#post-zionism

[squidgirlautism]

everytime someone asks me if im a zionist i feel the urge to tell them i’m a suffragette as well

[etz-ashashiyot]

In light of these* previous posts, I am rerunning these polls. Please vote however they apply to you, and spread them for reach even if they don't apply to you. Thanks!!

(*Context: [1], [2], [3], [4], [5])

Hey fellow Jews who do not identify as Zionist -OR- Anti-Zionist, what is your ideal hope for the future of Israel and Palestine?

Two State Solution (fully separate)

One State Solution that is Israel with full civil rights for everyone

One State Solution that is Palestine with full civil rights for everyone

Federated One State Solution (i.e., one country with multiple states)

One [New] State Solution with full civil rights for everyone

Two State Solution with overarching coalition (e.g., A Land for All)

Greater Israel; "Palestine" is dissolved and the people relocated

Fully Palestine; "Israel" is dissolved and the people relocated

I am fundamentally opposed to states existing at all, so something else

Three State Solution

The status quo but peaceful

Other options? (explain in notes)

Voting ended onMay 23, 2024

This poll is specifically for Jews who identify as non-Zionists, post-Zionists, refustoidentifyniks, people who do not view this type of dichotomy as a valid premise to begin with ("nice dichotomy idiot, but what lies outside of it?" lol), or something else I haven't considered. If you actively identify as a Zionist or Anti-Zionist, please vote in the other appropriate polls that are being posted at the same time. If you are sorta lukewarm about either identity and/or have such a complicated relationship with one or both labels that you only reluctantly identify as either? That's a personal judgement call, but you're welcome to vote here, there, or in both as it applies/changes.

Please answer your IDEAL solution, not necessarily what you think would be the most likely or most practical, but your idealized outcome. I intend to reblog each of these with a second poll that asks what your preferred pragmatic solution would be after posting.

Everyone please be respectful of the folks replying to this poll, as with the others. There are lots of other places to debate people or discourse, but this post is not one of them. My goal here is simply to gather information and others' perspectives, not to argue or deconstruct them. Everyone please be respectful of the folks replying to this poll, as with the others. There are lots of other places to debate people or discourse, but this post is not one of them. My goal here is simply to gather information and others' perspectives, not to argue or deconstruct them.

[eretzyisrael]

Amnesty and its Israeli Collaborators

The recent Amnesty International report which accuses Israel of apartheid and crimes against humanity is demonstrably dishonest, tendentious, and so lacking in context to be unworthy of serious consideration. Indeed, it has even been called “a paradigmatic example of anti-semitism [sic].” But this will not prevent its use as a weapon in the ongoing diplomatic and legal war being waged against Israel in the UN. As Anne Herzberg of NGO Monitor wrote,

These groups [Amnesty, Human Rights Watch, B’Tselem]—through their personal connections and singular influence at the U.N. Human Rights Council, and the acquiescence of Europe—instead will simply get U.N. Special Rapporteur Michael Lynk and the Navi Pillay-headed Commission of Inquiry [COI] to uncritically adopt their claims and mark them with the U.N. stamp of approval in the next few months. Unsurprisingly and in keeping with his history of anti-Israel activism (as well as in violation of U.N. rules), although he is ostensibly currently conducting an independent and objective investigation of apartheid, Lynk promoted the group’s report on Twitter. There is no doubt that the COI will act in a similar fashion.

Here are a few of Amnesty’s dozens of recommendations (p. 272ff.): Israel must repeal its nation-state law, “relocate” Jewish residents from areas outside 1949 armistice lines, cancel evictions of Arabs (for nonpayment of rent) and change the law so that “Palestinians” are not subject to “forced eviction,” grant recognition to all “unrecognized villages” in the Negev (i.e., legalize squatting on state land), remove all restrictions on freedom of movement of people and goods into and out of the Gaza strip, punish officials and military personnel for their “violations of international law” and “crimes against humanity,” and – last but not least:

Recognize the right of Palestinian refugees and their descendants to return to homes where they or their families once lived in Israel or the OPT, and to receive restitution and compensation and other effective remedies for the loss of their land and property.

It should be clear from the above that Amnesty’s objective is no less than the end of Israel as a Jewish state, and its replacement by an Arab-majority state. Nevertheless, we can expect in short order UN resolutions calling for sanctions on Israel and attempts to prosecute Israeli officials and IDF officers in accordance with Amnesty’s recommendations.

The accusations contained in the report constitute a große Lüge, a “big lie.” They are “supported,” in a parody of scholarship, by citations from their own previous reports, from anti-Israel UN agencies like the notorious Human Rights Commission, from documents provided by the so-called “State of Palestine,” from interviews with Palestinians, from the work of anti-Israel academics, and of course from numerous NGOs, including those that were recently outlawed in Israel because of their links with the terrorist Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine.

Amnesty is the largest player in the world-wide “human rights” industry. The organization operates in numerous countries and has an overall budget of close to $US 300 million. It started out in the 1960s with a pro-Western orientation, perhaps receiving funds secretly from the British government and the CIA. At some point it became more critical of the West; in 2011, it called for George Bush to be prosecuted over the treatment of 9/11 detainees. In recent years, it has focused disproportionately on alleged human rights abuses by Israel, perhaps as a result of hiring a number of anti-Israel activists for key positions. Agnes Callamard, Amnesty’s secretary-general since March 2021, recently had to disavow a tweet she made in 2013, idiotically accusing Israel of poisoning Yasser Arafat.

But Amnesty’s biased researchers had significant help on the ground. The Zionist group Im Tirtzu (disclosure: I’m a member and donor) analyzed the Amnesty report and found that 77% of the citations from various NGOs in the report came from 16 Israeli organizations, which are heavily funded by foreign money, mostly from the EU and its constituent governments. They are the usual suspects; B’Tselem, Adalah, Ir Amim, HaMoked, Peace Now, and others. Over the past 10 years, these groups have raked in more than half a billion shekels ($US 171 million) from the European Union and its constituent governments. B’Tselem alone got more than 62 million shekels ($US 19 million).

This is a huge sum and should be a scandal of major proportions. These organizations, despite having almost no support among Israel’s Jewish population, are able to exert great pressure in the legal and political realms. They have petitioned the Supreme Court to dismantle communities built over the Green Line, to prevent the demolition of the homes of convicted terrorists, to prevent the deportation of illegal residents, and so on. They seem to have good access to the Israeli media, as illustrated by the recent B’Tselem and Peace Now campaign to mainstream the idea that there is an outbreak of “settler violence.” But most importantly, they produce a steady flow of accusations against Israel to the international media and to foreign governments.

Whenever there is a military conflict, they swing into action to provide respectability to the propaganda from Israel’s enemies; and they provide the fodder for international condemnations of Israel, as happened in 2009 with the Goldstone Report. Much of the material they supply is simply a repetition of claims made by the PA and Hamas, which achieve credibility through the “halo effect” created by their passing through a supposedly disinterested NGO.

Why does the EU pay to maintain subversive anti-state organizations in Israel? Some of the officials involved may actually believe that they are advancing the cause of human rights. On a few occasions, when the connection to terrorism has been blatant, the EU or a government has suspended funding for a particular group. But they appear to be fine with the idea of supporting the Palestinian cause, the dissolution of the Jewish state, at least when no guns or bombs are directly and immediately involved. I believe that there is a deep feeling in Europe, possibly going back long before there was a Palestinian cause (or even Palestinians), that the world would be better off without Jews or, even more so, their state. Antisemitism has somehow morphed into humanism.

And why does Israel permit her enemies to support a subversive fifth column inside the state? I don’t know. Big money corrupts. Maybe enough Israeli politicians have personal connections to these NGOs, and they or friends and family benefit from them, and that’s why the laws that have been passed to regulate foreign money are weak and toothless. Maybe now, after the damage has been done, the Knesset will take action.

The Amnesty report is just another libel against the Jewish people, like the medieval blood libels and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. There is little that the State of Israel can do to silence its external enemies. But it does not have to allow them to pay her home-grown quislings to do their dirty work.

Abu Yehuda

[eretzyisrael]

Giving Up Zionism

Amichai Shikli, the dissident member of Naftali Bennett’s party and the only coalition member to vote against the budget, had an op-ed in today’s Israel Hayom newspaper that got my attention. I’ll translate the first few sentences:

At the end of a virtual tour of the back streets of the Old City, the Temple Mount appears, in all its glory; in the background, the skyline of Jerusalem with Augusta Victoria [monastery] and Mt. Scopus. Welcome to the Palestinian pavilion at Expo Dubai.

Now we enter the Israeli booth. The word “Israel” appears in all the colors of the rainbow, the headline “toward tomorrow.” Presenting the official video is Lucy Ayoub, the daughter of a Christian [Arab] father and a Jewish mother who, in an interview with Ha’aretz, boasted that “she does not surrender to occupation.”

He continues that the exhibit focuses on the great technological accomplishments of the “startup nation.” The Palestinians, on the other hand, emphasize the historical Muslim connection to Jerusalem and “Haram al-Sharif” (the Temple Mount), which is at the center of Palestinian identity. The Israeli exhibit, he notes, “concedes the national and historical aspect from the start.”

This doesn’t surprise me. Whoever designed our exhibition wants to present Israel as ultra-diverse (i.e., the rainbow and Lucy Ayoub) and hyper-modern; the part about the roots of the Jewish people in the land from Biblical times and their deep connection to it, especially to Jerusalem and the Temple Mount, was played down. The designers seem to have presumed that this isn’t the Israel that works well for people in Dubai, or Europe for that matter. Only “religious” Jews care about that.

They are wrong. The Marxist and secular David Ben Gurion, made it clear in the very first paragraphs of Israel’s Declaration of Independence:

Eretz Yisrael was the birthplace of the Jewish people. Here their spiritual, religious and political identity was shaped. Here they first attained to statehood, created cultural values of national and universal significance and gave to the world the eternal Book of Books.

After being forcibly exiled from their land, the people kept faith with it throughout their Dispersion and never ceased to pray and hope for their return to it and for the restoration in it of their political freedom.

For Ben Gurion as well as his arch-enemy Menachem Begin, Zionism was not only about defending the Jewish people against antisemitism, it was (primarily) about the return of the Jewish people to their historic homeland, and, as Allen Hertz puts it, the realization of their aboriginal rights of entry and settlement. In this connection, I’m reminded of a story about Chaim Weizmann. When asked why the Zionists insisted on Palestine when there were many other places they could settle, he supposedly responded “That is like my asking you why you drove twenty miles to visit your mother last Sunday when there are so many old ladies living on your street.”

But some Israelis apparently don’t agree. What is important to them is physical security and economic success. They would have agreed with Moshe Dayan who, upon seeing the newly-conquered Old City, said, “what do we need all this Vatican for?” Perhaps they would even have agreed with Israel Zangwill, who in 1905 led a faction at the Seventh Zionist Congress favoring the establishment of a Jewish homeland in Uganda, Canada, or Australia. They don’t see a problem with the increasing number of non-Jews making “aliyah” to Israel, as long as they are loyal to the state. Certainly the idea of ceding Hevron, for example, or other parts of Judea and Samaria to the Palestinians would not bother them if they were convinced that this could happen without compromising their security.

I have two objections to this point of view. One is legal, and the other is, for lack of a better word, spiritual. The legal point is this: there is a string of documents and treaties, beginning with the Balfour Declaration, continuing with the adoption of the British Mandate for Palestine at the San Remo Conferencein 1920, the Anglo-American Convention on Palestine of 1924, and of course Israel’s Declaration of Independence, all of which rest their case for a Jewish homeland in Eretz Yisrael on the Jewish People’s historical connection to the land, which confers upon them the Aboriginal Rights mentioned above.

The Palestinians understand this quite well, which is why they attack every aspect of it. That is the reason they exist that we are not a “people,” but “just a religion.” One of things (in addition to our unique language, religion, and culture) that makes us a people, of course, is our long and exceedingly well-documented connection to Eretz Yisrael, so of course that is a problem for them. At the same time, they attempt to deny – and physically destroy the evidence for – the presence of the Jewish people here over the centuries. Sometimes this can be amusing, as when they insist that a place should be called by its “original” Arabic name, which then turns out to be a transliteration of an older Hebrew name.

Regarding the second objection, I used the word “spiritual” in a larger sense than just the religious one. Although the military challenge to Israel presented by the Palestinians is small, the cognitive and cultural war that is being waged against Israel from all around the world on their behalf has only become nastier, and is beginning to threaten both our relations with other nations and our own internal social health. In particular, we are beginning to give up on our self-definition as a Jewish, Zionist state.

The pogroms of May, in which Arab citizens viciously attacked Jewish residents of mixed cities, the recent attack on an Israeli police officer by private Arab security contractors, and the degree to which Bedouin criminals are running wild in the southern part of the country show that even Israel’s Arab citizens respond to perceived weakness.

There is a long list of things that we can do to push back against the abandonment of our Zionist consciousness. Most urgent is that we cannot afford to have a government that contains anti-Zionist elements, such as the Islamist Ra’am party of Mansour Abbas (not to be confused with Mahmud Abbas of the PA). I fully understand how it came about, but it is not acceptable. The presence of Ra’am in the Knesset (never mind the governing coalition!) violates section 7a of Israel’s Basic Law governing the Knesset, because the party platform “[negates] the existence of the State of Israel as the state of the Jewish people.” Although it isn’t necessarily wrong to allocate a large amount of funds to improve services to Arab citizens, it is scandalous to place 30 billionshekels (almost US $10 billion) in Abbas’ hands to distribute as he wishes. By our cynicism, we have anointed him King of the Arabs.

Most important is the reinstatement of the Zionist goal of settling all of Eretz Yisrael by Jews. Programs should be created that will provide inexpensive homes in Judea and Samaria to young families who are priced out of the housing market today. This will require finding the gumption to oppose the US and Europe in order to build in Judea and Samaria, but we can do that.

There’s a great deal more, but readers can fill it in. Israelis often use the word “Tzionut” (Zionism) ironically. When I first made aliyah in 1979, someone asked me why I came. Tzionut, I said. He looked at me like I was insane. But it’s the reason there is a state at all, and if we forget the importance of Eretz Yisrael to the Jewish people, there won’t be one very much longer.

Abu Yehuda

[eretzyisrael]

Israel, Wake Up!

Hamas has produced a blueprint for “post-liberation Palestine” which describes how they will create the new state of “Palestine” after the Jewish state is destroyed.

It explains how they will variously slaughter, dispossess, or enslave the Jews of Israel, and acquire their property. “This is an issue that requires deep deliberation and a display of the humanism that has always characterized Islam,” they write. Indeed.

This is not a hoax or a propaganda stunt. It is a serious document which tries to grapple with the very real problems that the new regime will have to solve if it is to inherit the land and the wealth that is in the hands of the despised Jews today. It was created by a committee appointed by Hamas leader Yahya Al-Sinwar. The translation to English that is linked above was carried out by the highly reliable Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI), who summarize it as follows:

The conference published a concluding statement listing “ideas and methods of operation [to be implemented] during the liberation of Palestine” after Israel ceases to exist. This list included, inter alia, a call for drafting a document of independence that will be “a direct continuation of the Pact of ‘Umar Bin Al-Khattab” concerning Byzantine Jerusalem’s surrender to the Muslim conquerors which took place apparently in 638; a definition of the leadership of the state until elections are held; recommendations for engagement with the international community and the neighboring states; a call for preparing in advance appropriate legislation for the transition to the new regime; a call for establishing apparatuses to ensure the continuation of economic activity once the Israeli shekel is no longer in use and to preserve the resources that previously belonged to Israel; and a call for compiling a guide for resettling the Palestinian refugees who wish to return to Palestine.

The conference also recommended that rules be drawn up for dealing with “Jews” in the country, including defining which of them will be killed or subjected to legal prosecution and which will be allowed to leave or to remain and be integrated into the new state. It also called for preventing a brain drain of Jewish professionals, and for the retention of “educated Jews and experts in the areas of medicine, engineering, technology, and civilian and military industry… [who] should not be allowed to leave.” Additionally, it recommended obtaining lists of “the agents of the occupation in Palestine, in the region, and [throughout] the world, and… the names of the recruiters, Jewish and non-Jewish, in the country and abroad” in order to “purge Palestine and the Arab and Islamic homeland of this hypocrite scum.”

These are the minutes of a latter-day Wannseekonferenz. And they must be taken seriously, just as Hitler should have been.

I am overreacting, you say. We could turn Gaza into a parking lot in ten minutes. Hamas is a joke and Yahya Sinwar is its punchline.

Well, yes and no. Of course we could turn Gaza into a parking lot; but will we? Sinwar and other Palestinian Arab leaders – like Marwan Barghouti, who is living comfortably today in an Israeli prison, but who could become the next President of the Palestinian Authority – are not expecting that Hamas could successfully conquer Israel by itself. What they are waiting for is the next regional war, when Israel finally confronts Iran and Hezbollah. In the chaos resulting from thousands of rockets falling on Israel from Syria, Lebanon, Gaza, and perhaps Iran and Iraq – including rockets with precision-guidance systems and armed drones – along with a probable invasion by Hezbollah in the North, the situation will be out of control. At that time, uprisings in Judea/Samaria, human wave attacks from Gaza, and an intifada by Arab citizens of Israel, could bring about a military and social collapse.

Israel, they believe, is already suffering a political collapse. Like former PM Ehud Olmert, we don’t want to win. Why else, Arabs think, would our government try to make an “arrangement” with Hamas rather than crushing it? Why have we virtually stopped construction in Judea and Samaria? Why do we allow illegal Arab settlements like Khan al-Ahmar to remain? Why has the government continued to transfer funds to the PA while it pays terrorists to murder Jews? Why do we allow Germany and other EU countries to send hundreds of millions of Euros for Arab construction in the part of Judea and Samaria that is supposed to be under Israeli civil control? Why have we allowed the Wakf free reign to destroy antiquities on the Temple Mount? Why are Jews still not allowed to pray silently there? And why have leftist cabinet members traveled to Ramallah to meet with Mahmoud Abbas?

Our government is a sharply divided coalition which includes an anti-Zionist, Islamist Arab party as well as one that represents the extreme Left. Although the majority of Israelis hold right-of-center ideologies, the right is split over the personality of Binyamin Netanyahu, and there is no popular figure for it to coalesce around.

But the loss of vitality is not only political, it is physical and spiritual. Today, Israelis are fat, with 26% of them obese (although not as fat as Americans, at 36%). Virtually all construction workers are Arabs. Agricultural workers are Thai, Filipino, or Arab; the sunburned kibbutzniks of the early years, who also comprised most of the IDF’s special units, are long gone. Today about 12% of Israel’s population are Haredim, who are in poor physical condition and don’t serve in the army. The word “Zionism” is most commonly used ironically. In the days of Ben Gurion and Rabin, the Zionist Left was well-represented in the fighting units of the IDF. Today’s post-Zionist Left, which dominates our media, academic, and legal arenas, often advises young people to avoid the draft.

Israeli Arabs hold the Jewish state in contempt. In a recent incident several Israeli policemen were beaten by members of a private Arab security company. During the riots (which many called “pogroms”) in mixed Arab/Jewish towns that took place in May during the most recent conflict in Gaza, Jewish homes and businesses were burned, Jews were beaten and even murdered. The police were unable to control the Arabs, and in many cases were nowhere to be found. The foreign and left-leaning Israeli media focused on a small number of Jews that responded violently, and presented the events as “Jewish-Arab clashes.” They were not. They were anti-Jewish riots.

Is there any wonder why Arabs, both in the territories and among our citizens, believe that our days as rulers of this land are numbered?

Hamas and the Palestinian Authority have been preparing their people for conflict since their establishment. Their educational, cultural, and religious systems all send the same message of grievance and loss of honor, as well as vicious antisemitic hatred. The number of young Palestinian Arabs who are prepared to risk death or imprisonment to murder Jews at random is a testament to their success. “Palestinian refugees” in several countries receive similar messages from UNRWA schools.

Israeli Arabs do not receive similar indoctrination, but virtually all of them share a sense of grievance and dispossession that alienates them from the state. As the May riots showed, many of them are prepared to act violently on behalf of their beliefs, even when the country is only involved in a minor military confrontation. What could happen in a regional war?

In the case of simultaneous massive rocket attacks, invasions, and insurrection, IDF ground forces and police would have to protect the Jewish population as well as fight our enemies. But some doubt that they are prepared even for their traditional task of repelling enemy armies. The former IDF ombudsman, Maj. Gen. Yitzhak Brick, produced a report in 2018 that was highly critical of ground force preparedness and capabilities. IDF officials dispute his charges, but the controversy continues.

Israel is a small country. The scenario in which she could be overwhelmed is not impossible, even by technologically inferior enemies. There are plenty of examples in which powerful Western armies have been defeated by determined third-world opponents. And they are determined, while we are conflicted.

Throughout history, there are examples of conflicts between cultures over a particular land. One side always wins; and through dispersal, murder, slavery, absorption, or all of these, the other one disappears. In this case, Hamas has explicitly expressed the will of the regional Arab Muslim culture to displace the Israeli Jewish one. This will is not likely to be dissipated by concessions on the part of the Jewish culture. Such concessions only increase the contempt in which it is held.

The struggle between cultures for Eretz Yisrael has been going on since roughly the beginning of the 20th century. The Arabs have always understood its elemental nature, but many Jews have believed that the conflict can be “solved” so that the cultures can coexist. That would be like “solving” the geological phenomenon of tectonic flow. The struggle will continue until one of the cultures disappears from the land, possibly in a final military confrontation as Yahya Sinwar hopes.

The Arabs have a vision and have never stopped aggressively fighting for it. The Jews, on the other hand, seem to have lost theirs – it was called “Zionism” – because, in part, they do not recognize the struggle for what it is: a zero-sum conflict over every inch of our homeland. They do not understand that it will not be resolved in the UN or Washington or Brussels. It will be decided here, on the land, in Judea, Samaria, the Jordan Valley, Gaza, Tel Aviv, on the Temple Mount, in Sheik Jarrah, Khan al-Ahmar, the Galil, the Negev, Lod, Acco, Yafo, and everywhere else Jews and Arabs face each other over the question “whose land is it?”

Military power is necessary, but not sufficient, for victory in this struggle. First we need to wake up and see it for what it is, in all its savagery; and then we need to start fighting to win, at every point of contact. Our enemies already are.

Abu Yehuda

[son-of-solomon]

...the major states [owe] their existence to conquest. The conquering peoples established themselves, legally and economically, as the privileged class of the conquered country. They seized for themselves a monopoly of the land ownership and appointed a priesthood from among their own ranks. The priests, in control of education, made the class division of society into a permanent institution and created a system of values by which the people were thenceforth, to a large extent unconsciously, guided in their social behavior... The consequence is that the representatives of the people do not in fact sufficiently protect the interests of the underprivileged sections of the population.

Albert Einstein, Why Socialism?