Ashkenazi supremacy is a powerful undercurrent to Jewish anti-Zionism, though most leftists are too self-deluded to admit it. Arendt also complained in 1944 that "Zionists had ideologically placed the center of the Jewish people's existence outside the pale of European peoples and outside the destiny of the European continent. . . . Thus the Zionists would deprive the Jewish people of its just share in the roots and development of what we generally call Western culture." Kind of a dumb point, since last I checked, you don't need to be physically located in Europe to be Western (see: Australia), but I catch her drift. The modern heir to the Arendtian tradition of casting a scornful Ashkenazi gaze on Israel's half-Asiatic mob is, of course, Substack's own NonZionism.
I remain of the view they should have carved out a piece of Germany. It would have been fairer to make the Nazis do penance for the sins of Nazis rather than sheet the whole problem home to Arabs. Much easier to wear a frock coat there than in the Levantine heat, too. A piece of Europe for this most European of peoples.
Its a nice beach, but the rigmarole has been considerable, and its impossible to give a full accounting of it yet, as it could get even worse.
The Empire created some singularly good societies. Places like SIngapore and Hong Kong represent the peak of human development. Of course this largely comes down to the enterprise of the people themselves, but the British did colonial administration well, when they were minded to. Perhaps our whole reason for adopting multiculturalism was a sublimated desire to have a mini-empire at home.
The partition of India, however bloody, was far better than any alternative. It was a good faith endeavour to resolve a sectarian dispute that had echoed down the ages, and it was mostly successful.
The Zionist project in Palestine comprised the exact opposite. It took a sleepy, bucolic corner of the Ottoman empire that had not seen major conflict since 1500 and turned it into an intractable sectarian dispute and the world's worst strategic flashpoint. It was objectively bad colonial administration.
*"In India Britain sought to reconcile religious communities; in Palestine it had deliberately created political antagonism between communities by making promises to one against the wishes of the other."* - JMN Jeffries
The striking thing for me is that the American empire seems destined to die in the same place the British one did. We all suspected the old grey mare was not all she used to be, but now it is confirmed. And a country that struggles to carry its bat against Iran is no match for China.
"There’s some counterfactual speculation about a Jewish state being formed in East Prussia after World War II, an idea also floated by Lord Moyne in 1941, when the assumption was that there’d be 'millions' of post-war Jewish refugees to resettle. Jews don’t have roots in the region, but neither do the Russians who now inhabit the Kaliningrad Oblast. It’s tempting to imagine the Yidishe Medine as a core member of the European Union, instead of being embroiled in regional conflict. There’s also poetic justice to the notion of Germany ceding territory to its Jewish victims. But in this alternative timeline, a Baltic Ashkenaz could also intensify German neo-Nazism and serve as a scapegoat for European integration. More importantly, a Zionist proto-state and population center had already been established by the 1940s, most displaced Jews wanted to leave Europe, and Stalin, who was already suspicious of Soviet Jewish efforts at autonomy, was unlikely to support a Jewish state within his post-war sphere of influence."
Practically speaking, this just wasn't going to happen.
I like a good alternate history. Sketch out for me a scenario where a European Jewish state actually happens, not just as an idle anti-Zionist talking point.
BISMARCK: "Good morning all and welcome to the agenda meeting for the dissolution of Austro-Hungary. Glad you could all make it."
(murmurs of acknowledgment)
BISMARCK: "Now I invited you here today to go through all the options for how we go about dissolving the empire, because I can't help but feel that if we fuck this up, bad things are going to happen. Now I understand we have the Turks with us. I understand they're going through something similar. Perhaps you'd like to tell us how you're winding up the Ottoman empire?"
TALAT PASHA: "Thank you. Basically we kill everybody. The Assyrians. The Armenians. The Greeks. Just put all of them up against the wall."
BISMARCK: "I see"
TALAT PASHA: "Just kill them all. We even starved the Maronites on the Mount. Didn't have to, but we did. Ironically, we didnt kill the Jews. About the only ones we spared. They always piss and moan about getting the worst of everything, but they actually got off pretty lightly here if you ask me"
BISMARCK: "Okay. Well, thanks. I'll bear that in mind. Now we have the British here. Their empire is not yet on its last legs but for the purposes of this fictional enterprise we will treat it as it if were. How say you Tommy?"
TOMMY ATKINS: "Well, we presume that everyone wants to be British anyway, so we hope to carry on as we did before, more or less voluntarily. I mean they'll want their own parliaments and so forth but our culture is objectively superior so they'll keep our language, sports, country clubs."
BISMARCK: "Yes but your food is shit"
TOMMY: "Granted. We'll have to give that up but we should be able to keep the rest. Keep it all friendly. Honestly, as long as they all keep banking in London I don't give a shit. Probably not an option for you chaps though."
BISMARCK: "Uh-huh. Can't help but feel like that will go tits up somewhere, but you do you. Now that leaves the Russians. This had better be good"
TSAR ALEXANDER: "I get Crimean Tartars. I put them here. I get Germans, I put them there. Put Jews here. I get a fence. You cross the fence, fuck your mother."
Idle anti-Zionist talking point, then. Though, ironically, a grand European council is basically what Herzl advised: "I think the Jewish question is no more a social than a religious one, notwithstanding that it sometimes takes these and other forms. It is a national question, which can only be solved by making it a political world-question to be discussed and settled by the civilized nations of the world in council."
As Misha noted here, that was never gonna happen. Israel was and remains a Schelling Point for Jews. No offense, but people who think there was ever some other possibility than to return to Zion are some combination of delusional and unable to cope with Jewish agency.
Respectfully, you don't seem to appreciate the circumstances of desperate refugees, who were willing to accept any viable option as an alternative to being killed by the Nazis.
At the Evian conference all sorts of schemes were being batted around (by Jews), including an idea that they be allowed to settle northwest Australia. Its true that the Zionists were trying to sandbag most of them, since they concluded (correctly, but also incredibly cynically) that closing all other options to Jews would encourage them to migrate to Palestine.
Unfortunately this was during the worst years of the depression, unemployment was running high, and no one was in the mood for mass migration. Still hugely regrettable that resettlement didnt happen - it would have saved both Jews and Arabs a great deal of trouble.
Respectfully, my grandfather survived the Holocaust and my mother was a war refugee from the ME, so I have a better idea of the circumstances of desperate refugees than you do.
I never claimed that Jews wouldn't seek a refuge otherwise. I claimed that the Jews were always going to make their homeland in Zion.
Of course, the minute I start hearing gibberish like "the Zionists tried to sandbag the rescue of Jews from the Holocaust", I know I'm dealing with an ignoramus.
"Hugely regrettable that resettlement didn't happen" - well, yes, that's exactly the point. It's hugely regrettable that Russia is massacring Ukrainians. It's hugely regrettable that the Yazidis were annihilated by ISIS. It's hugely regrettable that the Uyghurs are being eliminated by China. It's hugely regrettable that the Kurds are oppressed by Turkey. A lot of hugely regrettable things happen to you when someone else controls your destiny. Suddenly all these exogenous circumstances make it so that it's too inconvenient to help you. The only thing that saved Jews trouble is when they stopped allowing other people to treat them as objects to be warehoused somewhere to save someone else "a great deal of trouble".
Sure, but the old British Army joke was "a Zionist is a Jew who is prepared to pay another Jew to move to Palestine". Mizrahi Jews would of course migrate if the standard of living was better. Western Jews may claim it as their homeland, but very few actually move there (if anything there is currently a net flow of Jews from Israel to Australia, Canada and the US).
Without the events of the 1930s and beyond its difficult to see that there would have been sufficient impetus for statehood, and the Zionists in their more honest moments acknowledged this.
While I strongly support Israel's foundation, I also think the constant arguing about it means the terms of the debate are defined by the absurdities of the settler-colonialists.
There is only one way to legitimate a state: have it function over a piece of geography against threat. The state's foundation is irrelevant; the state's moral worth is irrelevant; the state's record of improving people's lives is irrelevant.
If the settler-colonialists were to actually care about those extraneous factors fairly and dispassionately, they would decry the very states that have attacked Israel for decades far more vociferously than Israel itself.
But no, the absurdity of Hashemite royal family's control over Jordan isn't a concern; the absurdity of Syria's manufactured and unrepresentative state isn't a concern; the absurdity of Rwanda is just not a concern.
It's a credit to so many Jewish people that they will engage in these arguments about the justification of Israel as a state and wax philosophical about the morality of this or that. But all this public argument ends up undermining Israel because Israel's existence should not be in dispute.
Israel existence is its own justification. Just like any other state.
I should care about the legalities of this or that historical document about as much as I do the Sykes-Picot line when discussing whether Syria is legitimate: about 0.
I agree very strongly with this conclusion. It is very hard to imagine that Arendt would have any sympathy for the modern Palestinian cause, or reacted to 7.10 in any way other than disgust and condamnation.
And of course the argument assumes that there was a displaced Arab Palestine, which is a quite heroic given the circumstances. There are zero other poor micro states in the région, the realistic alternative was Palestine as a part of another State, likely Egypt.
But that's fine because the only role the Palestinians play in all this is as victims, innocent of all agency and thus of all blame.
"Given this, it’s odd that Manne should wag his finger at the Irgun. As though violent resistance was not understandable in this context, and in light of a Britain blockade against Jews fleeing the killing fields of Europe to Palestine."
Among other things, Irgun threw grenades at Arab workers in Haifa who worked at a factory employing Arabs and Jews. I have no idea what kind of person wouldn't wag their fingers.
Did you miss the part where Misha called you out by name? Here I’ll give it over again:
“Only armchair philosophers who have never made or built anything and have never led anyone, can point to the giants who willed that tiny state into existence then kept it alive against all odds and say — actually no, it would have been better to have done it like this or like that.”
This is also a very strange comment, because I have written dozens of times that the people who built the state (Labour Zionists) were giants, who did the best they possibly could under very adverse circumstances, and therefore we should not blow up their achievements in pursuit of vain dreams of correcting some supposed 'failure to finish the job' in 1948 or whatnot. The problem with Zionism was not the execution (except to the extent it was undermined by Irgun clowns), it was the plan itself, but we are where we were and have to make the best of it.
But to know that you would have to not be an illiterate clown.
One of our boys’ middle names is Menachem. Our chabad rabbi was pleased. He asked me who he was named after (wink wink). When I said Begin he fell off his chair
I think Israel is a mistake but not for any of the reasons listed, nor against any of their refutations. There are other mistakes in the World. However realising something is a mistake means anyone can fix it. Refusing the error creates chaos as determinations seek absolute power without absolution. As well as the usual failure to police narcissism.
Yes, boring is good, and Israel would be much more boring if the god shaped hole in the modern western left and in modern Islam had not coalesced around the perfect victim, the Palestinians, and the perfect scapegoat, since they already were for so many, the Joos:
"Those who were skeptical or smarter than the scrappy Zionists perished in Galician killing fields and gas chambers"
Or, you know, escaped to America, Canada, Australia, Argentina...
Ashkenazi supremacy is a powerful undercurrent to Jewish anti-Zionism, though most leftists are too self-deluded to admit it. Arendt also complained in 1944 that "Zionists had ideologically placed the center of the Jewish people's existence outside the pale of European peoples and outside the destiny of the European continent. . . . Thus the Zionists would deprive the Jewish people of its just share in the roots and development of what we generally call Western culture." Kind of a dumb point, since last I checked, you don't need to be physically located in Europe to be Western (see: Australia), but I catch her drift. The modern heir to the Arendtian tradition of casting a scornful Ashkenazi gaze on Israel's half-Asiatic mob is, of course, Substack's own NonZionism.
Also those heirs in the pale died. Id say her heirs, but she had no literal heirs
I remain of the view they should have carved out a piece of Germany. It would have been fairer to make the Nazis do penance for the sins of Nazis rather than sheet the whole problem home to Arabs. Much easier to wear a frock coat there than in the Levantine heat, too. A piece of Europe for this most European of peoples.
Modern Tel Aviv alone is worth all the rigmarole
Its a nice beach, but the rigmarole has been considerable, and its impossible to give a full accounting of it yet, as it could get even worse.
The Empire created some singularly good societies. Places like SIngapore and Hong Kong represent the peak of human development. Of course this largely comes down to the enterprise of the people themselves, but the British did colonial administration well, when they were minded to. Perhaps our whole reason for adopting multiculturalism was a sublimated desire to have a mini-empire at home.
The partition of India, however bloody, was far better than any alternative. It was a good faith endeavour to resolve a sectarian dispute that had echoed down the ages, and it was mostly successful.
The Zionist project in Palestine comprised the exact opposite. It took a sleepy, bucolic corner of the Ottoman empire that had not seen major conflict since 1500 and turned it into an intractable sectarian dispute and the world's worst strategic flashpoint. It was objectively bad colonial administration.
*"In India Britain sought to reconcile religious communities; in Palestine it had deliberately created political antagonism between communities by making promises to one against the wishes of the other."* - JMN Jeffries
The striking thing for me is that the American empire seems destined to die in the same place the British one did. We all suspected the old grey mare was not all she used to be, but now it is confirmed. And a country that struggles to carry its bat against Iran is no match for China.
I briefly discussed this idea at https://1000yearview.substack.com/p/anti-zionism-as-jewish-alternate:
"There’s some counterfactual speculation about a Jewish state being formed in East Prussia after World War II, an idea also floated by Lord Moyne in 1941, when the assumption was that there’d be 'millions' of post-war Jewish refugees to resettle. Jews don’t have roots in the region, but neither do the Russians who now inhabit the Kaliningrad Oblast. It’s tempting to imagine the Yidishe Medine as a core member of the European Union, instead of being embroiled in regional conflict. There’s also poetic justice to the notion of Germany ceding territory to its Jewish victims. But in this alternative timeline, a Baltic Ashkenaz could also intensify German neo-Nazism and serve as a scapegoat for European integration. More importantly, a Zionist proto-state and population center had already been established by the 1940s, most displaced Jews wanted to leave Europe, and Stalin, who was already suspicious of Soviet Jewish efforts at autonomy, was unlikely to support a Jewish state within his post-war sphere of influence."
Practically speaking, this just wasn't going to happen.
"This was never going to happen, except when it did happen, and then only to the extent it did."
I like a good alternate history. Sketch out for me a scenario where a European Jewish state actually happens, not just as an idle anti-Zionist talking point.
(meeting opens)
BISMARCK: "Good morning all and welcome to the agenda meeting for the dissolution of Austro-Hungary. Glad you could all make it."
(murmurs of acknowledgment)
BISMARCK: "Now I invited you here today to go through all the options for how we go about dissolving the empire, because I can't help but feel that if we fuck this up, bad things are going to happen. Now I understand we have the Turks with us. I understand they're going through something similar. Perhaps you'd like to tell us how you're winding up the Ottoman empire?"
TALAT PASHA: "Thank you. Basically we kill everybody. The Assyrians. The Armenians. The Greeks. Just put all of them up against the wall."
BISMARCK: "I see"
TALAT PASHA: "Just kill them all. We even starved the Maronites on the Mount. Didn't have to, but we did. Ironically, we didnt kill the Jews. About the only ones we spared. They always piss and moan about getting the worst of everything, but they actually got off pretty lightly here if you ask me"
BISMARCK: "Okay. Well, thanks. I'll bear that in mind. Now we have the British here. Their empire is not yet on its last legs but for the purposes of this fictional enterprise we will treat it as it if were. How say you Tommy?"
TOMMY ATKINS: "Well, we presume that everyone wants to be British anyway, so we hope to carry on as we did before, more or less voluntarily. I mean they'll want their own parliaments and so forth but our culture is objectively superior so they'll keep our language, sports, country clubs."
BISMARCK: "Yes but your food is shit"
TOMMY: "Granted. We'll have to give that up but we should be able to keep the rest. Keep it all friendly. Honestly, as long as they all keep banking in London I don't give a shit. Probably not an option for you chaps though."
BISMARCK: "Uh-huh. Can't help but feel like that will go tits up somewhere, but you do you. Now that leaves the Russians. This had better be good"
TSAR ALEXANDER: "I get Crimean Tartars. I put them here. I get Germans, I put them there. Put Jews here. I get a fence. You cross the fence, fuck your mother."
BISMARCK: "That'll do. Pass the vodka."
Idle anti-Zionist talking point, then. Though, ironically, a grand European council is basically what Herzl advised: "I think the Jewish question is no more a social than a religious one, notwithstanding that it sometimes takes these and other forms. It is a national question, which can only be solved by making it a political world-question to be discussed and settled by the civilized nations of the world in council."
As Misha noted here, that was never gonna happen. Israel was and remains a Schelling Point for Jews. No offense, but people who think there was ever some other possibility than to return to Zion are some combination of delusional and unable to cope with Jewish agency.
Respectfully, you don't seem to appreciate the circumstances of desperate refugees, who were willing to accept any viable option as an alternative to being killed by the Nazis.
At the Evian conference all sorts of schemes were being batted around (by Jews), including an idea that they be allowed to settle northwest Australia. Its true that the Zionists were trying to sandbag most of them, since they concluded (correctly, but also incredibly cynically) that closing all other options to Jews would encourage them to migrate to Palestine.
Unfortunately this was during the worst years of the depression, unemployment was running high, and no one was in the mood for mass migration. Still hugely regrettable that resettlement didnt happen - it would have saved both Jews and Arabs a great deal of trouble.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%89vian_Conference
Respectfully, my grandfather survived the Holocaust and my mother was a war refugee from the ME, so I have a better idea of the circumstances of desperate refugees than you do.
I never claimed that Jews wouldn't seek a refuge otherwise. I claimed that the Jews were always going to make their homeland in Zion.
Of course, the minute I start hearing gibberish like "the Zionists tried to sandbag the rescue of Jews from the Holocaust", I know I'm dealing with an ignoramus.
"Hugely regrettable that resettlement didn't happen" - well, yes, that's exactly the point. It's hugely regrettable that Russia is massacring Ukrainians. It's hugely regrettable that the Yazidis were annihilated by ISIS. It's hugely regrettable that the Uyghurs are being eliminated by China. It's hugely regrettable that the Kurds are oppressed by Turkey. A lot of hugely regrettable things happen to you when someone else controls your destiny. Suddenly all these exogenous circumstances make it so that it's too inconvenient to help you. The only thing that saved Jews trouble is when they stopped allowing other people to treat them as objects to be warehoused somewhere to save someone else "a great deal of trouble".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yazidis
Sure, but the old British Army joke was "a Zionist is a Jew who is prepared to pay another Jew to move to Palestine". Mizrahi Jews would of course migrate if the standard of living was better. Western Jews may claim it as their homeland, but very few actually move there (if anything there is currently a net flow of Jews from Israel to Australia, Canada and the US).
Without the events of the 1930s and beyond its difficult to see that there would have been sufficient impetus for statehood, and the Zionists in their more honest moments acknowledged this.
While I strongly support Israel's foundation, I also think the constant arguing about it means the terms of the debate are defined by the absurdities of the settler-colonialists.
There is only one way to legitimate a state: have it function over a piece of geography against threat. The state's foundation is irrelevant; the state's moral worth is irrelevant; the state's record of improving people's lives is irrelevant.
If the settler-colonialists were to actually care about those extraneous factors fairly and dispassionately, they would decry the very states that have attacked Israel for decades far more vociferously than Israel itself.
But no, the absurdity of Hashemite royal family's control over Jordan isn't a concern; the absurdity of Syria's manufactured and unrepresentative state isn't a concern; the absurdity of Rwanda is just not a concern.
It's a credit to so many Jewish people that they will engage in these arguments about the justification of Israel as a state and wax philosophical about the morality of this or that. But all this public argument ends up undermining Israel because Israel's existence should not be in dispute.
Israel existence is its own justification. Just like any other state.
I should care about the legalities of this or that historical document about as much as I do the Sykes-Picot line when discussing whether Syria is legitimate: about 0.
Yes!
I agree very strongly with this conclusion. It is very hard to imagine that Arendt would have any sympathy for the modern Palestinian cause, or reacted to 7.10 in any way other than disgust and condamnation.
And of course the argument assumes that there was a displaced Arab Palestine, which is a quite heroic given the circumstances. There are zero other poor micro states in the région, the realistic alternative was Palestine as a part of another State, likely Egypt.
But that's fine because the only role the Palestinians play in all this is as victims, innocent of all agency and thus of all blame.
"Given this, it’s odd that Manne should wag his finger at the Irgun. As though violent resistance was not understandable in this context, and in light of a Britain blockade against Jews fleeing the killing fields of Europe to Palestine."
Among other things, Irgun threw grenades at Arab workers in Haifa who worked at a factory employing Arabs and Jews. I have no idea what kind of person wouldn't wag their fingers.
Did you miss the part where Misha called you out by name? Here I’ll give it over again:
“Only armchair philosophers who have never made or built anything and have never led anyone, can point to the giants who willed that tiny state into existence then kept it alive against all odds and say — actually no, it would have been better to have done it like this or like that.”
This is also a very strange comment, because I have written dozens of times that the people who built the state (Labour Zionists) were giants, who did the best they possibly could under very adverse circumstances, and therefore we should not blow up their achievements in pursuit of vain dreams of correcting some supposed 'failure to finish the job' in 1948 or whatnot. The problem with Zionism was not the execution (except to the extent it was undermined by Irgun clowns), it was the plan itself, but we are where we were and have to make the best of it.
But to know that you would have to not be an illiterate clown.
I admire the labour zionists despite their flaws but you underrate jabotinsky and begin
It's impossible to underrate Begin
One of our boys’ middle names is Menachem. Our chabad rabbi was pleased. He asked me who he was named after (wink wink). When I said Begin he fell off his chair
Begin wasn't a giant and he didn't build shit. Ben Gurion should have had him shot when he had the chance.
Arendt was not a serious thinker. She was hot and put out at a time when few women did (albeit mostly for Nazis), thus her fame.
Oh but the ingratitude of the Arab Palestinians not kneeling fervently enough to the brave & dedicated European Zionist colonizers, what affrontery !
I think Israel is a mistake but not for any of the reasons listed, nor against any of their refutations. There are other mistakes in the World. However realising something is a mistake means anyone can fix it. Refusing the error creates chaos as determinations seek absolute power without absolution. As well as the usual failure to police narcissism.
Why do you think it was a mistake
bad worlding
https://whyweshould.loofs-samorzewski.com/bad-worldbuilding-comfort-zones/
subset of writing
https://whyweshould.loofs-samorzewski.com/the-world/
these are crossposted from first passes blogged on substack, they link back tosubstack for comment I guess
It is a common mistake, exacerbatedby narcissism (see Steve Stewart-WIlliams on how narcissists are drawn to activist roles) (can confirm).
Boring is good.
Yes, boring is good, and Israel would be much more boring if the god shaped hole in the modern western left and in modern Islam had not coalesced around the perfect victim, the Palestinians, and the perfect scapegoat, since they already were for so many, the Joos:
https://critiqueanddigest.substack.com/p/a-metacritique-of-palestine?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&r=9tvwd
(Which is not to excuse the messianic reaction this provoked in many, but does go some way to explaining it)