Zionism is anti-semitic. Zionism has always been anti-semitic. And that anti-semitic violence is deployed against Palestinians first and foremost. https://twitter.com/davidsheen/status/1125995059361583104

I refer to Zionism as anti-semitic a lot because it is. I don't refer to it as "internalized anti-semitism" and other more forgiving phrases because it has never been just Herzl's self image problems as a Jew, but a movement for sovereign power.

Meaning it always intended systemic power. The Zionists' anti-semitism would be systemic when reaching sovereignty. It doesn't make sense to me to minimize this by treating it as victims doing victim blaming

Btw this thread is gonna be very, very long.

So starting from the beginning on how Zionism is anti-semitic. Theodore Herzl's diaries and writings are full of anti-semitic language and imagery, directed especially at unassimilated Jews, especially refugees from pogroms who arrived poor, sick and unable to speak the language

Clocking in to work. More later

Assimilated/assimilating Jews in Central and Western Europe like Herzl sought to distance themselves from Eastern European Jews who tended to be poorer, more religious, victimized by violence and in dress and language distinctly 'other' from their new host countries

This image of a degraded victim who is not organic to society is a large part of what becomes the Zionist idea of the galuti Jew (exilic Jew) that I'll come back to shortly. First a look at this in Herzl's most famous text, Altneuland (Old-New-Land)

Altneuland is Herzl's utopian vision for Zionism. It is the maturation of his earlier Der Judenstaat and is a founding Zionist document. It was important enough to Zionists upon publication that a colony founded in 1909 was renamed as the title of the Hebrew translation: Tel Aviv

In Altneuland a Vienna Jew names Löwenberg travels with a Prussian military aristocrat named Kingscourt to a remote Pacific island, stopping in Palestine en route. Herzl's portrays Palestine as sparsely populated, impoverished and decayed.

In Vienna before departing Löwenberg meets a Jewish family who are poor peddlers including their young son David. By their name, Litwak, they represent Lithuanian Jewish migrants to Vienna and their portrayal as meak is how Herzl saw unassimilated Jews

Lunch break over. More later

The transformation of the Litwaks - stand ins for Jews - and the simultaneous transformation of Palestine into a thriving, bustling land [recall Herzl didn't see it this way already] is the central narrative arc in Altneuland

When 20 years later Löwenberg and Kingscourt pass again through Palestine they see not only Herzl's utopian colonial project, but also a grown David Litwak as a physically and mentally strong leader of of the colony. Gone is the meak and weak and born is the New Jew

[an aside, the sole 'native' character in the book, Rachid Bey, says no one is upset with the colonizers and more or less says, "thanks for the great railroad settlers! Have whatever you want!"]

In the end while David Litwak's transformation impresses Löwenberg, the colonial project is validated not by him but when Kingscourt, the Prussian aristocrat, gives his approval.

Altneuland's meaning overall is this: There is something wrong with Jews. Becoming colonizers will fix this. We will know we are fixed when anti-semites give us validation for not being like *those* Jews

In his diaries Herzl gets so much worse than this like when he spouts anti-semitic conspiracy theories like "wealthy Jews rule the world" or laments that Jewish men are emasculated from circumcision. Moving on from Herzl

The founder of Labour Zionism, the ideology that took Zionism from a small number of colonizers through the first three decades of the Israeli state, was A.D. Gordon. He was also a rabid anti-semite

Gordon blamed Jews for anti-semitism writing, "We are a parasitic people. We have no roots in the soil, there is no ground beneath our feet. And we are parasites not only in an economic sense, but in spirit, in thought, in poetry, in literature, and in our virtues..." 1/2

"...our ideals, our higher human aspirations. Every alien movement sweeps us along, every wind in the world carries us. We in ourselves are almost non-existent, so of course we are nothing in the eyes of other people either." 2/2

Gordon's description of Jews as rootless parasites mirrors that of non-Jewish anti-semites. Gonna check in with one more Israeli 'founding father' whose anti-semitism is different than Gordon and Herzl's before returning to their ideology and view of 'exile'

The 'father of Jewish settlement in Palestine' was Arthur Ruppin. He founded the Palestine Office (now the Jewish Agency), co-founded the first kibbutz and Tel Aviv and *a lot* more.

There are few important Zionist activities in Palestine between 1905-1940 that Ruppin wasn't involved in at highest levels. He was also an anti-semitic eugenicist by training.

Biological racism sees Jews as a contaminating Other, a 'semitic' intrusion European nations and geographies. It how, for anti-semites reimagined Jews from being a religious/cultural grouping into a biological race. Ruppin was a proponent of all this.

Busy for a bit. More later or on the bus to work in the AM

By "later" meant five days later apparently lol

Ruppin's eugenics framework deeply informed his colonizing activities. His goal was synthesizing eugenics and settlement to breed Jews with less "Semitic" chatacteristics which, like other anti-semitic eugenicists, he saw as contaminating the racial purity of the Jewish "volk"

Gordon and Herzl were not eugenics proponents like Ruppin. Theirs, esp Gordon, was more a Tolstoyian religion of labor that would create New Jews through colonizing work. Still Ruppin shared their anti-semitic beliefs about Jews, he simply attributed the "flaws" to biology.

Ruppin being a eugenicist impacted who he saw fit to become a colonizer in Palestine (aka displacer of Palestinians) and how they might participate. He saw Yemeni Jews as capable only of menial labor for example.

He saw them as able to participate in colonialism by reducing reliance on Palestinian labor but did not consider Yemenis as positive contributors to his imagined Jewish Volk

Ruppin believed that Mizrachim were lacking a "vital force" towards genetic improvement and attributed their then slowly declining (in some places) demographic numbers to biological/mental unfitness rather than migration and assimilation.

Ruppin's conception of Ethiopian Jews, again he viewed Jewishness as racial/genetic not so much religious nor cultural, was also premised on eugenics.

On Ethiopian Jews Ruppin said they are "N******, who came to Judaism by force of the sword in the sixth century B.C. They have no blood connection to the Jews," advocating denial of Ethiopian participation in colonization

[an aside: There is no ethical colonization of Palestine offered here as alternative. Ethnic cleansing is built into settler colonialism including Zionism. Embracing Ethiopian or Mizrachi Jews would not have changed this dynamic]

These founding racializations carry through to the present with the oppression of Mizrachim and Ethiopian Jews. Pertinent to anti-semitism is that Mizrachim are not targeted the same as Palestinians, nor Ethiopian Jews like other Afro-descendant populations under Israeli rule

Meaning that they are systemically targeted not just as Black or Arab, but specifically as groups of Jews too. So yes it is anti-Black and anti-Arab racism *and* it is also anti-semitism

Only the white supremacist understanding of "Jew" as inherently "Ashkenazi Jew" keeps Israeli oppression of Mizrachi and Ethiopian Jews from being more widely read as an articulation of anti-semitism

Herzl, Gordon, Ruppin and others' anti-semitism gains systemic presence with the shlilat ha-galut (sometimes written as shlilat ha-golah) or "negation of exile", a core component of all strains of Zionism

This is sometimes anglicized as "negation of diaspora" and in Hebrew the terms galut and golah are both used to describe this in literature. But no matter the Hebrew word choice, there are two different concepts here wrt diaspora and exile

New Zionist settlers to Palestine are referred as "oleh" ["ascended"]. Settlers who leave Palestine are called "yordim" [descended]. Yordim are Israel's diaspora from the pov of Zionism. Diaspora Jews may be a diaspora but are not an Israeli one.

So whether saying "negation of exile" or "negation of diaspora" the grouping in question refers to non-Israelis as the people whose live, histories and cultures must be negated

Shlilat ha-galut means a disavowel of Jewish life and culture outside Palestine and characterizing it as being outside of history. It is seen through the Zionist lens of it not being true Jewish life

In academics shlilat ha-galut looks like this introductory timeline in Van Crevald's biography of Moshe Dayan where Jews disappear from history entirely after the fall of the Second Temple

Jews leave history entirely in Zionist thought between the fall of the Second Temple and commencement of Zionist settler colonialism in Palestine.

This supposed departure from and return to history is just a more sophisticated and respectable version of the anti-semitic Wandering Jew imagery that Gordon's quote above invokes

Shlilat ha-galut's disavowel of Jewish life and cultural production includes dismissing the rich linguistic developments of Bukharian, Yiddish, Krymchak and other Jewish languages

Ruppin called Yiddish "degenerate" and "impure". David Ben Gurion once thanked a Partisan fighter/Shoah survivor for sharing her story “even though it was told in a foreign and ear straining language,” Yiddish.

The shlilat ha-galut's cultural hegemony in Zionism is so strong that when the Mograbi showed the Yiddish film Mayn Yidishe Mame in 1930, a crowd of thousands attacked, shutting it down violently "in defense of the Hebrew language" (as the mob titled itself)

In the 1950s Zionist youth groups would smash windows to disrupt Yiddish language productions despite it being the common tongue to a majority of the million Shoah survivor/refugees that arrived post-WWII

The Israeli government levied an additional 10% on Yiddish language productions to dissuade the circulation of one of Ashkenazi culture's greatest achievements, the beautiful Yiddish theater

This attack on Yiddishkeit, on 1000 years of Ashkenazi cultural production and linguistic development is part of Gordon, Ruppin and others' vision for Zionists to be something other than Jews

This discourse of negating galuti Jews for perceived physical, mental and moral unfitness also demonstrates how settler colonialialist (and white supremacist more generally) movements like Zionism embed ableism into their ideologies.

Herzl's transformation of David Litwak in Altneuland from a sickly child from a sickly family into a phsyically strong leader is both an anti-semitic and ableist image of Jews as emasculated and weak

Given Ruppin's eugenecist framework and how Zionists portrayed Yiddishkeit as "degenerate" it's predictable how Zionism embeds ableism in its concepts of ideal colonial citizenry

This ableist anti-semitism is how Israel referred to the million shoah refugees that arrived in the late 1940s as "undesirable human material" or, in President Chaim Weizmann's words, "human dust"

This continuity of anti-semitism from the founders of Zionism to the founders of the Israeli state like Weizmann and Ben Gurion is done through shlilat ha-galut's structural presence in Zionism

Even at the personal level Ben Gurion invokes Gordon's thoughts quoted above when he said Jews had “material, political, spiritual, cultural and intellectual dependence – because we are alien, bereft of homeland, rootless and separated from the soil…”

None of this has meaningfully changed in the decades since. Shlilat ha-galut is such an important ideological structure that the term galuti (exilic, sometimes said as 'galutnik' or other variants) today is a pejorative term denoting naivete and weakness

This is sometimes said more viscerally as in the use of the Hebrew anti-semitic slur yehudon, common translated as "Jew boy" or "little Jew boy" but in meaning more like "k*ke" or when "Jew" is used as a slur

Somewhat famously a number of US diplomats have been called yehudon by Israeli officials or public personalitiea, including from the Knesset floor. Staunchly pro-colonial officials like Martin Indyk and Dan Kurtzer among others had the slur levied at them

This after they mildly criticized anti-Palestinian policies, especially Israeli colony expansions. Applying pressure from the US regime got these diplomats, who to a person are schmucks, called yehudon

In the context of shlilat ha-galut the accusation is one of weakness and servileness. It is a clear lineal path from Zionism's anti-semitic constructions of galut to the deployment of Hebrew language anti-semitic slurs against Jews

This representation of Israel as Jewish strength and violence and galut as weak and victimized is hegemonic in many Jewish communities (which is to say anti-semitism is hegemonic)

As one representation see this line by grating aggro-bro Seth Rogen in the 2007 film Knocked Up

This clip has the characters contrasting images of Jews as victims against pride in Israeli state violence. This combination of the Shoah+Zionism anchors much of Ashkenazi Jewish identity in the non-Israeli settler colonies due to extensive assimilation into white settlerness

It is the image of galuti weakness contrasted with the sovereign violence of the New Jew and, in its embrace of this Zionist narrative, finds deficiency in non-Israeli Jewish life

The clip like the rest of the film intends comedy but the character's assertation that the only way Jews are fuckable is because women are impressed by New Jews delivering sovereign violence is a faithful production of idealized Zionist masculinity

& the "get laid tonight" line baselines the film's entire plot. B4 dismissing the exchange as just intentional portrayal of drunken bro-ness, which it is, in dialogue it's Israeli sovereign violence gives him the self image of worth to approach his love interest in the 1st place

Lol should probably give more examples than Judd Apatow movies but there's more to get through and this thread already scrolls interplanetary distances

As ugly and tragic as it is that so many Jewish communities, especially tho not exclusively Ashkenazim, embrace anti-semitism this way, most Jews are not this articulation of anti-semitism's primary victims and targets, Palestinians are

Some cornballs/noted professors offer takes like "Palestinians are semites/semitic too". This blends the semitic language grouping with the specifically anti-Jewish bigotry/oppression of anti-semitism. In effect, if not intent, it's a weird ass argument for Big Tent Anti-semitism

But in a way it's not as far off as it seems, not bc of an orientalist notion of "semite", but because in Zionism we have the destruction of the native world to construct an anti-semitic one.

Palestinians in Zionism are not positioned as Jews in anti-semitism, but as natives in settler colonialism. Some scholars argue that Zionism displaces European anti-semitism onto Palestinians but that's just slightly off

As in Zionism displaces Palestinians not with anti-semitism, but in its construction. So they bear the burden just not as targets with one main exception: Palestinian Jews, a group disarticulated from their indigeneity and articulated instead to the settler colony.

The main targets of Zionist violence are Palestinians. The main targets today of Zionist anti-semitic violence are Black, Ethiopian, Mirachi and Sephardi Jews as noted by Ella Shohat in their classic paper: "Sephardim in Israel: Zionism from the standpoint of its Jewish Victims"

Some English language sources for all this: Herzl's diaries and books Der Judenstaat and Altneuland are named above. For more on Herzl see, among others, Massad's The Persistance of the Palestinian Question

The Gordon citation is from Sternhell, The Founding Myths of Zionism. For in depth decsription Gordon's labour zionism and its founding as a settler colonial encounter see Shafir: Land, Labor and the Origins of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict 1882-1914

For Ruppin as an anti-semetic eugenecist and its impacts on colonization see Etan Bloom, Arthur Ruppin and the production of modern Hebrew culture (doctoral thesis)

For Mizrachim as targets of Israeli oppression see the Shohat article named above. For Ethiopian Jews see in english primarily googleable activist and journalistic accounts or my Israeli anti-Blackness series http://www.weavenews.org/stories/2017/9/18/israeli-anti-blackness-part-i

For the anti-semitic and ableist reception given by Israel to shoah survivors see Segev, The Seventh Million

There is one good english language study I'm aware of about shlilat ha-galut that will not be recommended here bc the author assaulted some of their students. Its googleable and pirateable if you absolutely must. Don't ask me tho

For more on the deployment of Hebrew anti-semitic slurs see easily googleable news accounts

For Seth Rogen as aggro-bro see his whole ouevre

For Palestinians as targets of Zionist settler colonialism see a great many works starting with Walid Khalidi's 1959 papers in Middle East Forum on to the present

Fin for now

Forgot earlier to note that the debate over Hebrew between Ashkenazi colonizers wasn't between Hebrew and Yiddish, but Hebrew and German (Herzl and Ruppin's preferred language). They viewed German as the proper language for their New Jew idea

During the early period of this debate Germany was in the process of genociding Herero, Nama and San ppl as part of its DSWA settler colony. I've never seen any reference to this genocide by early Zionist leaders so can't say if they even knew about it

But they, at a minimum Herzl, Nordau and Ruppin, were well aware of German imperialism and approved of it. Ruppin by his academic training in and participation in German eugenics academia necessarily knew of Eugen Fischer and German eugenicist policies in DSWA

This is the concept of German as a "civilized language" that Ruppin and Herzl saw as their ideal colonial image and given a later German genocide, is less sensationalistic than it might seem

Christian Zionism is no less eugenicist than anything Ruppin offered. Here a far right Christian advocacy group does race science celebrating we who will help realize then burn in their rapture https://twitter.com/cufioncampus/status/1140008630231674885

Eugenics today as it was since the beginning of Zionism, this time from Bibi talking pseudogenetics (which wouldn't mean what he says it means even if he portrayed the results accurantely). H/t @ztsamudzi

This really is a horrible encapsulation of the above too where Zionists internalize anti-semitic race science and deploy it in service of removing Palestinians from Palestine

Zionism is anti-semitic Zionism is anti-semitic Zionism is anti-semitic Zionism is anti-semitic Zionism is anti-semitic Zionism is anti-semitic Zionism is anti-semitic Zionism is anti-semitic Zionism is anti-semitic Zionism is anti-semitic Zionism is anti-semitic Zionism is anti

French Parliament passing bs saying anti-Zionism = anti-semitism is so incoherent and awful. Zionism is anti-semitic, aggressively so and *always* has been. France's action is colonial rubbish against Palestinians and affirms a very specific kind of violent anti-semitism: Zionism

Zionism is and has always been anti-semitic eugenicist settler colonialism. https://twitter.com/haaretzcom/status/1220519101925249024

Early Zionist leaders were openly anti-semites inspired by European blood & soil nationalisms and specifically aspired to mimic protestant colonial states in service to empire so...maybe Pompeo's speech is Herzl's Kingscourt giving approval to David Litwak https://twitter.com/YehudahMirsky/status/1297861018626985984