I know Zionism as the idea that Jewish people have the right to self-determination.
Do you:
1 - Think that it is something different?
2 - Think that it is, but Jewish people specifically do not have it? (I believe this is racist)
3 - Think that no people have it?
4 - Something else?
If you think that Jewish people have it but just not in Palestine, where in the world do you think they should have had it?
You're wrong on the definition of zionism.
Zionism is a European nationalist movement that uses the assumption there is a consensual concept of "homogeneous jewish people" who have the right to self-determination to justify Palestine's colonization.
Anti-zionism is being against the colonization of Palestine and being against nationalism and supremacism.
Anti-semitism is hating someone because of the are jew.
So are the vast majority of Israelis, coming from Arab countries, not Zionist? What is your connection with the Zionist movement that let's you define it?
When is a migration of people to a land isn't colonization, in your book?
> So are the vast majority of Israelis, coming from Arab countries, not Zionist?
Yes, they are. Being a European movement doesn't mean non-european cannot be zionist.
Fascism is also a European movement as it emerged in Italy.
> When is a migration of people to a land isn't colonization
When there are no settlements, no oppression of indigenous people, no land exploitation, no discrimination law made by the colonizer.
It's not "in my book", it's in every books not made by a colonizer.
If self-determination means an enthnostate then no people has that right. If every ethnic group had its own state in which it was guaranteed supremacy, the world would be a complete mess. It doesn't work. We are seeing in Israel/Palestine a thoroughly worked out example of why it doesn't work, and what the consequences are when you try to make it work.
I don't see how Israel/Palestine is any kind of evidence that ethnostates can't work. There are Palestinians that have been peacefully living in Israel just fine for decades. There are unique historical reasons why there's so much conflict in this region.
> Palestinians that have been peacefully living in Israel just fine for decades.
when you write something like this ask yourself if were Palestinian if you would be happy if you son or daughter said they are moving to Israel to live there. if you answer Yes, we good. but of course no way you’d ever say yes…
How is ethnicity related? Judaism isn't an ethnicity, and there are Jews in Israel from Poland, from Ethiopia and from India. In terms of ethnicity, Israel is probably one of the most diverse places on Earth.
Judaism is a religion, but Jewish identity encompasses ethnicity.
And Judaism is a religion founded on the idea of a "chosen people" formed from the "seed of Israel" after all. And the Tanakh says this chosen people is entitled to the Palestine region. So we can easily see how this is a mythos made of an ethnostate, when interpreted through an extremist (Zionist) lens.
The Jewish people already loving in Palestine had a right to live there.
The problem is when you try to forcefully displace an entire civilian population to make way for a colonial movement.
In the same way I, as a Finn, would not have the right to take over any region in the Urals and kick out the people who live there, the Zionists had no right to do just that in Palestine since over a hundred years ago.
No one is arguing in support of displacing a population. However, it seems like you believe that everyone should just stay where there are, and no population should ever migrate to any place. That's both naive and simply was never the case in the history of human kind. People migrate, for thousands or reasons, and almost no one leaving on a land on this planet have lived there since the beginning of times.
A piece of land isn't yours because you were born there or your grandpa did. There's one Earth in we need to share it. No one can deny the connection of Jews to the land of Israel, in a same way that no one can deny the connection of Palestinians to the same place. The Palestinians Arab don't need to move back to the Arab Pennisula, where they came from, and the Israelis don't need to move back to Poland, Yemen, Russia, Morocco, you name it. "The times they are a-changin'".
Zionism is the support of the Israeli colonial project. Jewish people have a right to self-determination regardless of Israel's existence; Israel's existence does not determine the right of self-determination for all jews. As such, the two things are not the same.
Zionism, then, is just support for a specific state (Israel), and support or lack or support for a state given its actions (colonial oppression) is not bigotry. Disliking a genocidal ethnostate does not influence in any way how you feel about the Jewish people as an ethnic and religious group. As such, anti-zionism and anti-semitism are not the same.
Jews don’t have a right to an ethnostate. No one does. Jews have a right to live within any country in the world, but not run an apartheid government or commit genocide.
> I know Zionism as the idea that Jewish people have the right to self-determination.
I think the notion that any group has rights is problematic at best. Individuals have rights, not groups. Individuals can act collectively as a group, but the idea that that somehow imbues the group with some sort of right seems strange or confused to say the least.
> I think the notion that any group has rights is problematic at best. Individuals have rights, not groups. Individuals can act collectively as a group, but the idea that that somehow imbues the group with some sort of right seems strange or confused to say the least.
This matches the "individuality thesis" [1] (often debated among philosophers).
For those who haven't explored the territory, I recommend the journey. There is no rush to figure it out. I suggest trying out various viewpoints and taking your time with it: maybe even remaining a bit uncertain for your entire life!
- Uncertainty often takes an unfair beating. Uncertainty is preferable to confused or premature certainty. I would actually go further and say there is deep virtue in uncertainty -- there is an openness there. Absolute certainty closes doors; in a way it closes its eyes to new experience.
- There is value in being uncertain about one's values! For individuals, locking in one's ethics can be unwise. [2] For cultures, value lock-in can be stifling or even oppressive. For AI, value lock-in is sometimes called incorrigibility and can be problematic or worse. Humans have a tendency to grow and change, all the way down to our value systems.
Anyhow, I digress. Here are some relevant selections from Wikipedia's entry on Will Kymlicka:
> In Multicultural Citizenship (1995), Kymlicka argues that group-specific rights are consistent with liberalism, and are particularly appropriate, if not outright demanded, in certain situations.
> For Kymlicka, the standard liberal criticism, which states that group rights are problematic because they often treat individuals as mere carriers of group identities, rather than autonomous social agents, is overstated or oversimplified. The actual problem of minorities and how they should be viewed in liberal democracies is much more complex. There is a distinction between good group rights, bad group rights, and intolerable group rights.
[2]: I learned this from What We Owe The Future by William MacAskill. Did he borrow it from someone else? Maybe Derek Parfit? I'll need to research more.
Counter question, by that logic, what about the right to self-determination of the Palestinian people? Or the people of Lebanon or Syria for that matter?
