“Independence movements throughout history have legitimacy - or at least are not to be condemned - except for Jews.”

Most states were not formed out of independence movements. With the exception of Ethiopia and South Sudan, all modern African states were formed by colonialism, cutting across indigenous cultural and linguistic groupings. All Central and South American states emerged from colonialism and its overthrow. South and Southeast Asia, the same.

Most European and East Asian states emerged from feudal and imperial regimes, many of which were polyglot territories unified under absolutist power. Very few territorial states emerged out of indigenous independence movements (the USA being the best, albeit perverted, example).

The idea, and historical pursuit, of independence based on some shared ethnic identity is a state legitimation project in which the goal is claiming the right to rule a territory based on some putative shared identity. France is for the French, England for the English, etc. These ethnonationist movements were problematic from the start, and continue to be problematic today as we can see them manifest their fascist tendencies across the world, including the USA. They are problematic because they establish rights of citizenship within a state on the basis of some ethnic or shared linguistic and cultural history, excluding or minoritizing those who don’t belong.

This racist ideology is at the heart of the anti immigrant frenzy we see across the globe today. It also underpins the genocidal policies in Myanmar, Israel, Serbia and Bosnia-Herzegovina, and Rwanda in recent decades.

Israel was founded on an original sin, and the populations of those territories continue to be condemned by that sin. Zionism pursues the perfection of that sin in an ever shifting quest for the perfect alignment of ethnic identity and territoriality as part of its ongoing state project. As a Jewish state, non-Jewish indigenous inhabitants can never be truly assimilated as citizens of that state, hence the Zionist struggle to expel and eliminate the other. If the state of Israel could get Christian and Muslim semites of the region to bend the knee and accept their suzerainty, as the Ottomans did with Christians and Jews, the State of Israel might well exist as a polyglot Jewish state, but the time of empire has passed. This is the modern world and non-Jews in the shifting borders of the Jewish state must go the way of the Rohingya.

Zionism isn’t entirely to blame for this state of affairs, as it was born out of the perverted nationalisms of 19th and 20th century Europe. All over the world we are seeing the gross injustices and violence that emerge when a state defines citizenship and its rights on the basis of culture and ethnicity rather than residency.

The end to this madness is found in the tiny peace movement in Israel where people—Jews and Muslims—are coming to realize that the only way out is a state that recognizes the right of all people to exist and participate equally in its governance.