The most damning aspect of Zionism is that white nationalists hate Jews but love Israel.
Okay, because people will argue semantics, perhaps I should have said "like" or "admire" rather than "love," but whatever diction we choose there's an abundance of evidence for the original point.
While I have you here, a few additional comments. Thanks for the good feedback, first of all. You've given me much to consider.
While some neo-Nazi types (along with some paleo-conservatives) identify as "pro-Palestine," there are significant differences between those types and their peers who express admiration for Israel. Here are four:
1. "White Zionists," as Richard Spencer calls them, adhere to the spirit and practice of Zionism (in its state-sanctioned iteration); the logic of Western colonization, from which this nonsense derives, is anathema (and hostile) to Palestine's national movement.
2. In fact, Palestinians, going back decades, in both homeland and diaspora, have worked hard to rebuke modes of resistance predicated on (or tolerant of) anti-Semitism. The Palestinian intellectual tradition testifies to this sensibility.
3. There's a tremendous difference of power between Zionism and its victims. Palestinians, like all colonized groups, are inherently reviled by the institutional forces that constitute and validate racial violence. Jewish people are, too. But Israel isn't.
4. Every (current) rationalization for Zionism emphasizes the need of Jewish people to escape anti-Semitism. What does it mean that the site of escape can become an avatar to no small number of anti-Semites? Palestine's national movement suffers no such contradiction.
The original post, then, doesn't simply identify a damning problem, but a debilitating one. Israel functions in the world as an agent of US power and so Zionism cannot disassociate itself from the practice of white supremacy and imperialism.
Perhaps the original post can be refined to say, "The most damning consequence of Zionism is that white nationalists can hate Jews but still love Israel." The mere possibility is enough to undermine its central convictions.
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This is exactly why academic boycott of Israel is justified and necessary. Palestinian scholars and students suffer arbitrary regimes of confinement and severe restrictions of movement.
What reason does the Zionist regime have to prevent this young man from acquiring a study visa? Because it can. Because it's capricious and ruthless. Because it dispenses rights according to religion.
.@PENamerica: please look into the violation of this writer's right to movement and expression. Unfortunately, it's a common occurrence for Palestinians living under Israeli occupation.
Okay, we're getting close to publication time for the new English translation of Ghassan Kanafani's "On Zionist Literature" (July 8). If you'll be so kind as to humor me, a few observations about the process and the book itself.
I didn't contribute much labor to the project--I wrote a short intro--and was only tangentially involved, but I have a decent sense of how the book came into being. It's a more complex process than you might imagine.
It's difficult to overstate how much work @Louis_Allday (editor) and Mahmoud Najib (translator) put into the project. It wasn't easy tracking down sources (many obscure) or doing the fact-checking on a text over fifty years old. They deserve our applause.
You've probably heard the phrase "the Palestine exception to the first amendment" or "the Palestine exception to free speech." (Or simply "the Palestine exception.") I've long been curious about it and finally got around to researching its provenance. This is what I found:
The phrase doesn't simply denote an inconsistent application of "free speech" where criticism of Israel is concerned. It also suggests a systemic absence of civil and political rights for Palestinians in the United States and Canada (and in some cases Europe).
There's a LOT to say about "rights" and "liberties" and the judicial system and their utility to a viable socialist/communist politics, especially in relation to colonized peoples, but I'll prattle about those issues another day. Moving on...
Career is never a valid excuse to betray the downtrodden.
"But she wants to run for Senate!"
"But she needs to appease Pelosi!"
"But she has to get reelected!"
These tired excuses are profoundly disdainful of Palestinians.
Why should we suffer to facilitate AOC's bourgeois aspirations?
Why are you asking us to in the first place?
I don't give two shits about her political career, or anyone else's. Serving empire requires ghoulish calculations. Plenty choose not to serve for this very reason.
Israelis had to invent a language, a cuisine, a paleo-history, a nationality, and a folk culture from a set of mythologies about the ancient past and then have the goddamn nerve to declare that Palestinians are a fiction.
For the many left-liberal types objecting to my comment:
First of all, if you deem that comment "antisemitic," then you're not merely a bad faith interlocutor; you're also resorting to the tired Zionist tactic of trying to punish Palestinians who refuse to cede our existence.
Otherwise, a few notes:
Re modern Hebrew. I don't deem the language illegitimate. Its revival outside the context of Zionism is a wonderful thing. Within the context of Zionism, though, it was an undeniably political choice indivisible from a project of colonial invention.
This young Palestinian, brilliant and kind, recently graduated college with honors and began a good job. A fanatical Trump-loving Zionist account doxed him and snitched him out to his employer. Now he faces severe recrimination. A few thoughts below...
"pretty boy" has an agile mind and a big heart. He's somebody our community can be extremely proud of. This is precisely the kind of person Zionists like to target for punishment, for they abhor our talent, they fear our pride, they dread our joy.
I was fired from a job in 2014 for tweets that were falsely deemed "antisemitic." I'll never forget the unadulterated dread that overwhelmed me when I first learned of an organized Zionist defamation campaign.