May 21, 2013

Surprise admission that Zionism is indeed a form of Racism

And the surprise confessor is.....A B Yehoshua in Ha'aretz in an article titled, Defining Zionism: The belief that Israel belongs to the entire Jewish people.

There's so much I agree with in the article I ought to be worried about it.
First of all, we must remember that from a historical perspective, the concept emerged only at the end of the 19th century. It’s meaningless to try and describe Yehuda Halevi as a Zionist, or any other Jew who immigrated to the Holy Land in centuries past. 
Nothing wrong with that.  But saying what something isn't doesn't work as a definition.
Here is the definition: A Zionist is a person who desires or supports the establishment of a Jewish state in the Land of Israel, which in the future will become the state of the Jewish people. This is based on what Herzl said: “In Basel I founded the Jewish state.”
That seems to be it.  Zionism is about the establishment of a state specifically for the world's Jews.  Yes?  Yes.

And one in the eye for those obfuscators and filibusterers who say that a zionist is someone who thinks Jews should all go and live in Palestine:
A Zionist, therefore, is a Jew [or anyone else - levi9909] who supported the establishment of a Jewish state in the Land of Israel, and not necessarily one who actually settled in the land. Herzl himself and many Zionist leaders never settled in the land, yet you wouldn’t hesitate to call them Zionists. Even today, the members of Zionist federations worldwide are considered Zionists by us and by themselves, even though they don’t live in Israel. 
But there is stuff I I disagree with:
Zionism is not an ideology. If the definition of ideology, according to the Hebrew Encyclopedia, is as follows − “A cohesive, systematic combination of ideas, insights, principles and imperatives that finds expression in the particular worldview of a sect, a party or a social class” − then Zionism cannot be considered an ideology, but merely a very broad platform for various ideologies that may even contradict one another. 
Say what?  As it happens, the definition could have simply said "identity group" in place of its incomplete list of "a sect, a party or a social class" or we could fit Jews into sect or party and posit zionism, as Yehoshua does, as an ideology for Jews.  It cannot be a platform for various ideologies once we define zionism as being about a state for Jews.  Humanistic ideologies are excluded unless we take out their humanistic dimension and append the suffix zionism to, eg, liberal, socialist, etc.  It works the same if we use zionist as a prefix to those things.  However we render humanist ideological labels when appended to or by zionist, we are rendering them non-humanist or oxymoronic.  This is because, as Yehoshua himself says, zionism is about a state for Jews, not for citizens, not for non-Jews and certainly not for Palestinians.

The article drifts a bit at the point he denies the ideological nature of zionism and tries to place it among any and every ideology.  He asserts Israel's citizenship law as an immigration law.  This is wrong, immigration laws do not generally deny citizenship to native born people.  They don't generally accord automatic rights of citizenship to people on the grounds of which religion their maternal ancestors practised.

But he ends up on a point I do agree with:
Liberating the concept of Zionism from all the appendages and addenda that have adhered to it would not only clarify the ideological and political arguments we have among ourselves, and thus prevent these disputes from being mythologized, but it would also force critics abroad to clarify and focus their positions.
Hear hear! I like to make my position perfectly clear.  A zionist state is a state for the world's Jews, it can only be established and maintained on the basis of colonial settlement, ethnic cleansing and segregationist laws.  Therefore, there should be no state for the world's Jews.

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