ZIONISM. A thread.
I am 55 years old. In my 1st year at primary school I was introduced to Israel by my first Hebrew teachers, an Israeli couple brought over to head the Jewish studies dept at the newly established school. It began a love affair which has endured ever since.(1)

Aged 10 I began cheder(a sort of jewish sunday school) where I began to learn about Zionism, the ideology behind the state. I have spent 50 years studying Zionism, Israel and the Shoah. My bookcases are filled with the great texts on the subject by the world's greatest experts(2)

5 years ago I fulfilled a lifelong yearning and made aliyah to live in Israel.
I think it not unfair to claim a degree of knowledge even expertise on the subject and the issues involved.
18 months or so ago I joined Twitter....(3)

Of course I knew in advance the hostility anything Israel attracts on here. What still surprises though is the staggering ignorance on display from so many whose lack of knowledge does not seem to act as a deterrent to loud often angry proclamations imbued with great certainty(4)

The level of debate often amounts to little more than religious incarnations of tired mantras devoid of any substance. Zionism as "jewish supremacy", a "far right ideology", Israel as a "settler colonialist" or "ethnostate" repeated ad nauseam.
So much guff. Where to begin?(5)

Of necessity this thread can only scratch the surface. With that caveat here goes...
Zionism is a modern political movement. It was born in the 19th century as a Jewish response to antisemitism. Herzl's views crystallised when covering the Dreyfus trial.(6)

There he saw that notwithstanding being a loyal and exemplary Frenchman Dreyfus was still the victim of antisemitism. Herzl became convinced that such would be the lot of the jews unless we became "normalised" by having a state of our own. (7)

As the movement grew other jews from all over Europe added to Herzl's thinking. Many were from eastern europe and were young, secular and socialist. The latter is significant because it may begin to explain the depths of the often irrational hostility to Zionism on the left. (8)

These jews found that despite fine words the socialist movements were not immune to antisemitism and often were replete with it. At best their attitude can be summarised as "to the jew as an individual everything, to the jew as a nation nothing". (9)

To join the socialist utopia the jews were expected to turn their backs on their heritage, culture and traditions and assimilate in order to escape persecution. Zionists rejected that 'invitation'. The left has never forgiven the heresy. (10)

The dominant stream of Zionism developed as a largely socialist movement within a Jewish framework. The pre state institutions they built were founded on those principles. It was precisely those jews who formed the bulwark of the immigration into Palestine. (11)

They were refugees fleeing pogroms and persecution seeking to build a better society in their ancestral homeland. The idea that they were colonial settlers at the behest of an imperial motherland is so absurd as to be laughable no matter how often the canard is repeated. (12)

Laughable also is the left arguing that Zionism is somehow at odds with Judaism. Seeing them relying on the words of obscure hasidic sects in support is truly hilarious.
Zionism was a largely secular departure from religion and opposed by the religious establishment (13)

Religious Zionists existed but were a minority of both religious people and Zionists.
That is not to say that secular Zionism did not draw inspiration from the Torah, religion etc but that in no way invalidates it as a separate and distinct development in jewish thought.(14)

This is important in debunking the nonsense about "conflation of judaism and Zionism" or that Zionism is somehow antithetical to Judaism. It remains what it always was ONE Jewish response to antisemitism: which takes me to the next point. (15)

Say the left but Zionism was but a minority among jews a century ago. Religious. Socialist. Bundist; all bigger than Zionism. True enough.
Sadly for this line of argument though is that the position today is so markedly different as to render the point utterly irrelevant (16)

Today Zionism and support for the state of Israel is embraced by the vast majority of the world's jews nearly half of whom already live in Israel. Like it or not that is a fact. Are there jews who are antizionist? For sure but they are now in a tiny minority. (17)

No amount of far left wishful thinking alters that inalienable fact.
Why the drastic change? In time honoured Jewish fashion I will answer a question with a question! What became of the Bund? Tragically, they along with their philosophy died in the camps (18)

It was the Zionists who 'won the argument' in a way that no one could in their worst nightmares have foreseen.The world stood by while 1/3 of us were rounded up like cattle and herded across Europe in history's only industrialised attempt to obliterate an entire people(19)

Sadly I can't move on without dealing briefly with the vile lie of Zionist- Nazi collaboration. Out of nowhere extreme leftists suddenly reach for the Haavara agreement as evidence. Scholars far more qualified than I have demolished the perverted distortions involved. (20)

I prefer to make a different point. It was Hashomer Hatzair (socialist Zionists) who were first in all europe to call for armed resistance to the Nazis. It was Zionists who led the Warsaw Ghetto uprising.
The collaboration lie was born in 1950s USSR more of which below (21)

Next the myth that Israel was a creation of British/US imperialism. What about the Balfour Declaration? Contrary to popular opinion it did not give Palestine to the jews. In fact the wording was a disappointment to Weizman unsurprising as it was a rather nebulous fudge (22)

in typically British style to promise little and be capable of meaning all things to all people. In practice it delivered nothing. 20 years later still no state and the British closed the doors to jewish immigration to Palestine thus sealing the fate of countless jews. (23)

Post war nothing changed as jews who had survived the Shoah desperate to leave the graveyard that was Europe were detained and either returned to Europe or interned on Cyprus. In the UN vote on partition the UK abstained. (24)

So far from supporting the creation of the state of Israel recently unearthed papers reveal that the British actively conspired with the Arab states to assist them in their plan to attack if Ben Gurion declared independence on the departure of the British! (25)