I agree with you - conflating Jewish people with the state of Israel (or Zionism) is anti-semitic, although with that said, an overwhelming majority of Israeli Jews support the state and the genocide.
With that said, I’ve got a very minor bit of pushback
There are plenty of jews who hate what Israel is doing and what it has become.
What it has become kind of implies some recent change from a historical version of Israel which wasn’t genocidal. There were some very early idealistic views of Zionism in the 1940s, but it has pretty much always been a fascistic ethnostate. Most people just haven’t been aware until recently.
What it has become kind of implies some recent change from a historical version of Israel which wasn’t genocidal. There were some very early idealistic views of Zionism in the 1940s, but it has pretty much always been a fascistic ethnostate. Most people just haven’t been aware until recently.
That is a perfectly fair point, I used the word “become” as I wasn’t completely sure on how the behavior developed or if it had been part of Israel from the start.
I can also see the logic of the jewish perspective after the holocaust, as a people they were hunted and exterminated across Europe, and wanted a country of their own to feel safe and secure.
However, that doesn’t give them the right to hunt and exterminate another people, which is where Israel lost the plot.
Zionism actually predates the Holocaust by decades, though of course the aftermath of the Holocaust absolutely brought it to reality.
I understand the idealistic vision of Zionism, but the reality was obviously very different. Israel started existence by displacing people who were already living in a place. Colonial settlers pushing people out of their homes, violently, massacring them, poisoning wells and more - an act of ethnic cleansing known as the Nakba.
It was always a White Jewish Supremacist Colonialist project anchored on a late 19th century Western way of seeing the World (the same perspective as Europeans with “colonies” in Africa were they often forced the locals to work for them - a form of Slavery, not Chatel Slavery but still Slavery - or Canada’s Indian Residential Shools).
Whilst most of the West actually evolved away from that (even if recently some of that was reversed), Israel was a bubble of White Jewish Supremacy (more White than Jewish, as shown by how the Israeli Authorities treated Black Jews from Ethiopia) stuck in time and with whatever little evolution toward Humanist values they imported via the minority of immigrants they had from the West (the majority by a wide margin of immigrants to Israel came from Russia and the Middle East, not the West) being reversed by amongst other things a Press and Politial environment that purposelly fed “Fear of the Other” and extreme Racism disguised as righteous anger at “violent” Palestinians (at times even openly called “vermin”).
So yeah, not only was the Nakba a display of the dominant values in Israel (as is their overtly ethnically discriminatory Constitution), but since that time the country has not evolved away from that original perspective on other human beings and those racist late XIX century and early XX century views on human beings.
(Whilst, for example, Canada ended Indian Residential Shools and that is now looked back as a bad thing, Israel is right now commiting a Genocide in Gaza and Lebanon even more deadly than the Nakba and Israeli Jewish “settlers” are openly commiting a Pogrom on Palestinians in the West Bank with the support - sometimes activelly so - of the Israeli Police and Military)
I agree with you - conflating Jewish people with the state of Israel (or Zionism) is anti-semitic, although with that said, an overwhelming majority of Israeli Jews support the state and the genocide.
With that said, I’ve got a very minor bit of pushback
What it has become kind of implies some recent change from a historical version of Israel which wasn’t genocidal. There were some very early idealistic views of Zionism in the 1940s, but it has pretty much always been a fascistic ethnostate. Most people just haven’t been aware until recently.
That is a perfectly fair point, I used the word “become” as I wasn’t completely sure on how the behavior developed or if it had been part of Israel from the start.
I can also see the logic of the jewish perspective after the holocaust, as a people they were hunted and exterminated across Europe, and wanted a country of their own to feel safe and secure.
However, that doesn’t give them the right to hunt and exterminate another people, which is where Israel lost the plot.
Zionism actually predates the Holocaust by decades, though of course the aftermath of the Holocaust absolutely brought it to reality.
I understand the idealistic vision of Zionism, but the reality was obviously very different. Israel started existence by displacing people who were already living in a place. Colonial settlers pushing people out of their homes, violently, massacring them, poisoning wells and more - an act of ethnic cleansing known as the Nakba.
It was always a White Jewish Supremacist Colonialist project anchored on a late 19th century Western way of seeing the World (the same perspective as Europeans with “colonies” in Africa were they often forced the locals to work for them - a form of Slavery, not Chatel Slavery but still Slavery - or Canada’s Indian Residential Shools).
Whilst most of the West actually evolved away from that (even if recently some of that was reversed), Israel was a bubble of White Jewish Supremacy (more White than Jewish, as shown by how the Israeli Authorities treated Black Jews from Ethiopia) stuck in time and with whatever little evolution toward Humanist values they imported via the minority of immigrants they had from the West (the majority by a wide margin of immigrants to Israel came from Russia and the Middle East, not the West) being reversed by amongst other things a Press and Politial environment that purposelly fed “Fear of the Other” and extreme Racism disguised as righteous anger at “violent” Palestinians (at times even openly called “vermin”).
So yeah, not only was the Nakba a display of the dominant values in Israel (as is their overtly ethnically discriminatory Constitution), but since that time the country has not evolved away from that original perspective on other human beings and those racist late XIX century and early XX century views on human beings.
(Whilst, for example, Canada ended Indian Residential Shools and that is now looked back as a bad thing, Israel is right now commiting a Genocide in Gaza and Lebanon even more deadly than the Nakba and Israeli Jewish “settlers” are openly commiting a Pogrom on Palestinians in the West Bank with the support - sometimes activelly so - of the Israeli Police and Military)