Iran was an IQ test. You favorite pundits flunked.
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I'm an out and out zionist, in that I think Israel has the right to exist.
It doesn't have the right to bomb another country for literally 0 reason.
What does that even mean?
Israel, like all countries, has a right to attempt to exist. No one has a Right to Exist, per se.
And certainly not if you can't even do it on your own. Israel has a right to attempt to exist. We should let them do that. Without our help. They'd probably be less shitty neighbors, if they didn't have the US backing them up, too, and everything would be more peaceful.
And Zionism goes beyond that, as you know, or you'd also be whatever the equivalent would be for thinking Iran has a right to exist.
There was an active political movement post-WW1(Not, two, one) that called for Jews to actively emigrate and settle in Israel.
And it was called, well, Zionism.
They were enough of a political force in Israel pre-WW2 that they actively tried to boycott Germany and had political protests against Nazi Germany, again, all pre-WW2.
Israel wasn't just given over the Jews post-WW2 because people were being nice, after all. They'd pretty much taken the place over before then.
Good of you to question mindless slogans that are repeated endlessly, even without realizing it as I just did.
For me, it means that I support Israel's existence. It's not threatened as of right now, but if it were, I have no problem with sending them aid to ensure their survival. Why? Because it would be chump change for Europe, while being crucial for Israel surviving.
They probably wouldn't be trying to dominate the region and be a hegemon, and they'd make more compromises.
The flaw in that argument is that Iran has existed for 2.5 millennia. Israel was a state that was just created due to an ideological movement. They worked hard on changing my mind in the past 2 weeks, but I still think that was a good thing. Ergo, Zionist.
But what alternative definition of Zionism do you think of?
I would. They can stand on their own or they can die. With the exception that they had proven themselves to be a great ally worthy of helping for our benefit.
But they have never been a great ally. They don't produce anything worthwhile. They goad us into wars constantly. They are the source of nearly all of the ill will that we have received as a nation.
Lots of things would be chump change but that doesn't mean that we can afford to spend chump change on everything that would cost chump change, because then things cease to be chump change.
If Israel's survival is predicated on external support, then Israel isn't going to survive. Because they appear to be completely unable to play nice or make peace with anyone around them.
That is optimistic. The world hegemon is always going to be hated. If not for Israel, people will find another reason.
Source: I find other reasons myself.
But I didn't say to spend on everything that costs chump change. Nor did I tell America to spend anything. I was talking about Europe. I'm embarrassed that we are supporting their aggression, but at the same time, I'd be embarrassed if we stood by and let Israel be destroyed and its people killed.
That is the case because at the moment, they don't have to, due to the backing of the world's hegemon. They were very good at playing nice when they had to - e.g. trying to persuade Syria and Jordan not to join the war in 1967, even though they could conquer valuable lands, giving back the Sinai, the various proposals for a Palestinian state.
Thanks.
And in that vein:
Should we be sending aid money to Ukraine? Palestine? What about all the countries Israel is bombing? Does Lebanon have a right to exist?
DoesDid Syria?Foreign aid is never chump change, because "foreign" is a really fucking big place.
Oooh, boy. The funny part of that argument is...it's a huge Zionist talking point. Zionists say Israel has existed for over two thousand years. The hardcore ones will tell you Israel is the oldest country on the planet. So I guess they're pretty established, by this point.
We'll get to that at the end.
Honest question, why? They're a small country, but per capita they're right up there with all the big boys when it comes to competing for the 'most atrocious actions' award. There very short history started with terrorism, continued with terrorism, and could end with terrorism. They've not only been extremely violent (which can be justified in some scenarios), but also extremely aggressive. They're either starting shit, or massively overreacting. They might very well be the most expansionist country currently on the planet, and they're probably the most "colonialist" in post-war history.
They just seem like kind of a shit country, honestly.
I mean, you said it was based on ideology. That ideology happens to be largely based on ethnic and religious supremacy and ethnonationalism. Which would be one thing - although probably still not something you'd support - if they had a legitimate claim to the land...but you don't get to just settle down somewhere and claim it's yours and was always yours, just because people you share a name with and whose coattails you can ride to Divine Right were there way back in the day.
The whole 'this land was always ours' thing is utter and complete propaganda; they came up with it when they were deciding where and how to put their new country, and realized it would be a convenient argument.
Zionism has made a region that already have a ton of problems even worse and also, as we were talking about, has done a huge amount of damage to other cultures too, like Christianity. "God commands us to bless Israel."
Zionism is a psychotic supremacist cult, and a deeply subversive and expansionist one too.
You won't find a bigger opponent of what the West, along with Israel, did to Syria.
Iran has existed pretty continuously. Its right to exist is not really questioned. Well, some hardcore zionists and neocons do - they want to split up every state into tiny statelets that are perpetually at war with one another so that no one can challenge the hegemon.
They live in a very dangerous neighborhood, and they're not exactly popular as Jews, interlopers and Western colonialists. And they're not only dishing it out, they're also taking it and putting their own lives on the line.
If you look at it from their perspective, which is not the same as accepting it, I think it becomes understandable that they are very aggressive. They, along with their neighbors, have been brutalized by close to continuous war every generation since 1948. It's very traumatic. In their mind, they have offered everything to their neighbors and to the Palestinians, made peace whenever they could, only to be met by the three noes. Part of that narrative is self-serving, of course, no state is an innocent angel - states are Machiavellian entities. I think October 7th sent many over a cliff. "We've been here for 80 years. We've been repeatedly attacked, we gave back land for peace, we tried everything to deal with Palestinians as almost equals, only to be rebuffed, and still we have to go to bomb shelters because of rockets coming from a place that we withdrew from in 2005, and now they've invaded our country and killed many people and taken hundreds of hostages."
Everyone likes to pretend to be all good and moral. But I think that if I were Israeli, and I was in that situation, I wouldn't care much for "the people of Gaza" either. And you might not either. It's easy to judge when you have no skin in the game. We are a fallen and selfish species. Perfection is impossible and we need to minimize harm instead.
Well, they gave up the Sinai, and they've been occupying Gaza and the West Bank since 1967 without ethnically cleansing it or annexing it. The plan was always to give it up in exchange for peace. Even the Golan Heights have periodically been put up in exchange for peace with Syria, though destroying Syria took that off the table.
I agree. But can they buy land and settle there? It brings us to the question of immigration. Hell, I'd say no. But they could, and they did. Note that both the Balfour Declaration and the Israeli Declaration of Independence guaranteed the rights of the native inhabitants.
If I recall correctly, the secular Jews were fine with a country anywhere, but in another example of "the most intolerant wins", the religious Jews would only accept Outremer, so that's where they settled.