Anonymous OP 6d

I think this is a better option than Palestinian land and with the global opinion against Israel including among the right wing in the US souring as they realize that there’s no coming back from their crimes it’s time to consider other options for the Zionists for a final peace in the levant

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Anonymous OP 6d

How about we just don’t give Zionists who believe they deserve an ethnostate an ethnostate?

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Anonymous #1 6d

The solution to ethnonationalism and territorial conflict is not “push them somewhere else” because 1. Nobody in Israel is going to allow that to happen and 2. That’s basically the philosophy that caused Israel to exist in the first place

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Anonymous #1 6d

Look Israel’s days of support are numbered, what do you expect will happen then? No one in Palestine will want to live together with them after these crimes and Zionists will continue to exist demanding a “homeland”. They will cease their militancy if they no longer feel threatened which there isn’t much in Siberia. China is a pragmatic nation, development of the Siberian border would be advantageous to its poorer northern regions and fill the power gap in Siberia as Russia weakens

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Anonymous #1 6d

The Nazis caused the Jewish exodus to Palestine where the Zionists became the new monsters, now the Zionists could have a second exodus to Birobhidzhan for a fresh start in a land where there’s minimal chance of any further war crimes happening.

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Anonymous OP 6d

Think about the history of Israel and how it came to be so radical and militant today. Jewish people have been displaced from country after country and in Israel they finally built something permanent. It was built on blood and continues to be, but it was made into an actual home. It has infrastructure and agriculture and very importantly, a strong religious ideology that emphasized Israel itself as the only acceptable promised land.

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Anonymous OP 6d

Actually, Israel was mostly built on Russian antisemitism. Prior to world war 2, most Zionist migration was from the Russian empire, which was the big major center of antisemitism at the time. More people began coming from Germany Poland France etc leading up to, during, and after the Holocaust. But the original Zionist migration was primarily from Russia.

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Anonymous #1 6d

And one of the reasons that people moved to Palestine was that it was a safe place at the time. It was way less dangerous and antisemitic than Europe was at the time. Jews regarded it as a safe place to come to escape the danger of Europe, and European powers thought it was a convenient place to stick all the Jews. Is this not similar logic to what you’re saying about the JAO? What makes you think similar issues wouldn’t arise? (Ignoring that resettlement from Israel itself would be a huge war)

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Anonymous #1 6d

Israel has infrastructure and agriculture and a strong sense of nationalism and a massive arsenal and a fundamentalist ideology tied to that specific region. The old days of “Jewish territorialism wherever it works best” are long gone. People are tied to Israel now specifically. And trying to displace them from somewhere yet again would be seen as vindicating all the militancy and would result in a massive war

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Anonymous OP 6d

#1 explained very well, but I also want to explain that Israel didn’t end up where it is because of the Zionist movement. Eretz Yisrael (hebrew name for the land now called Israel and Palestine) has always been our ancestral, spiritual, and cultural home. Our calendar follows the agricultural cycles there, our holidays celebrate the plants that grow there, our language was born there, our ancestors spent 2,000 years dreaming of returning there

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Anonymous #4 6d

We always had ancient roots there, and now Israelis have laid new roots but it’s all tangled up with the old. They won’t go anywhere because they don’t have the connection to any other land that they do to this one

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Anonymous #4 6d

I think it’s important to note that Jewish Territorialism considered sites other than Ottoman (and later British) Palestine, so there’s more going on that *just* “return to ancient Israel.” Like Argentina was a very prominent location, and Kenya, Angola, Cyprus and others had all been considered at various points.

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Anonymous #1 6d

Like the idea of “make a Jewish state” existed as a concept that wasn’t necessarily tied to Israel, but connecting it to religious Zionism and to the cultural and historic significance of that region meant it ended up being the preferred location.

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Anonymous #1 6d

The early Zionist movement was a secular movement driven by concern about antisemitism. It was also a minority movement. Most Jews at the time were very hopeful that Jewish Emancipation would finally give them equal rights in Europe so didn’t want to leave. The only ones that did wanted to be a free people and go home— and going to Palestine was the only option supported by non-Jewish powers

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Anonymous #4 6d

But the backlash to Jewish Emancipation grew and culminated in the Holocaust. When the Holocaust ended, Jewish settlements in Palestine were one of the only places survivors could go and largely the only place they wanted to go

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Anonymous #4 6d

After the Holocaust, most who survived wanted to no longer be a people in diaspora so this could never happen again

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Anonymous #4 6d

I think it’s interesting how both the Jewish emancipation movement in Europe and the Zionist movement both persecuted Yiddish. In Europe it was regarded as a corrupted dialect that existed to separate Jews from their country and which needed to be abandoned in favor of assimilation to the dominant languages. While in Palestine and later Israel it was regarded as a linguistic tie to the diaspora that they felt needed to be wiped away in favor of Hebrew.

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Anonymous #1 6d

I think it’s also important that we don’t whitewash history and pretend Zionism wasn’t viewed as an explicitly colonial project at the time. In the modern day colonialism is agreed to be bad so people feel the need to pretend it wasn’t that. But back then it wasn’t seen as a bad word. Prominent Zionist thinkers like Ze'ev Jabotinsky were extremely clear about it being a form of settler colonialism. They just didn’t think that was bad.

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Anonymous #1 6d

I’m not pretending anything about Zionism, I’m explaining why leaving Israel is a no go

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Anonymous #4 6d

Yeah no I agree I just thought this was a good time to air out some of my historical thoughts because it’s very rare to encounter people with both knowledge of the history and a capacity for nuance. I 100% agree that people aren’t gonna leave Israel.

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Anonymous #1 6d

That’s fair enough, I understand!

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Anonymous #4 6d

Also, the Yiddish thing is a bit of a sore spot for Jews. Yes, there were some attempts to get people to stop speaking Yiddish during the Zionist and Emancipation movements, but they had very little impact. The Holocaust is what nearly killed Yiddish, and after that, everyone agreed to try to preserve what was left

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Anonymous #4 6d

Obviously the Holocaust was the biggest factor in the decline of Yiddish. Same goes for Sephardic and Yevanic. But I think the Hebrew assimilationist policies in Israel are pretty clearly a major factor in the decline of Jewish languages after Aliyah has occurred.

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Anonymous #1 6d

I guess it can be sort of viewed in the two pursued solutions to the perceived “dual loyalty” that has been prominent in historical antisemitism? Many Jewish people have historically attempted to either lose their Jewishness to assimilate to their country, or they go to Israel and lose the distinct cultures of their country of origin.

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Anonymous #1 6d

Hebrew assimilationist policies were a small part of Israeli history though— Hebrew became the main language in Israel pretty naturally as Jews from all over the world came together— Hebrew was the only shared language. Today in Israel people are quite proud of their diaspora cultures

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Anonymous #4 6d

The combination of Diaspora cultures from around the world with shared roots is what makes Israel what it is

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