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0 = Low
10 = High
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Given that no October 7th survivors have claimed to have been raped, including those who were kidnapped, I wonder if you could tell me why that is your framing of the entirety of why anyone might criticize zionism, which is an expolicitly colonial ideology with many decades of history that might be praised or criticized for a myriad of reasons.
@Panfilo Zionism in 2024 is completely different than Zionism in 1930, and is not 'explicitly colonial' anymore than someone who supports the existence of the United States is explicitly colonial.
Wikipedia: "Following the establishment of the modern state of Israel, Zionism became an ideology that supports the development and protection of the State of Israel as a Jewish state."
In so many discussions, people pretend that Zionism means something like "supports annexing the entire West Bank" which is just a completely laughable strawman.
@SemioticRivalry 100 years after the founding of the United States, this country was still engaged with the settlement, expulsion, and reduction of native land and people. Most of the criticisms of colonial projects were still true of America in 1876 (or more like 1852 to be pedantic), and some are still true of it today (checkerboard zoning, Samoan non-citizenship, reservation watershed pollution, many such cases).
I agree with you that criticizing Israel today is in some ways like criticizing the US in 1852. The hardcore settler far right in Israel may be a minority, but they're getting their way gradually over time. The checkpoints and ghettos are apartheid. A two-state solution was down to 30-something percent popularity before October 7th, and full Palestinian enfranchisement is categorically rejected across most of Israel. This combination of circumstances makes zionism in 2024 still much more like a colonial segregation project than anyone should be comfortable with.
@Panfilo Again, I don't know what your understanding is of the term 'zionist', but it is entirely possible to be critical of specific actions by the Israeli government and to still think that Israel should exist- this is the view of most people in Israel.
@Panfilo "Zionism/Zionist" is the fashionable way to berate "jews" while trying to avoid the charge of antisemitism. Everyone knows what it means. It means what it has always meant.
@tbird I meant the number scale weโre voting on. Zionism is a distinct set of political stances, not an inherent element of Jewishness.
@tbird Professional polls include prompting as to what kind of positive or negative scale they are portraying even when the directionality of the scale can be easily inferred.
@Panfilo right. I am sure some of the people who voted 0 mean "0, my opinion of jews is overwhelmingly positive".
@KeenenWatts if someone went around saying "I don't hate black people I just hate African Americans, black people in Africa are fine" I know what conclusion I'd have about him. I'm gonna draw similar conclusions here.
@ShakedKoplewitz are you really trying to say that being an African American is the same thing as being a Zionist?
@V4D0NTH8 I'm saying that implausible paper-thin excuses for blatant racism are dumb. You can't get off of hate speech on a technicality.
@ShakedKoplewitz If someone criticizes the Boers qua apartheid, is it your understanding that they necessarily have thinly veiled hatred for all Dutch/British people, or all Europeans generally?
@ShakedKoplewitz but I thought zionist is a political ideology that you can adopt or discard, Independent of your race (so anyone can be a zionist), whereas being African American is something you Are or aren't and have no control over so It's not at all the same thing.
@V4D0NTH8 @Panfilo all this hair-splitting misses the point. The context and timing of these zionism/jewishness discussions makes clear what people are really talking about and what they really think.
Say anything as a jew that someone else doesn't like and you immediately get labelled a zionist -- then all slander is permitted. It is a slur at this point, and equivalent to good old jew-bashing, with even the same tropes.
@tbird If someone calls you a zionist in response to a non-Israel-related comment, I agree with you, that's antisemitic. Context matters, and it can give a word fucked up implications. But a slur is a word that brings that negative context with it, and there are situations where the term has critical meaning when correctly, literally used.
For example, the people dreaming of beach front property in an ethnically cleansed Gaza see themselves as zionists. If I said "I abhor this zionist settler project" in response, I'm not bringing their jewishness into it. Rather, the geopolitical history and their own self-identification are what brings the zionist label into the conversation.
@Panfilo and I would have no problem with your example if that was really how that word is being thrown around. You're still being deliberatrly daft about the current situation and the current state of the discourse. The term zionist has been hijacked. Use the z-word in place of the j-word, and you can say any antissemitic thing you want. It's not good-faith criticism of zionism.
Be well.
@tbird There is nothing we can do about how society thinks semantically, we should just try to communicate in the most socially comprehensive way possible, by referring to the appropriate definitions of words when we use them. Especially when engaging with people who have different opinions.
@V4D0NTH8 that doesn't have anything to do with what I said. When pro-Palestinian activists curse the "zionists" at an American university campus, we know they mean jews. Nothing to do with people using words incorrectly. It is deliberate. They mean "the jews".
@tbird I just want to check, do you believe that antizionist jews are also trying to use a dogwhistle for all jews? Like, jews who celebrate the high holy days and seem otherwise proud of their culture, but specifically disagree with or actively protest the Israeli state and zionism.
@Panfilo no. But I would bet anything that they are a very small minority among the people going on about zionism, and among the 27 people who voted 0 above. The rest either mean "jew" or they ascribe all of their paranoid bigotry against jews to "zionists". Same difference. It became the socially acceptable way to say the same conspiratorial, paranoid, ridiculous things people have always said about jews.
@Panfilo the antizionists aren't saying "Israel should withdraw WB settlements but shouldn't be brutally murdered", that's the Scott Aaronson (pro Zionist) position. They're saying ",river to the sea" and "go intifada" and "October 7 was fine actually". They're brutal monsters, not people with reasonable concerns (those people do exist - they're just well within the Zionist overton window).
@V4D0NTH8 Zionism is pretty fluid but the general definition taken to mean "Jews should be allowed to safely exist in Israel". So the default interpretation of "antizionist" is "killing Israeli Jews is fine actually". That's not exactly the same thing as racism in itself but it's (a) still horrible and (b) clearly motivated by antisemitism people aren't really trying to hide.
@V4D0NTH8 sure? Heck Arabs who are Israeli citizens can even live safely in Israel. Aside from a few fringe settler attacks (which Israelis are generally against and which Israel's own military works to stop), terrorism only goes one way though.
@V4D0NTH8 if you want a long description of the mainstream left-zionist position, Scott Aaronson wrote a good description. It's well within the Zionist overton window and seems hard to object to