• Todd Bonzalez
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    5 months ago

    Zionism is essentially the belief that Ethnically Jewish people deserve their own homeland. This usually translates to “Israel has a right to exist”.

    This does not necessarily mean endorsement of ethnic cleansing. That is not the core of Zionism, it is the core of what you oppose, and you have been convinced to casually refer to those things as Zionism.

    Taking a hard-line against Zionism in this way is like saying “Catholicism is basically the belief that women should be brood mares”. Sure, Catholics are largely against Abortion, but they aren’t a monolith. You’re going to find plenty of members of the group that don’t tow the line on that.

    In this sense, you are looking at the Israeli leaders that use Zionism as a justification for what they are doing to Gaza/Palestine et al, and deciding that everyone under the Zionist umbrella must be exactly the same. The problem here is that you’re dead wrong about what Zionists actually believe and are alienating people that might otherwise be your allies, because they can’t tell if you’re arguing that Palestine should be free, or if their friends and families in Israel deserve to be displaced, oppressed, or even murdered in revenge for the Nakba.

    • sparkle
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      Cymraeg
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      5 months ago

      Yeah no. Jewish Israeli people can live in Palestine, with the Arabs they’re trying to displace, like Jews have for thousands of years before modern Israel existed. Israel is inherently, and has always been, an apartheid ethnostate and has no reason nor right to exist. Israeli nationalism is a bad thing and Israel’s entire purpose is Jewish supremacy. If you remove the “ethnostate” aspect of Israel, you don’t have Israel; there is no Israel without either apartheid or genocide of non-Jews.

      Israel has no right to exist. No state really has any right to exist, but Israel’s existence is especially bad. It should be dissolved. That doesn’t mean displacement of the people that live there, that means the replacement of the Israeli state.

      There are plenty of Israelis who were adults when Israel was founded, and participated in the extermination of Arabs during the colonial occupation, and cheered on the theft of their lands. They form the foundation of Israeli society, and most of the non-Arab Israeli populace still encourages the oppression and genocide of Arabs. I do not believe any individual who cheers on the genocide of the peoples their great-grandparents recently stole the lives of should have the “right” to live on the recently stolen land.