its organization, methods, political philosophy and social appeal to the Nazi and Fascist parties. It was formed out of the membership and following of the former Irgun Zvai Leumi, a terrorist, right-wing, chauvinist organization in Palestine.

From "A letter to The New York Times." Saturday December 4, 1948 by Albert Einstein, Hannah Arendt, Sidney Hook, et.al.
posted by Glegrinof the Pig-Man at 9:41 AM on October 30, 2024 [26 favorites]

There are different gradations of antisemitism. Obviously a goal of removing all Jews and Jewish cultures from the planet is the most extreme, and worst, form; nobody will deny that. But a goal of undoing centuries of diaspora, erasing countless Jewish cultures, languages and traditions, and forcing all Jews into a single monoculture penned up in a few thousand square miles of desert is also antisemitism, and that's what Zionism wants. Zionism is antisemitic.

Jews don't belong in Israel. Jews belong everywhere.
posted by Faint of Butt at 9:48 AM on October 30, 2024 [31 favorites]

Interesting comment by Albert Einstein on Likud and Irgun Zvai Leumi, so these guys predate WWII by like a decade, thanks!

All really large scale human migrations are genocides or turn into genocides, of the people moving or the people where they move, or both.
posted by jeffburdges at 10:23 AM on October 30, 2024 [1 favorite]

Back in February, Rick Perlstein wrote The Neglected History of the State of Israel for the American Prospect (accompanying This Is Hell interview) spelling out "the doctrines of one of Zionism’s original political traditions—the faction that ended up winning, and whose foundations were literally fascist." I mention the This Is Hell interview b/c it was part of a series of interviews they were doing at the time with Jewish/Israeli scholars and reporters uncovering the whitewashed terrorist and fascist history of Zionism and Israel's founding.
posted by Pedantzilla at 10:25 AM on October 30, 2024 [14 favorites]

In the article by Rick Perlstein linked above, he refers to Simone Zimmerman, the founder of IfNotNow. She is one of the people featured in the 2023 documentary "Israelism," which is now up on YouTube and is really worth watching.
posted by mydonkeybenjamin at 6:30 PM on October 30, 2024 [4 favorites]

its so weird to me that there is an impetus to indict zionism itself in the effort to condemn israel's actions, both historically and current. in my opinion, it is enough to say that the violent, misguided (or at least shortsighted) project has resulted in bloodshed and repression. the only consideration i could give this strategy is the potential to somehow stop israeli aggression, and it would be incredibly naive to accept such a thing.
posted by AlbertCalavicci at 8:54 PM on October 30, 2024 [1 favorite]

Israel's actions (namely ongoing and deliberate genocide, including the wanton murder of children) require nothing else to condemn them.

Zionism, as a historical movement, is worthy of criticism as a violent and racist colonial project, even if it had no ongoing modern consequences.

Of course, they are inextricably intertwined, but one does not open the other for criticism. They are both worthy of condemnation independently.
posted by pattern juggler at 9:23 PM on October 30, 2024 [7 favorites]

Seconding the recommendation for Israelism. I had not really grasped the scope, depth and reach of the indoctrination project before watching that. Outstanding work.
posted by flabdablet at 4:36 AM on October 31, 2024 [3 favorites]

Israelism was so accurate, so real and hit so close to home that I basically got bored halfway through like, yeah ok I get it, I already know this, have already lived this, have already seen it all firsthand, etc. I would recommend it to anyone who is not jewish to see the full scope and scale of how zionism has entrenched itself into mainstream jewish institutions and has so successfully intertwined itself with jewish identity.
posted by windbox at 8:23 AM on October 31, 2024 [9 favorites]

Comparing Israel to Nazi Germany is unhelpful, mostly because it gives Zionists the opportunity to point to the Working Definition of Antisemitism (which has been written into anti hate laws all over the world), which specifically calls out comparisons to Nazi Germany, and dismiss you as Officially Antisemitic.

Much better to compare their policies to Jim Crow and Manifest Destiny.

You know, the policies that inspired Nazi Germany.
posted by Reyturner at 11:02 AM on October 31, 2024 [9 favorites]

it gives Zionists the opportunity to point to the Working Definition of Antisemitism (which has been written into anti hate laws all over the world) and dismiss you as Officially Antisemitic

I distinctly remember a time, and it was not all that long ago, when the conflation of Judaism with Zionism and/or the government or army of Israel was itself widely understood to be a pernicious antisemitic trope. In fact, the very Working Definition you allude to says as much. And yet here we are.

The thing about blatantly running a genocide in full view of the entire world, aided and abetted by their own biggest arms suppliers, is that it makes ordinary people care a hell of a lot less about any accusation that the génocidaires and their supporters and enablers might throw at us.

Accusations of antisemitism have now been so thoroughly debased by their routine weaponization as to have completely lost their sting, which has had the perverse effect of making Jews everywhere less safe because lord knows actual antisemitism isn't going anywhere any time soon.

That said, I agree with you that the extent to which fascism took its lead from the US needs to be more widely understood. Hell, even the indefensibly brutal West Bank settler movement was originally driven by an American terrorist.
posted by flabdablet at 11:30 AM on October 31, 2024 [9 favorites]

Is that definition one adopted by the moderation team?
posted by Kitten as a cat at 12:51 PM on October 31, 2024 [2 favorites]

When I was watching Israelism I was thinking about how effective hasbara was on me as a (non-Jewish) young person growing up in Australia. Back in the late '80s I wanted to take a year off after high school before I went to uni, and one thing I considered doing was going to work on a kibbutz in Israel, because I associated the kibbutz movement with positive things like working together for a common good and "making the desert flourish" (cringing now as I write these words). I wrote to the Israeli embassy for info and they sent me a whole bunch of glossy pamphlets which I read with no critical perspective whatsoever, as far as I can recall. I ended up not going to Israel, but particularly over the last year I've often wondered how I would have reacted to what I saw there if I had. Would I have been able to see the reality, or would I have dismissed anything uncomfortable by saying "it's complicated"? Not confident that it wouldn't have been the latter. It wasn't until I went to uni and heard about the first intifada from other students that I finally started to become aware of what was actually going on.

I've also thought a lot about the impact of culture. I read so many novels as a child about the Holocaust, many with children as the main characters, and I remember really feeling the horror of their experiences in a very visceral way (the same thing happened when I read Eleanor Coerr's Sadako and the Thousand Paper Cranes, about a child who was a victim of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima). But I didn't read a single novel about the experiences of Palestinian children during the Nakba, and I heard nothing about any of the history at school, either. I recently read Mornings In Jenin by Susan Abulhawa, and it struck me how powerfully a book like this would have affected me as a child.
posted by mydonkeybenjamin at 10:52 PM on October 31, 2024 [5 favorites]

The birth of Israel and the death of Zionism | Ilan Pappé | The Big Picture (Middle East Eye, YouTube, 1h16m6s)
posted by flabdablet at 9:54 AM on November 1, 2024 [2 favorites]

Articles like these are very irritating. From what I can tell, the thesis statement is that Israel shouldn't exist as a concept because it's founded in anti-Semitism ... versus, Israel is a stain on the earth because the institution sits on stolen land and exists to kill and main people.

We have 12 months of videos and photos of kids without heads, because Israeli people shot them off. We also have unending accounts of Palestinian and Lebanese hospitals being bombed. All of these are accounts straight from people who live there. This article seeks to centre Jewish people as the real victims of Israel, so as to obscure the fact that the main perpetrators of this suffering are Jewish.

There's been a tonne of moral equivalence between Palestinian suffering and Jewish suffering if you look in the right places. The X account of Rivkah Brown is a good place. The whole emphasis on whether the state of Israel is a fruit of anti-Semitism is to ward off the truth that Israel is nothing more than a settler colony.
posted by Didnt_do_enough at 2:02 AM on November 2, 2024 [1 favorite]

In response to Faint of Butt : "erasing countless Jewish cultures, languages and traditions, and forcing all Jews into a single monoculture penned up in a few thousand square miles of desert is also antisemitism, and that's what Zionism wants. Zionism is antisemitic."

The funny thing is, Palestinians are the ones who are penned in an enclosure in the desert. Jews, including Israelis, have the ability to go anywhere. I met one who was studying in a uni in Russia. He told me all about his vacations in France. Never once did he say anything about how it was a struggle to leave Israel. He also said he did more years in the IDF than the compulsory number, because the Israeli government would then pay for his college education abroad.

Palestinians (and Lebanese!) are also having their cultures, traditions, and bloodlines wiped out.... by Zionism (and lets just say it, many individuals who happen to be Jewish, we can't let people with names, faces, and addresses hide their agency and their guilt inside the big blanket).

It's so disturbing to see that the perpetrator is now laying claim to the sufferings that they CAUSED to claim victimhood. We must not let the stories be confused.
posted by Didnt_do_enough at 2:20 AM on November 2, 2024 [1 favorite]

From what I can tell, the thesis statement is that Israel shouldn't exist as a concept because it's founded in anti-Semitism ... versus, Israel is a stain on the earth because the institution sits on stolen land and exists to kill and main people.

I didn't see the article make any claim that would imply "versus". Criticism of Israel on both of those grounds strikes me as fair and reasonable, and in fact the article offers it:

Zionism is not, then, a race-based system of economic exploitation at its core, though it does benefit from such exploitation: it is, first and foremost, a program of land acquisition. We can see the dual attack on Palestinian economic self-determination and land ownership in Israel’s routine destruction of Palestinian olive groves. Settlers, often armed or otherwise protected by armed agents of the state, uproot, burn, or cut down olive trees, with increasing frequency since 2019. The aim is to drive Palestinians from their land by destroying the subsistence produced by the land itself and nurtured over centuries by Palestinian farmers, in an effort to “Judaize” the area. As Palestinians flee from unchecked violence, forced from their land at the barrel of a gun, Jewish settlements appear in their wake, strictly illegal but in practice facilitated by the state until they are eventually recognized and assimilated into the legally regulated regime of property. (The whole cycle of legalizing illegal settlements, in any event, is something of a formality as their existence and proliferation is the entire raison d’être of the Zionist project.) When Palestinians refuse to leave and cannot be forced, they are murdered.

There are common threads running through the political processes by which both the Shoah and the Nakba came to be, and I think the article does a pretty good job of identifying those.

The more people understand the entire range of available criticisms of settler colonialist projects, the sooner might humanity find it within ourselves to stop making this same horrendous blunder over and over and over, and the sooner it might actually mean something to say "never again".
posted by flabdablet at 4:07 AM on November 2, 2024 [6 favorites]

I found this doc, The Occupation of the American Mind, to be helpful in understanding the media's presentation of Israel here in North America.
posted by sneebler at 10:33 AM on November 2, 2024 [3 favorites]

U.S. Navy's "Houthi Hunting Club" patch depicts Houthis as jawa sand people from Star Wars (reddit)

US to deploy B-52s Stratofortress bombers to Middle East
All these platforms have myriad roles now, via cruise missiles, etc, but one usually thinks of B-52s as dropping really large numbers of bombs. At least during the Iraq war, they've flown from based on US soil using mid-air refuling, but maybe the US has so many bases in the Middle East now that they'd base them there in a conflict with Iran, or maybe they'll expose only a few in the Midle East where they have shorter trips, so that most could remain prepared for their "original mission".

As I remarked above, Albert Einstein's comment on Irgun Zvai Leumi clarifies that Likud predates WWII by like a decade, so in a sense Israel should be viewed as a civil war between Jewish Palestinians and Islamic Palestinians. A civil war that turns 100 year old around the end of this decade.

Yes, Jews moved into Israel from elsewhere, hence why the PLO's first two charters sought expulsion of Jews who arrived after 1947. Yes, there was epic levels of involvement by neighboring states and the US, epitomized by this imho ambiguous statement:

"If there were not an Israel, we’d have to invent one" - President Joe Biden

Anyways, I've never grasped how "someone else's civil war" carries so little weight in the US, including among Republicans. Yes, Israel looks useful both to oil men like Bush1 & Cheney, and more recently to Christians who want their rapture, but both of them have higher priorities, and the party is much larger. Isreal being at all relevant to the west seems like Isreali propoganda.
posted by jeffburdges at 4:02 PM on November 2, 2024 [1 favorite]

in a sense Israel should be viewed as a civil war between Jewish Palestinians and Islamic Palestinians.

I think that's a huge misread. The patterns of conflict seen in Palestine over the last century have much more in common with those brought on by other settler colonialist projects than by other instances of local sectarian violence.

Further, I think it's a misread that plays directly into the hands of Likud's propagandists, who have been working for decades to frame Palestinian resistance to lives, homes and livelihoods being routinely, arbitrarily destroyed by Israeli bombs and bulldozers - actions that any human being in the world would completely understandably resist if subjected to, regardless of the religion of the bomber and bulldozer operators - as if that resistance were some kind of existential threat to Judaism.

So no, in no sense do I think that what Israel has done and continues to do can or should be viewed as a civil war. It is manifestly, obviously a settler colonialist extermination project aimed squarely at civilians, with underlying motivations deserving of no more respect than those that led to the Shoah. And this is the case regardless of how many uncomfortable questions it might stir up for those of us born and raised in settler colonialist societies of our own.
posted by flabdablet at 11:32 PM on November 2, 2024 [11 favorites]