This is something I've wondered about but never really seen an official leftist position on, and it's gotten a lot more relevant with the ongoing Palestinian uprising. Also curious if there is any good reading out there on this subject.

  • Frank [he/him, he/him]
    ·
    1 year ago

    The leftist position is don't do settler colonialism

    the backup leftist position is don't be such a murderous fuck that reconciliation becomes impossible.

    There's no resolution to this problem that's going to let you sleep at night. All the options now are different kinds of nightmares. The time for some kind of peaceful outcome was almost a century ago when the small factions calling for a secular state made up of Jews, Arabs, and Christians in the former Mandate of Palestine were wiped out to keep them from getting in the way of the Zionist project.

    Also; There are lots of Jewish Israelis who don't have a "mother country" to go back to. When the Europeans declared the state of Israel many of the arab kingdoms forcibly dispossessed and exiled Jews living in their borders, sending hundreds of thousands of refugees to Israels. shore. The predominately European and Ashkenazi Israelis didn't want them, viewed them as religiously and ethnically inferior with all the vitriol you'd expect from European colonizers. Those people don't have dual citizenships and if they went anywhere it would be as refugees. Many of them were completely impoverished and decades later their descendants their descendents make up a lot of the Hasidic demographic that is often poor and often vehemently religious Zionist, which is in turn partially due to a policy on the part of the still mostly European and Ashkenazi political class placing them in settlements on the frontier as a buffer between Palestine and Israel proper.

    Shit's fucked. And it's important to realize that none of this was fait acompli. hard right-wing and fascist Zionists worked very, very hard and murdered a shocking number of people to make sure that peace was impossible. They killed other Jews, both zionist and non-zionists, especially Leftist jews. They killed secular Palestinian leaders, leftist Palestinian leaders. They killed or otherwise neutralized all kinds of people, factions, and movements who could have moved things towards some kind of detente or peaceful resolution. Their goal has been domination and a Zionist ethnostate for a long, long, long time.

    None of this just happened. We arrived at this extreme situation because right wing ethnonationalists worked very hard to make sure no other outcome was possible. Now many people will suffer horribly because all other avenues have been closed off.

    Show

    • KittyBobo [he/him, comrade/them]
      ·
      1 year ago

      It's going to be really funny if all the foaming at the mouth pro-Israel libs change their tune once Israeli refugees start flooding their countries.

      • zifnab25 [he/him, any]
        ·
        1 year ago

        The original conceit of Israel was as a release valve for antisemitic countries to deport their Jewish diaspora. I guarantee you that the UK and France and Germany and the rest of Eastern Europe (and big chunks of the US, for that matter) aren't going to want to take them back.

        But also, a bunch of these people - Netanyahu included - are dual citizens anyway, so its less of an issue for the folks with the financial privilege to depart. What's going to be more problematic are the folks who got dragged out to Israel by their parents and left in lurch when the political forces propping the region up begin to fall apart.

        But then the answer for the Israelis is no different than the answer for every other large economically stratified community facing a collapse in foreign subsidies and cheap foreign labor.

        • Socialism

        • Barbarism

        Choose wisely.

    • BeamBrain [he/him]
      ·
      1 year ago

      their descendents make up a lot of the Hasidic demographic that is often poor and often vehemently religious Zionist, which is in turn partially due to a policy on the part of the still mostly European and Ashkenazi political class placing them in settlements on the frontier as a buffer between Palestine and Israel proper.

      Makes it all the more infuriating that Zionists accuse anyone who opposes them of antisemitism. It doesn't get much more antisemitic than using Jews as ablative armor for your genocidal settler colonial project.

      • Frank [he/him, he/him]
        ·
        1 year ago

        Yeah. That and the 'all Jews and Zionists, all Zionists are Jews" thing are prime bullshit. Senior politicians in Israel, including Bibi, have been happy to work with foreign fascist organizations to essentially force the hand of Jewish people by making wherever they live so dangerous that Israel starts to seem attractive by comparison. Reading up on how Mizrahi and Beta Israel Jews were and are treated by the Israeli state is really illuminating as to what Zionism really is as an ideology.

        • Wertheimer [any]
          ·
          1 year ago

          In case anyone doesn't know:

          Israel has admitted for the first time that it has been giving Ethiopian Jewish immigrants birth-control injections, often without their knowledge or consent.

          The government had previously denied the practice but the Israeli Health Ministry’s director-general has now ordered gynaecologists to stop administering the drugs. According a report in Haaretz, suspicions were first raised by an investigative journalist, Gal Gabbay, who interviewed more than 30 women from Ethiopia in an attempt to discover why birth rates in the community had fallen dramatically.

          One of the Ethiopian women who was interviewed is quoted as saying: “They [medical staff] told us they are inoculations. We took it every three months. We said we didn’t want to.” It is alleged that some of the women were forced or coerced to take the drug while in transit camps in Ethiopia.

          https://archive.ph/K0y5i

          • NephewAlphaBravo [he/him]
            ·
            1 year ago

            Zionism had to effect a dual colonialism: it had to seize, with violence, the land of Palestine, while also seizing the Jewish diaspora.

            Never heard it put like that before, damn.