awhile ago a coworker and i were play arguing whether or not the mystery gang were all romantically a thing/polycule or just really good friends (yknow bored at work things) and knowing my bfs interest in scooby doo i texted him asking him to be the tie breaker and he responded “well it depends which canon youre going off of” and just instantly cold sweat knew i was out of my depth
as mixed race person and settler I wonder if some of the continual refusal to reckon with the fact the majority of Jews in medinas yisroel are refugees or the children of refugees AND (by U.S. standards) people of color at the same time they are settlers comes from the fact that a lot of the people opening their mouths very very wide right now are also children of refugees and people of color at the same time they are settlers, and this creates some rather more complicated politics of proximity and culpability and facing the reality that what imperial systems did is make a lot of oppressed people into settlers on other peoples’ land, so it’s just cleaner and easier for everyone involved to ride the “Israelis are all us-standard White & rich westerners (this is interchangeable with being Ashkenazi a word I learned 5 minutes ago) from the US and Europe who have somewhere else to go (wherever they came from) and that is their secret mansions in New Jersey” train into the ground.
a similar reality is the need to “capitalism-wash” Zionism as an ideology and draw direct links between Zionism = capitalism. Obviously Zionism can be implemented in a right wing kind of way (bibi and friends and a lot of people right now) but in between Herzl and Ben-Gurion a LOT of the people, arguably the main & central thread of Zionism, were leftists, socialists and communists, and the dream of a socialist life was intertwined with agrarianism and the praxis of moving to Palestine to set up colonies. Obviously all of this does not justify settler colonialism but I think the repeated need of tumblr leftists speaking wholeheartedly about the complete concurrence of capitalism and Zionism (or that Zionism reflects the capitalist dream of the family) also reiterates many leftist’s refusals to recognize the ways that socialism and communism are not inherently free from the potential to harm large groups of people and the establishment of socialist states can be settler-colonial if it justifies the murder and expulsion of mass groups of people to realize their political goals.” In this sense there is enormous crossover between nakba denialists (the nakba was “necessary” for the preordained fulfillment of the state of Israel, or it didn’t happen) and those who deny the death and dislocation caused by USSR’s policies, I.e. the holodomor (“necessary” to bring those pesky kulaks into line and for the preordained fufillment of the Soviet state)
a lot of the discursive oversimplifications of Zionism involve making it interchangeable with say “major” colonial ideologies like English or French colonialism but IMHO the lesson around Zionism is about how oppressed peoples can adopt western ideologies of nationalism as liberation and that the great tragedy of Zionism is the reality that oppressed groups of people including leftists are more than capable of being settler colonialists who violently displace mass groups of people and establish an ethnostate if they value their own liberation and right to violence beyond the physical lives and realities of other people. It’s blatantly obvious that most goysiche people see themselves as inanately morally purer than Jews and so therefor /they’d/ never do soemthing like that, but the reality that a settler colonial ideology ended up supported by an extremely ethnically diverse group of very oppressed people who often were involved in different leftist movements (to oversimplify history) is really something that should bother many goysiche people of color and/or leftists a whole lot more. A lot of them are far closer to the situations and ideologies that created Zionism in the first place than they’d like to believe
