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

[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."