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A criterion I see people use a lot is whether or not they are actually supporting the bigot, putting money into their pocket or adding to their popularity. I actually have even fewer useful thoughts on this than usual because I have no rules. Everything I do is arbitrary cherry-picking and I'm not even sure I'm capable of doing anything else? If I am sufficiently motivated to read something, I'll do it. I actually just learned the other day that Arthur C. Clarke was probably a pedophile? I was better off not knowing! I didn't know a solitary thing about him or his life til then and now it's like, well. Great. Absolutely nothing actually changed in the world between me not knowing and me knowing, except that now I enjoy it less.

Hmm, some of this was unexpected. When I think of myths about zionism, it's usually from the other end. I don't think I've (knowingly, apparently) met anyone offline who associated zionism/Israel with privileged elites or as an arm of Western empire. That usually comes off as straightforwardly antisemitic. To me, if that's the immediate picture, it goes to the disconnect between how American Jews perceive Israel vs everyone else. I think most of those narratives around zionism are massively naive but at least have some relation to real experiences or motivations of someone who might actually follow-through on what zionism was selling (because "for public consumption" narratives were being sold to Jews too). I also don't know if people take Jews seriously about religious devotion, so come up with secular explanations that make more sense to them? It's random but I have this stupid joke from an article I read about a cousin-in-law (long story) quoting why she moved to Israel from the US: “I told her, the Messiah doesn’t come to Fair Lawn, New Jersey.” Some people actually care about that stuff. Christians have really hammered the notion of "Judeo-Christian" for their own purposes, which obfuscates that Jewish religious practices are really insular and not well understood by non-Jews, and popular Jewish depictions in media are focused on the cultural signifiers of mostly New York atheist secular Jews (Woody Allen, Larry David, Jerry Seinfeld, etc.) to the point where that is more identifiably Jewish than Jewish religious practice.

Like my off-the-cuff stereotype image of an early 20th century zionist is a Polish Jew who lives in a shtetl, they're a member of local group where they do typical community/youth group bullshit (Beitar or more benign) while they talk about how great it would be to live in the Holy Land and how much it sucks to live in a mud pit surrounded by people who hate you, they read zionist literature or listen to zionist speakers, they donate money to the cause, and they die in Europe in the Holocaust without going anywhere.  

I mean, just by the numbers, that has to be the most typical case, right?

And I think the usual American Jewish experience was to have tons of cousins or uncles or whatever who were that guy. American Jews mostly descended from Eastern European Ashkenazi Jews who came before 1925, after which their extended families could not get in due to quotas, so everyone else was murdered and the few who survived went to Israel. 

Like I think these are pretty common patterns in family trees for American Jews (these are the husbands of 2 of bubby's sisters, one from Izbica and one from Leczna): 

https://imgur.com/0YtjS4T

https://imgur.com/BXGpspe

So they have a vision of Israel based on two types of guys they were familiar with, one who represented a regretfully unrealized dream and one who represented deliverance from hell and from statelessness to a homeland. And from that, you get a vision of Israel that is: 1. Functionally "correct," as in, the zionist was correct in predicting that he should leave Europe and that their solution would have worked, millions of Jewish people and communities probably would still be alive if they had already established a state both outside the danger zone and where Jews have collective power; 2. Necessary, as Jews needed somewhere to go in a very literal way post-war but more so that other countries could not be trusted to open their borders and accept Jews fleeing violence at any scale; 3. Morally obligated from the world, as a form of reparations, but more like an actual investment in the future akin to 40 acres and mule* more than attempting to calculate the value of the loss that is owed; 4. Completely half-baked because the unrealized dream of a dead guy frozen in amber forever never gets into realities of how that sausage would get made.

(*as an aside, I was thinking about the irony of 40 acres and a mule being a promise made mostly for land stolen more recently than either the British or Ottoman occupation of Palestine. But, considering that the native claim to that land was never going to be a serious consideration at that point - we should have done it!)

This is all biased by being very America-centric, however, for once that doesn't make it a disproportionate "minority" experience, because the US has almost half the world's Jews (and Israel has the other half,) it's just distorted, not a small sample of people. I doubt most Israelis share the American conception of Israel, but the policies of the most powerful country on Earth are shaped by Americans, not Israelis. I think the most obvious bias/misconception is that American understandings of Israel are very Holocaust-centric. One way this plays out is something you already mentioned, where most Israelis come from. While a huge percentage of survivors ended up in Israel, that's not where the story begins and that doesn't mean a likewise huge percentage of Israel's population was survivors, but Americans aren't as aware of Mizrahi or Sephardic Jews. Lack of trust formed by trauma also isn't necessarily wrong but it's definitely not necessarily right, and nothing about Israel's actions as a real state that exists in real life indicate that it is going to be a long-term way to ensure the safety of Jews (imo the opposite.) American conceptions of Israel also ignore (or I think more accurately, are either ignorant of OR don't care about) the actual tenets of "zionism" as a philosophy or plan of action, because I think Americans tend to view Palestinian displacement as a like, unfortunate side-effect of Israel's development being messy rather than something that was specifically planned for. (Also Americans are Islamophobes.) People also don't really care that much about philosophical origins of things, because in practice whatever we retcon onto them so that they fulfil their current purpose might as well be real. Planned Parenthood was founded on eugenics, but the only people who care about that are the people who want to destroy Planned Parenthood. Ergo, people who care about what Herzl wrote in 1890 or whatever are reaching back to a time that was barbaric everywhere to argue against the present. I don't think they see the throughline that continues today from the originating philosophies. Also, political shit from the past is completely incomprehensible anyway. You come across references to various zionist parties or the Bund or their various factions/coalitions all the time when reading casually about Jewish life in Europe and it comes off as confusing politicking in Europe, bygone inside baseball from a bygone time. I probably wouldn't understand half of Woodrow Wilson's platform either and I don't agree with racist shitheads being president, but I'm still a Democrat, etc.

Personally, most elements of the above were part of my conception of Israel for most of my life BUT my conception of a *post-1948* zionist was different (and overwhelmingly negative), because to me, it was a guy who didn't consider the goal achieved yet, it was an arbitrary end point that could only be completed by taking more land. Israel sucks real bad but if I never see the word "zionist" again on social media in my life, it would be awesome. Same with "settler-colonial." There are terms like that which might be literally true or trickle into the parlance of our times (lol) from academia but they lose almost all their usefulness and often end up as a harmful bastardization, if not just being completely made up, mush of ideas (this also happens a lot with psychology, but maybe most famous is the sociological term "emotional labor," where its usage in vernacular has almost no relationship to the real term but it sounds like it has a lot of rigorous examination behind it.) If the term doesn't distinguish between people moving from one place to another to oversee the extraction of resources to send back, people moving from one place to another in territorial expansion, and people moving from one place to another because they want to want to live there, then it's a bad term, but it's often used interchangeably. It ends up with people inadvertently arguing against the free movement of people or for blood-and-soil ethnonationalist land bullshit. Stealing from people by force or trickery is the thing that's bad! Murdering people is the thing that's bad! Segregation is the thing that's bad! I agree with the people who say that the only solutions for peace in Israel-Palestine should be modeled off of sectarian conflicts, rather than trying to litigate the legitimacy of justifications used by either side of a conflict. 

BTW the Russian Pale is like a wall where all information stops if you are researching Jewish ancestry. Even the maps suddenly become worse once you reach the border (https://maps.arcanum.com/en/map/europe-19century-secondsurvey/embed/?layers=158%2C164&bbox=2817448.339766522%2C6427027.392676492%2C2835747.3930060593%2C6452696.897915288)

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