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isn't that literally the definition of zionism? Why is this even a meme?
Zionism at its most reductive and ideal is the idea that Jewish people should have a state/homeland that will never persecute them for being Jewish.
In theory, that is what Joe Fucking Biden meant when he told a crowd of Jewish people that he was a Zionist.
The problem starts when you start asking questions like: "How do you do that?" and the actual Zionists, surprisingly, aren't that interested in the creation of a secular state, or what's going to happen to the non-Jewish people already living there.
So, that's the meme. The conflict between the ideal and the reality, this weird thought space between concept and reality that really only takes a person thinking one step ahead to notice but liberals, like Joe Biden, didn't and don't.
If you're being generous to liberals, and not a realist who knows they're active and knowledgeable participants.
Zionism is a settler colonialism project that was able to really start with the support of British Imperialism. Zionism as a political movement started with Theodore Herzl in the 1880s as a 'modern' way to 'solve' the 'Jewish Question' of Europe. Western Nations supported this instead of instituting legal protections and refuge for Jewish people fleeing persecution.
Adi Callai, an Israeli, does a great analysis of how Antisemitism has been weaponized by Zionism during its history.
Since at least the 1860's, Europe was increasingly antisemitic and hostile to Jewish people. Zionism was explicitly a Setter Colonialist movement and the native Palestinians were not considered People but Savages by the Europeans. While Zionist Colonization began before it, the Balfor Declaration is when Britain gave it's backing of the movement in order to 'solve' the 'Jewish Question' while also creating a Colony in the newly conquered Middle East after WWI in order to exhibit military force in the region and extract natural resources.
That's when Zionist immigration started to pick up, out of necessity for most as Europe became more hostile and antisemitic. That continued into and during WWII, European countries and even the US refused to expand immigration quotas for Jewish people seeking asylum. The idea that the creation of Israel is a reparation for Jewish people is an after-the-fact justification. While most Jewish immigrants had no choice and just wanted a place to live in peace, it was the Zionist Leadership that developed and implemented the forced transfer, ethnic cleansing, of the native population, Palestinians. Without any Occupation, Apartheid, and ethnic cleansing, there would not be any Palestinian resistance to it.
Herzl himself explicitly considered Zionism a Settler Colonialist project, Setter Colonialism is always violent. The difficulty in creating a democratic Jewish state in an area inhabited by people who are not Jewish, is that enough Palestinian people need to be 'Transferred' to have a demographic majority that is Jewish. Ben-Gurion explicitly rejected Secular Bi-national state solutions in favor of partition.
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Zionism’s aims in Palestine, its deeply-held conviction that the Land of Israel belonged exclusively to the Jewish people as a whole, and the idea of Palestine’s “civilizational barrenness" or “emptiness” against the background of European imperialist ideologies all converged in the logical conclusion that the native population should make way for thenewcomers.
The idea that the Palestinian Arabs must find a place for themselves elsewhere was articulated early on. Indeed, the founder of the movement, Theodor Herzl, provided an early reference to transfer even before he formally outlined his theory of Zionist rebirth in his Judenstat.
An 1895 entry in his diary provides in embryonic form many of the elements that were to be demonstrated repeatedly in the Zionist quest for solutions to the “Arab problem ”-the idea of dealing with state governments over the heads of the indigenous population, Jewish acquisition of property that would be inalienable, “Hebrew Land" and “Hebrew Labor,” and the removal of the native population.
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10 myths of Israel by Ilan Pappe, summerized and full book
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Transfer Committee and the JNF led to Forced Displacement of 100,000 Palestinians throughout the mandate.
Ethnic Cleansing
Historian Works on the History
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Palestine: A Four Thousand Year History - Nur Masalha
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The Concept of Transfer 1882-1948 - Nur Masalha
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A History of Modern Palestine - Ilan Pappe
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The Hundred Years' War on Palestine - Rashid Khalidi
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The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine - Ilan Pappe
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The 1967 Arab-Israeli War: Origins and Consequences - Avi Shlaim
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The Biggest Prison on Earth: A History of the Occupied Territories - Ilan Pappe
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The Gaza Strip: The Political Economy of De-development - Sara Roy
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10 Myths About Israel - Ilan Pappe (summery)
The problem starts when you start asking questions like: “How do you do that?” and the actual Zionists, surprisingly, aren’t that interested in the creation of a secular state, or what’s going to happen to the non-Jewish people already living there.
i can see how this is conceptually a problem, but i struggle to understand why people care about it, as far as my understanding goes, you couldn't find a country without a history of some form of colonialism.
you can go as far backward or as forward as you want, but i think there is always going to be some form of colonialism and conflict in humanity, it's just engraved into the evolutionary history of humanity, as it is in most other forms of life, the primary difference is that we figured out how to make guns so we can shoot at each other instead of fighting more traditionally.
As far as government goes, i don't really know how much of that would be a problem, especially considering that this is the middle east and a lot of middle eastern countries have religion explicitly integrated into the government (at least in under my knowledge). If we're talking about giving rights to people, things get more complicated. And i'm not super familiar with this myself, but it is to my knowledge that non jewish people living in israel have the same rights as jewish people (or broadly similar rights) excluding occupied territories of course.
This is also excluding the extremely high tensions between arab/palestinian people and israeli/jewish people in the region as well, which only makes things more messy and complicated.
i suppose on the surface i'm sort of iffy on the idea of israel, but given the broader context of the middle east, i'm not really sure zionism is any worse than the existing structures in the middle east.