So much ignorance in so short a post. At least it conveys the sense among Palestinian elites that if they can write our history, they can write our future. The thing “Zionists can’t get over” in the very first sentence is a fact taught to every Israeli schoolchild - with the caveat of the many times when it wasn’t quite true. For example, google the Yemeni Jewish aliyah of the 1880s. Or Sephardi Zionism generally. But the problem here isn’t just their claim that they have the right to shrink our story to the size and shape of their politics. The problem is that the great heart and center of our story, the thing that gives Zionism its astonishing strength, is painstakingly excised from their version of our story. If Zionism were just the European ideologies that go by that name - religious Zionism, liberal Zionism, communist Zionism, cultural Zionism, etc. - it would have been destroyed in the very first Arab war against it. Heck, it would never have managed to build a state in the first place. No, Zionism’s secret weapon isn’t Israel’s nukes, it’s the millions of refugees who were corralled into Israel by the catastrophic displacements of the 20th century. Most Iraqi Jews were not Zionist a century ago - it’s true. But Palestinian intellectuals don’t understand that this is an argument in Zionism’s favor. Those Jewish Iraqis were turned into Zionists by their fellow Iraqis, who left them no choice. Google Rashid Ali and the Farhud. Ditto Polish Jews, Moroccan Jews, even Lebanese Jews - the last community to actually leave the Arab world en masse. This is the basic truth the Palestinian narrative is desperate to avoid: Jews were made Zionist only through desperate need. Which is Zionism’s point and prediction about modernity and the terrible impulses at the heart of modern mass societies. Elite intellectuals are moved by elite ideologies and see everything as a function of intellect. We can forgive them their elitism. But it is nevertheless a boundless. A more serious *social* history of Zionism - the story of the millions of desperate, ordinary people who Zionism saved - reveals Zionism’s real strength. The Zionism of rescue, not the Zionism of ideologues, is the source of Israel’s immense resilience - and why every Arab strategy pursued to this day has failed to dislodge us. When Palestinian elites stop telling our story as a shrunken version of their politics, but instead become genuinely curious about our experience and start to see us on our own terms, their efforts and strategies to secure a better Palestinian future will start to bear fruit. https://bird.makeup/@ussamamakdisi/1797510988448800989
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