On Wikipedia's Zionism definition

A conversation with a friend

This was a convo yesterday I had with a friend (I translated it to English). Bold is them, unbolded is me.

Hey Beck, I’m curious as to your thoughts on this Wikipedia Zionism definition? It’s bothering me.

Hey. Yeah, I saw this convo/debate was going around. I have some thoughts, but seems like you do too. What are they, what’s bothering you?

The definition just puts all of Zionism in this category of colonization, but really it’s just about the Jewish people having a home in the land of Israel.

Okay, so when you say having a “home’, what do you mean? What’s required in your opinion?

I’m not really sure, but just a state that is Jewish but democratic.

Okay, so what makes a state Jewish? Hebrew? Jewish holidays as public holidays?

Those things, but also just having a state that is majority Jewish.

Okay - let’s pause there. So to be a Jewish state, we have a majority of Jews. How did we get to that reality in which the majority of people in the country’s border by 1950 were Jewish? We expelled at least 700,000 Palestinians and didn’t let them return.

Yeah, but they chose to leave.

First of all, that’s just a talking point. There was war and violence and threats on villages and in some cases, massacres and rapes. But even if that wasn’t the case and people decide to leave temporarily because of war, that doesn’t mean they shouldn’t be allowed to return home. Your home is your home; a new regime doesn’t change that. If I was them, I would have left to to protect my family.

Yea but like Mizrahim (Jews from Arab countries) can’t just go back.

Yea, and multiple wrongs don’t make it okay. Like you say that because you think it’s wrong that full communities were disposssed. and it is.

But also, even after the war in ‘48, Israel put the remaining Palestinians still in the country under martial law for almost two decades. Minutes from government meetings explicitly state that the military government over Palestinian citizens of Israel was explicitly kept in place to nationalize their land. So I’d say there’s some good evidence for ‘as much land as possible with as few Palestinians as possible’ as a central aspect of this state project. And you yourself said it has to be majority Jewish to be a Jewish state, so how else would we get there?

I don’t know. That wasn’t the point of Zionism. The point was to give Jews safety from pogroms and later the holocaust.

Sure, I agree with that. Early on, I don’t think post-Dreyfus affair a bunch of European Jews were like ‘how can we kick as many Palestinians out of Palestine and take over the land.’ It was about what measures we can take for our own communities.

So our intent wasn’t and isn’t bad. It’s not some evil.

I think it’s like that phrase: the road to hell was paved with good intentions. It did create a political movement that was backed and even pushed by European countries in a moment where taking land in other parts of the world and creating political projects was totally the norm and had zero consideration for people already there. And states are often created through violence. We can’t base this just on initial intention. Ethnic cleansing and dispossession exists at the base.

Plus - it’s not just something that happened. You are seeing that exact pattern being played out right now in places like Area C and the Negev/Naqab. This is why people use terms like ‘continuing Nakba’, because those same methods are still being used. And then you have people like Smotrich, who is literally in charge of the West Bank, who actively is carrying out his ‘decisive plan’ which calls for the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians. And of course, genocide and ethnic cleansing in Gaza.

I just think this is all missing the point that Jewish people just deserve a home.

Okay, so let’s focus on that - you said a home for Jews require a Jewish-majority state?

Yes.

Okay, so then we agree that for that to happen, in its founding, Israel had to expel hundreds of thousands of Palestinians in order to create conditions in which Palestinians would be a minority and Jews would be a majority.

I don’t know.

I think you do know, this is just uncomfortable, because there’s no way of actually recognizing this without it changing the foundations of what we were raised on.

This is Israel’s original sin. You said we are Jewish and democratic, but ethnic cleansing is not democratic. It was, as the Wikipedia page says, aiming to get as much land and as few Palestinians as possible into a new state backed by military power.

At the least, we need to be able to recognize that democracy and ethnic cleansing don’t go hand in hand.

I guess that somewhat makes sense, but it makes me jump. It just feels like it doesn’t recognize that anti-semitism exists. What were we supposed to do?

Anti-semitism existed and still very much exists, and in today’s world is getting worse. We have a state, but state power hasn’t and won’t stop Anti-semitism. Plus, anti-semitism in the world doesn’t mean we can then dispossess people of their lands, homes communities. Adding more violence to it is just going to create more violence, not lessen it.

Plus, today, there is an equal number of Palestinians and Jewish Israelis in the areas under Israel’s control, as in from the river to the sea. If you are saying Israel needs to be a Jewish majority in order to maintain itself as a Jewish state, then only options are to

-ethnically cleanse Palestinians, which is bad.

-get more Jewish people to move to Israel, which is unlikely to happen unless there are surges in antisemitism, which I think we agree is not an outcome we want for the Jewish community

-Go back to 1967 borders, which is both politically impossible at this point and also still doesn’t necessarily answer the heart of the issue of being a democracy, which is Palestinian refugees. Plus, maybe at some point, depending on birth rates, the numbers again would be 50-50 in terms of population and we are back to where we started.

What so we shouldn’t be here at all?

We are here. We shouldn’t be using ethnonationalist supremacy to maintain exclusive power and to disposses people of their land and homes. And if we are going to continue doing it, I think we can at least recognize that the wikipedia page is relatively accurate for Israel as a state project who is ethnically cleansing and replacing Palestinians (think of all the kibbutzes and moshavs who have the same names as the Palestinian villages the state expelled), and who privileges Jewish political power over Palestinian human, civil and political rights past and present.