I assume anti-zionism means denying that the state of Israel has the right to exist? In which case I'd say yeah that's pretty firmly linked with anti-Semitism
Yeah, Zionism is the concept of national self determination applied specifically to Israel. Being against Zionism and not being against all other forms of national self determination is clearly antisemitic; being against national self determination in general is just being imperialist.
Sure. But the current implementation of Zionism (semantically speaking, can you implement a belief?) in Israel goes well beyond the conceptual definition, I think.
no it is not.
It is if you believe creating the Jewish state will start the Rapture.
Here's some food for thought: there are Jews who are anti-zionist. Some believe that the promised land was given to them by God, and as such a creation of a promised land by man is an affront to god. Others in the International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network believe that zionism is causing an "apartheid state" (their words not mine).
I think there is a difference to be discerned here and that its very important to avoid conflating anti-zionism and anti-semitism. Anti-semitism is wrong, hands down. Anti-zionism has layers. When it is steeped in anti-semitism, it is wrong. however, when you argue about zionism beyond anti-semitism, there is more there.
Why mention anti zionism at all when the actual definition doesnt mention it?
France will adopt the definition of anti-Semitism set by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA), he said, adding: “Anti-Zionism is one of the modern forms of anti-Semitism.”
The IHRA definition does not use the phrase “anti-Zionism” but does say denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination “e.g., by claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavor,” is anti-Semitic.
For context, here is the full definition + examples as set out.
“Antisemitism is a certain perception of Jews, which may be expressed as hatred toward Jews. Rhetorical and physical manifestations of antisemitism are directed toward Jewish or non-Jewish individuals and/or their property, toward Jewish community institutions and religious facilities.”
To guide IHRA in its work, the following examples may serve as illustrations:
Manifestations might include the targeting of the state of Israel, conceived as a Jewish collectivity. However, criticism of Israel similar to that leveled against any other country cannot be regarded as antisemitic. Antisemitism frequently charges Jews with conspiring to harm humanity, and it is often used to blame Jews for “why things go wrong.” It is expressed in speech, writing, visual forms and action, and employs sinister stereotypes and negative character traits.
Contemporary examples of antisemitism in public life, the media, schools, the workplace, and in the religious sphere could, taking into account the overall context, include, but are not limited to:
Calling for, aiding, or justifying the killing or harming of Jews in the name of a radical ideology or an extremist view of religion.
Making mendacious, dehumanizing, demonizing, or stereotypical allegations about Jews as such or the power of Jews as collective — such as, especially but not exclusively, the myth about a world Jewish conspiracy or of Jews controlling the media, economy, government or other societal institutions.
Accusing Jews as a people of being responsible for real or imagined wrongdoing committed by a single Jewish person or group, or even for acts committed by non-Jews.
Denying the fact, scope, mechanisms (e.g. gas chambers) or intentionality of the genocide of the Jewish people at the hands of National Socialist Germany and its supporters and accomplices during World War II (the Holocaust).
Accusing the Jews as a people, or Israel as a state, of inventing or exaggerating the Holocaust.
Accusing Jewish citizens of being more loyal to Israel, or to the alleged priorities of Jews worldwide, than to the interests of their own nations.
Denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination, e.g., by claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavor.
Applying double standards by requiring of it a behavior not expected or demanded of any other democratic nation.
Using the symbols and images associated with classic antisemitism (e.g., claims of Jews killing Jesus or blood libel) to characterize Israel or Israelis.
Drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis.
Holding Jews collectively responsible for actions of the state of Israel.
Antisemitic acts are criminal when they are so defined by law (for example, denial of the Holocaust or distribution of antisemitic materials in some countries).
Criminal acts are antisemitic when the targets of attacks, whether they are people or property – such as buildings, schools, places of worship and cemeteries – are selected because they are, or are perceived to be, Jewish or linked to Jews.
Antisemitic discrimination is the denial to Jews of opportunities or services available to others and is illegal in many countries.
the fact i have to overtly mention i don't have any problems with jewish people or judaism as a religion whenever i make any attempt to criticise the existence of israel as a nation state within geopolitical context pretty much sums up my feelings on this.
I always found the rapture to be such a fucked up piece of the bible, like this is earth, our home, and yet we're supposed to celebrate its destruction and our removal from it? Ya sure those left behind have to fight a war against the armies of hell but like they're doing something.
The rapture bit of American Dad is basically what I feel is wrong with the rapture and people wishing for it.
Rapture has very little biblical basis, its just wishful hoping for sadistic suffering of others but wanting to get a card out of it. Its a very self-absorbed piece of theology, which seems consistent with it being mostly only popular with american evengelicals.
This is likely what is meant by "anti-zionism"
The problem is that the Jews have just as much right to live in the middle east as Arabs do, given that they originated from there. And they didn't want to live in europe anymore, not after Hitler had his way with most of them. There was no easy solution to that fucking mess - especially given that Hitler arguably influenced modern day anti-semitism within fundamentalist Islam.
I love how these definitions of antisemitism enable Israel to do to Palestinians exactly what Germany did to the Poles and other Slavs in WW2, while shielding themselves of any criticism by claiming anyone pointing this out must hate Jews as a whole
They are obviously nowhere near Nazi levels, but the sometimes straight-up illegal resettlement of Palestinian land is obviously a thing that has been on the international radar for years now. And now that I've mentioned this, someone, somewhere, will call me antisemitic for it.
And this statement can be said without the intention of denying Israel's legitimacy of a state. Just because it was a racially motivated endeavor, led mostly by France, Britain, and America, doesn't mean that classifying it as such is denying the Jews that moved to the region any right to live there. They were already beginning to migrate to the region beforehand, it's just that after the Holocaust the most powerful countries on earth agreed that Jews deserve the right to self-determination and therefore had an international charter to establish a nation to do so. It was, by its very nature, a racist endeavor. Not a malicious one by any means, and one that had mostly good intentions (barring religious nutjobs), but it was racist nonetheless.
These two parts of the IHRA's definitions seem to specifically exist to allow for legitimacy in Israel's shitty settlement policy. It makes it so anyone who points out how it's part of some fucked up racial superiority thing just gets called an antisemite so they don't have to spend any more energy defending it.
What a piss-poor justification. Most Europeans descend from civilizations that used to live further east. Every human being has African ancestors if we go far enough up the family tree. Does that give us the right to not only live there, but establish our own government on already settled land?
So what? Jews weren't the only victims of hate crime by the Nazi regime. Where was the gay right for self-determination? When were those deemed "mentally unfit" by the Nazis given a country of their own?
I can guarantee that a lot of non-jewish concentration and extermination camp survivors most likely didn't want to live in a bigoted Europe either, especially those still hated by most of the population after WW2.
But they were given squat, and had to endure persecution in their respective countries until people fought back against it and started enforcing values of tolerance.
Rather than swiping the issue under the rug and gifting the most recognizable victims of the Nazis an already inhabited piece of land, perhaps the Allies should have thought about uprooting the sources of those evils.
What? You're attributing Israel's war crimes to Nazism? Bollocks. Israel's government are entirely accountable for their own atrocities.
why does the US give so much money to Israel
Those groups no longer exist as a nation of any sort and there can be no state for them. There's nothing to grant the right to self-determination to. The same cannot be said of Jews, who have had a national question since we started using that phrase. It was inevitable that they'd be given a state, the only variable was how Arabs would reconcile themselves with it. They didn't.
Oh, is that the criterion that makes a difference between the two situations?
Very well, then leave the country, go back to Europe, and give their land back to native Americans, if you want your stance to be consistent.
I was under the impression that Zionism referred to the 'manifest destiny' attitude Israel has with regards to Palestinian land and property, as evidenced by their building of illegal settlements. In which case I'm totally anti-Zionist.
Seems like this is all just arguing semitics.
Your last sentence is completely uncalled for. I was saying that this entire mess started because of the holocaust. Although the Jews had wanted to return to their ancestral homeland for quite some time before, there wouldn't have even been such a strong push for a Jewish state if Hitler hadn't killed six million Jews. And more importantly, in case you weren't aware, there is evidence that most of the modern day anti-semitism in the middle east can be traced back not to the founding of Israel, but the sspread of Nazi anti-semitic propaganda among arabs during WWII.
Yeah, in case you confused and thought the Arab League only opposed the UN partition plan because they were taking their land, nope - they already fucking hated jews, because so many of them had absorbed the same bullshit Hitler had spewed in Europe, along with other foreign anti-semitic bullshit like the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.
also the whole part where they had been promised independence after the first world war but it was definitely the nazis
Honestly, I just see the criteria as realpolitik. It's inevitable that the world is populated by different peoples derived from an ever growing population tree where each has their own self-conception, and this is the basis for government. Their cultural bonds shaped by history and their social consciousness awakened by modernity are the basis for a civic identity in a democracy. It holds a complex society together.
It's really confusing to see both many liberals and leftists take these absolute stances on issues of national questions these days, ones which stand in stark contrast to the nuance or even straight up nationalism of liberals and socialists in history. This especially applies to you as a Frenchman. You can find all sorts of French radical liberals, socialists, anarchists, and syndicalists through the 19th century into the 20th that were pretty nationalistic.
Anti-zionism is even more confusing considering the left-wing, socialist nature of many zionists which made even the USSR think Israel would be an ally at first, so they supported its creation.
the problem is that there is a large qualitative difference between a jewish nation-state, and any other purely "national" nation-state.
the jewish nation which serves as the basis for the idea of zionism has an undeniable religious and ethnic character, unlike, say, being a french national for example - you can be french despite not being either religiously (some jews and muslims) or ethnically (basque) related to other people considered french nationals. the result of this is that although an arab might be termed an "israeli arab", and have similar rights and privileges, most zionists will never consider them being equal in actually running the nation, zionism being adamant about a state run "by jews, for jews", only the definition of what that means changing.
does it not not seem strange to anyone arguing this point that despite making up more than one-fifth of the population, arabs hardly have any real representation in the big political parties outside of their own party, the joint list, which itself is merely a big tent created out of completely unrelated and ideologically opposed parties so as to actually not split the vote? in a fair and equal society, shouldn't they be represented at least somewhat proportionally in all parties?
living here myself, i find myself more and more opposed to the idea of zionism - any zionism - as either right or healthy for the region.
Zionism is based on fundamentally racist ideas of national homelands.
I don't think that's really the problem at all, because I would bet my savings the ethnocentric nature of a national identity is highly reflective of internal and external pressures. There's no reason to expect liberalization towards a greater kind of national identity in conditions that don't favor it, that's something you reap or afford rather than just implement.
Otherwise, people in that region are just going to look out for themselves because anything beyond that is pie in the sky idealism which, unless everyone else is practicing it too, leaves you vulnerable. This is why the particular focus on Israel does look anti-semitic.
Jews being a small diaspora group means that possibly of all the peoples on the planet them first achieving national self-determination is the most necessary prerequisite for any fair association with the rest of the world. I criticize people like Axel for exporting his comfy views on nationality, which don't even reflect on the entire history of liberal and left opinion on it, to parts of the world where they simply don't apply because different parts of the planet developed differently. What a surprise.
This is exactly the problem with modern ideology, its grand radical ideas that are supposed to rationally get to the root of a problem and export itself to emancipate humanity from some evil pathology always comes up short in a way that reflects on that ideology's own inherent limitations. There's a pretty clear historical trend where the most universal and modern ideologies are not really any less parochial, vulgar, and chauvinistic than generic popular conservatism. They often shift the blame for their flaws on others.
You can see at play here. Axel is forced him to repudiate an entire human tendency of people staking a claim in land to pass down across generations as a culture just to be consistent in his opposition to one thing in today's world, Israel, that he doesn't like. However, not everyone can equally afford this absolute view like he can, which is where binding yourself to ideology like this ironically means degenerating back into chauvinism as you single out, blame, and place the burden on others to essentially deal with the limits of your own higher beliefs.
This is why anyone should be skeptical that opposition to Israel is just consistent opposition to nationalism, racism, or something and not with a significant intersection with anti-semitism.
Anyone promising a magic cure to the status quo in the M.E. by identifying a problematic actor is selling you bullshit. Everything about the birth and evolution Europe's nations suggests properly delineated borders, a middle class, and economic ties creates the harmony needed for liberalism and its civics.
Regardless of the fact that I don't think any kind of oppression Olympics should have any relevance to a people's right to self-determination (because, you know, just because less of them have been killed, since there was less of them in the first place, doesn't mean gays didn't have just as hard a time under the Nazis), I find this statement that Jews have been and remain the most hated people across the world to be rather unfounded.
In the west, they're not typically victims of institutional racism like other minorities are. You won't find them overrepresented in poor-paying or unstable jobs, like you would with Black people or Arabs for instance. They're not significantly poorer as a whole than the national average.
Yes, you still have antisemitic people, like neo-nazis, but you'd be mistaken if you thought this kind of people don't also harbor islamophobic or overall racist beliefs.
(Also notice how there are specific words to describe hatred based on religious beliefs like Islam, but black people, who've got it undeniably worse, don't have a word for hatred targeted specifically towards them. Your claim that there exists a word specific to hatred towards Jews because they were and remain the most hated group in the world is baseless.)
So no, the claim that Jews have it far worse in the west than anyone else doesn't hold up at all. The fact that anti-Semitism is on the rise doesn't change that fact; after all, I'm older today than I was yesterday, but that doesn't make me older than Teddy Roosevelt.
Don't get me wrong, there's nothing bad about Jews not being the most oppressed group in the world. It's reassuring to see that some minorities sometimes manage to avoid oppression. But you can't possibly say that Jews have it worse than anyone else in the West without a proper source, nor use it as justification for this group to be given a nation of their own and not other, similarly oppressed groups.
So your argument is basically "might makes right". Which is not only a despicable principle in and of itself, but doesn't even apply to the creation of the state of Israel. After WW2, Jews weren't in such a position of power that they would've been able to singlehandedly create their own state. They were only able to do so because the Allies felt they should be given ownership of the land where their ancestors lived. If the location didn't matter, they would've simply carved a piece of Germany for that.
So, again, answer me clearly this: Why shouldn't native Americans be given their ancestors land back, when you support doing the same for Jews, using the same principle?
"You not following older left-wing party lines to the letter makes you weird and stupid." Uh, ok? Thanks for the ad-hominem devoid of any substance, I guess.
I know that might sound weird to someone who live in a highly partisan country dominated by the two-party system, but in many countries, there are usually more than two stances on an issue, and more than a single one within a given political leaning.
I have no idea why you would think that thinking for myself, forming my opinions based on the arguments I've been presented and their legitimacy makes me weirder and stupider than if I were to simply regurgitate my favourite party's line, but it sounds like projection to me.
i agree that any easy solutions or any reductionism as to the actors responsible for problems in the middle east will necessarily be nothing more than rhetoric, often meant to gain power, but i completely disagree with the implication here that the focus on israel is somehow a sign of some degree of latent antisemitism in the political sphere of europe and north america.
while often existing criticism of israel is co-opted as a cover by antisemites, as they are less likely to be scrutinized for anti-zionism, there can be made legitimate criticisms of israeli policy in just about any regard of how the state functions, such people are not to be blindly accepted as merely opposing what they believe is wrong, but they also are not to be blindly branded as antisemites.
there is no need for wide-eyed idealism and optimism to see that it is not government policy that determines the social facts on the ground, but that the causality between these two is the other way around, and that the only way one can influence policy in a realistic matter is to accomplish both social and economic change - indeed, a thing that can be achieved by calling zionism into question instead of merely accepting it as either sacred or absolutely necessary for survival. as long as we reify such historically held ideas as core principles of the very fabric of the nation-state of israel, there can be no movement forward regardless of "internal or external pressures" changing. perhaps, it is exactly the absence of such pressures that americans and europeans (although often misguidedly) are trying to fix, applying some external pressure while at the same time supporting internal organizations who may act as an internal pressure.
in fact, the very idea you seem to put forward, that a nation-state exclusively for jews as its nationality is necessary for fair association with the rest of the world is called into question by macron's words, as at the same time there is a clear attempt to have a semantic disconnect between "jew" and "israeli national". far from necessary, the only way to bring forward such a strong disconnect between the categories is to dismantle any strict and necessary connection between the nationality of "israeli" and the religious-ethnic category of "jew", a connection which exists in all forms of zionism in some form.
I'll argue that none of the countries artificially created post-WW2 by European colonial powers have any inherent right to exist. They're lines on a map drawn by distant rulers as a matter of political convenience, without any respect for the nations (in the socio-historical sense) that already existed in those regions. The lack of alignment between political and ethnic boundaries has directly led to some of the worst atrocities in modern history.
But the damage is done, and now we have a population of geographically co-located Middle Eastern Jews, so as a distinct ethno-political group with a majority population in their region they have a right to an autonomous state. What they don't have a right to is political control over areas where they ethnically represent a small minority, like Gaza. What matters is who lives in a place, not lines on a map drawn by long-dead distant rulers.
Is that anti-zionist? The definition has gotten so muddled that I honestly can't tell.
They're a western ally in the middle east. Same reason they have so many naval bases here in Australia.
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