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):
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.
I think part of the disconnect is you are coming from a place that is more informed than 99.9% of people on this, having meticulously researched our Jewish ancestry, and much more informed than I have been too. And also that a lot of the people who you or I might know who even thought that hard about who a Zionist is or was were Jews. How many non-Jews around us were thinking hard about Zionism before 2023? So I don't think they are picturing the Polish Jew struggling in a shtetl as the prototype early Zionist (especially since most of them died and didn't get to have a voice), though people who have looked into their Jewish ancestry might.
I have seen the colony of Europe thing and the Western elites thing a whole freaking lot in left and pro-Palestinian spaces, so it definitely affected my image since I wasn't that informed (also for me personally rather than the super-rich which I mentioned more as a common example of a mythical image to challenge, I was imagining intelligentsia who were writing the Zionist materials, who at least had to have been luckier than much of the world's population and elite in that sense; probably got that habit from communist spaces I've been reading a lot where any bourgeois is identified as a privileged elite), and it makes me think they have to be common myths. Which is why I've wanted to do a dive like this podcast--I'm also only halfway through and haven't even gotten to the time of the Holocaust yet, which is also why my post here doesn't incorporate much of that, even though it's so central to the story. I was definitely not thinking in terms of "oh this whole family/community was murdered, but if they had taken up the call of Zionism, they would have survived," which I see now probably a lot of people did think. I've never thought in those terms, only in terms of it was a place where survivors went after it was over, or people who were desperately fleeing in the moment.
When writing a lot of this I was thinking in terms of people moving to Palestine before things like Betar even existed (which was created by Jabotinsky in one of those Zionist political splits). Another thing I didn't realize was how much of what we picture as Jewish identity (and I don't mean to include Betar in Jewish identity) was established as part of early Zionism: I didn't realize Hebrew was revived from almost a dead language, serving especially the purpose of a unified language for those settling in Palestine who spoke different languages. I imagined rabbis going around speaking that consistently since forever, not just barely knowing parts to read the Torah. I just never thought too hard about any of this, really.
I think I was looking at it more from an on-the-ground POV--who were the Zionists that actually started going there and did the thing? rather than American POV. But absolutely American and European Jews who became Zionists were mainly fed the whitewashed "for public consumption" version of the platform--that's mainly what I meant in that; it was first and foremost the story peddled to other Jews to market the idea, just also used for governments and financiers. The people hearing that didn't have TV/video or stuff like that showing them what the actual conditions were like, or what Palestinian society existed that would be displaced, and reports were highly whitewashed to promote immigration. But in addition to all of the ones donating and vaguely supporting, almost certainly some or most people literally showed up to immigrate and got there with all their stuff and were shocked "who are all these people here who don't want us here? I thought we were done with that." Especially since the ones whose home conditions were the worst had the most incentive to emigrate and it's hardly likely they were the most informed. I mainly point to the different early groups to highlight their commonalities (with just a bit of trivia thrown in)--all the different split groups on various sides were versions of people who were fed up and wanted change and from the general pool of adopters of revolutionary attitude.
Anyway I agree with your conclusion there, but to me the historical tracing of who the people who settled in Mandatory Palestine are (and who fled to Israel with no other option like the Mizrahi Jews of the Muslim world) is central when I see people saying Israel should not exist, because you have to understand correctly why it does exist in order to address whether it should or not. And then if it shouldn't exist, what would be the right thing to do? Which to me kill or deport them is not a legitimate moral option, nor is put them in a combined country with people who don't want to be in a combined country with them and whose majority very well may kill or deport them. But if you listen to myths about who the people who settled there were/are, then this might seem like fully just retribution.
There are lots of things that were not ideally brought into existence but were for reasons, but where once they are, the right answer is not to get rid of them (like babies in various circumstances). So this whole focus on whether Israel should exist or not doesn't seem right to me, but I see so much dwelling on it. It exists, what now? Supposing it's like the baby above who is now a teenager or adult that came up in a terrible situation and is now doing anti-social, harmful criminal behavior, it's ideally to contain/restrict it in a safe, secure place, address the mental illness (take away the maladapted mental controls aka leaders), rehabilitate and provide a measure of restitution to those it wrongs. But the U.S. has long been an overindulgent adoptive parent instead, which obviously needs to stop and they join the rest of the world in being the justice system instead.
On the religious holy land part--I tend to overlook that because I have the conception that most Jews are secular in the U.S. and in Israel, but it's definitely a big factor for at least a sizable minority or more. But from the same lens I was looking at of the ones who were immigrating, I don't see it as a strong enough force to drive a full life-uprooting move on its own except for the small minority of the very religious ones. It surely had to be accompanied by the reasons of the political-social-economic situation for the large majority, right?
It doesn't surprise me whatsoever that the Russian part is a wall of non-information, the country was really far behind most of Europe at that point in development (hence everyone wanting revolution), there was hardly an industrial revolution there until after 1890 (the Russian Empire had like 7-8% of the world's population but like 4% of the world's industrial production around that time) and massive amounts of land to administer, with a lot of it clearly seen as places for undesirables--Jews were barely people worth considering to the governing forces there, so having good records and stuff was so far from a priority.
Blah I accidentally reloaded the page and lost this comment, but I remembered that I wanted to mention that I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of early zionist settlers expected resistance. The whole sphere around Jewish life seemed so steeped in ethnic hatred, and I don't meant just against Jews. I remember this interview about life in Sniatyn (great grandpa Shulim's hometown https://kehilalinks.jewishgen.org/sniatyn/#E.RichRemembrance) where she describes the mutual hatred of Jews and ethnic Poles and Jews and ethnic Ukrainians, but also of the Ukrainians' lower social status and apparent poverty compared to Poles and they seemed plagued by social ills. Meanwhile, she mentions that there were German families on the outskirts from settlement programs, and in other places that was terribly oppressive to Poles (eg https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Germanisation#Polish_territories though Sniatyn was in Galicia). I can't imagine Polish-Ukranian relations were good, and in another case, the story supposedly from great grandma Eva's family in Busk is that her brother and his family were killed after being forced to flee the Polish home that was sheltering them - a group of Ukranians burnt it one night, and it's not even clear that they knew that they were harboring Jews.
It's all so depressing and crazy, and sort of shocking as an American where our racism is so uncomplex lol. I'm not good at learning, understanding or remembering history and it all coalesces into a horrible stew of misery to me.
Yeah, I didn't mean to imply this was the main common understanding, but a common American Jewish trope to which non-Jews often defer to out of sympathy without examining (more on that in a sec) beyond being a good Jewish "ally." Most people seem to think about it so little that they wouldn't even arrive at a notion of early zionists as anything, they just have whatever image of a "historical Jew" is in their head, which I tend to think is the image of Ellis Island tired immigrants or like, Tevye lol.
I think I wouldn't go so far to say that I'm "informed" on zionism because that implies deeper factual knowledge of specific history that I really don't have, instead I was just trying to explain the ways American Jews would have emotional "ties" to Israel despite being pretty separated/sheltered from the realities of Israel, and why it seems completely absorbed into the mainstream without being treated as like, the official adoption of a 19th century political idea, or even really acknowledging its roots. I sometimes get emails from Jewish genealogy sites I'm a member of (JewishGen, the Jewish Records Indexing Project, Gesher Galicia) or the Jewish Federation of Pittsburgh (I donated to their Afghan refugee settlement program) about calling for prayers for Israel or their support in general and they never act like their statements would be considered even the slightest bit controversial or even political. So this wasn't meant as a counterpoint to examining the roots of zionism, more just my perspective on why it exists in America now and what form it takes, which seems so divorced from its origins. Of course NOT practicing means I have no insight into how zionism is formally incorporated at shul/temple but as a cultural idea, it's unavoidable.
I don't think people think about what went into common pro-Israel refrains directly (Jews need a place guaranteed to be safe, what else were Jews supposed to do after the war, Israel has a "right" to exist which I always interpret as "deserves" to exist or earned the right, etc), but that's what make sense to me as a very high level explanation. Anti-Israel or at least Israel-critical Jews are the ones who make compelling arguments about the realities of Israel in practice, because as a country rather than an ideal, its actions are usually indefensible. And ideals/values are more likely to come from socialization in the community or from your family than actually engaging with factual events from the news or understanding history.
Online yeah I see the elite imperialism stuff all the time, but from my general experience IRL and certainly from mainstream mass media and political language, I think widespread sympathy for Jews about anything that can be seen as a product of the Holocaust is widespread. Jews are oddly popular in America (https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2023/03/15/americans-feel-more-positive-than-negative-about-jews-mainline-protestants-catholics/ - in fact, suspiciously so, people who harbor ill will are aware of how bad it looks so it is hard to parse. There was a more interesting poll I saw maybe from gallup that broke apart the very vs somewhat favorable stat, and the "very" favorable was disproportionate, which is a red flag to me for people not being Normal about it, but I can't find it again.) Maybe some of that is sympathy & support for Jews also plays really well into an American WWII hero/savior narrative. Anyway, not counting the sort of weirdly-jealous Christian sects that Death Cult for Cuties would talk about or the rapture-wanters, most non-Jews I've ever heard make casual mention of Israel seem to have a default posture of sensitivity, which I'm sure comes from an emotional place (the Holocaust narrative) and not an ideological one (anything related to coherent politics or the philosophy of zionism.) But that might also come from guilt/embarrassment for being critical in front of Jews, not what they actually have accepted as a belief (especially since favorability of Israel is lower than favorability of Jews, but it's still a majority.) Also, Jews in America have managed to reach the upper echelons of society. Not to say that all Jews have prospered or are elites or any of that, but non-Jewish elites are likely to have Jewish friends and associates and rich cloistered assholes know to avoid offending their buddies lol. Like that's not supposed to imply the antisemitic stereotype, but there are tons of places with basically zero Jews at all, so it makes sense that elite thinking in America is different somewhat from other places because of they do have a presence.
Some of the contemporaneous language you see about pre-war zionists who didn't actually make aliyah reminds me of like....Boxer from Animal Farm lol. Which does go back to the whole elites manipulating yokels thing, but then elites and yokels did in fact make it happen and the yokels got what they were looking for, so, the yokel version was also equally real? Also yokel is overstating it a bit, I'm thinking more middle class, or artisan/professional class. I saw this bit in a 1910 obituary from the Zamosc yizkor (memorial) book:
"When he was just a child, his father died, and he was left with his mother in great penury and need. From that time on, until today, he had a life full of pain and need, which literally oppressed him. However, he would not complain about his bitter lot, rather, he would find solace in his Zionist ideal, which he served with all of his heart and soul. It was only here, that he saw the hope for his people, and their success in the future. His cherished idea was the ‘Colonial-Bank,’ which was founded for the development of the Yishuv in the Land of Israel. A few hours before his death, when his severe illness intensified, he instructed his sister, that she should carry out all of his tasks. He very strongly identified with the situation of the worker in the Holy Land…. he was raised on the lap of Torah study, and its lore. The will to knowledge was very great with him. However, for known reasons, he could not realize his requirement to travel abroad, in order to round out his knowledge."
This strikes me as someone who is driven by material interests, but has developed it into a religious fervor as a coping mechanism. I wish I had more examples on hand but you see it called a "dream" so much, his heart was with the Holy Land this and that. Though to be fair Zamosc was a lot more prosperous and cosmopolitan than a lot of other places, it was less shtetl-like.
I often wonder about the "right to exist" thing from the sense like, it's hard to imagine how any new country could be formed without a lot of strife and complication and loss of land from wherever it breaks off from and someone getting screwed. Does that mean all the countries that exist now are what we think should exist in perpetuity? I don't think religious states are a good idea at all and will always lend themselves to discrimination and illiberal policies, but that will always be in tension with the fact that people should also get to choose the type of society they want to live in. Jewish customs have a huge number of implications for everyday living, and Jews "make it work" when assimilated in various parts of the world, but I fully understand how nice it must be for that to be officially facilitated as much as possible. All sorts of other cultures or subcultures/groups have this too, and they are often not being well served by the countries they live in. If Jews had migrated to Palestine en masse and didn't engage in antagonistic measures to exclude Palestinians, like if naturally congregating and segregating Jewish areas developed, would declaring independence to create Israel be different? Are the reasons for migrating actually relevant at all? To me, the only difference is the degree to which Israel owes Palestinians restitution for how it was done and what is continuing to be done (which right now is: so much it's incalculable,) but it doesn't change the the question of the existence of the state per se that much. Like one day we might have to deal with the question of something like, Texas seceding and I'm not sure it's necessarily correct that they should be forced to remain, and the moral questions there are more about the people who would want to remain and paternalistic protection of people against what's bound to be a shitty idea. But if Jews want to overwheingly live in a place called Israel with a particular structure, and Palestinians overwhelmingly want to live in a place called Palestine with a different structure, why wouldn't it be acceptable for one group to declare independence and be separate countries? The actual problem with Israel doesn't have to be complicated: don't commit horrible atrocities against humans. And yeah, understanding how it got to that point matters but it's also where things go into unproductive, if not outright counterpoductive, territory, so it all depresses me. I have a very grim view of the future unfortunately.
I think I'm mostly going to say stuff that just agrees but adds here.
I don't think the question of the ethnostate (another word I'm getting tired of seeing in the discourse because it represents so many different formulations) can be simply answered as it's strictly bad, though I definitely don't think encouraging them is good, like you say. Since you were talking about Contrapoints' recent post, I saw this: https://www.reddit.com/r/LeftoversH3/comments/1lwwfoh/there_are_two_types_of_people/
which to me is just screaming, "the world should be simple, why can't the world be simple? I don't want to think in a nuanced way."
The example that comes to mind for me is: should Native/original Americans have been allowed to have states of their own continue with their own structure of laws protecting their religious traditions and borders? Or is it good that they now only exist as sub-state entities without full lawmaking capabilities and no allowance of military?
Isn't the issue the behavior of some specific ethnostates? Also mixed liberal republics act horribly sometimes as do "non-nationalist" socialist states. I feel like the "no ethnostates" declaration is very often tied to a specific ideology of "my form of government is better or more enlightened." Also they ignore the fact that more Palestinians want an ethnostate themselves than a mixed democracy.
The question of whether people should be allowed to separate is also so complicated. Like should we have allowed the Confederacy to separate? Should Bangladesh have been forced to remain part of Pakistan? Should the UK have just made all of India, Pakistan and Bangladesh a single country because splitting by ethnicity is bad? Should they have just disappeared and let everyone sort it out themselves (and maybe form ethnostates)? If Puerto Rico, or Catalonia, want to separate, is that bad? The question of where to draw the lines has never ever been simple.
To me if you have a very distinct culture and the mainline government is not serving your interests, separating is very valid, even if it creates an "ethnostate." Invading others to create your ethnostate is specifically what's bad to me, or treating others who are unavoidably there badly--say if you split off but inevitably have some of the other group living among you. But the Confederacy had a very different culture, and most people feel justified in saying their culture was evil (both the whole and the splinter group invaded lands in this one so it's not a real differentiator). So do we judge whether any specific culture is moral (who is the arbiter? just the most powerful countries or the country being split from?) before saying they should have their own country?
Also I just learned the term post-Zionist, which I think describes what you were saying earlier pretty well, about Zionism's mission having been completed (for good or ill) and post-1948 Zionism being a different thing that is damaging with no real benefit. Zionism was not done in a moral way from the start, but the benefit of trying for a world where 6 million Jews don't die and the rest displaced still was something.
And I totally agree with Natalie that now that we've elected Trump, there's barely hope of the U.S. joining in justice for Palestinians--there's so much more chance to pressure a Democrat to doing things, what leverage does anyone on the left-hand side have over Trump?
The utilizing leverage thing is also an interesting topic to me, and it intersects with people getting pissed off at leftists for not supporting Democrats. For me the threatening to withhold votes thing is a valid form of utilizing leverage, though should be balanced with also maximizing the probability that the candidate who might do something and who can be leveraged will win. So in my opinion in 2024, be very threatening early on, trying to shape the Biden then Harris platform without ever having the inner intention of not voting for them, then as the general election gets closer, switch over to solidarity and promotion to make their platform the strongest and most convincing it can be (they must win to be able to execute any of this), then upon winning (hopefully), agitate strongly to emphasize their position is not secure. This is the way. According to me. Yes you should posture a little, and put on a front or lie even.
As you can probably tell, I'm very much in the camp that two-state is the only real way for Israel-Palestine, but this needs to be accompanied by strongly enforced peacekeeping, with the US joining the rest of the world, or other countries doing something without the US for once, since now we have Trump and thus we aren't doing this in the near future. Israel has pissed enough people off that there might finally be a window to put them in "world jail." If the US were actually leading, I feel like it could have actually happened.
An aspect I find disturbing maybe isn't even the lack of nuance, it's the demand for lockstep conformity. I was thinking about that from the What is to be Done stuff, where it's clear why that framework would result in rigid conformity (because if there was 1 truly rational correct way to act, and everyone did it, then it would all be the same.) Like all Natalie is saying is that she's not going to be a social media presence the way leftists want her to. She's not comfortable being involved with rhetoric she finds dangerous, she doesn't agree with certain things people want to hear, she doesn't think it will help if not be counterproductive, etc. Ostensibly if the issue is whether she supports Palestine, that's resolved. But no one who has been "waiting" for her to "speak out" is reassured to see that she did so, everyone's so mad that they can't make her do exactly what they want her to do or say exactly what they want her to say. That's a part of leftism I will never be comfortable with either. (Also probably some people feel defensive that she's talking about them, so the charges of "she's making this about herself??" are super ironic/hypocritical. I'm pretty sure this is more where Michael Hobbes was coming from than the former, he's too smart for the conformity stuff, however he's also a douche because he knows what he is doing and what happens when he QTs random small accounts.)
The idea of 1 true righteous kind of state follows from all that too. I feel like one of my attributes as a liBeRaL is that I have no idea what the answer is to any of those questions, and that I don't believe anyone has an answer, and various things will work or not work depending on the circumstances or unexpected variables outside anyone's control or ability to predict. This will result in a lack of consistency and the wrong thing happening frequently. Yep! It will!
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)
I think part of the disconnect is you are coming from a place that is more informed than 99.9% of people on this, having meticulously researched our Jewish ancestry, and much more informed than I have been too. And also that a lot of the people who you or I might know who even thought that hard about who a Zionist is or was were Jews. How many non-Jews around us were thinking hard about Zionism before 2023? So I don't think they are picturing the Polish Jew struggling in a shtetl as the prototype early Zionist (especially since most of them died and didn't get to have a voice), though people who have looked into their Jewish ancestry might.
I have seen the colony of Europe thing and the Western elites thing a whole freaking lot in left and pro-Palestinian spaces, so it definitely affected my image since I wasn't that informed (also for me personally rather than the super-rich which I mentioned more as a common example of a mythical image to challenge, I was imagining intelligentsia who were writing the Zionist materials, who at least had to have been luckier than much of the world's population and elite in that sense; probably got that habit from communist spaces I've been reading a lot where any bourgeois is identified as a privileged elite), and it makes me think they have to be common myths. Which is why I've wanted to do a dive like this podcast--I'm also only halfway through and haven't even gotten to the time of the Holocaust yet, which is also why my post here doesn't incorporate much of that, even though it's so central to the story. I was definitely not thinking in terms of "oh this whole family/community was murdered, but if they had taken up the call of Zionism, they would have survived," which I see now probably a lot of people did think. I've never thought in those terms, only in terms of it was a place where survivors went after it was over, or people who were desperately fleeing in the moment.
When writing a lot of this I was thinking in terms of people moving to Palestine before things like Betar even existed (which was created by Jabotinsky in one of those Zionist political splits). Another thing I didn't realize was how much of what we picture as Jewish identity (and I don't mean to include Betar in Jewish identity) was established as part of early Zionism: I didn't realize Hebrew was revived from almost a dead language, serving especially the purpose of a unified language for those settling in Palestine who spoke different languages. I imagined rabbis going around speaking that consistently since forever, not just barely knowing parts to read the Torah. I just never thought too hard about any of this, really.
I think I was looking at it more from an on-the-ground POV--who were the Zionists that actually started going there and did the thing? rather than American POV. But absolutely American and European Jews who became Zionists were mainly fed the whitewashed "for public consumption" version of the platform--that's mainly what I meant in that; it was first and foremost the story peddled to other Jews to market the idea, just also used for governments and financiers. The people hearing that didn't have TV/video or stuff like that showing them what the actual conditions were like, or what Palestinian society existed that would be displaced, and reports were highly whitewashed to promote immigration. But in addition to all of the ones donating and vaguely supporting, almost certainly some or most people literally showed up to immigrate and got there with all their stuff and were shocked "who are all these people here who don't want us here? I thought we were done with that." Especially since the ones whose home conditions were the worst had the most incentive to emigrate and it's hardly likely they were the most informed. I mainly point to the different early groups to highlight their commonalities (with just a bit of trivia thrown in)--all the different split groups on various sides were versions of people who were fed up and wanted change and from the general pool of adopters of revolutionary attitude.
Anyway I agree with your conclusion there, but to me the historical tracing of who the people who settled in Mandatory Palestine are (and who fled to Israel with no other option like the Mizrahi Jews of the Muslim world) is central when I see people saying Israel should not exist, because you have to understand correctly why it does exist in order to address whether it should or not. And then if it shouldn't exist, what would be the right thing to do? Which to me kill or deport them is not a legitimate moral option, nor is put them in a combined country with people who don't want to be in a combined country with them and whose majority very well may kill or deport them. But if you listen to myths about who the people who settled there were/are, then this might seem like fully just retribution.
There are lots of things that were not ideally brought into existence but were for reasons, but where once they are, the right answer is not to get rid of them (like babies in various circumstances). So this whole focus on whether Israel should exist or not doesn't seem right to me, but I see so much dwelling on it. It exists, what now? Supposing it's like the baby above who is now a teenager or adult that came up in a terrible situation and is now doing anti-social, harmful criminal behavior, it's ideally to contain/restrict it in a safe, secure place, address the mental illness (take away the maladapted mental controls aka leaders), rehabilitate and provide a measure of restitution to those it wrongs. But the U.S. has long been an overindulgent adoptive parent instead, which obviously needs to stop and they join the rest of the world in being the justice system instead.
On the religious holy land part--I tend to overlook that because I have the conception that most Jews are secular in the U.S. and in Israel, but it's definitely a big factor for at least a sizable minority or more. But from the same lens I was looking at of the ones who were immigrating, I don't see it as a strong enough force to drive a full life-uprooting move on its own except for the small minority of the very religious ones. It surely had to be accompanied by the reasons of the political-social-economic situation for the large majority, right?
It doesn't surprise me whatsoever that the Russian part is a wall of non-information, the country was really far behind most of Europe at that point in development (hence everyone wanting revolution), there was hardly an industrial revolution there until after 1890 (the Russian Empire had like 7-8% of the world's population but like 4% of the world's industrial production around that time) and massive amounts of land to administer, with a lot of it clearly seen as places for undesirables--Jews were barely people worth considering to the governing forces there, so having good records and stuff was so far from a priority.
Blah I accidentally reloaded the page and lost this comment, but I remembered that I wanted to mention that I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of early zionist settlers expected resistance. The whole sphere around Jewish life seemed so steeped in ethnic hatred, and I don't meant just against Jews. I remember this interview about life in Sniatyn (great grandpa Shulim's hometown https://kehilalinks.jewishgen.org/sniatyn/#E.RichRemembrance) where she describes the mutual hatred of Jews and ethnic Poles and Jews and ethnic Ukrainians, but also of the Ukrainians' lower social status and apparent poverty compared to Poles and they seemed plagued by social ills. Meanwhile, she mentions that there were German families on the outskirts from settlement programs, and in other places that was terribly oppressive to Poles (eg https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Germanisation#Polish_territories though Sniatyn was in Galicia). I can't imagine Polish-Ukranian relations were good, and in another case, the story supposedly from great grandma Eva's family in Busk is that her brother and his family were killed after being forced to flee the Polish home that was sheltering them - a group of Ukranians burnt it one night, and it's not even clear that they knew that they were harboring Jews.
It's all so depressing and crazy, and sort of shocking as an American where our racism is so uncomplex lol. I'm not good at learning, understanding or remembering history and it all coalesces into a horrible stew of misery to me.
Yeah, I didn't mean to imply this was the main common understanding, but a common American Jewish trope to which non-Jews often defer to out of sympathy without examining (more on that in a sec) beyond being a good Jewish "ally." Most people seem to think about it so little that they wouldn't even arrive at a notion of early zionists as anything, they just have whatever image of a "historical Jew" is in their head, which I tend to think is the image of Ellis Island tired immigrants or like, Tevye lol.
I think I wouldn't go so far to say that I'm "informed" on zionism because that implies deeper factual knowledge of specific history that I really don't have, instead I was just trying to explain the ways American Jews would have emotional "ties" to Israel despite being pretty separated/sheltered from the realities of Israel, and why it seems completely absorbed into the mainstream without being treated as like, the official adoption of a 19th century political idea, or even really acknowledging its roots. I sometimes get emails from Jewish genealogy sites I'm a member of (JewishGen, the Jewish Records Indexing Project, Gesher Galicia) or the Jewish Federation of Pittsburgh (I donated to their Afghan refugee settlement program) about calling for prayers for Israel or their support in general and they never act like their statements would be considered even the slightest bit controversial or even political. So this wasn't meant as a counterpoint to examining the roots of zionism, more just my perspective on why it exists in America now and what form it takes, which seems so divorced from its origins. Of course NOT practicing means I have no insight into how zionism is formally incorporated at shul/temple but as a cultural idea, it's unavoidable.
I don't think people think about what went into common pro-Israel refrains directly (Jews need a place guaranteed to be safe, what else were Jews supposed to do after the war, Israel has a "right" to exist which I always interpret as "deserves" to exist or earned the right, etc), but that's what make sense to me as a very high level explanation. Anti-Israel or at least Israel-critical Jews are the ones who make compelling arguments about the realities of Israel in practice, because as a country rather than an ideal, its actions are usually indefensible. And ideals/values are more likely to come from socialization in the community or from your family than actually engaging with factual events from the news or understanding history.
Online yeah I see the elite imperialism stuff all the time, but from my general experience IRL and certainly from mainstream mass media and political language, I think widespread sympathy for Jews about anything that can be seen as a product of the Holocaust is widespread. Jews are oddly popular in America (https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2023/03/15/americans-feel-more-positive-than-negative-about-jews-mainline-protestants-catholics/ - in fact, suspiciously so, people who harbor ill will are aware of how bad it looks so it is hard to parse. There was a more interesting poll I saw maybe from gallup that broke apart the very vs somewhat favorable stat, and the "very" favorable was disproportionate, which is a red flag to me for people not being Normal about it, but I can't find it again.) Maybe some of that is sympathy & support for Jews also plays really well into an American WWII hero/savior narrative. Anyway, not counting the sort of weirdly-jealous Christian sects that Death Cult for Cuties would talk about or the rapture-wanters, most non-Jews I've ever heard make casual mention of Israel seem to have a default posture of sensitivity, which I'm sure comes from an emotional place (the Holocaust narrative) and not an ideological one (anything related to coherent politics or the philosophy of zionism.) But that might also come from guilt/embarrassment for being critical in front of Jews, not what they actually have accepted as a belief (especially since favorability of Israel is lower than favorability of Jews, but it's still a majority.) Also, Jews in America have managed to reach the upper echelons of society. Not to say that all Jews have prospered or are elites or any of that, but non-Jewish elites are likely to have Jewish friends and associates and rich cloistered assholes know to avoid offending their buddies lol. Like that's not supposed to imply the antisemitic stereotype, but there are tons of places with basically zero Jews at all, so it makes sense that elite thinking in America is different somewhat from other places because of they do have a presence.
Some of the contemporaneous language you see about pre-war zionists who didn't actually make aliyah reminds me of like....Boxer from Animal Farm lol. Which does go back to the whole elites manipulating yokels thing, but then elites and yokels did in fact make it happen and the yokels got what they were looking for, so, the yokel version was also equally real? Also yokel is overstating it a bit, I'm thinking more middle class, or artisan/professional class. I saw this bit in a 1910 obituary from the Zamosc yizkor (memorial) book:
"When he was just a child, his father died, and he was left with his mother in great penury and need. From that time on, until today, he had a life full of pain and need, which literally oppressed him. However, he would not complain about his bitter lot, rather, he would find solace in his Zionist ideal, which he served with all of his heart and soul. It was only here, that he saw the hope for his people, and their success in the future. His cherished idea was the ‘Colonial-Bank,’ which was founded for the development of the Yishuv in the Land of Israel. A few hours before his death, when his severe illness intensified, he instructed his sister, that she should carry out all of his tasks. He very strongly identified with the situation of the worker in the Holy Land…. he was raised on the lap of Torah study, and its lore. The will to knowledge was very great with him. However, for known reasons, he could not realize his requirement to travel abroad, in order to round out his knowledge."
This strikes me as someone who is driven by material interests, but has developed it into a religious fervor as a coping mechanism. I wish I had more examples on hand but you see it called a "dream" so much, his heart was with the Holy Land this and that. Though to be fair Zamosc was a lot more prosperous and cosmopolitan than a lot of other places, it was less shtetl-like.
I often wonder about the "right to exist" thing from the sense like, it's hard to imagine how any new country could be formed without a lot of strife and complication and loss of land from wherever it breaks off from and someone getting screwed. Does that mean all the countries that exist now are what we think should exist in perpetuity? I don't think religious states are a good idea at all and will always lend themselves to discrimination and illiberal policies, but that will always be in tension with the fact that people should also get to choose the type of society they want to live in. Jewish customs have a huge number of implications for everyday living, and Jews "make it work" when assimilated in various parts of the world, but I fully understand how nice it must be for that to be officially facilitated as much as possible. All sorts of other cultures or subcultures/groups have this too, and they are often not being well served by the countries they live in. If Jews had migrated to Palestine en masse and didn't engage in antagonistic measures to exclude Palestinians, like if naturally congregating and segregating Jewish areas developed, would declaring independence to create Israel be different? Are the reasons for migrating actually relevant at all? To me, the only difference is the degree to which Israel owes Palestinians restitution for how it was done and what is continuing to be done (which right now is: so much it's incalculable,) but it doesn't change the the question of the existence of the state per se that much. Like one day we might have to deal with the question of something like, Texas seceding and I'm not sure it's necessarily correct that they should be forced to remain, and the moral questions there are more about the people who would want to remain and paternalistic protection of people against what's bound to be a shitty idea. But if Jews want to overwheingly live in a place called Israel with a particular structure, and Palestinians overwhelmingly want to live in a place called Palestine with a different structure, why wouldn't it be acceptable for one group to declare independence and be separate countries? The actual problem with Israel doesn't have to be complicated: don't commit horrible atrocities against humans. And yeah, understanding how it got to that point matters but it's also where things go into unproductive, if not outright counterpoductive, territory, so it all depresses me. I have a very grim view of the future unfortunately.
I think I'm mostly going to say stuff that just agrees but adds here.
I don't think the question of the ethnostate (another word I'm getting tired of seeing in the discourse because it represents so many different formulations) can be simply answered as it's strictly bad, though I definitely don't think encouraging them is good, like you say. Since you were talking about Contrapoints' recent post, I saw this: https://www.reddit.com/r/LeftoversH3/comments/1lwwfoh/there_are_two_types_of_people/
which to me is just screaming, "the world should be simple, why can't the world be simple? I don't want to think in a nuanced way."
The example that comes to mind for me is: should Native/original Americans have been allowed to have states of their own continue with their own structure of laws protecting their religious traditions and borders? Or is it good that they now only exist as sub-state entities without full lawmaking capabilities and no allowance of military?
Isn't the issue the behavior of some specific ethnostates? Also mixed liberal republics act horribly sometimes as do "non-nationalist" socialist states. I feel like the "no ethnostates" declaration is very often tied to a specific ideology of "my form of government is better or more enlightened." Also they ignore the fact that more Palestinians want an ethnostate themselves than a mixed democracy.
The question of whether people should be allowed to separate is also so complicated. Like should we have allowed the Confederacy to separate? Should Bangladesh have been forced to remain part of Pakistan? Should the UK have just made all of India, Pakistan and Bangladesh a single country because splitting by ethnicity is bad? Should they have just disappeared and let everyone sort it out themselves (and maybe form ethnostates)? If Puerto Rico, or Catalonia, want to separate, is that bad? The question of where to draw the lines has never ever been simple.
To me if you have a very distinct culture and the mainline government is not serving your interests, separating is very valid, even if it creates an "ethnostate." Invading others to create your ethnostate is specifically what's bad to me, or treating others who are unavoidably there badly--say if you split off but inevitably have some of the other group living among you. But the Confederacy had a very different culture, and most people feel justified in saying their culture was evil (both the whole and the splinter group invaded lands in this one so it's not a real differentiator). So do we judge whether any specific culture is moral (who is the arbiter? just the most powerful countries or the country being split from?) before saying they should have their own country?
Also I just learned the term post-Zionist, which I think describes what you were saying earlier pretty well, about Zionism's mission having been completed (for good or ill) and post-1948 Zionism being a different thing that is damaging with no real benefit. Zionism was not done in a moral way from the start, but the benefit of trying for a world where 6 million Jews don't die and the rest displaced still was something.
And I totally agree with Natalie that now that we've elected Trump, there's barely hope of the U.S. joining in justice for Palestinians--there's so much more chance to pressure a Democrat to doing things, what leverage does anyone on the left-hand side have over Trump?
The utilizing leverage thing is also an interesting topic to me, and it intersects with people getting pissed off at leftists for not supporting Democrats. For me the threatening to withhold votes thing is a valid form of utilizing leverage, though should be balanced with also maximizing the probability that the candidate who might do something and who can be leveraged will win. So in my opinion in 2024, be very threatening early on, trying to shape the Biden then Harris platform without ever having the inner intention of not voting for them, then as the general election gets closer, switch over to solidarity and promotion to make their platform the strongest and most convincing it can be (they must win to be able to execute any of this), then upon winning (hopefully), agitate strongly to emphasize their position is not secure. This is the way. According to me. Yes you should posture a little, and put on a front or lie even.
As you can probably tell, I'm very much in the camp that two-state is the only real way for Israel-Palestine, but this needs to be accompanied by strongly enforced peacekeeping, with the US joining the rest of the world, or other countries doing something without the US for once, since now we have Trump and thus we aren't doing this in the near future. Israel has pissed enough people off that there might finally be a window to put them in "world jail." If the US were actually leading, I feel like it could have actually happened.
An aspect I find disturbing maybe isn't even the lack of nuance, it's the demand for lockstep conformity. I was thinking about that from the What is to be Done stuff, where it's clear why that framework would result in rigid conformity (because if there was 1 truly rational correct way to act, and everyone did it, then it would all be the same.) Like all Natalie is saying is that she's not going to be a social media presence the way leftists want her to. She's not comfortable being involved with rhetoric she finds dangerous, she doesn't agree with certain things people want to hear, she doesn't think it will help if not be counterproductive, etc. Ostensibly if the issue is whether she supports Palestine, that's resolved. But no one who has been "waiting" for her to "speak out" is reassured to see that she did so, everyone's so mad that they can't make her do exactly what they want her to do or say exactly what they want her to say. That's a part of leftism I will never be comfortable with either. (Also probably some people feel defensive that she's talking about them, so the charges of "she's making this about herself??" are super ironic/hypocritical. I'm pretty sure this is more where Michael Hobbes was coming from than the former, he's too smart for the conformity stuff, however he's also a douche because he knows what he is doing and what happens when he QTs random small accounts.)
The idea of 1 true righteous kind of state follows from all that too. I feel like one of my attributes as a liBeRaL is that I have no idea what the answer is to any of those questions, and that I don't believe anyone has an answer, and various things will work or not work depending on the circumstances or unexpected variables outside anyone's control or ability to predict. This will result in a lack of consistency and the wrong thing happening frequently. Yep! It will!