How ‘Zionist’ became a slur on the US left
www.theguardian.com
For many Jews, Zionism signifies a connection to Israel. But a large number of student protesters see the violence in Gaza as a logical conclusion of the late 19th century ideology

For decades, Joe Biden has proudly declared that he is a Zionist, and he has repeated that claim since Hamas’s 7 October attacks on Israel. But for the student anti-war protests gripping the US, the words “Zionist” and “Zionism” have become a watchword – pejorative and emblematic of the violent state policies driving the war on Gaza.

On social media and in the streets, critics no longer call out supporters of the state of Israel as “pro-Israel”: they call them Zionist. Some university encampments have posted signs saying: “Zionists not allowed.”

Student protesters say that their criticisms of Zionism are rooted in the state of Israel’s displacement and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians. Pro-Israel activists have responded by defending the term. “If the last six months on campus have taught us anything, it is that a large and vocal population of the Columbia community does not understand the meaning of Zionism,” a group of more than 500 Columbia University students recently wrote. “We are proud to be Zionists.”

  • Aceticon@lemmy.worldEnglish
    103·
    2 months ago

    They’ve become the very thing they fought against nearly a century ago.

    Well, that’s the thing, it wasn’t they - those were completelly different people who just happenned to share the same religion and etnicity.

    Put aside the racist thinking (even the soft, closet version of racism that’s been pushed by libs in the last couple of decades under claims of being “positive”) that bundles all people of the same gender/etnicity/origin/sexual-orientation as being the same, all equally deserving and all implicitly victims or aggressors, and this situation is simply aggressors doing horrible, inhuman acts against other human beings, due to a mix of greed and extreme racism.

    The only kind of fair expectations and judgment is based on people’s actions, not other actions of other people of the same gender/etnicity/origin/sexual-orientation, and that different other people who happen to share with these violent sociopathic agressors a characteristic that is entirelly irrelevant for this behaviour of theirs, were themselves victims of another bunch of violent sociopathic agressors and fought the good fight, only has meaning for those people whose treatment and perception of other human beings is shaped by their race, i.e. for racists.

    If there is one thing all this has shown is that a lot of people turn out to have been running around with a deeply discriminatory view of others, including pretty straightforward racism, even though they believed they were no such thing (the opposite, even) because the discriminatory judgements the made of others were said to be “positive”.

    Those people might not have done it for bad reasons, but they still interiorised deeply discriminatory views of other human beings, a moral disfunctionality which was weaponized by Zionists to allow them to act against their victims with quasi-inhuman levels of racism and violence, all this well before the current situation in Gaza.