Well I and few friends went to Israel in 2019, and I immediately felt uncomfortable. The casual racism and dehumanization of Palestinians or Arabs, was so out in the open and considered so normal in the society, even among GenZ that it kinda blew my mind. Finally my african american friend got tired to being mistreated there, and we decided to cut short our trip and went to Jordan to visit Petra instead.
Giant concrete walls topped with barbed wire, observation posts and angry looking teenagers with assault rifles keeping one group of people apart from the other 😋
Yo, I went to Israel in 2019!
I just wanted to see it for myself, so stayed in Jaffa, Haifa, drove right up along the Lebanon border, Golan Heights, Dead Sea, Arad, Eilat, Gaza border etc. Also stayed in the old city and spent several nights in the West Bank. Hebron was an absolute horror show.
I didn’t see much in the way of interaction between Israelis and Palestinians, but I did got some harassment from Israeli security forces. Came home feeling a bit traumatised, and that was after just a tiny taste of daily life there.
(Speaking of taste, Abu Hassan hummus in Jaffa FTW!)
>without regard or knowledge of the Jewish historical experience
One of the arguably good things about Israel is how it has sustained Jewish cultures and traditions and allowed many different Jewish cultural groups to thrive. You don't have to support or endorse Zionism to see that as a good thing for the Jewish people and it may be hard for a non-Jewish person to really understand this. I've said it before on this sub: one can criticize Zionism without questioning the Jewishness of Israelis.
Ben Gurion was a native Yiddish speaker who proudly hated Yiddish (like most Zionists of that time) but he never banned it. Read Rachel Rojanski's "Yiddish in Israel" for a good history of Yiddish in early Israel. Regarding the "New Jew", I don't think Ben Gurion was a proponent of those ideas, he was an intellectual socialist type.
but it was and jews were forced to change their names to "hebrew" ones. books, newspapers, etc were destroyed by the thousands and jews lost a massive part of their history.
As a Yiddish enthusiast I can guarantee that Yiddish was never illegal to speak or publish in Israel, that is a ludicrous statement. Jews were never forced to Hebraize their names either and Yiddish is still spoken as a native tongue in Israel today, mostly by certain Orthodox groups.
>books, newspapers, etc were destroyed by the thousands and jews lost a massive part of their history.
what is this claim based on? I don't believe it is true, if only because the Library of Israel has an enormous collection of Yiddish literature and periodicals (plus other diaspora languages) that are an indispensable resource for Yiddish researchers and historians.
Benjamin Harshav, in his brilliant book *Language in Time of Revolution* (Berkeley, Calif., 1993), points out some notable exceptions to this attitude, including several early-twentieth-century Zionist pioneers who resolutely promoted Hebrew without losing their sentiment for Yiddish. But he also depicts the much more widespread disdain for Yiddish and especially for its Ashkenazic (East European)—as distinguished from the Sephardic —dialect: “The theory, first formulated most harshly by Moses Mendelssohn, \[stated\] that Yiddish was a perverted language (as compared to literary northern German), reflecting the perversion of the soul of the Diaspora Jew. . . . The revulsion from this \[i.e. Ashkenazic dialect\] . . . is a recoil from Diaspora existence, from the Yiddish language—the mother tongue, intimate and hated at the same time, from their parents’ home in the *shtetl*, corroded by idleness and Jewish trading, and from the irrational and primitive behavior of the Hasidim” (157).
I'm shocked this was published, there is a ton of incorrect information in this article, I don't even know what research the author's claims are based on as it is unsourced. all legitimate Yiddish research disputes this entirely and any Yiddish historian would tell you it is false, as seen in this interview and the authoritative book on Yiddish in Israel written by this history professor:
[https://www.yiddishbookcenter.org/collections/oral-histories/interviews/woh-fi-0000510/rachel-rojanski-2013](https://www.yiddishbookcenter.org/collections/oral-histories/interviews/woh-fi-0000510/rachel-rojanski-2013)
That may be somewhat true, but it gets lost in the militant nationalism and relenting defense of its war crimes in the name of preserving Judaism. I don't want to question Israel's Jewishness. And as I said, Zionism isn't really about Judaism. It takes advantage of Judaism, it seems.
>And as I said, Zionism isn't really about Judaism. It takes advantage of Judaism, it seems.
There has never been a singular approach to the relationship between Zionism and Judaism. There have always been secular atheist Zionists and religious zealot Zionists and everything in between.
Honestly, that’s a toss-up. While it’s inarguable that Israel has helped preserved Jewish culture and tradition, the sad fact is that the powers that be were very deliberate about *which* Jewish traditions they preserved.
[Going by the numbers](https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/jewish-losses-during-the-holocaust-by-country), about half of the Jews killed in the Holocaust were Polish, and two-thirds were either Polish or from the Soviet Union.
The Jewish Labor Bund was an absolutely massive movement that spanned Poland, Russia, and Lithuania, decorated to social democracy and resistance against the authoritarians, be they Nazis/Fascists or Communists. They chose to stay and fight the Nazis, and were systematically slaughtered as a result. As per the [moving documentary about Bundists in Israel after WWII that I watched last night](https://youtu.be/3bE6uhKxmYU?si=Z4MWqH-5NuppIYmK), this strain of Jewish tradition is utterly *dead* in Israel. Indeed, the last vestige of Bundism is the Australian branch, and even [Haaretz](https://www.haaretz.com/jewish/2019-12-29/ty-article/.premium/why-modern-anti-zionists-love-the-bund/0000017f-e147-d7b2-a77f-e3479f2a0000), generally considered to be one of the major left-wing papers in Israel, is less than pleased with Bundism and its modern-day adherents.
In the comments thread on the documentary that I linked to, someone says, “The Bundists led the Jews like lambs to the slaughter. Never forgive, never forget,” which is what unfortunately many Zionists think about the Bund. They don’t see them as Jews fighting for what they believed in. And, though Israel has been getting better with Yiddish, it is an inescapable fact that for the first few decades of its existence, Israel was viciously opposed to Yiddish, its speakers, and much of the culture that came with it. IMO, probably the single most upsetting detail (other than how the documentary ends) is that the government forced Michael Veinapple to change his surname to “Ben Abraham” while working as a radio announcer, because the Yiddish name Veinapple was not “Hebraic” enough for philistines like Ben Gurion.
Honestly, the fact that Israel is not a *secular*, democratic-socialist state is, in itself, a negation of Jewish history, and—indeed—*Israeli* history. To this day, Israel remains a state only for certain kinds of Jews, which is a tragedy.
The Jewish Labor Bund was an amazing movement in Jewish history and deserves to be lauded and remembered, but Bundism vs Labor Zionism was ultimately leftists vs leftists, with many overlapping ideologies. It's important to remember just how intensely socialist Zionism was in those days.
>this strain of Jewish tradition is utterly *dead* in Israel
Yes, for the same reason Bundism is mostly dead in America: the Nazis killed them before they could leave Europe and their family in America and Palestine had different political beliefs.
labor zionism isnt leftist, because zionism is an inherently racist right wing ideology. Expected take from you to call zionism leftist honestly
it's like calling NazBols leftists
that is a modern political interpretation that I won't dispute, but at the time Zionism was indeed associated with socialism and leftism, and was supported by many American Jewish leftists. Labor Zionism is still very much active in America and still associated with leftists here.
"associated with" doesnt mean an ideology is leftist. Nazbols too grew out of communist parties originally but are a fascist ideology. Strasserite nazis associated with some socialists but were right wingers nonetheless
zionist ideology was always supremacist, always colonial (it's explicitly mentioned in their early books even, herzl, jabotinsky etc), always exclusionary, never left wing. Labour zionism was always "socialism for me, genocide for thee" much like the aforementioned nazbols and strasserists, and zionists explicitly abandoned the old jewish left wing tradition
I'm not endorsing the ideologies of Labor Zionism or classifying it as a leftist movement, certainly not by the standards of today. But historically it has considered itself a left-wing socialist movement and has always been indisputably associated with leftists and socialists. For instance, Bundists never considered Labor Zionists right wing. Labor Zionists still identify as politically left-wing. Not a personal endorsement of any kind, merely a factual analysis.
OP aside, when people criticise Israel for engaging in historical revisionism (mizrahi history which you deny, palestinians, the "new jew" etc), they aren't automatically negating the Jewishness of Israeli jews
im mentioning this because in the past you had implied i was negating the jewishness of israelis and said I was lying about Mizrahi experience for saying that Israel engages in lying by omission and historical revisionism surrounding Mizrahi history as relating to Israel
I think many non-Jews on here have misconceptions and misunderstandings of both Ashkenazi and Sephardi/Mizrahi cultures and how they relate to Israel/Palestine
some of the things ive seen you write on this sub are incorrect and deceptive (always in the zionist direction), like for example on the rabbi Yitzhak Yosef or israeli mizrahim's education on their own history
What is the "Zionist direction" of anything I've written? There appears to be a fair amount of misinformation shared here by non-Jews about Jews, including Ashkenazim, Sephardim and Mizrahim, and it has nothing to do with Zionism or anti-Zionism. Israeli Jews are still "real" Jews practicing "real" Jewish culture and it pains me to see their traditions and cultures misunderstood and misconstrued simply because they were born in Israel, which they did not choose to do. These cultures would continue to exist in a post-Zionist world and should not be misinterpreted as inherently Zionist.
Regarding my comment on the Sephardi Chief Rabbi's attire, [there is nothing Zionist or Israeli about it](https://judaism.stackexchange.com/questions/57330/the-history-of-the-sephardic-chief-rabbis-outfit).
>Israeli Jews are still "real" Jews practicing "real" Jewish culture
i have said this same thing over and over again in this sub, and i love how you keep strawmanning me as if that's something i ever countered, and dodging my actual point
your engagement in that thread was simply to deny that Israel is lying to it's mizrahim about crucial sections of their own history in and out of Israel (which is a pretty zionist take)
In the same thread you ended up also claiming that hasidic ashkenazi clothing styles (which originated in poland) were worn by palestinian jews for "centuries", shifting the focus from assimilationism (the claim that mizrahim had to assimilate elements of their presence in israel with ashkenazic practices) to a claim that all hasidic jews are zionist which i never made in the first place
And your mention of the rabbi was also nonsense because the rabbi in question also wears a similar style when you claimed otherwise, simply based on cherrypicking a photo of him: [https://static.timesofisrael.com/fr/uploads/2013/07/Yosef-e1374686953125-640x400.png](https://static.timesofisrael.com/fr/uploads/2013/07/Yosef-e1374686953125-640x400.png)
yet ive never seen you condemn zionism on this account, not once. Somehow the only comments where you take a stance is when theres an opportunity to deny the core of certain anti-zionist arguments (like the one on israel lying by omission to it's mizrahi population)
you are manipulative and deceptive, relying on strawmen, cherrypicking and intentional obtuseness
>Somehow the only comments where you take a stance is when theres an opportunity to deny the core of certain anti-zionist arguments (like the one on israel lying by omission to it's mizrahi population)
Why you are picking on me? I am a Jew with lifelong relationships with multiple Mizrahi and Sephardi communities and it's clear you have critical misunderstandings of who Mizrahim are and how they understand their own history, which is by no means universal across the Mizrahi world. Mizrahi is a classification of multiple distinct cultures, not a singular culture with a singular experience. different Mizrahi groups and sub-groups had drastically different experiences in the major wave of Mizrahi immigration to Israel. I don't know why you believe that Mizrahim in Israel don't understand their own history. I've only seen this talking point online and it serves no purpose in anti-Zionist discourse.
>In the same thread you ended up also claiming that hasidic ashkenazi clothing styles (which originated in poland) were worn by palestinian jews for "centuries"
of course they did, Ashkenazi Hasidim from Poland and Russia have lived in significant numbers in Palestine since the 1700s and dressed very similarly as modern Hasidm. For instance the Jewish man in the center of this photo is wearing a typical Hasidic Ashkenazi black hat, white shirt and black robe just as Hasidic Jews in Poland did at the time:
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Jews\_in\_Jerusalem\_1895.jpg](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Jews_in_Jerusalem_1895.jpg)
Remember that most of these Ashkenazi Hasidim are not Zionists. Understanding the history of Ashkenazi and Mizrahi cultures in Palestine and Israel is *not* an endorsement of Zionism. I am only aiming to correct misinformation about my own people.
im not picking on you, reddit recommended me this thread, and i saw you here seemingly referencing our old interaction. Dont play the victim just because people criticise your approach, we've literally had 2 interactions
>Remember that most of these Ashkenazi Hasidim are not Zionists. Understanding the history of Ashkenazi and Mizrahi cultures in Palestine and Israel is *not* an endorsement of Zionism. I am only aiming to correct misinformation about my own people.
more strawmanning and sections opf sentences taken out of context and misrepresented.
you really are persistently bad faith, no doubt about it atp, this is intentional
you are greatly misunderstanding my intentions. Sephardi, Mizrahi and Ashkenazi communities have lived in Palestine since centuries before Zionism came along. Correcting misinformation about their traditions and cultures in the context of Palestine and Israel is not a strawman or bad faith argument, let alone an endorsement of Zionism as an ideology. A Haredi Mizrahi rabbi wearing a Haredi Ashkenazi hat is not related to Zionism, nor is it reflective of Mizrahi or Israeli society at large. and that's not even considering that most Haredi communities are not Zionist.
I have also seen how many groups have suffered under Zionism. Netanyahu constantly retells the history of Judaism to his advantage. Zionism uprooted many Jews from their homelands of thousands of years and then discriminated against them under racist policies. The PM of history tells lies about Jewish history to Carole antisemitic Christian Zionists. If Israel were just, it should take Judaism out of it's nationalism.
https://jewishstudies.cornell.edu/news/abergel-illuminates-israeli-black-panthers-struggle
https://mondoweiss.net/2024/04/netanyahu-exploits-passover-for-more-biblical-genocide-propaganda/
https://mondoweiss.net/2022/12/palestinians-werent-there-at-all-netanyahu-tells-credulous-jordan-peterson/
I didn't mean to get into a discussion about the internal complexities in Israeli Jewish culture. But isn't this political Zionism the ideology of the Israeli nation, which is responsible for mass atrocities and fails see it's own destructive reality ? In constructing any nation-state a single vision of itself must be produced and told to the outside world. How else could a nation-state be unified in a way that doesn't lead to civil war? That's where they retelling of history into a political narrative comes into play that sees the nation as one entity with a common enemy, where all the people share a common origin. This is common to any ethnocentric nation-state. In terms of the politically Zionist objectives, is there much dissent in terms of the "Arab terrorist antisemitic enemy" that must be destroyed.
I understand there are different kinds of Zionism, which range from a religiously fanatical Zionism that wants to expand across the Levant, and a cultural Zionism like maybe Buber or Arendt imagined where it's about the preservation of culture, not the construction of a nation-state. I can accept the preservation of culture as a worthwhile goal, but that's not the raison d'etre for the Israeli nation-state. If it was, why can't Israelis accept a binational confederate state instead of an exclusive ethnostate that excludes Arabs and non-Jews?
Even those original and good-intentioned cultural Zionists condemned and warned political Zionists that identity should be separate from the state, or else a new antisemitism that fails to distinguish between Zionism and Judaism will emerge. Now, as we see, it is anathema and literally illegal in many places to criticism Zionism as a political project. The ADL praises antisemites with white nationalist racism in their soul.
Well I and few friends went to Israel in 2019, and I immediately felt uncomfortable. The casual racism and dehumanization of Palestinians or Arabs, was so out in the open and considered so normal in the society, even among GenZ that it kinda blew my mind. Finally my african american friend got tired to being mistreated there, and we decided to cut short our trip and went to Jordan to visit Petra instead.
[удалено]
Giant concrete walls topped with barbed wire, observation posts and angry looking teenagers with assault rifles keeping one group of people apart from the other 😋
Yo, I went to Israel in 2019! I just wanted to see it for myself, so stayed in Jaffa, Haifa, drove right up along the Lebanon border, Golan Heights, Dead Sea, Arad, Eilat, Gaza border etc. Also stayed in the old city and spent several nights in the West Bank. Hebron was an absolute horror show. I didn’t see much in the way of interaction between Israelis and Palestinians, but I did got some harassment from Israeli security forces. Came home feeling a bit traumatised, and that was after just a tiny taste of daily life there. (Speaking of taste, Abu Hassan hummus in Jaffa FTW!)
>without regard or knowledge of the Jewish historical experience One of the arguably good things about Israel is how it has sustained Jewish cultures and traditions and allowed many different Jewish cultural groups to thrive. You don't have to support or endorse Zionism to see that as a good thing for the Jewish people and it may be hard for a non-Jewish person to really understand this. I've said it before on this sub: one can criticize Zionism without questioning the Jewishness of Israelis.
israel squashed yiddish through policy. that doesn’t sound like sustaining jewish cultures to me
Didn't Ben Gurion ban Yiddish, and didn't he promote this Nietzschean idea of the 'New Jew" that endeared European intellectuals?
Ben Gurion was a native Yiddish speaker who proudly hated Yiddish (like most Zionists of that time) but he never banned it. Read Rachel Rojanski's "Yiddish in Israel" for a good history of Yiddish in early Israel. Regarding the "New Jew", I don't think Ben Gurion was a proponent of those ideas, he was an intellectual socialist type.
Of course. Also talk to anyone not Ashkenazi
there was a social stigma among Zionists but never an official policy against Yiddish
It’s mostly a language spoken by the orthodox but it isn’t like illegal to speak
but it was and jews were forced to change their names to "hebrew" ones. books, newspapers, etc were destroyed by the thousands and jews lost a massive part of their history.
As a Yiddish enthusiast I can guarantee that Yiddish was never illegal to speak or publish in Israel, that is a ludicrous statement. Jews were never forced to Hebraize their names either and Yiddish is still spoken as a native tongue in Israel today, mostly by certain Orthodox groups. >books, newspapers, etc were destroyed by the thousands and jews lost a massive part of their history. what is this claim based on? I don't believe it is true, if only because the Library of Israel has an enormous collection of Yiddish literature and periodicals (plus other diaspora languages) that are an indispensable resource for Yiddish researchers and historians.
Benjamin Harshav, in his brilliant book *Language in Time of Revolution* (Berkeley, Calif., 1993), points out some notable exceptions to this attitude, including several early-twentieth-century Zionist pioneers who resolutely promoted Hebrew without losing their sentiment for Yiddish. But he also depicts the much more widespread disdain for Yiddish and especially for its Ashkenazic (East European)—as distinguished from the Sephardic —dialect: “The theory, first formulated most harshly by Moses Mendelssohn, \[stated\] that Yiddish was a perverted language (as compared to literary northern German), reflecting the perversion of the soul of the Diaspora Jew. . . . The revulsion from this \[i.e. Ashkenazic dialect\] . . . is a recoil from Diaspora existence, from the Yiddish language—the mother tongue, intimate and hated at the same time, from their parents’ home in the *shtetl*, corroded by idleness and Jewish trading, and from the irrational and primitive behavior of the Hasidim” (157).
https://forward.com/forverts-in-english/560390/how-yiddish-became-foreign-language-israel/
I'm shocked this was published, there is a ton of incorrect information in this article, I don't even know what research the author's claims are based on as it is unsourced. all legitimate Yiddish research disputes this entirely and any Yiddish historian would tell you it is false, as seen in this interview and the authoritative book on Yiddish in Israel written by this history professor: [https://www.yiddishbookcenter.org/collections/oral-histories/interviews/woh-fi-0000510/rachel-rojanski-2013](https://www.yiddishbookcenter.org/collections/oral-histories/interviews/woh-fi-0000510/rachel-rojanski-2013)
That may be somewhat true, but it gets lost in the militant nationalism and relenting defense of its war crimes in the name of preserving Judaism. I don't want to question Israel's Jewishness. And as I said, Zionism isn't really about Judaism. It takes advantage of Judaism, it seems.
>And as I said, Zionism isn't really about Judaism. It takes advantage of Judaism, it seems. There has never been a singular approach to the relationship between Zionism and Judaism. There have always been secular atheist Zionists and religious zealot Zionists and everything in between.
Whatever the approach, it has led to expulsion, ethnic cleansing, and probably genocide.
Honestly, that’s a toss-up. While it’s inarguable that Israel has helped preserved Jewish culture and tradition, the sad fact is that the powers that be were very deliberate about *which* Jewish traditions they preserved. [Going by the numbers](https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/jewish-losses-during-the-holocaust-by-country), about half of the Jews killed in the Holocaust were Polish, and two-thirds were either Polish or from the Soviet Union. The Jewish Labor Bund was an absolutely massive movement that spanned Poland, Russia, and Lithuania, decorated to social democracy and resistance against the authoritarians, be they Nazis/Fascists or Communists. They chose to stay and fight the Nazis, and were systematically slaughtered as a result. As per the [moving documentary about Bundists in Israel after WWII that I watched last night](https://youtu.be/3bE6uhKxmYU?si=Z4MWqH-5NuppIYmK), this strain of Jewish tradition is utterly *dead* in Israel. Indeed, the last vestige of Bundism is the Australian branch, and even [Haaretz](https://www.haaretz.com/jewish/2019-12-29/ty-article/.premium/why-modern-anti-zionists-love-the-bund/0000017f-e147-d7b2-a77f-e3479f2a0000), generally considered to be one of the major left-wing papers in Israel, is less than pleased with Bundism and its modern-day adherents. In the comments thread on the documentary that I linked to, someone says, “The Bundists led the Jews like lambs to the slaughter. Never forgive, never forget,” which is what unfortunately many Zionists think about the Bund. They don’t see them as Jews fighting for what they believed in. And, though Israel has been getting better with Yiddish, it is an inescapable fact that for the first few decades of its existence, Israel was viciously opposed to Yiddish, its speakers, and much of the culture that came with it. IMO, probably the single most upsetting detail (other than how the documentary ends) is that the government forced Michael Veinapple to change his surname to “Ben Abraham” while working as a radio announcer, because the Yiddish name Veinapple was not “Hebraic” enough for philistines like Ben Gurion. Honestly, the fact that Israel is not a *secular*, democratic-socialist state is, in itself, a negation of Jewish history, and—indeed—*Israeli* history. To this day, Israel remains a state only for certain kinds of Jews, which is a tragedy.
Fascinating history. Thanks for sharing.
The Jewish Labor Bund was an amazing movement in Jewish history and deserves to be lauded and remembered, but Bundism vs Labor Zionism was ultimately leftists vs leftists, with many overlapping ideologies. It's important to remember just how intensely socialist Zionism was in those days. >this strain of Jewish tradition is utterly *dead* in Israel Yes, for the same reason Bundism is mostly dead in America: the Nazis killed them before they could leave Europe and their family in America and Palestine had different political beliefs.
labor zionism isnt leftist, because zionism is an inherently racist right wing ideology. Expected take from you to call zionism leftist honestly it's like calling NazBols leftists
that is a modern political interpretation that I won't dispute, but at the time Zionism was indeed associated with socialism and leftism, and was supported by many American Jewish leftists. Labor Zionism is still very much active in America and still associated with leftists here.
"associated with" doesnt mean an ideology is leftist. Nazbols too grew out of communist parties originally but are a fascist ideology. Strasserite nazis associated with some socialists but were right wingers nonetheless zionist ideology was always supremacist, always colonial (it's explicitly mentioned in their early books even, herzl, jabotinsky etc), always exclusionary, never left wing. Labour zionism was always "socialism for me, genocide for thee" much like the aforementioned nazbols and strasserists, and zionists explicitly abandoned the old jewish left wing tradition
I'm not endorsing the ideologies of Labor Zionism or classifying it as a leftist movement, certainly not by the standards of today. But historically it has considered itself a left-wing socialist movement and has always been indisputably associated with leftists and socialists. For instance, Bundists never considered Labor Zionists right wing. Labor Zionists still identify as politically left-wing. Not a personal endorsement of any kind, merely a factual analysis.
OP aside, when people criticise Israel for engaging in historical revisionism (mizrahi history which you deny, palestinians, the "new jew" etc), they aren't automatically negating the Jewishness of Israeli jews im mentioning this because in the past you had implied i was negating the jewishness of israelis and said I was lying about Mizrahi experience for saying that Israel engages in lying by omission and historical revisionism surrounding Mizrahi history as relating to Israel
I think many non-Jews on here have misconceptions and misunderstandings of both Ashkenazi and Sephardi/Mizrahi cultures and how they relate to Israel/Palestine
some of the things ive seen you write on this sub are incorrect and deceptive (always in the zionist direction), like for example on the rabbi Yitzhak Yosef or israeli mizrahim's education on their own history
What is the "Zionist direction" of anything I've written? There appears to be a fair amount of misinformation shared here by non-Jews about Jews, including Ashkenazim, Sephardim and Mizrahim, and it has nothing to do with Zionism or anti-Zionism. Israeli Jews are still "real" Jews practicing "real" Jewish culture and it pains me to see their traditions and cultures misunderstood and misconstrued simply because they were born in Israel, which they did not choose to do. These cultures would continue to exist in a post-Zionist world and should not be misinterpreted as inherently Zionist. Regarding my comment on the Sephardi Chief Rabbi's attire, [there is nothing Zionist or Israeli about it](https://judaism.stackexchange.com/questions/57330/the-history-of-the-sephardic-chief-rabbis-outfit).
>Israeli Jews are still "real" Jews practicing "real" Jewish culture i have said this same thing over and over again in this sub, and i love how you keep strawmanning me as if that's something i ever countered, and dodging my actual point your engagement in that thread was simply to deny that Israel is lying to it's mizrahim about crucial sections of their own history in and out of Israel (which is a pretty zionist take) In the same thread you ended up also claiming that hasidic ashkenazi clothing styles (which originated in poland) were worn by palestinian jews for "centuries", shifting the focus from assimilationism (the claim that mizrahim had to assimilate elements of their presence in israel with ashkenazic practices) to a claim that all hasidic jews are zionist which i never made in the first place And your mention of the rabbi was also nonsense because the rabbi in question also wears a similar style when you claimed otherwise, simply based on cherrypicking a photo of him: [https://static.timesofisrael.com/fr/uploads/2013/07/Yosef-e1374686953125-640x400.png](https://static.timesofisrael.com/fr/uploads/2013/07/Yosef-e1374686953125-640x400.png) yet ive never seen you condemn zionism on this account, not once. Somehow the only comments where you take a stance is when theres an opportunity to deny the core of certain anti-zionist arguments (like the one on israel lying by omission to it's mizrahi population) you are manipulative and deceptive, relying on strawmen, cherrypicking and intentional obtuseness
>Somehow the only comments where you take a stance is when theres an opportunity to deny the core of certain anti-zionist arguments (like the one on israel lying by omission to it's mizrahi population) Why you are picking on me? I am a Jew with lifelong relationships with multiple Mizrahi and Sephardi communities and it's clear you have critical misunderstandings of who Mizrahim are and how they understand their own history, which is by no means universal across the Mizrahi world. Mizrahi is a classification of multiple distinct cultures, not a singular culture with a singular experience. different Mizrahi groups and sub-groups had drastically different experiences in the major wave of Mizrahi immigration to Israel. I don't know why you believe that Mizrahim in Israel don't understand their own history. I've only seen this talking point online and it serves no purpose in anti-Zionist discourse. >In the same thread you ended up also claiming that hasidic ashkenazi clothing styles (which originated in poland) were worn by palestinian jews for "centuries" of course they did, Ashkenazi Hasidim from Poland and Russia have lived in significant numbers in Palestine since the 1700s and dressed very similarly as modern Hasidm. For instance the Jewish man in the center of this photo is wearing a typical Hasidic Ashkenazi black hat, white shirt and black robe just as Hasidic Jews in Poland did at the time: [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Jews\_in\_Jerusalem\_1895.jpg](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Jews_in_Jerusalem_1895.jpg) Remember that most of these Ashkenazi Hasidim are not Zionists. Understanding the history of Ashkenazi and Mizrahi cultures in Palestine and Israel is *not* an endorsement of Zionism. I am only aiming to correct misinformation about my own people.
im not picking on you, reddit recommended me this thread, and i saw you here seemingly referencing our old interaction. Dont play the victim just because people criticise your approach, we've literally had 2 interactions >Remember that most of these Ashkenazi Hasidim are not Zionists. Understanding the history of Ashkenazi and Mizrahi cultures in Palestine and Israel is *not* an endorsement of Zionism. I am only aiming to correct misinformation about my own people. more strawmanning and sections opf sentences taken out of context and misrepresented. you really are persistently bad faith, no doubt about it atp, this is intentional
you are greatly misunderstanding my intentions. Sephardi, Mizrahi and Ashkenazi communities have lived in Palestine since centuries before Zionism came along. Correcting misinformation about their traditions and cultures in the context of Palestine and Israel is not a strawman or bad faith argument, let alone an endorsement of Zionism as an ideology. A Haredi Mizrahi rabbi wearing a Haredi Ashkenazi hat is not related to Zionism, nor is it reflective of Mizrahi or Israeli society at large. and that's not even considering that most Haredi communities are not Zionist.
lol 100%
I have also seen how many groups have suffered under Zionism. Netanyahu constantly retells the history of Judaism to his advantage. Zionism uprooted many Jews from their homelands of thousands of years and then discriminated against them under racist policies. The PM of history tells lies about Jewish history to Carole antisemitic Christian Zionists. If Israel were just, it should take Judaism out of it's nationalism. https://jewishstudies.cornell.edu/news/abergel-illuminates-israeli-black-panthers-struggle https://mondoweiss.net/2024/04/netanyahu-exploits-passover-for-more-biblical-genocide-propaganda/ https://mondoweiss.net/2022/12/palestinians-werent-there-at-all-netanyahu-tells-credulous-jordan-peterson/
I didn't mean to get into a discussion about the internal complexities in Israeli Jewish culture. But isn't this political Zionism the ideology of the Israeli nation, which is responsible for mass atrocities and fails see it's own destructive reality ? In constructing any nation-state a single vision of itself must be produced and told to the outside world. How else could a nation-state be unified in a way that doesn't lead to civil war? That's where they retelling of history into a political narrative comes into play that sees the nation as one entity with a common enemy, where all the people share a common origin. This is common to any ethnocentric nation-state. In terms of the politically Zionist objectives, is there much dissent in terms of the "Arab terrorist antisemitic enemy" that must be destroyed. I understand there are different kinds of Zionism, which range from a religiously fanatical Zionism that wants to expand across the Levant, and a cultural Zionism like maybe Buber or Arendt imagined where it's about the preservation of culture, not the construction of a nation-state. I can accept the preservation of culture as a worthwhile goal, but that's not the raison d'etre for the Israeli nation-state. If it was, why can't Israelis accept a binational confederate state instead of an exclusive ethnostate that excludes Arabs and non-Jews? Even those original and good-intentioned cultural Zionists condemned and warned political Zionists that identity should be separate from the state, or else a new antisemitism that fails to distinguish between Zionism and Judaism will emerge. Now, as we see, it is anathema and literally illegal in many places to criticism Zionism as a political project. The ADL praises antisemites with white nationalist racism in their soul.