The Druze also insisted on being part of the draft, which e.g. Haviv Rettig Gur has argued made a strong impression on Israeli Jews in general (and, famously, Bibi in particular). "We will put our sons in harm's way for your national project" is the sort of gesture that invites reciprocity.
To add to your Druze example, the Druze are a very small minority, around 1.6% of Israel's population, so their misgivings with Israel can simply be ignored or inflated depending on how Israeli media wants to spin the narrative.
Their small size also means that very few politicians are scrambling to pander to them, instead they pander to what their Jewish audience wants them to think they're willing to do for their blood brothers.
So the Druze being a non demographic or political threat, who are mainly known for serving in the IDF in combat roles ( where manpower is badly needed ), with no true economic power, makes them very easy to tolerate.
> "This is why I don’t criticise stuff like the Palestine Emirates Plan."
Aren't they trying to implement some variant of this in Gaza at the moment? It's probably one of the less bad options, at least if you add the stipulation of "no more Mein Kampf in schools", which seems like a bare minimum the PA should be doing if they want to be taken seriously as peace partners.
Fair points here, though I wouldn't call Israel's failure to incorporate West Bank and Gaza Palestinians "a deficit in Zionism." Israel has 2.1 million Arab citizens, which Zionism has fairly effectively accommodated. What other countries have done better with an 18% Muslim minority?
The problem isn't with Zionism as an ideology, but with the demographic math. It's one thing for a country the size of Russia to incorporate Chechnya. It would be another for, say, Armenia to try ruling over Chechnya. Insofar as Religious Zionism encourages demographic innumeracy, then, yes, this is a deficit. But there are many Zionists still capable of doing the math.
The ideology of Zionism is to build a state in Israel in the 20th century, with all that that entails. You don't get to do your own Math, you have to work with the Math that exists. I write about that here: https://nonzionism.com/p/the-basic-problem-with-zionism
The ideology of Zionism is to build a state in Israel, yes, but "in Israel" doesn't necessarily mean all of Eretz Yisrael. The First Zionist Congress declared that the movement's goal was to create a "publicly and legally secured home in Palestine for the Jewish people." The Balfour Declaration uses similar language regarding a Jewish national home "in Palestine." The British Mandate once included Jordan, so obviously the territorial demarcation of "Palestine" is itself historically contingent.
In other words, sure, Zionism is inherently flawed if it's predicated on the demographic math of Israel plus the West Bank and Gaza. But it doesn't need to be. The sine qua non of Zionism is a Jewish demographic majority, not territorial maximalism. As you note, for 19 years, Israel didn't rule over the Palestinian Territories. There are other ways to break the demographic logjam: two states, Jordanian re-annexation, confederation. All of these solutions have their own flaws, but the choices aren't limited to one state vs status quo vs mass expulsion.
But Israel had to conquer the WB and Gaza because the situation for those 19 years of constant raids was intolerable.
Certainly, there are other choices, but the fact that presently the choice is suppression forever, and that this legitimately appears to be the best choice for the timebeing, is a deficit in Zionism (just because something has a deficit doesn't means it's bad on balance, obviously).
Israel didn't conquer the West Bank and Gaza because of fedayeen raids, though. These were mostly a phenomenon of the 1950s. It conquered them in response to a war triggered by Egypt. If Egypt hadn't triggered the war, and Jordan hadn't joined in, then the "intolerable" situation would presumably have continued. As another commenter noted, Israel also had the opportunity to return the West Bank to Jordan in the 1980s. We're not dealing with an inevitability of Zionism here, but with historical contingency and poor decision-making.
Yeah but Israel didn't have to hold onto the WB and certainly didn't need to build settlements there - that was something Israel decided to do to itself.
I'm not sure about Chechnya, but some authors have chosen to call Russia's war in Afghanistan a genocide, and I think it is analogous - it did indeed kill 10% of the population, expel over 30%, and destroy half of the villages in the country. Naturally, I think, similarly to the current war in Gaza, this moniker must be rejected. I doubt Russia's indiscriminate and brutal military strategy had anything to do with killing Afghans. If the mujahideen or the Chechens gave up without a fight, the USSR would've left without a fight. This is unlike, say, the Circassian genocide. The Israelis who say that the one thing missing from the war effort is the ability to glass Gaza and expel its population are thus deferring to a characteristically Russian attitude.
"The fact that they exist in a state of permanent hostile opposition, active rebellion only prevented by the constant and escalating use of force, shows that Zionism is an objective failure at the task it has been set by history, namely providing a political order that integrates the population of human beings that live within its territory."
Actually, it shows that Palestinian nationalism is an objective failure. Palestinian nationalists have consistently chosen for 58 years to prioritize their doomed quest to destroy Israel over making peace and ending the occupation. That Palestine constantly refuses to make the hard choices and the necessary compromises to make peace with Israel and end the occupation is an objective failure of Palestinian nationalism, not Zionism.
It's an objective failure of both, but in a more fundamental sense, the failures of Palestinian nationalism are the failures of Zionism, because it was Zionism that created Palestinian nationalism.
It's not a failure of Zionism. The historic task of Zionism is not and never has been "a political order that integrates the population of human beings that live within its territory." I don't know where you got that from. The task of Zionism is Jewish self-determination, and living under the rule of an oppressive Arab majority stands in direct opposition to that. Ask the Chechans, they get it
Don't be a dipstick. The task of Zionism is to build a Jewish state in the Land of Israel. Therefore you have to figure out what to do with the other people living there. If it's 70 years in and you still haven't figured it out, then you messed up.
They did figure it out, 75 years ago. Divide the land and build the Jewish state in the area with the most Jews and the fewest Arabs. Zionism doesn't require building a Jewish state in ALL the land of Israel. Unfortunately, Palestinian nationalism does require building an Arab state in ALL the land of Palestine, and that's why they're messed up, but again, that has nothing to do with Zionism.
But Zionism was fine with the 1947 partition, and that UN partition was based on demographics. It was the shrabs that couldn’t be happy with their piece and forced Israel’s hand.
Best of your recent output. I've said this before but you should generally stick with the Israel stuff and lay off the racism: a. It produces more coherent articles; and b. It is more tasteful.
I'm surprised you didn't mention the whole story of how the whole Chechen project turned out for Russia, ie very badly. Chechen troops have not proven to be particularly effective, that's a meme. Instead, Chechenya has been on the cutting edge of Russia's descent into lawlessness and third worldism, something the less stupid Russian right wingers (ie Karlin) have never tired of pointing out. The Chechens get to run their province as they see fit (while being subsidized by Moscow) and their mafias (official and unofficial) get first dibs on the assets the state periodically redistributes. It was a victory for Putinism, but this is not a healthy development for any state.
Relatedly, can't figure out if this set of factual developments supports or undermines your narrative...
If you're in the UK and cant read this due to that country's Online Safety Act, I suggest using archive.ph (for which there also is a firefox extension).
So I take it substack don't inform you at all? If that's the case mine (or anyone else's) substack could get posts blocked, without me knowing. Which would be annoying.
Second Temple Judaism is pretty cool: It’s been around a thousand years; it gave the world monotheism; it bequeathed both Christianity and Islam, which is most of the world’s population.
Are the Talmud and Kabbalah cool?
The Amishification of Judaism conserved Jews as a people through a 2000-year diaspora, but in the 21st century leaves Judaism unfit to serve as the center of gravity holding a people together, let alone a nation-state.
The non-Zionist path seems to be to abandon the idea of a Jewish nation outside of this religion, causing the Jewish people to dwindle. Eventually, all that would remain are the insular Orthodox communities in the Diaspora. Israel would disappear along the way, and it’s hard to see how that happens without significant violence and death.
If a Judaism capable of serving as that center of gravity for the Jewish people today were to emerge—perhaps through a process of extreme natural selection in the United States this century—it might solve the Palestinian problem through conversion. There is nothing genetically wrong with Palestinians; the issue lies in their cultural programming (indeed, Palestinians in the Diaspora, who have some distance from this programming, have made impressive contributions). As Zera Yisrael, they could rejoin the indigenous religion and culture of the decolonized land, or insist on an Arabized identity, in which case they have a multitude of Arab states to choose from.
Second Temple Judaism was absorptive of the inhabitants of Eretz Israel.
Many people call (my) this thesis “crazy” or “paradoxical” (Because this childish thought about Russia being historically antisemitic unlike America...but America doesn't really grasp the Israeli model), as if the idea of an equation of patriotic models, not nation-states, between Russia and Israel were some flight of fantasy. In reality, it is painfully obvious: territorialism and historicism bind these two projects far more deeply than the lazy minds around us can comprehend. The future State of Palestine (I think there will be one) will be a sort of post-sovietic state; fragile and easy to control or to disintegrate. This territorialist teleology produces what is inevitable: a permanent conflict of integration, especially when the neighbors are Turko-Mongolic or Arab-Islamic pieces of "civilization" that are totalizing by their very nature. Russia and Israel both pursue total integration and not just “trade” and "peace" 😁, but only on their own terms, following the imperative of their foundations.
The case of Chechnya exemplifies this perfectly. Anyone who reduces it to “a local rebellion” or “ethnic separatism” misses the point: it is more than that. To understand Chechnya, one must grasp centuries of Islamic and Islamistic Russophobia; the civilizational pressure that has shaped Russian frontier consciousness for over a millennium. Raids, incursions, ideological warfare ("the whole Golden Hord islamic trauma")...this is the constant. And yes, even Iran played a subtle but key role in the Chechen conflict just like it does in Gaza. History repeats in coordinates: just as Shiism finances anti-Israeli nationalisms around Israel, it still finances Russophobic movements elsewhere (although both Russia and Iran claim to be allies before the americanist front). Same logic. Different theater.
This is worth an article in itself, but Canaanism was a very silly movement that exemplified the Zionist tendency to present as a practical solution to objective material problems what are actually attempted solutions to internal spiritual turmoil.
A far more effective strategy would have been top play up the shared heritage of Islam and Judaism in their strict monotheism, subsantially overlapping legal codes, and history of collboration in some eras. But Jews weren't interested in that then, and they aren't now either.
I don't think it was that silly tbh, which is the reason why this handful of people were able to punch way above their weight culturally, if not politically.
Material problems are downstream of spiritual/cultural issues. Canaanism was willing to bite a cultural bullet the zionists wouldn't. They were also not socialists, which is a big plus.
My comment was a bit tongue in cheek, I don't think they ever had a real chance, but they identified the cracks in the zionist narrative early on.
The silliness was in thinking that it offered a solution to the problem of Israel's position in the region and inability to assimilate its Arab population. They purported to be facing external reality when really it was the same endless quest to rid themselves of neurosis.
It can provide a model if the demographic ratio doesn't fall below what it is today, but that's precisely what incorporating the Palestinians would do.
Charles Napier, the British general who conquered the Sindh province in what is now Pakistan said two things that are relevant here:
"So perverse is mankind that every nationality prefers to be misgoverned by its own people than to be well ruled by another."
And
"The best way to quiet a country is a good thrashing, followed by great kindness afterwards."
Didn't work so well in Ireland. Toqueville's Paradox applies.
I suspect that Napier's suggestion about Ireland would have been to double down on land reform and implement home rule of some kind much earlier.
The Druze also insisted on being part of the draft, which e.g. Haviv Rettig Gur has argued made a strong impression on Israeli Jews in general (and, famously, Bibi in particular). "We will put our sons in harm's way for your national project" is the sort of gesture that invites reciprocity.
To add to your Druze example, the Druze are a very small minority, around 1.6% of Israel's population, so their misgivings with Israel can simply be ignored or inflated depending on how Israeli media wants to spin the narrative.
Their small size also means that very few politicians are scrambling to pander to them, instead they pander to what their Jewish audience wants them to think they're willing to do for their blood brothers.
So the Druze being a non demographic or political threat, who are mainly known for serving in the IDF in combat roles ( where manpower is badly needed ), with no true economic power, makes them very easy to tolerate.
> "This is why I don’t criticise stuff like the Palestine Emirates Plan."
Aren't they trying to implement some variant of this in Gaza at the moment? It's probably one of the less bad options, at least if you add the stipulation of "no more Mein Kampf in schools", which seems like a bare minimum the PA should be doing if they want to be taken seriously as peace partners.
Fair points here, though I wouldn't call Israel's failure to incorporate West Bank and Gaza Palestinians "a deficit in Zionism." Israel has 2.1 million Arab citizens, which Zionism has fairly effectively accommodated. What other countries have done better with an 18% Muslim minority?
The problem isn't with Zionism as an ideology, but with the demographic math. It's one thing for a country the size of Russia to incorporate Chechnya. It would be another for, say, Armenia to try ruling over Chechnya. Insofar as Religious Zionism encourages demographic innumeracy, then, yes, this is a deficit. But there are many Zionists still capable of doing the math.
The ideology of Zionism is to build a state in Israel in the 20th century, with all that that entails. You don't get to do your own Math, you have to work with the Math that exists. I write about that here: https://nonzionism.com/p/the-basic-problem-with-zionism
The ideology of Zionism is to build a state in Israel, yes, but "in Israel" doesn't necessarily mean all of Eretz Yisrael. The First Zionist Congress declared that the movement's goal was to create a "publicly and legally secured home in Palestine for the Jewish people." The Balfour Declaration uses similar language regarding a Jewish national home "in Palestine." The British Mandate once included Jordan, so obviously the territorial demarcation of "Palestine" is itself historically contingent.
In other words, sure, Zionism is inherently flawed if it's predicated on the demographic math of Israel plus the West Bank and Gaza. But it doesn't need to be. The sine qua non of Zionism is a Jewish demographic majority, not territorial maximalism. As you note, for 19 years, Israel didn't rule over the Palestinian Territories. There are other ways to break the demographic logjam: two states, Jordanian re-annexation, confederation. All of these solutions have their own flaws, but the choices aren't limited to one state vs status quo vs mass expulsion.
But Israel had to conquer the WB and Gaza because the situation for those 19 years of constant raids was intolerable.
Certainly, there are other choices, but the fact that presently the choice is suppression forever, and that this legitimately appears to be the best choice for the timebeing, is a deficit in Zionism (just because something has a deficit doesn't means it's bad on balance, obviously).
Israel didn't conquer the West Bank and Gaza because of fedayeen raids, though. These were mostly a phenomenon of the 1950s. It conquered them in response to a war triggered by Egypt. If Egypt hadn't triggered the war, and Jordan hadn't joined in, then the "intolerable" situation would presumably have continued. As another commenter noted, Israel also had the opportunity to return the West Bank to Jordan in the 1980s. We're not dealing with an inevitability of Zionism here, but with historical contingency and poor decision-making.
Yeah but Israel didn't have to hold onto the WB and certainly didn't need to build settlements there - that was something Israel decided to do to itself.
True and shamir shouldn't have said no to London agreement
I'm not sure about Chechnya, but some authors have chosen to call Russia's war in Afghanistan a genocide, and I think it is analogous - it did indeed kill 10% of the population, expel over 30%, and destroy half of the villages in the country. Naturally, I think, similarly to the current war in Gaza, this moniker must be rejected. I doubt Russia's indiscriminate and brutal military strategy had anything to do with killing Afghans. If the mujahideen or the Chechens gave up without a fight, the USSR would've left without a fight. This is unlike, say, the Circassian genocide. The Israelis who say that the one thing missing from the war effort is the ability to glass Gaza and expel its population are thus deferring to a characteristically Russian attitude.
"The fact that they exist in a state of permanent hostile opposition, active rebellion only prevented by the constant and escalating use of force, shows that Zionism is an objective failure at the task it has been set by history, namely providing a political order that integrates the population of human beings that live within its territory."
Actually, it shows that Palestinian nationalism is an objective failure. Palestinian nationalists have consistently chosen for 58 years to prioritize their doomed quest to destroy Israel over making peace and ending the occupation. That Palestine constantly refuses to make the hard choices and the necessary compromises to make peace with Israel and end the occupation is an objective failure of Palestinian nationalism, not Zionism.
It's an objective failure of both, but in a more fundamental sense, the failures of Palestinian nationalism are the failures of Zionism, because it was Zionism that created Palestinian nationalism.
It's not a failure of Zionism. The historic task of Zionism is not and never has been "a political order that integrates the population of human beings that live within its territory." I don't know where you got that from. The task of Zionism is Jewish self-determination, and living under the rule of an oppressive Arab majority stands in direct opposition to that. Ask the Chechans, they get it
Don't be a dipstick. The task of Zionism is to build a Jewish state in the Land of Israel. Therefore you have to figure out what to do with the other people living there. If it's 70 years in and you still haven't figured it out, then you messed up.
They did figure it out, 75 years ago. Divide the land and build the Jewish state in the area with the most Jews and the fewest Arabs. Zionism doesn't require building a Jewish state in ALL the land of Israel. Unfortunately, Palestinian nationalism does require building an Arab state in ALL the land of Palestine, and that's why they're messed up, but again, that has nothing to do with Zionism.
Obviously it does. You can pilpul away many things, but you can't pilpul away 5 million people.
Obviously it doesn't. It's easy to argue against Zionism when you strawman what Zionism is. Much harder to engage with it honestly.
But Zionism was fine with the 1947 partition, and that UN partition was based on demographics. It was the shrabs that couldn’t be happy with their piece and forced Israel’s hand.
Best of your recent output. I've said this before but you should generally stick with the Israel stuff and lay off the racism: a. It produces more coherent articles; and b. It is more tasteful.
I'm surprised you didn't mention the whole story of how the whole Chechen project turned out for Russia, ie very badly. Chechen troops have not proven to be particularly effective, that's a meme. Instead, Chechenya has been on the cutting edge of Russia's descent into lawlessness and third worldism, something the less stupid Russian right wingers (ie Karlin) have never tired of pointing out. The Chechens get to run their province as they see fit (while being subsidized by Moscow) and their mafias (official and unofficial) get first dibs on the assets the state periodically redistributes. It was a victory for Putinism, but this is not a healthy development for any state.
Relatedly, can't figure out if this set of factual developments supports or undermines your narrative...
It's so strange, an otherwise intelligent guy, he believes the stories he's told by the news and asserts their false conclusions authoritatively......
If you're in the UK and cant read this due to that country's Online Safety Act, I suggest using archive.ph (for which there also is a firefox extension).
I got blocked?
Yes. You were not aware?
I don't keep good enough tabs.
So I take it substack don't inform you at all? If that's the case mine (or anyone else's) substack could get posts blocked, without me knowing. Which would be annoying.
They sent a general email, but nothing specific to me.
Yes I got the general email too.
Second Temple Judaism is pretty cool: It’s been around a thousand years; it gave the world monotheism; it bequeathed both Christianity and Islam, which is most of the world’s population.
Are the Talmud and Kabbalah cool?
The Amishification of Judaism conserved Jews as a people through a 2000-year diaspora, but in the 21st century leaves Judaism unfit to serve as the center of gravity holding a people together, let alone a nation-state.
The non-Zionist path seems to be to abandon the idea of a Jewish nation outside of this religion, causing the Jewish people to dwindle. Eventually, all that would remain are the insular Orthodox communities in the Diaspora. Israel would disappear along the way, and it’s hard to see how that happens without significant violence and death.
If a Judaism capable of serving as that center of gravity for the Jewish people today were to emerge—perhaps through a process of extreme natural selection in the United States this century—it might solve the Palestinian problem through conversion. There is nothing genetically wrong with Palestinians; the issue lies in their cultural programming (indeed, Palestinians in the Diaspora, who have some distance from this programming, have made impressive contributions). As Zera Yisrael, they could rejoin the indigenous religion and culture of the decolonized land, or insist on an Arabized identity, in which case they have a multitude of Arab states to choose from.
Second Temple Judaism was absorptive of the inhabitants of Eretz Israel.
There is plenty genetically wrong with Palestinians, but they are indeed redeemable under radically changed political arrangements.
Good writing, full of useful insights.
Many people call (my) this thesis “crazy” or “paradoxical” (Because this childish thought about Russia being historically antisemitic unlike America...but America doesn't really grasp the Israeli model), as if the idea of an equation of patriotic models, not nation-states, between Russia and Israel were some flight of fantasy. In reality, it is painfully obvious: territorialism and historicism bind these two projects far more deeply than the lazy minds around us can comprehend. The future State of Palestine (I think there will be one) will be a sort of post-sovietic state; fragile and easy to control or to disintegrate. This territorialist teleology produces what is inevitable: a permanent conflict of integration, especially when the neighbors are Turko-Mongolic or Arab-Islamic pieces of "civilization" that are totalizing by their very nature. Russia and Israel both pursue total integration and not just “trade” and "peace" 😁, but only on their own terms, following the imperative of their foundations.
The case of Chechnya exemplifies this perfectly. Anyone who reduces it to “a local rebellion” or “ethnic separatism” misses the point: it is more than that. To understand Chechnya, one must grasp centuries of Islamic and Islamistic Russophobia; the civilizational pressure that has shaped Russian frontier consciousness for over a millennium. Raids, incursions, ideological warfare ("the whole Golden Hord islamic trauma")...this is the constant. And yes, even Iran played a subtle but key role in the Chechen conflict just like it does in Gaza. History repeats in coordinates: just as Shiism finances anti-Israeli nationalisms around Israel, it still finances Russophobic movements elsewhere (although both Russia and Iran claim to be allies before the americanist front). Same logic. Different theater.
If only Ratush and his buddies could get some momentum when it was still early
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canaanism)
They had a workable vision, the human capital was there. A missed opportunity.
This is worth an article in itself, but Canaanism was a very silly movement that exemplified the Zionist tendency to present as a practical solution to objective material problems what are actually attempted solutions to internal spiritual turmoil.
A far more effective strategy would have been top play up the shared heritage of Islam and Judaism in their strict monotheism, subsantially overlapping legal codes, and history of collboration in some eras. But Jews weren't interested in that then, and they aren't now either.
I don't think it was that silly tbh, which is the reason why this handful of people were able to punch way above their weight culturally, if not politically.
Material problems are downstream of spiritual/cultural issues. Canaanism was willing to bite a cultural bullet the zionists wouldn't. They were also not socialists, which is a big plus.
My comment was a bit tongue in cheek, I don't think they ever had a real chance, but they identified the cracks in the zionist narrative early on.
The silliness was in thinking that it offered a solution to the problem of Israel's position in the region and inability to assimilate its Arab population. They purported to be facing external reality when really it was the same endless quest to rid themselves of neurosis.
It had a potential to lead to a solution eventually. Shifting the focus away from ethnic nationalism.
If mastering Hebrew was enough to give you upward mobility in a prosperous society, that could've been a workable platform to integrate many arabs.
If you want to go Bronze Age, you'll have to marry the women or at least cohabit with them and acknowledge the offspring.
Ain't happening.
How successful is the integration of Arab citizens of Israel surely that can provide a model to an extent
It can provide a model if the demographic ratio doesn't fall below what it is today, but that's precisely what incorporating the Palestinians would do.
To what extent do you think current Arab Israelis are integrated ? There is obvs hasbara slop exaggerating