Too tired to argue politics

[avram]

So I’m in the local coffee shop, waiting for my chai to steep, and four members of a local left-wing political action group are finishing up a meeting. They’ve apparently just had a new member join up, because the leader congratulates him on joining a group that’s “hated by right-wing Zionists”, which she immediately amends to “right-wingers and Zionists”.

I turn and ask her “What about left-wing Zionists?”. She’s says there’s no such thing, because anyone who oppresses people can’t be left-wing.

I should probably have done something other than shrug and turn back to my chai, but she was leaving anyway, and where the hell would I even begin? How can I argue with someone who claims to be a left-wing anti-Zionist, yet doesn’t know what leftism and Zionism are? Would she even believe me if I told her I went to a left-wing Zionist school for eight years?

I don’t want you to think this is a problem unique to the left. I run into the same thing on the right even more often — people who live in their own little fact-bubbles and don’t even know what the words they’re using mean.

Ah, well. That wasn’t the first time I’d seen that group in that coffee shop, and it probably won’t be the last, so maybe I need to stock up on facts and counter-arguments for next time.

Comments

[bigscary.livejournal.com]

My family has been left-wing Zionists since the turn of the century. I had to dispose of mouldering, crumbling tomes of left-wing Zionist history and philosophy. I can't imagine anyone not understanding that mainline Zionism was a socialist ideology to the point that right-wingers came up with a new name for themselves.

Stupids.

[kent-allard-jr.livejournal.com]

Yeah, the kid was ignorant. At least I hope she was a kid.

In fairness, Israel's most vocal supporters have been leaning rightward for a while now, and Israel's leaders have been largely descended from the Revisionist wing of the Zionist movement. So it's no surprise she might think this.

[avram]

Nah, she looked like an adult.

[acrobatty.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I think this kind of thing is why my nephew in California turned Republican, sheer self-defense. AFAICT, all he ever heard the local lefties talking about was how meeeeean Israel was to the poor oppwessed Palestinians and how nobody decent would ever support Israel.

They ARE oppressed, of course, and it DOES suck, but the manichean take on this subject is as inappropriate as it is common.

[jonbaker.livejournal.com]

And Israel's left is anti-Zionist, or "post-Zionist" as they like to style themselves. But really, the intellectual Palestinian (pre-1948, i.e. Jewish) Left was pretty anti-Zionist. Just read Hazony's book (http://www.meforum.org/article/64) (he's a right-wing Zionist) for the history of left-wing anti-Zionism morphing into left-wing post-Zionism in Israel.

Meanwhile, those of us who are lefty on American politics are left out in the cold by the general leftist anti-Zionism.

And the old leftist Zionism has mostly died out. Israel is not as socialist a state as it probably would have liked to be, although it's more so than the US. My sister went to a leftist-Zionist summer camp (Kindervelt (http://www.winchevskycentre.org/institutions/naivelthistory.html)) the last year it was in operation (1962?). So now she lives in Israel, still a leftist and a Zionist, although I don't think her Zionism is particularly lefty, whatever that means.

But the corruption and veniality of many members of Israel's government seems to be approaching third-world "communist" levels.

[avram]

It occurred to me a while back that there's room in the philosophical/political landscape for a sort of anti-Zionist anarcho-Judaism -- the belief that God deprived the Jews of their homeland in order to fully enact their status as his Chosen People, and that the Jews more successfully fulfilled their destiny as a lamp unto the world as a stateless people than as a nation-state. Looks like the post-Zionists are at least halfway there.

[bigscary.livejournal.com]

So are the Satmarers and associates.

[batyatoon]

I just like the phrase "anti-Zionist anarcho-Judaism."

*grumbling to self*

[dirkcjelli.livejournal.com]

Compared to atheists, everyone is a reactionary arch-conservative...

Re: *grumbling to self*

[avram]

I know plenty of reactionary conservative atheists.