Zionism in Canada is not the same as zionism in the Israeli regime. Its effect is fundamentally generating hatred towards Palestinians vs enacting hate.
If exposing Israel’s colonialism leads people to normalize colonialism than you’re fighting a losing battle to begin with. Israel shines a mirror on Canada that is necessary for Canadians to see in order accept the truth.
Now if you’re saying it’s lip service done at the opportunity cost of something more effective, I’m all ears. But as to your first point I don’t see a negative to calling Zionism a hate-group.
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 onlyone of those groups and why.
IMO the real reason young people are recognizing colonialism is because we’re in late stage colonialism (on a global scale) and if it wasn’t this generation it would be whichever future generation came of age during capitalism breaching insolvency. The economy has people experiencing the shoe on the other foot for the first time. That’s what’s breaking the spell. Not exposure to semantically accurate facts.
IMO a false equivalence between Hamas/Zionists won’t convince people that Israel bombing hospitals and the USA bombing schools is where we want our tax dollars going.
Cuz that is the core of the issue. Canadian tax payers are funding this. Way I see it the more top of mind that fact is the better.
I think it’s certainly fair to say that the receding benefits of colonialism and capitalism in the metropole has influenced how privileged groups have begun to question the legitimacy of this system, but it’s also important to remember that this isn’t the first time that’s happened in America or Europe, and liberalism is exceptional at appropriating challenging ideas. The current fascist culture in the US and Canada is the consequence of a decades-long neoliberalization of the economy and integration of social justice rhetoric into neoliberal politics with popular success (Jasbir Puar has produced some incredible scholarship on how this relates to contemporary imperialist and appropriation campaigns in Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times). It also isn’t like Canadians and Americans are terribly concerned about imperialism through “neocolonial” tactics like corporatization and privatization instead of direct state occupation and extractive enterprise.
For example, Canada hosts the majority of the world’s mining corporations, and the state heavily invests in that industry; the current Liberal government was elected on the grounds of being preferable to a more overtly fascistic Con platform and has since expanded public funding support for privatized extractive industries like fossil fuels as climate change kills more and more people in the Global South every year. So, the fact that most people only recognize the colonialism in Palestine as a result of Israel’s very visible and undeniable genocidal violence is actually beneficial to a system that primarily uses those more invisible and abstract mechanisms of genocidal violence. The genocide in Palestine is only a part of Canada’s participation in genocidal violence, and the state’s interest in supporting Israel is more peripheral than its investment in continued extractive and destructive industry in colonized spaces of the Global South.
That’s also why I’m saying that it is important to recognize the fundamental values behind these politics, as the majority of people are denied political literacy by this same state and are therefore vulnerable to rhetoric that occludes those values.
Now I honestly have no idea what you’re saying. Like you’re putting a lot of connected things that I vaguely agree with but like you have no general thesis for me to reply to yet you sound like you’re disagreeing with me…?
I can’t respond to you based on what I understand cuz it’s basically you somehow think Canadians recognizing zionism bad somehow perpetuates colonialism.
Now I don’t think you think that, but it’s really hard to boil down what you’re saying to any other perspective based on how you’re presenting it.
I’m saying that your explanation is too reductive and ahistorical.
Yes, the current conditions have influenced how people in the metropole – within the spaces that are privileged by colonialism like Canada, the US, the EU, the UK – question the legitimacy of this system, but that doesn’t guarantee its end. Things can just keep getting worse and more violent, and we know that because the last time people in the metropole expressed this severe level of dissatisfaction in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, it didn’t end colonialism or capitalism. We live under the same system they did, and it has become exponentially more destructive and violent since their time. Privileged people in the metropole were satiated by marginal improvements in social welfare and economic policies like the New Deal and suburbanization, and readily abandoned any solidarity they purportedly had for each other or other workers internationally. To suggest that this system will change fundamentally just because the affluent white workers are finally unhappy with it is the exact narrative that people who have not fought this system for generations would intuitively subscribe to. Activists in the metropole tend to coop and appropriate anti-capitalist and decolonial movements more than they elevate them.
Zionism relates to this because of how especially energizing and spectacular it has become in popular discourses in the metropole since Israel began this more militaristic campaign of genocide three years ago; over a century after their colonialism started and nearly eighty years after the first Nakba. A tactic that liberals use to obscure or minimize their own genocidal violence is to use particularly visible and obvious images of genocide and political violence to define what that violence is so that their more invisible and gradual means of genocide are less immediately apparent as genocide to most people in the metropole. Canadians will more readily understand that genocide looks like the Holocaust in Nazi Germany and Israel’s genocide of Palestinians in Gaza, and not the Canadian state’s impoverishment of Inuit in Nunavut or the targeted killings of Guatemalans by Canadian mining corporations (that the state supports financially).
I’m saying that yes, Canadian Zionists are a hate group, but that we should not be satisfied with that recognition so long as the fundamental values and motivations of that hate remain the fundamental organizing principles of this country. My example of Hamas being officially classified as a terrorist organization under Canada’s Criminal Code, which also defines hate in a vague way that is alienated from the politics of white supremacy and settler-colonialism, was meant to demonstrate that liberals will readily concede that Zionists are hateful if it means they can still classify groups that resist colonialism as equally hateful. They care less about defending Israel than they do defending their own genocidal interests.
I’m saying that your explanation is too reductive and ahistorical.
I’m saying that yes, Canadian Zionists are a hate group, but that we should not be satisfied with that recognition so long as the fundamental values and motivations of that hate remain the fundamental organizing principles of this country.
I’m sorry but, respectfully, you are having a conversation with yourself.
AFAIC our discussion is me saying Zionism being classified as a hate group is a good thing; and you saying it isn’t but it is and now I’m being reductive and ahistorical??
I get what you’re saying but IMO its misguided.
Zionism in Canada is not the same as zionism in the Israeli regime. Its effect is fundamentally generating hatred towards Palestinians vs enacting hate.
If exposing Israel’s colonialism leads people to normalize colonialism than you’re fighting a losing battle to begin with. Israel shines a mirror on Canada that is necessary for Canadians to see in order accept the truth.
Now if you’re saying it’s lip service done at the opportunity cost of something more effective, I’m all ears. But as to your first point I don’t see a negative to calling Zionism a hate-group.
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
Okay fair point. Now I see what you’re saying.
IMO the real reason young people are recognizing colonialism is because we’re in late stage colonialism (on a global scale) and if it wasn’t this generation it would be whichever future generation came of age during capitalism breaching insolvency. The economy has people experiencing the shoe on the other foot for the first time. That’s what’s breaking the spell. Not exposure to semantically accurate facts.
IMO a false equivalence between Hamas/Zionists won’t convince people that Israel bombing hospitals and the USA bombing schools is where we want our tax dollars going.
Cuz that is the core of the issue. Canadian tax payers are funding this. Way I see it the more top of mind that fact is the better.
I think it’s certainly fair to say that the receding benefits of colonialism and capitalism in the metropole has influenced how privileged groups have begun to question the legitimacy of this system, but it’s also important to remember that this isn’t the first time that’s happened in America or Europe, and liberalism is exceptional at appropriating challenging ideas. The current fascist culture in the US and Canada is the consequence of a decades-long neoliberalization of the economy and integration of social justice rhetoric into neoliberal politics with popular success (Jasbir Puar has produced some incredible scholarship on how this relates to contemporary imperialist and appropriation campaigns in Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times). It also isn’t like Canadians and Americans are terribly concerned about imperialism through “neocolonial” tactics like corporatization and privatization instead of direct state occupation and extractive enterprise.
For example, Canada hosts the majority of the world’s mining corporations, and the state heavily invests in that industry; the current Liberal government was elected on the grounds of being preferable to a more overtly fascistic Con platform and has since expanded public funding support for privatized extractive industries like fossil fuels as climate change kills more and more people in the Global South every year. So, the fact that most people only recognize the colonialism in Palestine as a result of Israel’s very visible and undeniable genocidal violence is actually beneficial to a system that primarily uses those more invisible and abstract mechanisms of genocidal violence. The genocide in Palestine is only a part of Canada’s participation in genocidal violence, and the state’s interest in supporting Israel is more peripheral than its investment in continued extractive and destructive industry in colonized spaces of the Global South.
That’s also why I’m saying that it is important to recognize the fundamental values behind these politics, as the majority of people are denied political literacy by this same state and are therefore vulnerable to rhetoric that occludes those values.
Now I honestly have no idea what you’re saying. Like you’re putting a lot of connected things that I vaguely agree with but like you have no general thesis for me to reply to yet you sound like you’re disagreeing with me…?
I can’t respond to you based on what I understand cuz it’s basically you somehow think Canadians recognizing zionism bad somehow perpetuates colonialism.
Now I don’t think you think that, but it’s really hard to boil down what you’re saying to any other perspective based on how you’re presenting it.
I’m saying that your explanation is too reductive and ahistorical.
Yes, the current conditions have influenced how people in the metropole – within the spaces that are privileged by colonialism like Canada, the US, the EU, the UK – question the legitimacy of this system, but that doesn’t guarantee its end. Things can just keep getting worse and more violent, and we know that because the last time people in the metropole expressed this severe level of dissatisfaction in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, it didn’t end colonialism or capitalism. We live under the same system they did, and it has become exponentially more destructive and violent since their time. Privileged people in the metropole were satiated by marginal improvements in social welfare and economic policies like the New Deal and suburbanization, and readily abandoned any solidarity they purportedly had for each other or other workers internationally. To suggest that this system will change fundamentally just because the affluent white workers are finally unhappy with it is the exact narrative that people who have not fought this system for generations would intuitively subscribe to. Activists in the metropole tend to coop and appropriate anti-capitalist and decolonial movements more than they elevate them.
Zionism relates to this because of how especially energizing and spectacular it has become in popular discourses in the metropole since Israel began this more militaristic campaign of genocide three years ago; over a century after their colonialism started and nearly eighty years after the first Nakba. A tactic that liberals use to obscure or minimize their own genocidal violence is to use particularly visible and obvious images of genocide and political violence to define what that violence is so that their more invisible and gradual means of genocide are less immediately apparent as genocide to most people in the metropole. Canadians will more readily understand that genocide looks like the Holocaust in Nazi Germany and Israel’s genocide of Palestinians in Gaza, and not the Canadian state’s impoverishment of Inuit in Nunavut or the targeted killings of Guatemalans by Canadian mining corporations (that the state supports financially).
I’m saying that yes, Canadian Zionists are a hate group, but that we should not be satisfied with that recognition so long as the fundamental values and motivations of that hate remain the fundamental organizing principles of this country. My example of Hamas being officially classified as a terrorist organization under Canada’s Criminal Code, which also defines hate in a vague way that is alienated from the politics of white supremacy and settler-colonialism, was meant to demonstrate that liberals will readily concede that Zionists are hateful if it means they can still classify groups that resist colonialism as equally hateful. They care less about defending Israel than they do defending their own genocidal interests.
I’m sorry but, respectfully, you are having a conversation with yourself.
AFAIC our discussion is me saying Zionism being classified as a hate group is a good thing; and you saying it isn’t but it is and now I’m being reductive and ahistorical??