"Ask A Jew" Wednesday

[u/AutoModerator]

It's everyone's favorite day of the week, "Ask A (Anti-Zionist) Jew" Wednesday! Ask whatever you want to know, within the sub rules, notably that this is not a debate sub and do not import drama from other subreddits. That aside, have fun! We love to dialogue with our non-Jewish siblings.

[u/Horsepenny]

Palestinian American here. I was wondering about the Jewish perspective on calling a Zionist a Nazi. The Zionists around me are mostly Christian, but I have also used this insult with Jewish Zionists, and something made me pause. I realized that (even though I give no shit what a Zionist feels), a nonZionist Jewish person might be party to that conversation (either online or by onlookers), and it may cause harm.

I only want to hurt the feelings of a Zionist, not the innocent people around me.

So, what is your opinion on the use of Nazi to describe Zionists?

(Another note - this is not how I start conversations. It is always in response to their insults. I usually get terrorist or other Islamophobic bullshit.)

[u/Saul_al-Rakoun → u/Horsepenny]

From this non-Orthodox and also Historical Materialist (so, Marxian) Jew's perspective, it's...fraught.

Religiously, Zionists are apostates who have broken the Mosaic covenant and placed themselves outside Am Yisrael. They are like the avdei egel ha-zahav. The shoddy neo-pagan Zionist religion the Zionists try to pass off as Judaism is avodah zarah, it is idol worship which by religious law officially incurs the most severe of the four death penalties.

Historically, and this is the rational kernel of what you're getting at, Zionism is a blood-and-soil nationalist and colonialist ideology. This is where it overlaps with Nazism -- an entitlement to particular-but-not-currently-owned area of land (Eastern Europe and cis-Uralic Russia vs. Palestine) transmitted by blood-right, combined with a drive to cleanse the land of its inhabitants by any means necessary in order to protect and preserve the race (Aryans vs. Ashkenazic Jews).

Another parallel is the religion: Nazism's neo-Paganism and Zionism's Datiism play corresponding functional roles, and if we want to get really spicy about it the Ahnenerbe was the Third Reich's version of the Israeli Antiquities Authority, "Biblical Archaelogy" Israel's version of the hunt for the Historical Aryan Race.

Where they diverge is that the Nazis alleged a worldwide anti-Aryan Jewish conspiracy was keeping down Germany (when the truth of the matter is that Germany was late enough to the capitalist development game that it just barely managed to get on the avoid-getting-colonized train, and then lost the 1914-1918 inter-imperialist struggle), while the Zionists could point to the very real and ongoing phenomenon of anti-Semitism (the Dreyfus affair happened while the Zionist movement was figuring out whether it was going to ask for a colony in Argentina or Palestine but before its first conference at Basel).

Further, Liberal Zionists exist while Nazism is a wholesale rejection of the idea of law. I think we should not allow our emotions to so wrap up our analysis that we can no longer distinguish between Lawful Evil and Chaotic Evil. Further, these Liberal Zionists allege that the Zionist state is held to standards not incumbent on any other country and is singled-out by the international legal order, while if Zionists and Nazis were wholly interchangeable we would expect them to be claiming things like the Shoah was an international Palestinian conspiracy. I don't think all the yada-yada-yada about the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem quite rises to that level.

So let's get back to the question you asked. I wouldn't frame it in terms of the trendy pop-psych activist culture notion of "causing harm" -- I wouldn't experience "harm" from being right next to you while you did that at a protest, but it would make me wonder what sort of person you were. I'd find it alienating. And I say that as someone who didn't lose family members in the Shoah, and whose ancestors (unlike most Askhenazic Jews) actually were colonized.

Now if you called Zionists a group of idolatrous, apostate, pagan dirt-worshipers, that I think I would be much more comfortable with. Shouting Nazi comparisons at Zionists feels to me probably better left to the Jews.

[u/Horsepenny → u/Saul_al-Rakoun]

That sounds perfectly reasonable. Seems like it is something I'm just gonna take out of my lexicon. Just to clarify (still gonna drop the word) what is the opinion on using towards Christian Zionists?

[u/Pitiful_Meringue_57 → u/Horsepenny]

if a christian zionist mentions the rapture or heavily implies that’s why they support israel i think it’s fair game. I think it’s less bad to say to a christian or non jewish zionist but i still don’t think it’s great and would probably recommend not doing it.