Comment by onyva | Hacker News Reader

Comment by onyva | Hacker News Reader

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Using “Zionism” to describe the regime in Israel is misleading. Hertzl was an emancipated Western Jew who was on a personal mission to reinvent the idea of Jews like himself. Western, educated Sephardi. Not Eastern Europeans living in the Middle Ages, which he was culturally and emotionally detached from. Most Sephardi Jews would not marry Eastern European nor consider them to be Jewish at this stage. Hertzl wanted to take on a colonial project to prove the world Jews can be as assertive and proactive as other people. At this stage of history it was to colonize something. He didn’t see Israel-Palestine as a destination nor was he religious. He wasn’t even aware of the activities of the failed “lovers of Zion” project of couple of Russians that tried revive a Jewish homeland in Ottoman Palestine. What happens next was a takeover and repurposing of his agenda, one the two movements “merged”, which eventually will coincide with the holocaust.

Ps Ben Gurion’s treatment of diaspora Jews, ruppin’s race pyramid and eugenics plan for the Jews, and other “anecdotes” are beyond the scope of this discussion, but should be remembered. There’s nothing saintly about pre-state Israel, nor innocent.

That makes sense. It doesn't make Hertzl any less involved nor less scum for choosing to occupy Palestine, regardless of his motives.

> Ps Ben Gurion’s treatment of diaspora Jews, ruppin’s race pyramid and eugenics plan for the Jews, and other “anecdotes” are beyond the scope of this discussion, but should be remembered.

Thanks, I'll look that up.

> There’s nothing saintly about pre-state Israel, nor innocent.

Which the current regime of course denies and tries to rewrite history to say otherwise.

Hertzl didn't choose to occupy anything. His main objective, and the one he fought off the "lovers of zion" over, was a legitimate internationally recognized place for Eastern European "Jews". This was in fact the most serious rift between Hertzl and the Russians.When he died in 1904, the zionist movement was re-purposed for something he never envisioned.

In principal, Western Jews like Hertzl himself did not plan to go anywhere. They saw themselves as Europeans were already emancipated since the first half of the 19th century and integrated (which led to growing anti-Semitism in Western Europe, but that's a different story).

Hertzl was secular and agnostic. Very different circumstances to those in the southern part of the Russian Empire (Pale of Settlement).

So what do we call the ideology that drives the murderous occupying state that exists today under the name of "Israel"?

fascism. Nationalism... Zionism is not an ideology. Zionism died with Hertzl and was already twisted in his life by the Russian faction of the Zionist Congress. Hertzl search was for a legitimate and internationally recognized place, and it didn’t have to be Israel/Palestine.

BTW, WHAT DO YOU call it when Arab leaders like AL-ASAD and AL-SISI, to name a few, kill and torture thousands of their own people, and people like you still find the energy to only reach their keyboard to criticize Israel? Is it fatigue (since you wasted so much time on Israel) or hypocrisy?

> BTW, WHAT DO YOU call it when Arab leaders like AL-ASAD and AL-SISI, to name a few, kill and torture thousands of their own people, and people like you still find the energy to only reach their keyboard to criticize Israel?

And who said we support Assad or Sisi? We're well aware that their regimes are murderous as well. It's not mutually exclusive to speak out against the Israeli occupation.

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