what the fuck even is the appeal of zionism anyway
what the fuck even is the appeal of zionism anyway
what with all these white jewish people in the imperial core who suddenly just NEED to go live in the middle east and commit war crimes and genocide along the way? Just... go buy a house in Arizona or something if you REALLY want to live in the desert? These people who are moving into Israel presumably had a place to live before moving across the planet. Why do they specifically need to move to Israel of all places? Who the fuck is waking up in the morning thinking "I need to murder brown children so I can live in that very specific bit of desert on the other side of the world"?
To put it simply: Jewish people found out the hard way what happens to people who don't have a nation-state to represent and protect them. International politics is fucking brutal, and without an army you are mostly helpless to prevent larger states from trampling all over you. Indigenous people all over the world have been genocided just because they were living on a piece of land too valuable to somebody else, so after the Shoah the world thought that giving the Jewish people a state would protect them. Now Israel's actual formation is much more complicated since only a select minority of Jews were part of that specific project but that's the basics.
The issue now is that Israel became one of those strong nation-states that trample all over weaker defenceless people. Now Palestinians are the (functionally) stateless ones that are stripped of their basic human rights for being born in the wrong place. The core problem of ultimate state sovereignty leading to ethnic cleansing still remains, just the targets have shifted over time as peoples move up and down the geopolitical ladder.
TLDR: "what if we just gave the Jews their own ethnostate? then if they keep getting killed no one can blame us anymore because they would be in charge of their own security" - UN post-war trying to solve fascism while nearly blacking out from liberalism
So instead of going after the underlying issue of why a genocide was being committed against a (generally) unprotected minority group, they just shifted some shit around on the pecking order and now the same thing is give or take happening with some roles reversed?
Yeah basically. There was already prior political pressure from the Zionist movement before WW2, and when the UK decided to get the fuck out of Mandatory Palestine they signed off on Zionists' plans there. The UN was then quite generous to Israel in the partition plan, and hoped that they could live in harmony with the Arab in an economic union with equal rights and everything. But then Israel, with it's population and army swelling from post-war immigration, realized that there would basically be no consequences if they just took more Palestinian land by force (insert "it's free real estate" meme). And well, Israel has been trying to ethnically cleanse the territory ever since.
Like all things, comrade, economic relations and the base comes first - then the social relations and superstructure flows from that.
Who are the settlers in Palestine? The poor and dispossessed from Israel and from around the world. Of course they are, these neighborhoods arent exactly safe or nice AND they're often subsidized directly or indirectly by the state or ngo's. The poor move in there because Israel proper is getting priced out. Same thing happened with settlers in America and Canada. They even gave land for FREE to settlers in western Canada (provided they cleared the forest on it within a year or something).
The poor move there because they have to, because they're driven by economics. That doesnt make what they do forgivable or right, but if you want to understand why its happening and begin to figure out how to stop it you must understand the base and economic reasons it exists. Plus, all that violence is abstract enough - the IDF and police handle it all, the settlers never have to actually see it or do it.
In the end, we can solve this when the Israelis and the settlers realize they have more in common with the Palestinians they're displacing than they do with bourgeoisie that are depriving them of shelter and wealth back home, even though they may share a religious faith with those bourgeois. If some critical mass figures that out, we can break this system like a dry twig and there can finally begin an actual peace process and reconciliation and justice in the middle east.
Who are the settlers in Palestine? The poor and dispossessed from Israel and from around the world.
Is this really the case though? I know there are some Israeli Haredi groups (with members living below the poverty line) that sponsor settlers, but I've also known some perfectly comfortable Americans that move out near Bethlehem.
Some of the settlements have pretty comfortable conditions even by U.S. standards, and even as nearby Palestinian neighborhoods still have to ration daily water.
The cheaper price of the settlements comes partially from benefits but also its less valuable land because you're under threat of counter attack. There's a premium on distance from those tensions within Israel. The settlers get benefits to move out. I'm sure there are plenty of ideological settlers that go so that in some potential peace deal they can grab up the land, but I'd bet a significant majority are poor or downwardly mobile and are attracted primarily to: the cheap rents and the subsidies Israel gives to settlers,
If you're not ideological and from America , you don't go to a settlement unless you're poor. You move to a regular neighborhood in Israel. It's just not worth the risk or the tension to be in a settlement if you can afford an apartment or house normally.
It's still an economic motivator to go there, since they get benefits from the state of Israel. If Israel didnt provide tangible benefits to people, like stolen housing, then no one would be moving there