Folks, relevant information - not context - about that USC valedictorian people are posting about.
Relevant information because you maybe don't want to valorize her as some kind of hero.
Not context because the information doesn't remotely change that the school is wrong and her harassers vile
(She's posted deeply antisemitic stuff to her instagram account claiming that, essentially, Jews have no historical connection to the land, that "zionism" arose is the early 1800s when Jews started coming to the land to steal it as part of a european conspiracy, etc.)
I’m not sure if I buy that those are antisemitic statements - the idea that Jews have no historical connection to the land is questionable, but Zionism emerging in the 1800s as a political movement of European Jews looking to settle in Palestine is a historical fact.
Zionism has been a key facet of the Jewish ethnoreligious identity for 2000 years. It's baked in. It didn't state in the 1800s.
If you want an example of an ancient ritual that mentions it explicitly, get yourself invited to a somewhat traditional seder next week and stick around until the end.
"Zionism" as a political movement was founded in the late 1800s. "Zionism" as the Jewish longing for, and intent to, return to the land of Israel is 2000 years old.
Don't equivocate between the two; they're related but different
I think it’s ahistorical to assume that the majority of Jews over the past 2,000 years wanted to uproot their lives and move somewhere their distant ancestors lived, which they knew about mainly through religious texts. It negates diaspora Jewish existence in a way I’m uncomfortable with.
You’re the one making sweeping claims about an entire group of people. It seems undeniable that a Jewish person in, like, 1400 in Lithuania would have had very little knowledge of the Land of Israel other than what was in their religious texts.
Hundreds of Hasidic rabbis and their families left that area in 1776 and immigrated to Jerusalem. A few years later a couple hundred rabbinic disciples of the Vilna Gaon did the same. Ethiopian Jews tried at least twice to walk to Jerusalem, once in the 1800s, once before that. Jewish communities…1/
…worldwide sent representatives to live in Jerusalem all throughout recorded history. They also sent money yearly to support the Jewish community there. Nachmanidies, known also by RaMbN, the acronym of his Hebrew name, immigrated from Spain in 1267. The synagogue he built in Jerusalem’s Jewish…2/
…Quarter is still there. I worked a block away & used to pray there often. The Jews were expelled from Spain in 1492 & Portugal a few years later. Hundreds eventually immigrated to Sefat in northern Israel. Others lived in different Israeli cities. These are just a few examples. There are more.
That’s all very cool history! And it’s in the context of Jews migrating to Israel to be subjects of whichever empire happened to be ruling there at the time, not to establish a Jewish state.
Again, that’s a big generalization to make. And it doesn’t change the fact that one of the reasons a Jewish state didn’t make sense is that most of the people who lived there weren’t Jews.
That was not at all the original argument you made, which is that the religion didn't want it. You've been provided evidence that that statement wasn't true, and now you're pivoting the goal posts.
Not a good look.
I said that most people would have had very little actual familiarity with Israel, or desire to uproot their lives, which is totally consistent with a few hundred families emigrating in the 1700s.
1) you were just provided examples of multiple waves of immigration going back the 1200's but sure keep focus on the 1700's.
2) you know we can go back and read your original posts right?
I was told about hundreds of families in the 1700s, hundreds of families in the 1400s, and a single person in the 1200s, along with ongoing intellectual exchanges. That’s completely consistent with what I’m saying and it’s weird of you to insist otherwise.
The Jewish people were displaced from their homeland so in that context a Jewish state did make sense there.
Otherwise people are just profiting from the crime that was committed against the Jewish people. That's where the inconsistency is in what you said.
But i also think the question of "indigenous" is an absolute waste of time and just a distraction, at worst a justification for doing away with Israel and letting a horrific government take its place that would be akin to the Taliban in Afghanistan, at best... no nothing at best. The issue should...
one of rights and equality, which the pro-hamas/ pro-Palestinians desperately want to avoid because they know damn well that a Palestinian state would be run by a theocratic totalitarian regime that treated girls, women and children horribly (like the Gazan government already does).
