They’re both wrong. But FWIW, the fact that one of them is Jewish is only ultimately decisive if you believe someone’s ethnicity confers validity on an argument in a way that transcends what’s actually being said.
https://twitter.com/abstraktions/status/1376911529321189389
It’s a futile method of argument. The majority of British, and probably global, Jewish opinion is undoubtedly closer to Luke‘s argument than Rivkah‘s. But that doesn’t settle the matter! Engage critically, don’t rhetorically wield identities in abstraction from the argument.
And on the substance... until the left gets its head around the reality that Zionism is *both* a “settler colonial ideology” *and*, historically, a “national liberation movement of the Jewish people” that appeared to be, in Deutscher’s phrase, “a historical necessity”...
...then we’ll keep getting tied in knots over I/P, Zionism/anti-Zionism, and antisemitism. You have to be utterly insensitive to Jewish history to think the (often loose/diffuse) affinity with Israel that exists in majoritarian Jewish identity is just settler-colonial chauvinism.
Gilbert Achcar (a socialist from an Arab background, if you’re one of those people who believes background/identity confers validity) wrote: “Statist Zionism is Janus-faced. One face face towards the Holocaust, the other towards the Nakba.”
That’s the duality than an “absolute” anti-Zionism, which is insensitive to Zionism’s historical origins and the reasons why most Jews feel an affinity with Israel, fails to grasp, and why it will always risk developing in an antisemitic direction.
That’s why I oppose both “Zionism” and an unqualified, absolute “anti-Zionism.” Usually, I prefer Steve Cohen’s “anti-Zionist Zionist” as the best label for the attitude the left should take. TL/DR: Read @dontlookanti, and Steve Cohen’s other writing on the topic.
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