[…] and the Jewish leadership wanted it as a safe haven for the Jews of Russia as well as a means of forcefully modernising Judaism.

I feel like this kinda explains why Zionists hate Orthodox Jews. With the way someone like Ethan Klein talks about Hasidic Jews, and how Israel treats the visibly Orthodox Jews (who, in most cases, are opposed to serving in the military for religious reasons). Not to mention this super racist concept of Sabra (?) Jews, who are strong and will prevail over their Arab enemies and perceive Holocaust victims as weak.

They really don’t like the fact that Orthodox Jews look visibly Jewish (religious), because Israel doesn’t care about the religious aspect of being a Jew (that’s fucking crazy), and actually would benefit more from being perceived as secular and uber modern libertine haven amongst their crazy fundamentalist neighbours. I think Overzealous or someone else has a video on this but I haven’t yet watched.

There’s more to this, with the self-hate aspect (comes from being othered in Europe), but I feel uncomfortable imposing further.

One would think a country that whines about not having their religious group be allowed to be represented as a nation would actually allow it’s citizens to practice said religion. Israel is fundamentally anti-semitic with it’s reductionism and the literal ethos of it’s upkeep.

By the late nineteeth century, the fervor of modern nationalism lead to the portrayal of Jews as a separate nation within a nation. Intolerable and not to be trusted. At the turn of the century, many groupings in Europe, under the yoke of large unwieldy empires like that of Russia and Austro-Hungary, began to organise themselves as national movements fighting for the restoration of lost rights.

(I typed out from the audio, so forgive the incorrect punctuation if there’s any)

I know this isn’t the point Pappé is trying to make, and he even lends credence to a Palestinian national movement in an effort to explain their right to self-determination. But I can’t help but take this as an indication that the concept of nationalism/nation states was a really bad idea for the world. And it’s even worse that people just went along with it.

People yearn for an identity, I know. But literally nothing good has come of a national identity. It’s stifling and annoying at best, and leads to extremism at worse.

I haven’t read Tony Judt’s book yet, but he did mention that the problem with Israel is that it’s trying to establish an ethnostate in a world that has already moved past that kind of ideology (heavily paraphrased). Yet, I live in a country that looks at Israel as a model for what it should achieve too: an ethnocracy (that is really theocracy but not in the same vein as many fundamentalist countries).

I think in this sense, nationalism is both a progression and a regression of society. When it has the capacity to devolve into ethno/racial-supremacy it hardly feels like progress.