• dank@lemmy.today
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    5 months ago

    Ethnic nationalism is just racism, whether practiced by white supremacist MAGA Americans or Holocaust survivors. In a liberal democracy, the government serves all people regardless of race. I’m confused by your premise that Holocaust survivors were entitled to their own ethnic state for some reason.

    Also, the Zionist movement was not a response to the Holocaust. It was a colonial enterprise that began well before the Holocaust in response to widespread persecution especially in Central Europe. Many Jews opposed the Jewish nationalism undergirding Zionism for the same reasons liberals today reject virtually all nationalist movements. Many emigrated to liberal democracies like the United States where they could live free of ethnic discrimination. Zionists instead chose to respond with their own ethnic persecution.

    It is worth recalling in this connection that at the turn of the century, Zionism’s similarities to other projects of colonization were not a source of embarrassment or shame for most of the movement’s adherents; indeed, they often saw them as a selling point. Zionist leaders studied and sought to learn from the experience of European colonial-settlement enterprises in places like Algeria, Rhodesia, and Kenya, and many imagined their own endeavor as similar in certain ways. Moreover, the Zionist movement readily used such terms as “colony,” “colonial,” and “colonization” to refer to its activities; thus, for example, the original name of its financial arm was the Jewish Colonial Trust. It was only later, after the First World War, that colonialism came to have strongly pejorative connotations for many Europeans. As a consequence the Zionist movement sought to dissociate itself from other European projects of colonization and settlement, began to stress the uniqueness and noncolonial character of its mission and methods, and stopped using such terms, at least in languages other than Hebrew.

    Zachary Lockman, Comrades and Enemies: Arab and Jewish Workers in Palestine, 1906-1948 (University of California Press, 1996) 21-57.

    • WamGams@lemmy.ca
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      5 months ago

      Why did you respond to a question yet refuse to answer the question?