7-21-2019When Zionism imagined Jewish nationalism without supremacy - Meron Rapoport +972

https://972mag.com/will-imagining-zionism-without-supremacy/142415/

In his recent boo [Beyond the Nation-State, published last year by Yale University Press], Dr. Dmitry Shumsky shows that, contrary to popular belief, the forefathers of Zionism did not envision a state based on Jewish supremacy. And yet Zionism, he says, inevitably involves the oppression of Palestinians . Dr. Shumsky, a historian of the Zionist movement at the Hebrew University, attempts to prove that [it is not traitorous to suggest that] Israel become a state of all its citizens, or, God forbid, a bi-national state…With extensive quotes by Zionism's forefathers — Leon Pinsker, Ahad Ha'am, Theodore Herzl, Ze'ev Jabotinsy and David Ben-Gurion — he shows that over the course of Zionism's first five decades, from the late 19th century until the early 20th century, the movement didn't aim for establishing a "nation-state" the way it is commonly understood today, and as is reflected in the Jewish Nation-State Law. According to Shumsky, the Zionist leaders envisioned the Jewish state as a multi-national one, or even as an entity within a larger framework, similar to the federalist structure in the United States…

 

Posted by Judith Ferster, AIME member