I think you misunderstand what “exceptionalize” means in this use. Exceptionalizing means that something is defined as deviant with either a positive or negative connotation, or in other words, that its traits are constructed as exclusive to it rather than as typical of whatever group that the exceptioanlized thing belongs to.

To exceptionalize Zionism as a hate-group would be to say that it is unusual in its motivations and tactics compared to settler-colonial states and politics generally as well as other hate groups. Zionism in Canada is very much enacting genocide in its moblization of sympathetic groups within Canada and influence on the investment and funding policies of institutions within Canada as well as the Canadian state; which again, directly supports Israel’s genocide of Palestinians. I’m not saying that Zionism should not be classified as a hate group or discussed as a hate group, since its subscribers do have specific political intentions and interests, but that we cannot exceptionalize the racist, genocidal politics of Zionists as anomalous or deviant from Canadian politics or from white supremacy. There is a misconception that Israel is somehow hyperbolic in its violence, even though its methods and effects are comparable to that of the US and Canada, and any white supremacist groups within them. Canada is a white supremacist state, despite incidental and periodic protections for racialized peoples, but considers overtly white supremacist groups as hate groups as it allows the state to define white supremacy by the image of those hate groups, not its underlying philosophy and historical processes.

The reason Canadians are only willing to recognize Zionism as genocidal once its violence became undeniable during the most documented genocidal campaign in human history is exactly because that immorality is now obvious in the same way that white supremacist militias within Canada and the US are obviously immoral. The overtness of that violence allows the liberal state to construct its softer, more gradual tactics as something completely distinct from genocide or racism. A great example of why this is so important is the fact that Hamas is already defined as a terrorist group in the Criminal Code, which was recently amended through Bill C-9 to define hate as, “as an emotion of an intense and extreme nature that is clearly associated with vilification and detestation.” Therefore, any equivalency between these “hate groups” would mean that the politics of Zionists and Palestinian resistance are equivalent, “both sides are bad because they are exceptionally violent and express hatred for another group,” which hardly describes the power differential between those groups as well as the sympathy that the Canadian state has for only one of those groups and why.

Hope that explains it better.

~ source for quote: https://www.justice.gc.ca/eng/csj-sjc/pl/c9/index.html

Right, could you like, cite anything to explain where you got this understanding? I can tell you can’t, because that second paragraph is imperialism, not nationalism, ultra or otherwise. You’d only make that mistake if you were just vibe-defining this, so I wonder why you felt the need to do this at all.

Nationalism isn’t just “when a place borders,” it is a specific set of relations and politics where ownership over land and access to the resources of that land is privileged through the arbitrary restriction to a naturalized (as in, imagined to be intrinsically and inevitably guaranteed power) group of people and dispossessed from an exploited or colonized group of people. It emerged in the late-eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as a way to rationalize settler-colonial hierarchies and unify disparate groups of European peoples in the imperial peripheries and metropole around manufactured cultural commonalities like language or heritage. I’m sure you’re aware of German Wars of Unification and their subsequent consequences. New Brunswick and Saskatchewan don’t have obviously similar material conditons besides that they are on the same continent and have similar ways of life forced onto them by a settler-colonial, liberal capitalist state. Settlers in both of those provinces do imagine a common national identity, which is “Canadian,” but that is something intentionally constructed by the state. And no, it isn’t “arguably” bad, unless you’re about to try and argue that the genocide and dispossession of indigenous peoples is only relatively wrong.

Imperialism is the subordination of other groups of people by a privileged group of people within a metropole or core to facilitate the extraction of resources back to that metropole through economic, political, or military coercion. Though it certainly may involve nationalism, as EuroAmerican imperialism does today, it is a distinct set of politics that does not require the same relations as nationalism as it refers to specifically the subordination of external groups of peoples and their lands to the benefit of the privileged, imperialistic group. Canada and the US began as settler-colpnial states on the eastern half of the continent now called North America, and both have expanded westward as part of imperialistic campaigns against indigenous peoples so secure access to the land for their settlers and therefore the transference of resources and power to the benefit of the metropole. Both foster national identities, but those identities are actually subsequent developments of their imperialism and function more to maintain control of those holdings by the metropoles than it was a means to facilitate that expansion.

These things are often cooperative, but they are by no means one thing. Israel is indeed a settler-colonial state occupying Palestine, but it’s one founded on nationalism by the creation of an arbitrary, “unified” Jewish ethnic identity (that also excludes black and African Jewish peoples) and relies on that to exist. Their expansionist and fascistic (which is found in that crisis narrative you reference as the “need” to eradicate potential threating groups) politics are indeed an example of the interrelation between nationalism and imperialism, but are not fundamentally different than Canadian and USAmerican nationalisms and imperialisms just by merit of being “more” violent, and therefore does not constitute some comic-book power up of those politics.

The only reason to distinguish it in the way you and the other commenter has is to misinform and exceptionalize Israel’s settler-colonial genocide of Palestinians and salvage some national identity for equally genocidal states like those in Europe and North America (whom cooperate with Israel for this very reason).

Fucking stop talking about shit you don’t know about, ffs with people on here.

Xenophobia is hateful. Ethno-nationalism is xenophobic and about blood purity.

Zionists are also fine with Palestinians in “Greater Israel” so long as they are subjugated/second class and don’t ask for national determination, they literally passed that racist law last year or whatever. That’s how they have treated Israeli Arabs since the Nakba. In a way they prefer it like that because it legitimizes them as a benevolent majority (“the only democracy” narrative).

Not sure what exactly you’re reacting against with such ferocity. De-exceptionalizing Zionism as just one more shitty nationalism of the kind we’ve seen already in action in my neck of the woods in the Balkans is not creating excuses for it. Quite the contrary.