A lot of people hear, "Zionist" or "Zionism" and they immediately respond with:
"But Israel causes oppression!"
"You must be anti-Palestinian!"
"You're colonialist!" and other awful things.
Those are the only topics that they can bring up when they discuss this ideology. No matter how much cognitive dissonance their point of view requires, this has become the chosen narrative.
What if I told you that this perspective is privileged? 😲
The concept of Zionism came about with two things in mind:
1. That Jews all over the world were being indiscriminately murdered for the "crime" of being Jewish.
2. That we *already* had a homeland and a safe space that we'd been kicked out of over and over again, and we knew this based on thousands of years of first person history, language, currency, etc. We knew where home was. We now know that even a blood test or spitting out some saliva proves this.
What if I told you that the beginning of this story WAS NOT the Holocaust, but the Holocaust was just one of many horrors of Jewish history the proved how necessary the concept was. That much like the Amendments don't GIVE us our rights, they just clarified that we have them; Zionism didn't establish the Jewish homeland, it just reminded everyone where it was and why we needed it.
So why is it "privilege" to focus on anything *other* than Jews when we discuss Zionism? Especially when most of the negative associations are media invented (and hurtful to all parties!)
Because our lives depend on it.
Zionism is what protected and saved Jews for hundreds of years- technically thousands before it became a legitimate ideology unto itself.
As we speak, it's protecting and saving the lives of French Jews...African Jews... Asian Jews. Right now! It's protecting Middle Eastern Jews. Not figuratively, literally. Those people aren't safe being Jewish where they lived.
Zionism means ONLY that the indigenous Jews want to live in their ancestral lands. PERIOD. It means nothing else- not about anyone else, not about anything else.
To misunderstand and misappropriate what Zionism is requires an immense amount of privilege. It means that you don't see, acknowledge, or value the lives it saves. It means YOU'RE removed from the oppression.
Ironic, right? Since not acknowledging the value of Jewish lives was why we needed to establish it officially in the first place.
Love,
Ladysingin
