I've been around and around on this topic on various discussion fora online, and must say that there is an awful lot complicating any discussion of Zionism that it almost always draws a lot of even self-contradictory responses without any conclusions.
1. Israel is a state that was founded as something super-imposed over Palestine, but also something super-imposed over other possible solutions to what world leaders post-WW II considered the 'Jewish question'. 2. The Yiddish-speaking cultures of European Jewry moved towards nationalistic awareness but did not achieve a nation (unlike, for example, Christian Slavs of various related but arguably distinct ethnicities). 3. The US got in on it and imposed an American-centric, simplistic 'Americo-Zionist' view on what could have been instead a more peaceful conclusion to a related but separate issue: what to do about independence for the former Ottoman holdings that the British and French had folded into their colonial systems between WWs I and II. Thus, a conclusion for Palestine could have been parallel to conclusions for Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Jordan, etc. However, those final waves of Yiddish-speaking Jews would have to have gone to the US, Canada and Australia. Instead they were forced into being a part of still yet another European landgrab in the ME. 4. One possible contradiction about Zionism and the fate of Palestine is simply that the very sort of Jews who helped lead a 'back to the Holy Lands' movement from Europe in the 19th century are also of the sort who might reject Israel as a Jewish state. 5. It's a sad aspect of so much of the American left side of the political spectrum that its Jewish parts have tended to see Zionism as progressive and liberational and have, over several generations, come to be indoctrinated that questioning the status of the Zionist state as unquestionable. This isn't to say that there aren't many non-religious, secular, assimilated 'Jews' who oppose Israel, but I often sense the position, if you explore it, comes down to: Militaristic Zionism and the landgrab of 1945-1948 weren't evil, that Zionism is reformable (a bit like talking with mixed race South Africans who considered themselves white and apartheidists to the end). 6. Also in the US, Israel has come to represent at least two complex things: One, it is a symbol or focus for many Jews who feel they have lost their ethnic identity (like so many Americans they probably have very little idea of what that identity actually was--their Yiddish-Slavic cultures, such as Sorbian, Polish and Russian Jewish have been lost). Before Israel, about the only way they knew they were in some sense 'Jewish' was that they knew of at least one grandparent who practiced some form of the religion, and certain relatives were victims of the Holocaust. Two, a constant part of American national identity seems to be of America as a chosen people engaged in the construction of a privileged nation. Yes, many will argue that there are many other forms of nationalism and these all tend to be exclusive. However, Americans have latched onto the idea that the US is the New Zion. And so the US's overwhelming support of Israel's militarism, belligerence, colonialism is actually an extension of what the US has got away with 1945-now. Combine that with a sense that Americans and Israelis are 'victims' and you get two very crazy, dangerous, paranoid, war-crazy countries, one the superpower, the other the client state. To conclude: The people who founded this modern Zionist state of Israel were and still are Europeans (Yiddish has largely been replaced by Yiddo-Hebraic, best called 'modern Israeli' but also American English). The single largest group falling under a single term would be the 'Ashkenazim' of C. and E. Europe. They spoke and produced a literate culture based on Yiddish, which could now be viewed as a broad dialect band that ranged from German-based to Sorbian-based. Most Europeans didn't understand much of anything at all about Yiddish because it was written in an alien script and used by a 'non-Christian people'. The other important group in the foundation of Israel were the so-called Sephardim, who were culturally speaking also Europeans. While the Yiddish-speaking Ashkenazim were formed from Italic, Balkan, Persian, Turkic and Slavic and possibly Caucasus sources, the Ladino-speaking Sephardim of Spain are largely of Arabic and N. African origins (their historical tragectory complicted by their exodus to the Ottoman realm when Spain was re-Catholicized). Even this sort of fairly recent development takes on near incomprehensible twists in the arguments about why European Jews deserve to take over Palestine. When Israelis refer to their mixed population and various ethnicities, they often include the Sephardim as 'ME Jews'--when they are as European as their more populous Ashkenazic counterparts (although this argument could still be complicated if people would start to admit just how EUROPEAN the Ottoman Empire itself was, which then leads to discussion places like Lebanon, Palestine and Syria are actually not the Orientalized lands we imagined them as). If we could move the discussion on the left beyond arguments like: the Jews, Christians and Muslims have been fighting over the Holy Lands for a thousand years, I think we would be doing some sort of service. We could get past the obscurantism of the Americans, American Jews, Israeli propagandists and any of those who support the erasure of Palestine and the Palestinian people (who at one time included Muslims, in the majority, but Christians and Jews, as well as non-Arabic nomads of Romany descent and Bosniaks). CJ _______________________________________________ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list Marxism-Thaxis@lists.econ.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
