No. of Recommendations: 2
So what? If the Palestinians are allowed to advocate for having a state of their own - and indeed every other people of the world - why not the Jews? If you want to say that things like countries shouldn't exist for anyone, that would be an interesting conversation to have. But saying that only the Jews are not permitted to advocate for an ethnically and culturally defined nationhood, while all other ethnically and culturally cohesive groups are permitted to do so, is not a legitimate position to take.
I never said any of that. What I am saying is that ethnically pure states are a myth, the pursuit of which lead to the Holocaust and continues to lead to genocide where ever the pursuit of a single "nation" state happens. Italy is not a country built around a people with a common history and language. This is a myth. It is a polyglot society comprised of culturally and linguistically distinct peoples forced together in a movement of national unification (poor word, it should really be national creation). In that process some dialects were elevated, others lost. Some regions won power, others lost. And even today there are national political struggles over who is Italian and who is not.
The problem here is not me, it is you. You cling to a unitary ethnic and cultural definition of the state that necessarily excludes some of the indigenous people of the territory. That ethnic group exercising control over the state does so in the name of only one part of the indigenous population of that territory, and since the definition of statehood excludes those not included in the cultural definition of citizenship, the state knows not what to do with those who are not citizens. Some within the state have an answer, which we are seeing unfold in Gaza and the West Bank. Recognizing this does not deny Jews the right to political representation in a state, although the Israeli state does deny political representation to the "Arabs" who live within its political jurisdiction (and I include all territories under Israeli military authority here). The problem of Zionism is that its definition of the state, and citizenship within the state (it is a Jewish state after all), does not permit a resolution to the "indigenous but not Jewish" question. Without an answer to that question, extremist Zionism will seek solutions that eliminate the cause of the question: i.e., non-Jewish indigenous people. This is the crux of the genocidal policies currently pursued by the Israeli state.
Anti-Zionism is anti-semitism. Why are the Jews, among all the peoples of the world, not allowed to want and advocate for having a country of their own?
This is a ridiculous, but effective, conflation. Point to a country where only one narrowly defined religious and/or ethnic community exists while denying indigenous people who do not belong to that narrowly defined group citizenship rights in the territory that this ethno-state effectively governs? This is, after all, what you are arguing for here. Do political rights only come through the denial of those rights to others, because that seems to be you claim when you are saying that anti-Zionism is anti-semitism. Do you mean to argue that every Jew is a zionist, by definition, and that any opposition to the current Zionist project of pursuing a greater Israel is an attack on all Jews? If so, what is the distinction between Judaism and Zionism?
Regardless of your answer to my questions, you still have no answer for what is to be done about the Israeli state policies of genocide in Gaza and ethnic cleansing in the West Bank. By the way, many Jews in Israel are opposed to these extreme Zionist policies. Are they antisemitic?
