> > Look, I choose to discount the Zionist claim to some sort of > > incontrivertable, inalienable deed to a patch of dirt in Eurasia as so > > much > > > myth and absurdly ancient history. > > Right, when something is inconvenient, simply posit that it doesn't exist > or isn't important. Every year for about 1900 years, it was "Next year in > Jerusalem. I am shocked that someone with your training dismisses > something that is so important to defining a people. Especially, after > they had a significant fraction of their worldwide number wiped out.
I am not positing that the historically based myth of a Jewish homeland in Palestine is unimportant to Jews. However, you have to be Jewish to believe or care about that myth. Americans had a myth of European civilization and superiority. In technical terms they were right. Did that justify genocide on Indians, enslavement and apartheid policies against Africans and their descendants, brutal anti-insurgency campaigns in the Philipenes, and racist immigration policies? Emicly the Zionist myth is reality for Zionist Jews and Christians. Etically it is a myth pressed into rhetorical propagandistic service to the Zionist program. > BTW, every bit of information that I received, including information from > Palistinian sources indicated that the Jewish population in the territories > that were granted to them by the UN in 1948 was larger than the Arab > population in that particular area. That is true. The Zionist program dates to roughly 1880. Prior to 1880 the sum of the indigenous Jewish and population of Jewish pilgrims who took up residence in Ottoman Palestine is estimated to be around 10% of a total population that was a fraction of what it is today. Most of these resided in Jerusalem. (This is from memory. I could be wrong.) After 1880, the Jewish population of Europe became more politicized and the dislocation and stress of modernization made Judeophobia much more pronounced, particularly in Central and Eastern Europe. Jews emigrated to Switzerland, Western Europe, Australia, North and South America, and Palestine. During the British Mandate Jewish immigration to Zionist colonies increased dramatically, resulting in constant pressure by the Palestinians to restrict Jewish immigration. By 1948 Jews were in the majority in the areas designated in the UN plan. > > The Zionists had and have a program that required colonizing territory at > > the > > > expense of a relatively strong and sophisticated indigenous Arab people. > > These sorts of colonial projects have been very successful when the > > colonizers resorted to genocide, ethnic cleansing, ethnocide by forced > > assimilation, or ethnic apartheid. > Can you give another example of colonialists where the people have defined > themselves by the territory that they were colonializing for even 100 years > prior to settlement? I fail to see *why* this is eticly relevant except as a rhetorical tool. However, no I know of no *perfect* parallels. However, history is not physics. Initial conditions are never the same, and even if they were events would still not play out identically in every detail. There would be parallels in the reconquest of Iberia, Sardinia or Sicily. In effect the Greeks and Slavs had to do the same through processes of ethnic (and religious) cleansing during their wars of national liberation from the Ottoman and Austo-Hungarian empires. However, this would have been limited to cleaning minority pockets rather than actually colonizing from scratch as in the case of the Zionist colonization of Palestine. However, the Crusaders did have an ancient mandate to colonize the Levant. (This is an uncomfortably close parallel). Even the early Muslim conquest of Mecca is somewhat parallel to the Zionist program. There are also parallels to the American doctrine of manifest destiny and the Monroe-Roosevelt doctrines of Hemispheric hegemony. I hardly see the Zionist program as a terribly unique or particularly righteous historical phenomenon. I do, however, largely support the Zionist project. However, this is out of alliance, interest, and Real Politik and reason, not out of irrational patriotism or religious investment in myth or superstition.
