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Comment by fnimick

2 years ago

> The assumption that Israel can only exist as an ethnostate is itself a political assertion - it's the hallmark of right-wing Zionism.

I had a discussion at length on this with some very historically learned people (far more than me) shortly after the attack, with the context of Biden's response.

The underlying cultural memory is that of the Holocaust, and of thousands of years of oppression and pogroms before, where nobody would ever help the Jewish people if they were in danger. Thus the belief that the second the Jewish people became a political minority in Israel, they would be immediately and inevitably subject to ethnic cleansing and persecution by the government. Jewish supremacy is viewed as the only way for Jews to be safe in a world full of people who either hate them or don't care enough to help.

This explains Biden's "bear hug" diplomatic approach as well, which as much as it was directed to Netanyahu, was actually directed at the Israeli population (and he is now much more popular than Netanyahu is, from approval polling). The only way to defuse the situation long-term is to convince the Jewish people that if they accept peaceful co-existence without enforced ethnic supremacy and apartheid; and the only way to do that is to convince them that if they are threatened, that they will not be left to die alone as they feel they have been so many times before.

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fnimick

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chimeracoder  2 years ago

> The underlying cultural memory is that of the Holocaust, and of thousands of years of oppression and pogroms before, where nobody would ever help the Jewish people if they were in danger. Thus the belief that the second the Jewish people became a political minority in Israel, they would be immediately and inevitably subject to ethnic cleansing and persecution by the government. Jewish supremacy is viewed as the only way for Jews to be safe in a world full of people who either hate them or don't care enough to help.

You're describing the reason that some Jews say they support the creation of an ethnostate. That's still an ethnostate, and treating Israel as synonymous with a Jewish ethnostate is the defining right-wing characteristic of Zionism.

It's important to note that what you're describing is not representative of the general opinion of Jews, either globally or in Israel. Many Jewish Holocaust survivors and their descendants oppose the creation of an ethnostate through ethnic cleansing.

  • Natsu  2 years ago

    It's weird to describe Israel as an "ethnostate" when it has a large population of Israeli Arabs who live there peacefully that nobody is trying to get rid of. If Palestine wants to live in peace, they can just stop attacking, yet all we seem to hear are calls for Israel to stop resisting.

    And it's odd to worry about what's "right wing" while Hamas wants the creation of a new caliphate that constantly chants about how they'd like to remove all the Jews from the area between the Jordan river and the Mediterranean sea. mirroring the ethnic cleansing done by many nearby Islamic states in the recent past.

    But it is true that the average Israeli does not want to ethnically cleanse anyone, because if they did want that, Israel could have simply destroyed all of Palestine a long time ago.