That's what we were thought in school as well, but the actual history quite a bit more complicated than that.
Modern racial antisemitism and political Zionism were two modern political projects that grew from the same 19th century soil of nationalism and race theory. They did not agree with each other, but they converged, from opposite directions, on the same fundamental conclusion: that the Jewish people constituted a distinct, unassimilable national and racial body that could not coexist as equals within a European nation-state. Political Zionism did not adopt the idea of Jewish separateness from antisemites. It inherited this idea directly from traditional Judaism itself. The entire structure of Halakha (Jewish Law), with its dietary codes, Shabbat observance, and, most crucially, its powerful prohibition on intermarriage, was a system designed to maintain the Jewish people as a distinct, separate, and unassimilated nation in exile. This was the internal, self-defined jewish reality for millennia. Modern racial antisemitism took this existing reality of Jewish separatism and reframed it as a hostile, biological threat to the European nation-state.
The secular European Zionists looked at this situation and synthesized two ideas. Zionists accepted the traditional Jewish premise ("we are a separate people") and accepted the antisemite's practical diagnosis ("they will never accept us as equals"). They rejected both solutions, the religious passivity of waiting for a Messiah and the "liberal delusion"(as Zionists described it) of assimilation. Instead, they chose to take the existing identity of Jewish separateness and reforge it using the modern tools of European nationalism and colonialism. That's also why Zionists published scathing articles about assimilated jews whom they perceived as deluded, cowardly, and "self-hating" for trying to be part of a European society.
The leadership and foot soldiers of the early Zionist project in Palestine (1900s), were not suffering from the trauma of the Holocaust (it was decades before) and did not suffer from any meaningful antisemitism, which they also documented themselves ("the Palestinians are child-like and easy to befriend"). Zionist actions and attitudes were thus the direct, confident expression of 19th Century European settler colonialism, as evident in the writings of Herzl, Jabotinsky and co. Zionism was born in the same intellectual environment as the "Scramble for Africa" and the "White Man's Burden."
Their argument was not: "We are traumatized victims who need a safe space.", because if that had been the case they wouldn't have rejected the ugandan land they were offered - it was: "You Europeans have successfully conquered and colonized vast territories inhabited by inferior natives. We, as a superior European people currently without a state, claim the right to do the same thing as you". It was the logical, confident, and systematic execution of a European colonial project by a group that chose to see itself as a superior people with the right to displace and subjugate an indigenous population it viewed as inferior (i.e. the 'kushim' of Palestine). Those secular European atheist jews who, despite rejecting religion as superstitious and irrational, still saw value in it as essential myth-making tool to justify the dispossession of natives and legitimize their colonial zionist project by weaponizing those myths ("our God [which they as atheists didn't even believe in] promised this land to us") .
> The leadership and foot soldiers of the early Zionist project in Palestine (1900s), were not suffering from the trauma of the Holocaust (it was decades before) and did not suffer from any meaningful antisemitism
You're conveniently ignoring the Eastern European pogroms during the late 19th and especially early 20th century. Jewish immigration, in both number and origin, to Palestine not-so-coincidentally tracks the severity of the pogroms. And actually, during this time many times more Jews immigrated to New York than to Palestine. Immigration to Palestine didn't explode until the rise of Nazi anti-semitism.
Collective punishment is wrong. Full stop. Global civil society largely internalized this ethic, after millennia of accepting collective punishment as legitimate, in large part because of the experience of Jews in Europe. It's ridiculous to deny the history of how this norm came about no less than it is to deny that collective punishment has become the facial justification for Israel's war in Gaza.
You're conveniently imposing your misreading on that quote since it's clearly talking about the experiences of _those Zionists living in Palestine_ around 1900.
David Ben-Gurion was the founder of Israel and its first Prime Minister and he confirms that: "They are nearly all good-hearted, and are easily befriended. One might say that they are like big children." David Ben-Gurion in Igrot (Letters), Tel Aviv: Am Oved and Tel Aviv University, Vol. I, 1971
And how come those pogroms didn't make those Zionist-Jews more empathetic to suffering and persecution? Instead they had the exact same racist and supremacist attitudes as the europeans they were complaining about.
"The British told us that there are some hundred thousand negroes [kushim in Hebrew] and for those there is no value." - Weizmann, quoted by Arthur Ruppin in: Yosef Heller, Bama'avak Lamedinah , Jerusalem, 1984, p.140.
> The leadership and foot soldiers of the early Zionist project in Palestine (1900s), were not suffering from the trauma of the Holocaust (it was decades before) and did not suffer from any meaningful antisemitism
Ben-Gurion himself was witness to pogroms in Poland. Does one need to be murdered or violently attacked to "suffer antisemitism"?
Every group is capable of and, in fact, exhibits racist attitudes. Hannah Arendt observed and commented on the racial hierarchy among Jewish Israel's when attending the Eichmann trial, with the European immigrants having higher socio-economic status than the native, darker-skinned Jewish population. Jews are no different than any other group, ethnic or otherwise.
And, FWIW, Jews are hardly the only ethnic or religious (or mixed ethnic-religious) group which has maintained a distinct identity across millennia and within larger populations, or found itself displaced and then displacing others. In fact, the Middle East has many such groups. The insistence on distinguishing and rationalizing Jews as being peculiar in this and similar regards is a distinctively European cultural obsession, though many regions around the world have their own "Jews" that play this perpetual "other" cultural role.
Again, collective punishment is wrong[1]. Full stop. There's no need to build a complex, racist, colonial narrative as a way to characterize Jews, Israelis, or Zionists as the bad guy in the unfolding Gaza crisis. There's zero need to make recourse to centuries of history to deduce what's wrong with Gaza or even how it came about. The left's oppressor-oppressed modality perpetuates prejudiced, reductive, racist thinking no less than other modes of reducing people to caricatures, and in the end just an excuse to malign or elevate people on a whim. Zionists emigrating from Europe to Palestine to flee persecution... bad. Salvadorians and other populations chain migrating to the US to flee persecution or economic hardship... good. But these assessments can and will flip on a dime.
[1] At least in the modern Westernized ethos, though it seems this judgment re the legitimacy of collective punishment or collective blame is sadly, demonstrably precarious.
>Ben-Gurion himself was witness to pogroms in Poland. Does one need to be murdered or violently attacked to "suffer antisemitism"?
Poor old Ben-Gurion, he "suffered so much from antisemitism" in europe that it turned him into a bloodthirsty racist colonialist who had to engage in a bit of ethnic-cleansing and mass-murder of kushim as therapeutic treatment.
>And, FWIW, Jews are hardly the only ethnic or religious (or mixed ethnic-religious) group which has maintained a distinct identity across millennia and within larger populations, or found itself displaced and then displacing others. In fact, the Middle East has many such groups. The insistence on distinguishing and rationalizing Jews as being peculiar in this and similar regards is a distinctively European cultural obsession,
That's not a "European cultural obsession", it's literally just Jewish Law (Halakha). It's also what Zionist-Jews themselves relentlessly weaponize as myth making tool to justify their occupation of Palestine and to make themselves immune to any criticism, even while committing Genocide.
>Jews are no different than any other group, ethnic or otherwise.
Jews would disagree with you on this, their whole claim to the land and justification for colonization and occupation of Palestine rests on that notion of being different, being the "chosen people" which perfectly aligns with the supremacist zionist ideology which had no qualms about ethnically-cleansing Palestine from those they classified as inferior kushim. ("The British told us that there are some hundred thousand negroes [kushim in Hebrew] and for those there is no value." - Weizmann, quoted by Arthur Ruppin in: Yosef Heller, Bama'avak Lamedinah , Jerusalem, 1984, p.140.)
>There's no need to build a complex, racist, colonial narrative as a way to characterize Jews, Israelis, or Zionists as the bad guy in the unfolding Gaza crisis.
"There's no need to build a complex, racist, colonial narrative as a way to characterize Aryans, Germans, or Nazis as the bad guy in the unfolding Dachau crisis."
>The left's oppressor-oppressed modality perpetuates prejudiced, reductive, racist thinking no less than other modes of reducing people to caricatures, and in the end just an excuse to malign or elevate people on a whim. Zionists emigrating from Europe to Palestine to flee persecution... bad.
"The left's oppressor-oppressed modality perpetuates prejudiced, reductive, racist thinking no less than other modes of reducing people to caricatures, and in the end just an excuse to malign or elevate people on a whim. Nazis emigrating from Europe to Poland to flee persecution... bad."
> The leadership and foot soldiers of the early Zionist project in Palestine (1900s), were not suffering from the trauma of the Holocaust (it was decades before) and did not suffer from any meaningful antisemitism
I might be misreading you here, but it really sounds like you're claiming that antisemitism began and ended with the Third Reich. You're aware that's not the case, right?
I'm clearly specifying a subset of Zionist-Jews in a specific location at a specific time "The leadership and foot soldiers of the early Zionist project *in Palestine* ..." and the crucial part which you simply dropped in your quote "which they also documented themselves [i.e. their experiences with the natives of Palestine] ("the Palestinians are child-like and easy to befriend")"
I honestly don't get how one can read that sentence and come to that conclusion, but at least you already suspected yourself of misreading
that seems to be the abridged version, the exact quote I found says:
"They are nearly all good-hearted, and are easily befriended. One might say that they are like big children." David Ben-Gurion in Igrot (Letters), Tel Aviv: Am Oved and Tel Aviv University, Vol. I, 1971
The problem is your comment doesn't make much sense unless you come to the conclusion I did - who cares if they weren't traumatized by the Holocaust specifically (of course they weren't!) if they were instead traumatized by, say, pograms?
They were so "traumatized" that they became racist and supremacist?
"The British told us that there are some hundred thousand negroes [kushim in Hebrew] and for those there is no value." - Weizmann, quoted by Arthur Ruppin in: Yosef Heller, Bama'avak Lamedinah , Jerusalem, 1984, p.140.
Interesting behavior. One would assume that those horrible pogroms would have thought those Zionist-Jews the value of empathy, but they just seem to have taken it as instruction manual and have been applying it themselves for almost a century now.
The question of whether you can find third-hand (or even first-hand) accounts of Zionists saying or doing bad things doesn’t really have any bearing on the question of to what extent Jews faced persecution, or to what extent that persecution motivated the Zionist project.
Incidentally, the idea that persecution or trauma necessarily makes a person (or a people!) better is flatly untrue; anyone familiar with psychology knows that. And, after all, we can find lots of examples of Palestinians doing bad things too.
>The question of whether you can find third-hand (or even first-hand) accounts of Zionists saying or doing bad things doesn’t really have any bearing on the question of to what extent Jews faced persecution, or to what extent that persecution motivated the Zionist project.
True! Zionism was clearly a white supremacist colonial project inspired by european nationalism in teaching and writing either way.
>Incidentally, the idea that persecution or trauma necessarily makes a person (or a people!) better is flatly untrue; anyone familiar with psychology knows that. And, after all, we can find lots of examples of Palestinians doing bad things too.
Also true! Similarly, Norman Finkelstein describes in "The Holocaust Industry"[1]: "that the American Jewish establishment exploits the memory of the Nazi Holocaust for political and financial gain and to further Israeli interests. According to Finkelstein, this "Holocaust industry" has corrupted Jewish culture and the authentic memory of the Holocaust". Zionists pumped out Hollywood movie after movie to lecture the world on how their tribe's oppression has been so uniquely evil, just to turn around and oppress others in the exact same way once they gained power.
I lost 3 great uncles in WW2, one lost his mind to PTSD and drink, and my grandfather came back a different human forever changed. That they fought and died fighting Nazis only for America to adopt and support ethnonationalist fascism is beyond my comprehension and tolerance.
Modern racial antisemitism and political Zionism were two modern political projects that grew from the same 19th century soil of nationalism and race theory. They did not agree with each other, but they converged, from opposite directions, on the same fundamental conclusion: that the Jewish people constituted a distinct, unassimilable national and racial body that could not coexist as equals within a European nation-state. Political Zionism did not adopt the idea of Jewish separateness from antisemites. It inherited this idea directly from traditional Judaism itself. The entire structure of Halakha (Jewish Law), with its dietary codes, Shabbat observance, and, most crucially, its powerful prohibition on intermarriage, was a system designed to maintain the Jewish people as a distinct, separate, and unassimilated nation in exile. This was the internal, self-defined jewish reality for millennia. Modern racial antisemitism took this existing reality of Jewish separatism and reframed it as a hostile, biological threat to the European nation-state.
The secular European Zionists looked at this situation and synthesized two ideas. Zionists accepted the traditional Jewish premise ("we are a separate people") and accepted the antisemite's practical diagnosis ("they will never accept us as equals"). They rejected both solutions, the religious passivity of waiting for a Messiah and the "liberal delusion"(as Zionists described it) of assimilation. Instead, they chose to take the existing identity of Jewish separateness and reforge it using the modern tools of European nationalism and colonialism. That's also why Zionists published scathing articles about assimilated jews whom they perceived as deluded, cowardly, and "self-hating" for trying to be part of a European society.
The leadership and foot soldiers of the early Zionist project in Palestine (1900s), were not suffering from the trauma of the Holocaust (it was decades before) and did not suffer from any meaningful antisemitism, which they also documented themselves ("the Palestinians are child-like and easy to befriend"). Zionist actions and attitudes were thus the direct, confident expression of 19th Century European settler colonialism, as evident in the writings of Herzl, Jabotinsky and co. Zionism was born in the same intellectual environment as the "Scramble for Africa" and the "White Man's Burden."
Their argument was not: "We are traumatized victims who need a safe space.", because if that had been the case they wouldn't have rejected the ugandan land they were offered - it was: "You Europeans have successfully conquered and colonized vast territories inhabited by inferior natives. We, as a superior European people currently without a state, claim the right to do the same thing as you". It was the logical, confident, and systematic execution of a European colonial project by a group that chose to see itself as a superior people with the right to displace and subjugate an indigenous population it viewed as inferior (i.e. the 'kushim' of Palestine). Those secular European atheist jews who, despite rejecting religion as superstitious and irrational, still saw value in it as essential myth-making tool to justify the dispossession of natives and legitimize their colonial zionist project by weaponizing those myths ("our God [which they as atheists didn't even believe in] promised this land to us") .