Disclaimer: before reading this and forming an opinion, please consider I am part Jewish myself.<p>The current situation is that you have: 1) the Jewish faith, 2) Jewish ethnicities, 3) a Jewish state (Israel).<p>Those 3 are connected: most practictioners of the Jewish faith belong to a Jewish ethnicity, the Jewish state was founded by Jews, and the Israeli law of return states that every Jew has the right to become an immigrant. Today, most people do not have a problem with 1 or 2. But 3 is a different story.<p>There were ancient kingdoms in the Eretz Yisrael (land of Israel), such as the Kingdom of Israel and the Kingdom of Judah. Those kingdoms eventually stopped existing, and the Jewish people lost administrative control of that territory. Many Jews continued to inhabit Eretz Yisrael, but did not have administrative control over the territory.<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bar_Kokhba_revolt#Aftermath" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bar_Kokhba_revolt#Aftermath</a><p>About 1800 years later, the Zionist movement identifies a need for the creation of a Jewish state, and successfully creates a new Jewish state in Eretz Yisrael. A large portion of the first Israeli citizens are members of the Jewish diaspora, that is, peoples who already had left Eretz Yisrael for 1800 years.<p>To my [limited] knowledge, there is no precedent for this in history, and that is how many people scratch their heads trying to understand the legitimacy of Zionism. Especially, the pre-Israel inhabitants of Eretz Yisrael.
The US mainstream media is constantly being manipulated by many a special interest group and are also extremely sensitive to anything that may affect their bottom line (e.g. the massive display of cowardice most mainstream media outlet put on during the mohamed danish cartoon affair [1] [2])<p>The fact that pro-israel interest groups are playing this game as well is nothing special.<p>They might be playing the game a little better than others, but in general: move along, nothing to see here.<p>[1] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jyllands-Posten_Muhammad_cartoons_controversy" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jyllands-Posten_Muhammad_carto...</a>
[2] <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C_OR3b-97Ds" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C_OR3b-97Ds</a>
Noam Chomsky has some excellent books and talks on YouTube about how dissident voices are silenced in mainstream media exactly like this. You'll only get hired as a journalist if you seem to agree with the political views of owners and advertisers. And if you publish a political view that owners or advertisers have a problem with, you get fired.<p><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/12617.Manufacturing_Consent" rel="nofollow">https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/12617.Manufacturing_Cons...</a>
<a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/194805.Understanding_Power" rel="nofollow">https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/194805.Understanding_Pow...</a>
This does not only affect traditional media outlets like The Guardian, but also social media giants. Recently, Facebook is being pressured by the Israeli government to adopt the IHRA's (International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance) definition of anti-semitism to include the term “Zionism”, and therefore ban it as hate speech. Which caused a backlash. See [1], [2] and [3].<p>[1] <a href="https://facebookweneedtotalk.org/" rel="nofollow">https://facebookweneedtotalk.org/</a><p>[2] <a href="https://www.theverge.com/2021/1/31/22256949/facebook-zionist-moderation-policy-hate-speech-israel" rel="nofollow">https://www.theverge.com/2021/1/31/22256949/facebook-zionist...</a><p>[3] <a href="https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/02/facebooks-latest-proposed-policy-change-exemplifies-trouble-moderating-speech-0" rel="nofollow">https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/02/facebooks-latest-propo...</a>
Easiest would be to answer with the Einstein and Hannah Arendt letter then, warning of the fascist Likud party. Nothing changed since, it even got worse.<p><a href="http://wilsonweb.physics.harvard.edu/HUMANRIGHTS/Einstein_Letter_Warning_Of_Zionist_Facism_In_Israel.html" rel="nofollow">http://wilsonweb.physics.harvard.edu/HUMANRIGHTS/Einstein_Le...</a>