Zionism

I feel I have to say something any time I mention Zionism, given the constant abuse of the IHRA definition of Antisemitism and other material as Zionist propaganda. I thought I should make a post that I can reference for clarity on the context of how I am using that term.

Prevailing world religions map (Wikimedia)

The conflation of Judaism, Zionism, and the specific policies of any contemporary (1948+) Government of Israel is extremely dangerous to Jewish peoples (plural - it is not a monolithic ethnicity and/or religion)!

“Two groups conflate Zionism and Judaism. Zionists, who want to legitimize Zionism by pretending it is Judaism; and antisemites, who want to de-legitimize Judaism by pretending it is Zionism.” - Yaakov Shapiro, an anti-Zionist Orthodox rabbi.

It is the Anglosphere (UK+CANZUS= England, Wales, Scotland, Northern Ireland, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, United States) and Christian Zionists (there are more Evangelical Christians within the USA than there are Jewish people globally) that helped create and continue to protect (from accountability that would apply to a regular UN member state) the Government of Israel.

Long before Theodor Herzl convened the First Zionist Congress in Basel in 1897, 16th- and 17th-century English Puritans (such as Thomas Brightman, Henry Finch, and Increase Mather) and other Protestant Christians promoted "Restorationism". This is the theological belief that the physical return of Jewish people to Palestine was a necessary precursor to the Second Coming of Christ. British statesmen like Lord Shaftesbury and Arthur Balfour (author of the 1917 Balfour Declaration) were significantly influenced by these Christian Restorationist traditions.

One of the early groups that believed in the colonization of Palestine and thought of North America as another “primised land”, the Pilgrims, are celebrated every year in the USA during their Thanksgiving. 17th-century English Puritans and Separatists (Pilgrims) relied heavily on biblical typology and Calvinist "covenant theology." They frequently analogized their Atlantic migration to the Biblical Exodus, viewing the Atlantic Ocean as the Red Sea, North America as "Canaan" or a "New Israel," and Indigenous peoples as Canaanites.

Just as the Hebrew Bible stories make clear that the family and followers of Abraham were visitors and foreigners in Canaan, who then colonized that land because they believe they “God” authorized it, these biblical colonization stories were used to justify the colonization of what they were calling “North America”.

The first Calvinist/Puritan-led English colonies in North America were established in 1620 (Plymouth Colony) and 1630 (Massachusetts Bay Colony). This all predates the formation of the USA, so obviously predates the formation of the contemporary Westphalian government of Israel in 1948.

This has been an Anglosphere/Protestant project for much longer than Jewish people were involved, and remains predominantly a Christian Protestant project. It is regularly estimated that for every 1 Jewish Zionist, there are more than 30 Christian Zionists.

These Christian groups are not supporting the Zionist project, or the Government of Israel, for pro-Jewish reasons.

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To this day we see people claiming that it is the Government of Israel that is influencing USA, Canadian, and other Anglosphere foreign policy (and the policy of other Western European governments). This sounds dangerously close to the antisemitic claim that “Jews” are controlling the world, when in fact Jewish people are still under constant threat by Christians (Supersucessionism) and other groups (some of the same groups that support Zionism for anti-Jewish reasons).

The policy of Canada towards refugees from the Shoah was “None Is Too Many”, and is consistent with Christian Zionism. Canada’s blind support for Zionism and the Government of Israel is not a reversal of policies surrounding the Shoah.

The fact that 80% of the global population of Jewish people are in two Zionist countries (USA and Israel) makes Jewish people less safe today than they have ever been.

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See also:

• End Times Antisemitism Christian Zionism, Christian Nationalism, and the Threat to Democracy

• The dispiriting truth about why many evangelical Christians support Israel
  For Christian Zionists, what happens to the Jews and Palestinians is, to put it very mildly, collateral damage

• Pew Research: More white evangelicals than American Jews say God gave Israel to the Jewish people

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Nineteen Twenty Three

For context on how the violent colonial nature of the Zionist project was always known, and how Christian colonialism of what some call North American was understood as the model, should read the Iron Wall essay written in 1923 by Ze’ev Jabotinsky.

• PDF of English translation

Note that this violent (and in my reading of that document clearly racist) colonial project was imagined before WW2 or the Shoah. Zionism, actively supported by Christians Empires and inspired by Christian colonialism, has always made Jewish people less safe.

1923 was also a critical year in the fight for the recognition of the inherent Rights of Indigenous Peoples at the United Nations.

In 1923 Deskaheh, Chief of the Iroquois League, representing the Six Nations of the Iroquois Confederacy, leaves Canada to go on a mission to Geneva (Switzerland). He hopes to attend the League of Nations (now the United Nations) in order to have it recognize the sovereignty of the Iroquois: “The constituent members of the State of the Six Nations of the Iroquois, that is to say, the Mohawk, the Oneida, the Onondaga, the Cayuga, the Seneca and the Tuscarora, now are, and have been for many centuries, organised and self-governing peoples, respectively, within domains of their own, and united in the oldest League of Nations, the League of the Iroquois...”.

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Has the Green Party of Canada abandoned the Global Greens Values? And why Zionism keeps cropping up.

Worldview stuck in the past, self-called "progressives" walking blindly into failures.

An Association Fallacy, and the need to move past settler-colonial thinking