Unhealthy Diet Coke Fixation

my son.. (frames from this video)

Israel was founded as a state for a specific ethnicity, the Jews.

It has never officially annexed Gaza and West Bank specifically because doing so would increase the Palestinian population of Israel. This is also why Israelis, even Liberal ones, find the idea of a one state solution abhorrent, because they'll be a minority.

The "Nation State Bill" declares Israel to be a nation for the Jewish people. Imagine if a country with a significant minority like the US or Australia declared that the nation was meant for White Anglo-Saxon Protestants. Would this be racist?

Palestinians can not get Israeli citizenship even if they can provide proof of having lived in Israel in living memory. People point out countries like Polands "citizenship by decent" law but Poland doesn't only do so for ethnic Poles. A descendant of Jewish or German Polish citizens has the same rights as a descendant of Polish citizens.

On the other hand, Jews with 0 known ancestry in Israel (including converts who have very little ties to the "imagined Jewish people") have the right to move to Israel.

"Arab Israelis" can not pass their citizenship onto their spouse or children if their spouse is from Gaza/West Bank. This has led to Palestinians born in Israel to an Israeli parent and with an Israeli spouse and children being deported. If they were Jewish that would not occur. These are legal discriminations based solely on whether you are Jewish or not.

A Palestinian born in West Bank does not have the right to Israeli citizenship. A Jewish settler in West Bank does have those rights. They live in the same territory, under the same government but the sole difference in their rights is their ethnicity.

This is not even really discussing the occupation of West Bank and the de facto occupation of Gaza but these facts are already far more radical than any other supremacist state on earth. Not Sri Lanka (which gave Indian Tamils citizenship in 2004), not Myanmar, not India, Malaysia or Bhutan. Definitionally, not the pseudo-ethnostates of Botswana, Lesotho and Eswatini.

Of course my instinct is to call bullshit, because obviously landback does not entail mass murder ethnic cleansing and genocide, but I’m also not sure how I feel about the concept of Israel’s Jews having total sovereignty over that land given what they are currently doing to the people who they feel do not deserve that sovereignty.

It’s disingenuous because Native Americans and other indigenous peoples are not seeking to conquer an already settled land that they may have lived in thousands of years ago before migration patterns and diasporas dispersed them, seeking to replace their culture and sense of personhood and totally annihilate their physical existence so they can extract wealth on top of that land. Native Americans aren’t demanding that China and Russia become Turtle Islandia because their ancestors may have lived there many tens of thousands of years ago. That is the claim Israel is making and what they are doing to the pre-existing residents of Palestine. All of that was done TO Native Americans, so to invert the relationship between colonizer and colonized by comparing the colonized’s claims towards liberation to Zionism, is to be intellectually dishonest to such an extent that it implies active malice.

The colonizers of the Americas are not comparable to the Palestinian people in this dishonest landback criticism because it is the Palestinians who are being dispossessed and the American settlers who were the dispossessers in the American context. By comparing landback to Zionism what you’re essentially saying is that Americas settlers are victims of Native Americans who wish to genocide them, an outright Neo Nazi racist fantasy but somehow spoken in the language of “revolutionary politics.”

Zionism has co-opted the language of national liberation (seen Zionists explicitly use that phrase) and decolonization but that’s because national liberation and decolonization rhetoric has primarily been used in this context to support Palestinian claims to self determination and sovereignty over their lands and they want to confuse the debate or undercut their critics, it’s not a genuine embrace of Lenin, Stalin and Mao on the National Question.

If anything that proves the salience of decolonization theories, the enemy, the colonial empires, have to attack the criticism by pretending as if they already embody its traits. This is a common rhetorical tactic the ruling class uses when they are losing a situation. “Oh we’ve always been against slavery!” saving face mentality when forced into a corner.

Zionism cannot be “decolonization” because it itself is a colonial venture that seeks to replace the pre-existing residents and their culture so wealth can be extracted from the lands. And it confuses things - when the Kingdom of Judea fell the majority of the world’s Jews already lived outside of it because of prior expulsions and diasporas. So for the majority of the world’s Jews at that time, the loss of Judea mostly had religious significance and it did not impact their lives much outside of that. But was it the Arabs who conquered Judea and made it a vassal? No that was the Romans whose empire no longer exists.