Zionism ≠ Judaism
In a recent Grayzone video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g2x9gcPmA7E&t=1603s, Aaron Maté, a Canadian Jew characterized Zionism and Israel’s right-wing government as driven by chauvinism. Seems like an apt descriptor and an effective tool to illustrate the important distinction between Zionism, a political—specifically a settler-colonialist—philosophy and Judaism, a religion and set of moral principles guiding the personal and interpersonal lives of adherents of the religion.
As a former Catholic, current Gaist, I’m clearly no scholar of the Torah, but I know enough to recognize that Judaism is chauvinistic to the extent that are other religions like Catholicism, which believe that they are the one true path. But in other respects, chauvinism is far from the center of the Jewish ethos, much of whose focus seems to be on interpersonal acts of kindness and caring. In prophetic books and to some readers of the Torah comes the repeated admonition to attend to the needs of the weaker classes of society. This is a rather far cry from chauvinism.
According to a Pew research poll, most Jewish adults say that remembering the Holocaust, leading a moral and ethical life, working for justice and equality in society, and being intellectually curious are “essential” to what it means to them to be Jewish. The chauvinistic attitude necessary to perpetuate the stealing of Palestinian lands in the West Bank, for example—with the justification that this was foretold by religious texts—seems to me to be in reality a stain upon the ethical fabric of Judaism, instead.
Sorry, Euro-American-etc. Jewish settlers, it feels terribly scamological. Certainly not justifiable within Judaism’s ethical core, certainly not logical, definitely a (violent) scam.