Erdogan's Zionism Comments Particularly Offensive

This doesn't surprise me at all, but, you do realize the majority of Jews in Israel are not Ashkenazi, right?

 

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Zionism developed in Europe. Israel's founders were mostly Ashkenazi. And even today, non Ashkenazi Jews are treated as inferior to Ashkenazi Jews in Israel. This is why you have groups like the Rainbow Coalition.

The majority of Jews in Israel are originally from Europe. Even today, although the majority of Jews born in Israel just recently displaced Jews born in Europe, more than half of immigrating Jews are from Europe.

http://www.cbs.gov.il/reader/shnaton/templ_shnaton_e.html?num_tab=st02_24x&CYear=2011

In all, Zionism is a modern example of colonialism.


Also, TVTropes is not a source.

 

Zionism developed in Europe because that's where they were discriminated against and realized they had an unlikely future in places like Germany and France and Poland. Settlement of the Levant actually pre-dates Zionism as a movement by a decade and a half, the latter being the consequence of the former and not the other way around.

So that's why they built places like Tel Aviv and Rishon L'Zion and the kibbutzim and became Ottoman citizens. But the Ashkenazi elite has been dead since the late 70s, namely because Likud was elected.

It happened two generations ago because Mizrachi Jews emigrated almost in entirety when they were expelled from Arab countries in the 50s, much as Russians did in the 90s and Ethiopians do now. The discrimination was largely due to cultural snobbery towards newcomers who were suddenly here in large numbers and out of sync with cultural norms.

It was Russians and Poles who came first, and Germans a generation later, and they faced the same sort of discrimination. It's a famous comedy skit detailing the whole history, similar to Abbot and Costello's "Who's on First?"

The whole movement was actually inspired by Angela Davis and the Black Panthers before the Rainbow Coalition, but it has always been largely fringe, as most Mizrachi voters tend to be staunchly traditionalist right-wing and make up the majority of Likud supporters.

Likud came to power in the first place because Begin addressed the frustration of Mizrachi immigrants and to this day is still the main party for Mizrachi voters. If anything, Israel's character is more Mizrachi than it is Ashkenazi, both in terms of who wins elections and even it's best known celebrities abroad who aren't Bar Rafaeli.

No. The majority of Jews in Israel were born here. And not all Jews of European origin are Askenazi. Sephardic Jews (Spain, Bulgaria, Turkey, Greece, etc) have customs more similar to Mizrachi Jews and look more like them as well. But besides that, it's hard to count, as many if not MOST Israelis are of mixed parentage. Tables like the one you provided only count the fathers (for some reason).

Most of the girls I've dated have either been mixed or Mizrachi -- because that's the dating pool. No one's parents seemed to mind my big blond, blue-eyed Texan head, except for the daughters of recent immigrants (Russian and Ethiopian) and every single Arab I dated (or tried to date, or nearly had to run for my life, I should say), be they Druze, Bedouin, Palestinian, Christian, Marronite or anything else. I've never dated an ultra-orthodox girl, but I'm sure they are similarly provincial with regards to outsiders.

In my humble opinion Druze girls might be some of the most beautiful women I've ever seen in my life, and their fathers might be the world's scariest and most protective!

The Occupation is in many ways colonialism, and a Palestinian Stae is a quarter of a century overdue, but to say the that Zionism is or was colonialism, is simply untrue. The project was to immigrate legally to the area with land bought and approved by the authorities at the time, which were the Ottomans. That's how the whole enterprise came to be, and even after the British Mandate was over, Ben Gurion's declaration of statehood was widely contested.

Had the Turks and British not been antagonists in WWI, there would have been no State of Israel, but even by then, most of the towns and kibbutzim and moshavim were already settled. Rishon L'Zion was founded in 1882, Tel Aviv in 1909. The State of Israel didn't exist until 1948.

It's user-supplied content, no different than Wikipedia. Neither of which are primary sources, but I'm writing a post on a message board, not an academic paper. It's also a great place to illustrate common misconceptions perpetuated by popular media, like the notion that all Jews are Ashkenazi, which is certainly common in the US.


There is a lot of playing loose with the facts in both Israeli and Palestinian national narratives. It's important to diversify your sources of information to avoid being a useful idiot for someone's propaganda. Equating Zionism with the occupation plays to the hands of both the ultra-right settlers and Israel-bashers and you aren't helping when you let them sell you that.

 

I'd also add that Turkish - Israeli relations are at least as much Erdogan's fault as they are Netanyahu's. I'm not fan of Netanyahu, but he has every right to be pissed off.

His statement was designed to score points with his own kind of dog whistling.

Had he wanted to criticize elements of Israel's internal politics, he would have had a vast array of choices of specific injustices to go with...and he didn't do that.

 

You intentionally want to conflate Judaism with a Jewish state so that you can claim anyone that is against the actions of Israel is against Jews. That's just nonsense.

Zionism is every bit a crime. It's no different from any other religion immigrating en masse and kicking people out to establish a new state. If Scientologists claimed California as a homeland, started kicking out non-Scientologists, claimed Scientologist state independence, and claimed the right to defend themselves we wouldn't stand for it for a second. You've got to be kidding me with this stuff.

 

Agreed. In all, the migrating Jews before the creation of Israel were treated very poorly by their government of origin.

I mentioned that when I quoted Israel's Central Bureau of Statistics (CBS). The Jewish population of Israel is almost completely due to migration, not growth from inhabitants pre-1900. There were approximately 87,000 Jews in Palestine prior to the Balfour declaration in 1917. By 1947 this number swelled to almost 600,000. It's safe to state that although the majority of Israelis are now born in Israel (40% of the population versus 33% who directly emigrated from Europe) the large majority were from Europe.

The CBS most recent data on aliyah by nation shows that 61% of all Jews are originally from Europe. Only 3% of Jews originated from European countries with a Sephardic majority (e.g. Spain, Bulgaria, Greece, etc.)

http://www.cbs.gov.il/reader/shnaton/templ_shnaton_e.html?num_tab=st04_02&CYear=2012

I use colonialism as defined as "the establishment, exploitation, maintenance, acquisition and expansion of colonies in one territory by people from another territory." The Jews who migrated to Israel pushed out an indigenous population who had no representation in the process. The Ottomans did not represent the Palestinians. And systems like the Jewish National Fund deliberately excluded the native Palestinians. Without Zionism, there would be no occupation. Without Zionism there would be no state of Israel.

Wikipedia has sources, whereas TVTropes does not.

Ultimately, my point is that although Israel exists today it is a result of massive migration from a people who had no inherent claim to an already claimed land. In my mind, this is the ultimate basis of the conflict. There is no way a two-state solution will work as both parties claim the land. Palestinians can show generational history, and Israelis believe they are the direct decedents of the Jewish populations who were exiled from their lands millenniums ago. Spiritually their claim is valid, but recent evidence shows there is no genetic basis for this claim.

My thoughts are that despite the violence that Zionism has wrought, the present situation should not be overlooked. Most Israelis were born on their lands and by no means should they be forced to give this up. Similarly, the displaced Palestinians should not give up their right to the land either.

My hope is that in the future Israel and Palestine become one secular, democratic nation with equal rights given to both populations as opposed to this pseudo two state situation with its occupation. Zionism is not compatible with this idea.

 

South Africa is working hard to make their one state solution work, there is no reason why the Israelis and Palestinians couldn't make it work. The world does not need another Pakistan/India

 

The Palestinians are going to ride separate but equal buses....

http://www.haaretz.com/news/national/israel-introduces-palestinian-only-bus-lines-following-complaints-from-jewish-settlers-1.506869

But please don't see this as me criticizing Israel because any criticism of the state of Israel is inherently anti-semtic or something like that....

 

Why do you hate Israel so much?

 

There's one reason: the majority of both people don't want it, and it's not for anyone in the West to force on them.

It's gaining in popularity on the fringes, both from the far-right, who would probably enact a state that truly resembles Apartheid, and at the very least, would not compromise on national flags and symbols and so on, and the far-left that is largely post-nationalist and Marxist in worldview anyway.

Palestinians themselves have developed their own national narrative in the backdrop of the last few hundred years of Ottoman, British, Jordanian/Egyptian and Israeli rule and have every right to realize it. Forming a binational state or some kind of federated republic would be considered a surrender of this aspiration, and it's certainly not very welcome in any serious discussion that Palestinians have, certainly not with any of the current leadership or any opposition party of any number.

Is it just and reasonable? Sure. But if there's one thing the average Israeli and Palestinian voter can agree on, is that they want as little to do with the other as possible. I don't think such a state has a chance of realistically surviving unless you wanted to limit the vote to university educated people or something

 

Do you think South Africans wanted it?

 

If you mean the white minority, in the end, yes. They didn't really have a choice. They were vastly outnumbered and the country would have been ungovernable due to the organized dissent. Plus the cold war was winding down and the west wasn't seeing the ANC as a "communist threat" any more, so I think it was an inevitable conclusion.

Many of the people there are still incredibly racist and treat black and asian people there like cattle and live in their white enclaves. Not all of course, I worked with a lot of people from SA and Zimbabwe that were very nice, but outside of maybe Capetown, even today I'd sooner live in Ramallah.

Israel is a very different place and has a very different situation. A two state solution will happen once a mainstream Israeli politician finds the political power and will to do it. I think if Sharon was still PM, or even if Olmert hadn't been stuck in scandals, it might have happened already.

 

This is exactly why Palestinians would accept a secular democracy far more easily than Israelis would. Because in the end, this is the only option that would give them the chance to be part of a viable nation which is not constantly on the brink of failure.

For Israelis, any solution other than one where their political will is imposed on Palestinian territories is a loss and hence undesirable. Particularly undesirable among the right wing voters and politicans, who are the most important group to convince.

If we are looking for a situation where both sides are happy or equally pissed, I really don't think it is a 1967-border solution with militarized walls and a hoarding of natural resources by Israel.

As you say, ultimately, if everyone wants to live in the neighbourhood which belong to them, and everyone wants to pray in Jerusalem without discrimination, and everyone wants security and safety, the best shot is a single state solution. But in a one state solution Israel has far more power to lose while being the more important decision maker. I think it's somewhat of a stretch to claim that most Palestinians and Israelis feel exactly the same way about this solution, even if both don't want it at some level at present.

 

It's hard to say from the data, because I said before, many of the children of the immigrants intermarry, and there's debate as to whether to consider the Russians post '91 as "Ashkenazi" since many of them are not even considered Jews by the government.

As for the Sephardim, it's also skewed, since most were expelled from Spain (Sephardi meaning "Spanish") and went to live in places like Holland, Turkey, the UK and France / North Africa. For an Israeli being Ashkenazi or Sephardi or Mizrachi is not so much a matter of origin as it is culture (food, language, religious traditions, etc). The differences are big enough that Israeli has both a Sephardi head rabbi and an Ashkenazi one, and that religious political parties are still split across these lines.

But I also understand it's not your point to point out the division of cultures, but of national origin. No one is arguing that the ancestors of the majority of Jews that live here today were already here before the late nineteenth century, and I wouldn't want to give you the impression that i believe that.

Well, lets be fair. the Ottoman Empire no longer exists, but when it did, there also weren't Jordanians, Israelis, Lebanese, Syrians...or Palestinians. There were Jews, Druze, Circassians and Arabs, all of which were Ottoman subjects.

Land deeds from the era are still used in court for legal cases over land in places like East Jerusalem, and they were in control for hundreds of years. If it was anyone's land, it was the Sultans, unless we are to go by claims made by religious people.

Those organizations largely existed to purchase land from it's owners.

The Occupation is a direct consequence of the 1967 war, and the government naively thought that seizing the land and moving people there would provide security. Zionism was appropriated in order for the settlers to justify the practice, with the claim that what they were doing was no different than what was done in the late 19th and early 20th century under the Ottomans.

What I'm trying to convey, is that the two were very separate undertakings, belonging to different eras, under different sovereignty, and with far different implications. While I'm in no way romantic about the early zionists and the way they built their farms and towns, it was a far cry different than colluding with your own army to take over prime land and claim it.

The problem is, the sovereignty of that land was Ottoman at the time, and had been since the middle ages, unless you count the brief period when Napolean was here.

That land was bought legally with Ottoman deeds. And to put it in perspective, this started decades before the last Comanches surrendered in Texas. Asking generations of Jews to leave the place they were born is about as likely to happen to as the Bush family is to give their land in Maine back to the Iroquois.

It was the resentment of the Jewish newcomers that stoked conflict in the early days leading up to the Mandate, but not the present conflict. It would be like saying that the troubles in Northern Ireland were simply the result of protestants living there...which isn't true.

Palestinians developed their national identity as a result of the last 100 years. Like most arabs, their national identity is largely the end result of naive British cartographers, who in my opinion deserve at least as much blame as anyone, especially if the charge is colonialism.

Palestinians have a distinct identity and have aspirations for statehood, and this movement started when most of them were still under Jordanian and Egyptian rule (and also treated them like crap). Most have no qualms about having a border next to Israel, as long as that border gets to have their own border guards on their side of it. Even Hamas in private discussions acknowledges this.

There is no archaeological evidence of the Exodus...or for that matter most of the things claimed by any of monotheism's Big Three. Considering that none of the claims can be backed by evidence, and contradict each other, it's not hard to understand how religion makes things very difficult to do normal diplomacy and draw perfectly reasonable lines on new maps.

I don't think there is a genetic or spiritual claim to land...if anything the direct descendants of Levantine Arabs and Jews are more similar than the people they intermarried with during their respective exiles.

In any case, superstition and race-theory shouldn't be a basis for any claim to land, but as it stands, Israel is a member of the United Nations and has been a sovereign state since 1948. All it needs to do is vacate land it took in the 67 war and sign a peace treaty with the state that inherits it, and the Arab League has already promised to normalize relations with Israel if it does so.

It's difficult to have a serious discussion about Israel when the things discussed aren't recent events and how to address them, but questioning over 100 years of history and how it should somehow be different. That's not an argument that fixes anything. That's not a solution to anyone's problems or respect for the people who live here.

Otherwise you become a willing participant in the game where you hold up a key and shout "Nakba, Nakba" or Nazi documents and shout "Holocaust, Holocaust" and avert the world's attention from your shortcomings as a leader and answer for real problems occurring in your own time.

The only grey issue in my mind is for Arabs who live inside the Green Line (Israel proper) and whose communities end up in discussions for land swaps. They often don't have a voice in these decisions that presume they would all become part of a future Palestinian State. Most say they support a future state, but want to remain Israeli. Likewise are settlers in the West Bank that are there for religious reasons. They don't give a crap about the State of Israel and would stay if a future Palestinian state would allow it.

I have no idea how that would play out.

It's a hope you share with a lot of my friends who are activists and writers who vote Hadash and Da'am. They argue eloquently for a post-Israel federated state but that's probably about as popular as turning Canada, Mexico and the US into a North American super-state.

And you are very much right when you say Zionism is not compatible with the idea. But neither is Palestinian nationalism, which doesn't to my knowledge have an "ism" of it's own in English at least, but is pretty much the mirror image of Zionism.

If it were up to me, we would all live in a borderless world, governed by the rule of law with secular humanist principles, supporting ourselves with regulated free-enterprise and investing the bulk of our resources into science, education and agriculture but no one has yet offered to put me in charge. In the meantime I have to deal with the world as it is, and that often means understanding how consensus unfortunately works and learning to live with the idea that people aren't going to think like I do about everything.