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Notes -
A short introduction to Liberal Zionist rhetoric, and why they usually just keep quiet.
A day ago a very interesting interview between Krystal Ball and Rep. Adam Smith took place. The topic of contention was Israel.
tl;dr: Openly defending Israel as a jewish ethnostate is OK as a democrat.
The interview starts off cordial enough. Adam establishes himself as the typical neo-liberal everyman who can sympathize with the plight of the downtrodden AND the military industrial complex (What a guy!) whilst Krystal fronts the now typical faux radical left 'not everyone in the DSA is insane, actually. At least I'm not' media personality that goes hard on the issues that pull on the heart strings.
Where things go south unexpectedly is around the 11:30 mark. Krystal compliments Adam on his recent strong voting pattern against aid to Israel, specifically the Thomas Massie amendment, and asks him to explain his thought process and change of heart. Adam waffles on a bit about his opposition to the Netanyahu government, a typical Liberal Zionist talking point, but then suddenly veers off the rails:
This is not out of context, this is the argument. Yes, Liberal Zionists are democrats. Yes, they are against the Netanyahu government. Yes, they believe in the concept of Israel as an explicit ethnostate. He believes it is not possible for Palestinians to represent jews in Israel. Two ethnic groups can not coexist. They are definitionally in a zero sum game of survival. That's the establishment democrat Liberal Zionist view for jews in Israel.
Understandably, Krystal catches on to this
Neo NaziZionist talking point that's somehow found its way into her otherwise progressive liberal leftist studio:Adam replies, a little more flustered than before:
Mein Kamerad... Krystal replies:
To which Adam retorts:
Which is the extent of his argumentation that isn't a soft recital of the many permutations of ethno nationalism argued for on the old /r/AltRight, RIP.
Krystal, to her credit as a host, tries to segue this into something else and asks why the US taxpayer should care about a jewish ethno supremacist project in the middle East, which Mike Huckabee would have been happy to answer. But Adam can't really seek refugee in the Scofield Bible so he doubles down on
Neo NazismZionism for jews:Well OK.
To all the Adam Smiths of the world. Why is having an ethnostate good for the jews but not anyone else? Why don't jews benefit from diversity in their western style open democratic society like everyone else? Why doesn't the magic freedom dirt in Israel transform your third worlders into engineers and scientists like it allegedly does everywhere else in the west, who would be just as jewish as anyone else in a few years. How is it possible to represent anything the Democrats have represented the world over and then believe this for Israel in the back of your brain?
Adam arrived to this interview ready to earnestly make the point that ethnonationalism is good for jews. He wanted to say this and he did. And I get it. Because he's not wrong. It's just that he believes it's wrong for everyone else. Most Liberal Zionists must understand that this contradiction is impossible to defend, which is probably why they don't talk about it at all. Hell, I'm starting to believe they can't even conceive of it. The Dual Morality is so strong it probably doesn't even register as a contradiction. But to hear it from the horses mouth is flabbergasting.
I've heard other center-lib influencers like Destiny outright acknowledge the hypocrisy, but they say it's OK because of the Holocaust- Israel should be an exception to the principles they claim to care about when it comes to promoting demographic change in Europe and the United States, and the Holocaust justifies that exception for Israel.
The other uncomfortable side of that equation- why is it bad for Europeans and Whites to oppose demographic change from mass migration? That also reduces to the Holocaust, so even though we face an apparent contradiction it is coherently derived from the same mythological foundation.
The Holocaust mythos is the center of this dialectic. Holding Jews and Gentiles to totally different standards is a core feature of that dialectic and is not even a contradiction even though it appears that way on the outside. This is the Moral Order.
...huh, I was starting to think you'd left the Motte entirely.
The thing is, once again you're attributing a kind of unique malice and hypocrisy to Israel even though, er, there are lots of ethno-states? Most countries are more like Israel than they are like the US, i.e. they consciously understand themselves to be the nation of a particular ethnic group. This isn't Jews and Gentiles held to different standards. This is the US, and to a slightly lesser extent Europe, being weird, and that weirdness originates, I'd argue, in the liberal revolutions of the late 18th century.
The Zionist malice is unique, no other ethnonationalist movement has such prominence in our cultural and political institutions. No other ethnonationalist movement tells us we are evil for not wanting to be demographically replaced by the third world, but we are morally obligated to support their own ethnonationalist project. The Japanese don't do that, the Chinese don't do that. The Russians try to stir up a lot of trouble but they don't do that. It's only Zionist Jews that advocate for mass immigration and anti-racism in the United States while demanding support for their own ethnonationalist project.
Take the ADL as Exhibit A of the behavior I'm describing.
Well, at least this time you're admitting openly that you think that Jews are malicious.
It seems to me that you're taking a large and common sensibility that is shared across most ethnic groups in the US - that the US is not and should not be an ethno-state - and then implausibly blaming that entirely on Jews/Zionists. The causality here is not at all clear. It's true that Jews generally support Israel, and Israel is an ethno-state, but they are far from unique in that light (that is, people in the US being positively-disposed to a foreign country that they share heritage with), and it's also unclear that there's any particularly strong correlation between 1) supporting Israel, and 2) wanting the US to not be an ethno-state.
I would point out, for instance, that group in America that hates Israel the most is also the group most opposed to the idea of the US as an ethno-state. Support for third-world immigration is surely highest on the left, especially the radical left, and those are the people who hate Israel most.
You claimed Zionism is not unique among ethnonationalist states, I claimed it is unique due to its long-standing political influence and domestic activism in the US that consciously created the moral dialectic that Adam Smith is appealing to in this conversation: it's bad for Whites to care about race, but we should support the Jewish ethnostate.
It would be totally impossible to trace the origin of Tolerance Education in the United States in any other direction. The Simon Wiesenthal Center was founded in 1977, which Wikipedia notes is known for Holocaust research and remembrance, hunting Nazi war criminals, combating antisemitism, tolerance education, defending Israel, and its Museum of Tolerance.
Wikipedia describes the origin of the center:
"Tolerance Education" in schools today is practically synonymous with Holocaust education, the Holocaust mythos formulates the center of this liberal consensus that White nationalism is the greatest evil but Jewish nationalism is something we all have to support.
Likewise the ADL was founded in 1913 and incubated by the American Jewish Committee and American Jewish Congress. The well-known Museum of Tolerance was opened in 1993. Speaking of the American Jewish Committee:
The causality is clear, over a century of Zionist organizations fighting White nationalism politically and culturally tooth and nail every step of the way, while simultaneously demanding unwavering support for Jewish nationalism. That is a unique malice.
The entire reason Krystal is so scandalized by the concept of the ethnostate is because she internalized her Tolerance Education!
The idea that the United States is not and should not be an ethno-state predates 1977.
The Simon Wiesenthal Centre is in no sense responsible for American civic nationalism. What on Earth are you talking about?
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