> The leadership and foot soldiers of the early Zionist project in Palestine (1900s), were not suffering from the trauma of the Holocaust (it was decades before) and did not suffer from any meaningful antisemitism
You're conveniently ignoring the Eastern European pogroms during the late 19th and especially early 20th century. Jewish immigration, in both number and origin, to Palestine not-so-coincidentally tracks the severity of the pogroms. And actually, during this time many times more Jews immigrated to New York than to Palestine. Immigration to Palestine didn't explode until the rise of Nazi anti-semitism.
Collective punishment is wrong. Full stop. Global civil society largely internalized this ethic, after millennia of accepting collective punishment as legitimate, in large part because of the experience of Jews in Europe. It's ridiculous to deny the history of how this norm came about no less than it is to deny that collective punishment has become the facial justification for Israel's war in Gaza.
You're conveniently imposing your misreading on that quote since it's clearly talking about the experiences of _those Zionists living in Palestine_ around 1900.
David Ben-Gurion was the founder of Israel and its first Prime Minister and he confirms that: "They are nearly all good-hearted, and are easily befriended. One might say that they are like big children." David Ben-Gurion in Igrot (Letters), Tel Aviv: Am Oved and Tel Aviv University, Vol. I, 1971
And how come those pogroms didn't make those Zionist-Jews more empathetic to suffering and persecution? Instead they had the exact same racist and supremacist attitudes as the europeans they were complaining about.
"The British told us that there are some hundred thousand negroes [kushim in Hebrew] and for those there is no value." - Weizmann, quoted by Arthur Ruppin in: Yosef Heller, Bama'avak Lamedinah , Jerusalem, 1984, p.140.
> The leadership and foot soldiers of the early Zionist project in Palestine (1900s), were not suffering from the trauma of the Holocaust (it was decades before) and did not suffer from any meaningful antisemitism
Ben-Gurion himself was witness to pogroms in Poland. Does one need to be murdered or violently attacked to "suffer antisemitism"?
Every group is capable of and, in fact, exhibits racist attitudes. Hannah Arendt observed and commented on the racial hierarchy among Jewish Israel's when attending the Eichmann trial, with the European immigrants having higher socio-economic status than the native, darker-skinned Jewish population. Jews are no different than any other group, ethnic or otherwise.
And, FWIW, Jews are hardly the only ethnic or religious (or mixed ethnic-religious) group which has maintained a distinct identity across millennia and within larger populations, or found itself displaced and then displacing others. In fact, the Middle East has many such groups. The insistence on distinguishing and rationalizing Jews as being peculiar in this and similar regards is a distinctively European cultural obsession, though many regions around the world have their own "Jews" that play this perpetual "other" cultural role.
Again, collective punishment is wrong[1]. Full stop. There's no need to build a complex, racist, colonial narrative as a way to characterize Jews, Israelis, or Zionists as the bad guy in the unfolding Gaza crisis. There's zero need to make recourse to centuries of history to deduce what's wrong with Gaza or even how it came about. The left's oppressor-oppressed modality perpetuates prejudiced, reductive, racist thinking no less than other modes of reducing people to caricatures, and in the end just an excuse to malign or elevate people on a whim. Zionists emigrating from Europe to Palestine to flee persecution... bad. Salvadorians and other populations chain migrating to the US to flee persecution or economic hardship... good. But these assessments can and will flip on a dime.
[1] At least in the modern Westernized ethos, though it seems this judgment re the legitimacy of collective punishment or collective blame is sadly, demonstrably precarious.
>Ben-Gurion himself was witness to pogroms in Poland. Does one need to be murdered or violently attacked to "suffer antisemitism"?
Poor old Ben-Gurion, he "suffered so much from antisemitism" in europe that it turned him into a bloodthirsty racist colonialist who had to engage in a bit of ethnic-cleansing and mass-murder of kushim as therapeutic treatment.
>And, FWIW, Jews are hardly the only ethnic or religious (or mixed ethnic-religious) group which has maintained a distinct identity across millennia and within larger populations, or found itself displaced and then displacing others. In fact, the Middle East has many such groups. The insistence on distinguishing and rationalizing Jews as being peculiar in this and similar regards is a distinctively European cultural obsession,
That's not a "European cultural obsession", it's literally just Jewish Law (Halakha). It's also what Zionist-Jews themselves relentlessly weaponize as myth making tool to justify their occupation of Palestine and to make themselves immune to any criticism, even while committing Genocide.
>Jews are no different than any other group, ethnic or otherwise.
Jews would disagree with you on this, their whole claim to the land and justification for colonization and occupation of Palestine rests on that notion of being different, being the "chosen people" which perfectly aligns with the supremacist zionist ideology which had no qualms about ethnically-cleansing Palestine from those they classified as inferior kushim. ("The British told us that there are some hundred thousand negroes [kushim in Hebrew] and for those there is no value." - Weizmann, quoted by Arthur Ruppin in: Yosef Heller, Bama'avak Lamedinah , Jerusalem, 1984, p.140.)
>There's no need to build a complex, racist, colonial narrative as a way to characterize Jews, Israelis, or Zionists as the bad guy in the unfolding Gaza crisis.
"There's no need to build a complex, racist, colonial narrative as a way to characterize Aryans, Germans, or Nazis as the bad guy in the unfolding Dachau crisis."
>The left's oppressor-oppressed modality perpetuates prejudiced, reductive, racist thinking no less than other modes of reducing people to caricatures, and in the end just an excuse to malign or elevate people on a whim. Zionists emigrating from Europe to Palestine to flee persecution... bad.
"The left's oppressor-oppressed modality perpetuates prejudiced, reductive, racist thinking no less than other modes of reducing people to caricatures, and in the end just an excuse to malign or elevate people on a whim. Nazis emigrating from Europe to Poland to flee persecution... bad."
You're conveniently ignoring the Eastern European pogroms during the late 19th and especially early 20th century. Jewish immigration, in both number and origin, to Palestine not-so-coincidentally tracks the severity of the pogroms. And actually, during this time many times more Jews immigrated to New York than to Palestine. Immigration to Palestine didn't explode until the rise of Nazi anti-semitism.
Collective punishment is wrong. Full stop. Global civil society largely internalized this ethic, after millennia of accepting collective punishment as legitimate, in large part because of the experience of Jews in Europe. It's ridiculous to deny the history of how this norm came about no less than it is to deny that collective punishment has become the facial justification for Israel's war in Gaza.