User:Vegan416/sandbox

Carbon chauvinism

Searle conclusion that "human mental phenomena [are] dependent on actual physical–chemical properties of actual human brains" have been sometimes described as a form of "Carbon chauvinism". Steven Pinker suggested that a response to that conclusion would be to make a counter thought experiment to the Chinese Room, where the incredulity goes the other way. He brings as an example the short story They're Made Out of Meat which depicts an alien race composed of some electronic beings who upon finding Earth express disbelief that the meat brain of humans can experience consciousness and thought.

However, Searle himself denied being "Carbon chauvinist". He said "I have not tried to show that only biological based systems like our brains can think. [...] I regard this issue as up for grabs". Searle thinks that in theory even silicon machines could theoretically have human-like consciousness and thought, if the actual physical–chemical properties of silicon could be used in a way that can produce consciousness and thought, but "until we know how the brain does it we are not in a position to try to do it artificially".

Round 8 - scholarly opinions critical of the (post-)colonialist interpretation of Zionism

Several editors in previous discussion seem to have wished to create the impression that the number of 21st scholars that are critical of the "(post) Colonial" interpretation of Zionism is only a single digit number (one going even as far as calling it a "fringe" view). To completely debunk this false impression that may have been created I bring here a list of 50 relevant 21st century scholars who are critical of the "(post) Colonial" interpretation of Zionism (most of whom wrote about it in the last 5 years). I actually have more leads like these but I got tired of exploring them and writing them nicely, so I decided to stop at a nice round number. Having made my point here, I don’t intend to continue in this line of randomly collecting scholar opinions in the near future, because I want to go back to working on my more systematic approach here, i.e. the “Encyclopedias project”. News on that will probably come next week on "Round 6".

Scholar Name	Year and Links	Source type	quotes
Yoav Gelber	2020	Chapter in academic book	Economic theories of colonialism and sociological theories of migration movements are also inadequate when applied to the Zionist experience
Benny Morris	2020	Book review	Colonialism is commonly defined as the policy and practice of an imperial power acquiring political control over another country, settling it with its sons, and exploiting it economically. By any objective standard, Zionism fails to fit this definition
Dore Gold	2011	3	The Myth of Israel as a Colonialist Entity: An Instrument of Political Warfare to Delegitimize the Jewish State
Tuvia Friling	2016	4	What Do Those Who Claim Zionism Is Colonialism Overlook?
Robert Eisen	2011	5	Moreover, Zionism was not colonialism. Palestine had no economic attraction for the Zionists because there was nothing in Palestine to exploit.
Dov Waxman	2019	Academic book	Zionist settlers were not European colonialists
Ephraim Karsh	2016	7	It is precisely this early international acceptance of Zionism as national rebirth in an ancestral homeland, rather than colonial encroachment on an indigenous populace, that the Palestinian Authority seeks to debunk by demanding an official British apology for the declaration.
Tom Segev	2023	Mainstream media RS: E-mail to the New York Times	“colonialism is irrelevant to the Zionist experience.” Zionists were motivated primarily by “a historical vision for their future identity in what they considered their ancient homeland” rather than an “imperial strategic or economic vision or a desire to dominate the local population.” “most Jewish immigrants in Palestine and Israel did not come as Zionists but as refugees.”
Ilan Troen	2019	9	Without evidence or argument, it neatly defines Jews as invaders and the Jewish state as an intruding colonial-settler society in the service of an imperialistic mission.
Yuval shany	2023	Mainstream media RS: Interview to the New York Times	dealing with the establishment of Israel as a colonial enterprise is “a significant category error.” It cannot apply to a conflict involving “two indigenous peoples.” It is misplaced given that the 20th-century influx of persecuted European Jews came from a historically indigenous “population of refugees not sent by any empire.” It cannot be applied to the many other Jews from Muslim North African and Middle Eastern countries who arrived in Israel after they suffered expulsion.
Jeffrey C. Alexander	2023	11	“Wars and social movements need to connect to dominant cultural tropes, and colonialism has become the go-to term for total pollution”,“Branding Israel with this term is seen as effective, even if it connects Jews to the very white European colonizers who murdered them by the millions.”
Moses Lissak	2009	12	The relation of the Jews to the Land of Israel is not colonial. It is religious and cultural.
Ruth Ginio	2024	13	"there is no real basis for the claim that the entire Zionist project and the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948 can be equated with European colonialism", "This is not a situation of colonialism according to its historical definition, but rather a situation of two conflicting nations sharing the same territory".
Fania Oz-Salzberger	2024	14	What about colonialism? Despite its pioneers’ European origins, Zionism is not, and never was, a colonialist project
Avi Berli	2024	15	Post Colonialism as an introduction to Antisemitism: If we remove the national motivations that led Jews to immigrate to the country and to invest in it and leave only the "colonial" ones we wouldn't be able to explain the success of Zionism.
Robert Wistrich	2015	16	"The anti-Zionist mythology of the left", "It is no accident that the confused ideology of the contemporary “post-colonial” left is vulnerable to antisemitism since it no longer has any anchor in the concrete, material realities or the geopolitical, security, and cultural contexts of the Middle East."
Zeev Sternhell	2010	17	the land was thus an existential necessity. Zionism was a stringent nationalism, a radical nationalism; but to claim that the arrivals were white settlers driven by a colonialist mind-set does not correspond to historical reality. The overwhelming majority - the Polish Jews in the 1920s, the German Jews in the 1930s, the displaced persons after the Second World War and the end of the British Mandate - came because they had nowhere else to go. The same applies to the immigrants after 1948, forced out of the Arab countries as a result of the founding of the State of Israel. To speak of a colonialist mentality in their case is absurd. The institutions set up in the inter-war period aimed at ensuring Jewish autonomy in all areas, rather than subjugating the Arabs of Palestine or expelling them.
Susie Linfield	2019	18	Wishful thinking on the Left is combined with a Manichaean world view: extreme animus against Israelis, identified as the evil white colonists, combined with an idealisation of the Palestinians, cast as the oppressed non-white revolutionaries. But what follows from any kind of Manichaean world is falsity, bad politics, and bad political analysis, because the world itself isn’t actually Manichaean.
John Strawson	2019	19	The use of the term “colonialism” by BDS supporters is not historiography but political rhetoric. They also assume that having named Israel as “colonial” that the political logic would be the need to dismantle the state.
Jeffery Herf	2023	20	the Zionist project was never a colonialist one.
Alvin Rosenfeld	2023	21	Today, a particularly virulent strain of antisemitism holds not just the Jews but the Jewish state guilty. Guilty of what? Of the cardinal sin according to many on the Left today: the imperialist oppression of non-whites. According to this view, the “settler-colonialist” Jews arrived from Europe and Russia in the 19th and 20th centuries and set about stripping the indigenous Palestinians of their national rights. Never mind that there had never been a sovereign Arab Palestine or that the Jews returned to Israel to create a state only because their Russian and European “hosts” had made their life unbearable or actively sought to end it. When an independent state was offered to the Arabs in 1947, they rejected it. Nevertheless, the Jews went on to establish a sovereign state of their own, which flourishes 75 years after its creation.
Martin Kramer	2020; 2005	22	"Is Zionism Colonialism? The Root Lie", "This is a very great lie, and it is a self-serving lie. Those who believe it can sustain in their hearts the hope that in any given span of a few years, Israel will disappear. America will decide to dismantle it, or the Jews will decide that it is too costly to maintain, and so will go to other countries that are safer and more comfortable. For colonialism is something that is transient and lasts only so long as it is cost-effective. But authentic nations are forever, the ties of nations to their land are never really severed, and nations are bound by ties of solidarity that cross the generations."
Gerald Steinberg	2023	23	Human rights antisemitism is accompanied and amplified by the theology of the neo-Marxist left, which is focused on opposing “racist, capitalist, imperialist, colonial oppressors.” Under slogans such as “intersectional solidarity” and DEI, (diversity, equality, and inclusion — except for Jews) these ideologues have conquered the leading universities, claiming to speak for ostensibly oppressed peoples (many of which are led by terror regimes) in the “global south,” while Israel, particularly after the 1967 war, is branded as the tool of American and European imperialism. In this tortured version of morality and human rights, western nationalism, including Zionism, is automatically “evil,” but Third World nationalism and “liberation” movements are good — the victims can never be unjust oppressors (even when they engage in indescribable brutality), and the “colonialists” cannot be righteous victims.
Alan Dowty	2022	24	But this was not “settler colonialism” as usually defined.
Alexander Yakobson	2018	25	If Zionism Were Colonial It Would Have Ended Long Ago: The Palestinians’ refusal to accept that they are confronting a rival national movement has been disastrous for them.
Allan Johnson	2021	26	An Open Letter to Peter Gabriel et al explaining why Israel is not a ‘Settler Colonial’ society
Irwin Cotler	2013	27	A third manifestation of political Antisemitism is the denial of any historical connection between the Jewish people and the State of Israel, a form of Middle East revisionism or ‘memory cleansing’ that seeks to extinguish or erase the Jewish people’s relationship to Israel, while ‘Palestinizing’ or ‘Islamicizing’ the Arab and Muslim exclusivist claim. If ‘Holocaust Revisionism’ is an assault on Jewish memory and historical experience, ‘Middle East Revisionism’ constitutes no less of an assault on Jewish memory and historical experience. It cynically serves to invert the historical narrative so that Israel is seen an ‘alien’ and ‘colonial implant’ in the region that ‘usurped’ the Palestinian homeland – leading to the conclusion that its people are a ‘criminal’ group of nomadic Jews whose very presence ‘defiles’ Islam, and must be expurgated.
Gil Troy	2021	28	Calling Israel racist, apartheid, genocidal, settler-colonialist and white supremacist or Jewish supremacist, is inaccurate and insulting, counterproductive and self-destructive. It encourages war, not peace; Jew-hatred, not reconciliation. It hardens hearts and polarizes positions. And, in demonizing the Jewish state, it encourages hooligans who target the Jews living in that state – and the Jews living everywhere else, too.
Donna Robinson Divine	2024	29	The failure of Middle East scholars to account for developments in the Middle East is not a bug but a feature of the field’s ethos: an exercise in political liberation from Western powers rather than an analytical understanding of the region’s deeper dynamics and complexities. With this ethos, the May 1948 resurrection of Jewish sovereignty in its ancient homeland is described entirely as an act of colonial aggression rather than the actual springtime revolution that it was after generations of mandated Jewish disempowerment.
Milton Shain	2023	30	Israel haters ignore a grievous history: The ‘apartheid’ analogy and the ‘colonial settler’ paradigm are simplistic and unhelpful
Norman Goda	2024	31	how might Jews respond over the long term to those drawing from a linguistic arsenal stocked with lazy, jargon-based, anti-Israel lies about colonialism, apartheid, and genocide, all tied together by righteous fury and rhythmic sloganeering?
Carry  Nelson	2019	32	“Claims that Israel has no right to exist as a Jewish state, that it was an illegitimate colonialist enterprise from the outset, are indeed anti-Semitic in effect.”
Philip Carl Salzman	2023	33	So the claim that Israelis are “colonial settlers” doesn’t hold water. Aside from the small population of Jews who never left the Holy Land, most of the returnees were refugees, half from Arab countries.
Moshe Postone	2010	34	Why is it that people don’t see what the situation is today, and try to see if there is a kind of resolution to what is essentially a national conflict that could free up progressive politics? To subsume the conflict under the rubric of colonialism misrecognizes the situation.
David Hirsh	2007	35	In the middle of the 20th century Israel was not imagined as a European colony. It is strained, to say the least, to believe that Jews in the refugee camps in Europe and in British Cyprus, recovering from starvation and from existences as non-humans, were thinking of themselves as standard bearers of ‘the European idea’. The seamless insertion of the history of ‘Zionism’ into a schematic history of colonialism casts Jews as going to Palestine in order to get rich on the back of the people who lived there. Jews, who are said to embody some European idea of whiteness, also embodied a European idea of rats and cockroaches which was held to constitute an existential threat to Europe.
Abram de Swaan	2004	36	This article seeks to show that such criticism often expresses a very different sentiment, an “anti-Israeli enthusiasm”. A vent for righteous indignation that brings some relief from the still-burning shame of the memory of the Shoah, it employs facile equations reducing the Jewish State to the last bastion of colonialism and thereby conceals the true issues underlying this conflict.
Josef Joffe	2024	37	Taught from Stockton, Calif., to Stockholm, Sweden, the doctrine has at its core white supremacy, which must be crushed. The gist is Western guilt, and it must be exorcised by laying it first and foremost on the colonialist state of Israel, i.e., the Jews.
David Ohana	2012	38	The colonialist discourse is not a new one. The analogy, however, has been disproved by the facts. The Zionist settlement of Palestine took place without military or political assistance from foreign states and so does not resemble any colonialist movement. Zionism was not a religious movement, but a national movement that saw the return to Zion as the modern expression of a people that wished to forge its collective destiny through a return to its historical sources. The Israelis created a rejuvenated homeland and established an identity between a large part of the people and their soil; they developed settlement, science, and technology, achieved a clear national identity with a culture, language, and creativity of its own, and succeeded in maintaining a democratic existence (within the “Green Line”) under the most trying condition there can be for a democracy – a protracted military conflict. Most important of all, the Israelis never felt strangers in their country. They did not apologize for their national existence, but saw it as the historical realization of a universal right supported by international recognition – not as an original sin.
Julia Edthofer	2015	39	it is demonstrated that the de-colonial framing of Israel as a "Western colonial project" can blur with antisemitic stereotypes--for instance when Israel is depicted as a neo-colonial evil par excellence and "Jewish complicity" with Western (neo)-colonialism is postulated.
Brian Klug	2022	40	there is a piece missing from the stock postcolonial discourse, a discourse that folds Zionism completely, without remainder, into the history of European hegemony over the Global South, as if this were the whole story. But it is not; and the piece that is missing is, for most Jews, including quite a few of us who are not part of the Jewish mainstream regarding Zionism and Israel, the centerpiece. Put it this way: For Jews in the shtetls of Eastern Europe in the late 1800s and early 1900s (like my grandparents), the burning question was not “How can we extend the reach of Europe?” but “How can we escape it?” That was the Jewish Jewish Question. Like Europe’s Jewish Question, it too was not new; and it was renewed with a vengeance after the walls of Europe closed in during the first half of the last century, culminating in the ultimate crushing experience: genocide. Among the Jewish answers to the Jewish Jewish Question was migration to Palestine. But, by and large, the Jews who moved to Palestine after the Shoah were not so much emigrants as (literally or in effect) refugees.
Andrew Pessin	2016	41	A brilliant entry on “Settler Colonialism” does the same against that lie and libel, in particular refuting the widely promoted notion that Israeli Jews are “white” and Palestinians are people “of color”—a notion that, other entries show, permits anti-Israel activists to make otherwise bizarre alliances with progressive campus groups and thus greatly fuels Israel-hatred across Western campuses.
Mitchell Cohen	2024	42	The anti-Jewish pogroms of 1881 were not about settler colonialism. The Dreyfus Affair was not about settler colonialism. Zionism was not settler-colonialism but a response to the Jewish question.
Gabriel Noah Brahm	2024	43	“Critical race theory” brands Jews not only as “white” (a term used on campus to mean “structurally racist”) but “hyper-white” (the whitest, therefore most racist of all). Theories of “settler colonialism” misrepresent Jews as colonizers in their own indigenous lands.
Uriel Abulof	2023	44	Yet I find the “Zionism (Israel) = colonialism = apartheid” equation factually false, intellectually lazy, morally wrong and practically counterproductive.
Gideon Shimoni	2007	45	Categorization of Zionism as a case of colonialism, thereby stigmatizing it, may serve the partisan rhetorical ends of the Palestinian cause, but it is fallacious as an analytical tool for impartial comprehension of the Arab–Jewish conflict. In the final analysis, theories of nationalism, which command a vast and profound literature, are far more valuable aids in comprehending the history of Zionism and the nature of the Arab–Jewish conflict than whatever goes by the description of postcolonial theory.
Chaim Gans	2016	46	Some of them claim that Zionism is sheer colonialism. But if we grant that the Jews constituted a borderline case of a nation at the end of the 19th century, and that the European Jewish collective and its members then faced serious and urgent practical problems in Europe, we have to argue normatively about the reasonableness of the nationalist solution proposed and carried out by the Zionists, and not just dismiss it as sheer colonialism as some major post-Zionists (and the Palestinians) do.
Balazs Berkovits	2021	47	"It seems that treating Israel as a settler-colonial state is supposed to provide the ultimate justification for singling it out for criticism and also to legitimize the Palestinian struggle in all its forms as an anticolonial movement. is presentation of Israel is to accentuate that the struggle is not between competitive nationalisms but between the conqueror, on the one hand, and the conquered, the displaced, the occupied, on the other", "This is is precisely the crux of the issue: much academic research on Israel has gradually lost scientific ambi- tion by adopting a solely political objective—the designation of a state as a colony is instrumental in this theoretical-political warfare, as it inherently comprises that state’s illegitimacy and calls for its termination.", "However, one does not have to be a Weberian to value this fundamental distinction and to repudiate the reification of concepts, the binaries and the false analogies in use within critical whiteness studies, settler-colonial stud- ies, and other fields of activist social science. But fallacious methodology has a clear function in these analyses—namely, a certain symbolic usage of the terms whiteness, colony , and settler colony , which inherently comprises an unequivocal moral judgment."
Joshua Cole	2017	48	Tis complexity makes me wonder if the question Penslar poses (is Zionism a colonial movement?) is necessarily the right one to answer persistent ques- tions about possible relationships between the history of Israel/Palestine and the history of European colonialism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. If anything, his focus on a particular movement over a broad span of time has shown us that terms such as “colonial” and “anticolonial” have context-specifc valences; these words are more helpful to our understanding when they are understood to apply to dynamic relationships rather than to coherent identities that persist over time, institutions, or political movements.
Rachel Fish	2023	49	On social media, Jews were painted as white-supremacist colonial settlers oppressing an indigenous ethnic minority. Very quickly, we saw that by employing these false labels, Israel wasn’t just accused of apartheid; on Twitter, apartheid came to mean Israel exclusively.
Simon Schama	2024	Mainstream media RS: Interview in The Jewish Chronicle	[A lot of the hatred that has erupted has been] “driven by oceanic historic ignorance and refusal to understand the complexity of the situation”. [It is what he calls the] “writing and chattering classes” [who have been] “most prone to grotesque, uninformed, historically ignorant stereotypes of Israel as a colonial settler state", “It is not a colonial settler state. It was a country of refugees, it was continuously occupied by Jews for many millennia.”
Peter Rutland	2024	Mainstream media RS: Opinion piece in CNN	The Gaza war is better understood as a conflict between two competing nationalist projects than as a case of settler colonialism. There are a number of inconvenient historical truths that complicate the “settler colonialism” narrative.
Jarrod Tanny	2023	Blog	Israel Is Not a White Imperialist Project: A Toolkit
Corinne E Blackmer	2024; 2022

Round 7- 21st century Encyclopedias

Encyclopedia name and details	Editor name	Article author name	Zionism described as colonial/colonization movement in first paragraph? If yes, how?	Zionism described as colonial/colonization movement in rest of lead section? If yes, how?	Zionism described as colonial/colonization movement in rest of the article? If yes, how?
Encyclopedia of the Palestinians. Facts on File. 2000. p. 454.	Philip Mattar	Neil Caplan	no	no
The continuum political encyclopedia of the Middle East (2nd ed.). Continuum. 2002. p. 928	Avraham Sela	Avraham Sela	no	no
Encyclopedia of the Modern Middle East and North Africa. (2nd ed.). Gale. 2004. Vol. 4. p. 2431	Philip Mattar	Donna Robinson Divine; Neil Caplan	no	no
Dictionary of the History of Ideas. (2nd ed.). Charles Scribner's Sons. 2004.	Maryanne Cline Horowitz	Arthur Hertzberg	no	no
Dictionary of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict. Macmillan Reference USA. 2004. Vol 2. p. 483	Claude Faure	Claude Faure	no	no
Encyclopedia of Race and Ethnic Studies. Routledge. 2004. p. 459	Ellis Cashmore	Ellis Cashmore	no	no
Encyclopedia of Modern Jewish Culture. Routledge. 2005. Vol 2. p. 983	Glenda Abramson	Noah Lucas	no	no
Encyclopedia of Religion (2nd ed.). Gale. 2005. Vol 15.	Lindsay Jones	David Biale	no	no
Europe 1789 to 1914 : Encyclopedia of the Age of Industry and Empire. Vol. 5. Gale. 2006. p. 2518	John Merriman; Jay Winter	Steven Beller	no	no
Europe since 1914 : encyclopedia of the age of war and reconstruction. Vol. 5. Gale. 2006. p. 2816.	John Merriman; Jay Winter	Paula Hyman	no	no
Encyclopedia Judaica (2nd ed.) Vol 21. Gale. 2006. p. 539	Fred Skolnik	Numerous scholars	no	no
Encyclopedia of Race And Racism. Vol. 3 (1st ed.). Gale. 2008. p. 240.	John Hartwell Moore	Noel Ignatiev	no	no
International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences. (2nd ed.) Gale. 2008.	William A. Darity Jr	Jonathan Boyarin	no	no
The International Encyclopedia of Revolution and Protest. Wiley. 2009.	Immanuel Ness	Shellie K. McCullough	no	no	no
Encyclopedia of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict. Lynne Rienner Publishers. 2010. Vol 3. p. 1660.	Cheryl Rubenberg	Zachary Lackman	no	yes, but attributed: "Palestinians have regarded Zionism as essentially a colonial-settler enterprise"
The Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia, 6th ed. Columbia University Press. 2010			no	no
International Encyclopedia of Political Science. SAGE. 2011. p. 2765	Bertrand Bradie	Alain Dieckhoff	no	no
The Encyclopedia of Political Science. SAGE. 2011. Vol 5. p. 1799	George Thomas Kurian	Jerome Copulsky	no	no
Encyclopedia of Global Studies. Vol. 4. SAGE Publications. 2012. p. 1835.	Helmut Anheier; Mark Juergensmeyer	Aviva Halamish	no	no
"Sionisme". Larousse (in French). 2012. Archived from the original on 2013-12-20.			no	no
Encyclopedia of race and racism. Vol. 3 (2nd ed.). Gale. 2013. p. 233. ISBN 978-0-02-866195-7.	Patrick Mason	Paul Scham	no	no
The Wiley-Blackwell Encyclopedia of Social and Political Movements. Wiley. 2013.	David A. Snow	Rottem Sagi	no	paragraph 4: "In pursuit of his goals, Herzl attempted to solicit the support of Baron de Hirsch, a multimillionaire who had already founded the Jewish Colonization Association"	no
Encyclopedia of Modern Political Thought. SAGE. 2013. p. 869	Gregory Claeys	Gadi Taub	no	no	no
Encyclopedia of Psychology and Religion, Springer US, 2014, p. 1960	David Adam Leeming	Kate M. Loewenthal	no	? not in first 2 paragraphs, and these are the only ones freely available online.	?
The Encyclopedia of Political Thought. Wiley. 2014	Michael T. Gibbons	Tamara M. Zwick	no	no	yes, but attributed: "Others make the case that Zionism and the creation of the state of Israel represent colonial aggression"
The Wiley Blackwell Encyclopedia of Race, Ethnicity, and Nationalism. Wiley. 2015.	John Stone	Dafna Hirsch	"the Zionist movement promoted the colonization of Palestine"	no	last paragraph, but attributed: "A non-Zionist critique of Zionism regards it as a version of European settler colonialism"
Routledge Encyclopedia of Modernism. Routledgde. 2016.	Vassiliki Kolocotroni	Nathan Devir	no	? not freely available	?
International Encyclopedia of the First World War. Freie Universität Berlin. 2018	Ute Daniel	Ofer Idels	no	no	no
Middle East Conflicts from Ancient Egypt to the 21st Century: An Encyclopedia and Document Collection. Vol. 4. ABC-CLIO. 2019. p. 1376.	Spencer C Tucker	Amy Blackwell	no	no	TBF
"Zionism". Britannica. Archived from the original on June 28, 2024. Last Updated: Jun 30, 2024			no	no	no

Comments:

1. The encyclopedias are ordered by publication date of the edition that is used. This is of course not an exhaustive list of all possibly relevant encyclopedias in the 21st century. There were encyclopedias that were not accessible to me at all, and its very likely there are others that I missed entirely in my searches. However I believe this presents a significant portion, maybe even the majority of relevant encyclopedias that have an article about Zionism. So I think it's unlikely that the results would change significantly when more encyclopedias are found (and anyone is of course free to look for more).
2. I provided links to most of the sources. There were a few that I found offline in my library. For these I supplied the text of the first paragraph in the footnotes. Images can be sent on demand.
3. With regard to opening defining sentence (see MOS:FIRST) specifically it might be useful to also look at reputable dictionaries, which are the experts in defining subjects in one sentence. Looking at 6 of the leading online dictionaries (1 2 3 4 5 6) we find that none of them mentions colonization/colonialism in its definition of Zionism.

Other

User:Vegan416/sandbox/Indigeneity

User:Vegan416/sandbox/Zionism

User:Vegan416/sandbox/Animal welfare in Nazi Germany

User:Vegan416/sandbox/Death Cult

User:Vegan416/sandbox/From the River to the Sea

User:Vegan416/sandbox/Typological Number

User:Vegan416/sandbox/Animal stereotypes of Jews in Palestinian discourse - draft

User:Vegan416/sandbox/Animal stereotypes of Jews in Palestinian discourse - sources

Genocide Debate

Sources

Name	Month	Profession	Source	(English or autotranslated and verified) example statement
Illouz	October 2023	Professor of sociology	Le Monde	"military response … against an enemy which has violated borders and international law, … is not genocide"
Kittel	October 2023	History Professor	Berliner Zeitung	No, Israel's military response is not genocide – regardless of whether one uses narrower or broader definitions of the term.
Berenbaum & Zavadivker	November 2023	Historians and Holocaust scholars: 1; 2	Jerusalem Post	"Israel has no greater ambition than to coexist with the Palestinians as peaceful neighbors; [The genocide claims] "threaten future attempts to identify, prevent, and prosecute that crime. It is equally damaging to the legitimacy of Holocaust and Genocide Studies as a field when such false claims are presented in the guise of scholarly expertise.""
Jürgen Habermas, Klaus Günther, Rainer Forst & Nicole Deitelhoff	November 2023	Philosopher and Social Theorist; Professor of Law; Philosopher; Political Scientist	Site of "Normative Orders" Research Center at Goethe University Frankfurt	The Hamas massacre with the declared intention of eliminating Jewish life in general has prompted Israel to strike back. How this retaliation, which is justified in principle, is carried out is the subject of controversial debate; principles of proportionality, the prevention of civilian casualties and the waging of a war with the prospect of future peace must be the guiding principles. Despite all the concern for the fate of the Palestinian population, however, the standards of judgement slip completely when genocidal intentions are attributed to Israel’s actions.
154 Holocaust scholars	November 2023	Holocaust scholars	open letter at a conference in Prague	"Today, more than ever, we need to reaffirm, without any caveats, the right of Jews to live in Israel and to defend themselves against those who deny Israel and Jews the right to exist. We deplore the humanitarian catastrophe of the Palestinian people in Gaza and note that it derives directly from the use of civilians as human shields by the Hamas. We, the scholars of the Holocaust assembled in Prague at the Lessons & Legacies conference, as well as other Holocaust scholars and persons devoted to Holocaust memory, unequivocally condemn the politics of terror pursued by Hamas and denounce the forces of global antisemitism."
Jikeli	November 2023	Historian	research paper	"Only five posts were positive about Israel, some refuting the accusation that Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinians. Notorious Jewish critics of Israel, such as Norman Finkelstein (Figure 11), Gabor Maté, and Jane Hirschmann were repeatedly used to accuse Israel of ethnic cleansing and genocide, often with embedded videos.", "It is worth noting that according to the United Nations definition of genocide, the Hamas massacre is genocide, while the Gaza war is not."
Waxman	November 2023	professor of political science	Jewish Currents	"To be sure, some of the deeply disturbing rhetoric coming from senior figures in the Israeli government [..] raises the risk of genocidal actions. [..] However, to claim that genocide is already occurring requires stretching the concept too far, emptying it of any meaning."
Buser	November 2023	Historian]	The Jewish Journal of Greater Los Angeles	"This is not genocide."
Blatman	November 2023	Holocaust historian	Haaretz	"The mere fact that Israel and the Palestinians have been waging a bloody war between them for four generations, and they are both committing war crimes and hair-raising acts of violence, still does not mean that a genocide began in Gaza in October 2023"
Simon	November 2023	Global Affairs professor, Director of the genocide studies	Time	"Israel has only explicitly said they want to exterminate Hamas, and has not directly stated intent to "destroy a religious, ethnic or racial group." Simon says it's possible a court could conclude that either Hamas or some elements of the Israel Defense Force (IDF) could be found guilty of committing an act of genocide, but "it's certainly not textbook in that connecting the intent to destroy ethnic group as such is difficult.""
Kiernan	November 2023	Historian, Professor of International and Area Studies	Time	"Israel's retaliatory bombing of Gaza, however indiscriminate, and its current ground attacks, despite the numerous civilian casualties they are causing among Gaza's Palestinian population, do not meet the very high threshold that is required to meet the legal definition of genocide."
Friling, Jockusch, Steier-Livny, Patt & Porat	November 2023	Historians and Holocaust scholars: 1; 2; 3; 4; 5	Haaretz	"Charging Israel With Genocide in Gaza Is Inflammatory and Dangerous. Historians must be guided by the facts, not political agendas. But when Omer Bartov in The New York Times charged Israel with 'verging' into genocide and ethnic cleansing, he grounded his argument in assertions, not evidence."
Goda & Herf	November 2023	Historians and Holocaust scholars: 1; 2	New York Times	"Israel's targets are military: Hamas's soldiers, tunnels, headquarters and weapons stocks. By placing military targets in and under civilian structures, it is Hamas that violates laws of war. The 1948 U.N. Genocide Convention mentions demonstrable intent to destroy a national, racial or religious group. Mr. Bartov is mute about Israel's hundreds of phone calls to Gazans warning them to leave buildings in which Hamas fighters were located. Israel has urged civilians to evacuate to the south to escape battle. A government intent on genocide would do the opposite."
Michlic	November 2023	genocide scholar	Belfast Newletter	"The left that expresses these ideas have no intellectual knowledge of international laws making clear distinctions between different ways of killings", "Israel’s war against Hamas in Gaza that entails urban house-to-house fighting that regrettably creates many civilian causalities, as in other wars of this type".
Kotek	November 2023	genocide scholar	L'Express	"The Israeli offensive on Gaza is nothing like the Herero genocide"
Spencer	November 2023	urban warfare researcher	CNN	"Israel is upholding the laws of war"
Karsenti et al	November 2023	Political scientist, historian and sociologists: 1; 2; 3; 4	AOC	"By denying their historical connection with Palestine and by attributing a genocidal intention to those who built a state to protect themselves from any genocidal recurrence, Didier Fassin reactivates a classic anti-Semitic gesture that always proceeds by inversion: accusing the Jews of being guilty of what one is preparing to do or fantasizes about doing to them.","And yet, one must choose sides on the question of whether or not one recognizes the right of the State of Israel to exist. If one recognizes it, then the massacre of civilians, intentionally targeted on its sovereign territory, gives it the right not only to defend itself, but to take the necessary measures to ensure that this can never happen again, and therefore to eliminate Hamas, whose program this is."
Crane	November 2023	International law scholar	NPR	"It's not an easy case because you have to have that smoking gun. So, you know, I respectfully disagree with his [Mokhiber's] approach on this. If you look at both parties in this tragedy that is unfolding, the prime minister of Israel has to specifically state that, I intend to destroy, in whole or in part, the Palestinian people. And I would suggest, respectfully, that that has not been said. Now, they have a long-term problem politically, practically and legally related to their treatment of the Palestinians. But I would beg to differ. I don't think one would categorize that as genocide."
Corn	November 2023	Professor of law and expert on military law	The Jewish Chronicle	"Many accuse Israel of genocide. These accusations undermine the meaning of what they allege. It might be appealing to toss such accusations about but, as Justice Stewart warned, the significance of the concept of war crimes and credibility of the law is eroded by such overbroad and often invalid accusations. One need only consider the genocide accusation. Palestinians make up 20 percent of the Israeli population with the same civil rights and legal privileges as any other Israeli citizen. How this aligns with the accusation that Israel is engaged in a systemic effort to destroy this ethnic group is perplexing. Nor do casualties in Gaza support even suspicion of genocide."
Ambos	December 2023	professor of criminal law and head of the Department of Foreign and International Criminal Law	Hard to group into a clear category	"Bartov chooses his words carefully. He warns of possibly impending genocide without claiming it is happening already. Some statements of certain Israeli policymakers are indeed worrisome. Yet, while they may be relevant for proving the necessary specific intent, they cannot automatically be attributed to the persons who are taking the military decisions."
Rosensaft	January 2024	Professor of law, expert on genocide law	Times of Israel	"The word genocide is used willy-nilly by people all over the world, but genocide, as it has evolved since 1948 when the genocide convention was first adopted by the UN General Assembly, is a legal concept. And whatever else Israel is doing, and has done, it is not intending to destroy the Palestinian people; either on the West Bank or in Gaza", "Even Netanyahu, with whom I fundamentally disagree on most issues, is not planning to evict the Palestinians from Gaza. So the term genocide does not work.", "October 7 was a deliberate action by a genocidal organization that targeted Israeli — meaning Jewish — civilians: women, men, children, and the elderly."
Paul	January 2024	Professor of law	San Fransisco Chroncile	"I see no evidence that Israel is trying to destroy all or a substantial part of the Palestinians."
Mirsky	January 2024	Middle east and human rights expert	UnHerd	"South Africa was able to present evidence of genocidal-sounding intent from any number of political actors in the Netanyahu government. None of them, though, have direct decision-making authority over the conduct of the war, leading to open hostility between some of them (Itamar Ben-Gvir above all) with the IDF high command. That direct authority is reserved not just to the military professionals, but to the war cabinet, convened by Netanyahu to insulate him from his own coalition partners, and in which the political opposition to Netanyahu is well-represented; given Israeli public fury at Netanyahu, he would no longer be in power if they weren’t in the room. Moreover, if genocide were Israel’s aim, issuing warnings before bombings, creating humanitarian corridors (however limited), and allowing in food and other necessities would be a pretty poor way of going about it."
Dershowitz	January 2024	Professor of law	Ynet	"Israel did not commit genocide, the number of civilians who were killed is proportional to the number of combatants, it is lower than any war in modern history. Israel is trying its best to preserve civilian life, whereas Hamas is doing its best to take civilian lives."
Wiese	January 2024	"research assistant and doctoral candidate at the Chair of European Law, Public International Law and Public Law"	Stern	"but is usually very difficult to prove"; "The destruction of the group must be the sole aim of the perpetrator"; under international law, there is a right to self-defence
Platt	January 2024	social sciences professor with a focus on genocide research	Deutschlandfunk Kultur (Audio episode)	"Genocide really doesn't fit here/does not fit at all" (from title)
Herik	January 2024	professor of international public law	Leiden University website	That is a claim that is very difficult to prove, because you have to prove that Israel is acting with the specific purpose of exterminating the Palestinians.
Cohen and Shany	January 2024	International Law Professors: 1 2	Just Security	The raising of even more serious charges – such as the commission of genocide, the "crime of crimes" – requires an even higher commitment to factual analysis, which should include all relevant facts, including those "inconvenient" to whoever is making such claims. Many of the allegations made in this regard, including those found in the recent South African application to the ICJ appear to fall short of this standard.
Walter	January 2024	Professor of international law	Reputable online legal publication	"Although the high number of civilian deaths and the enormous material damage are horrific, they do not necessarily prove an intent to commit genocide. For example, the repeated calls for the civilian population to leave certain parts of the area or the observance of the obligation to warn and set a deadline before withdrawing protection from a civilian hospital because it is being used outside its humanitarian purpose to commit acts harmful to the enemy speak against such an intent."
Muravchik	January 2024	Political scientist	The Wall Street Journal	"Hamas, not Israel, is guilty of genocide."
Boot	January 2024	Military historian	The Washington Post	"But while it's easy to second-guess the actions of Israeli forces, there is no evidence that they have engaged in a deliberate campaign to 'destroy, in whole or in part,' the Palestinian people — which is what 'genocide' means in international law. Awful as the civilian deaths in Gaza have been, they still constitute less than 1 percent of the territory's population. If Israel, with all the firepower at its disposal, had been trying to commit mass murder, the death toll would have been higher by orders of magnitude.", "That's why the charge of genocide has been rejected not only by the United States but also by Canada, Britain and Germany, among others."
Burke-White	February 2024	Professor of international law	University of Pennsylvania website	It should be noted that genocide is an incredibly difficult crime to prove. Genocide refers to any of a series of acts – such as the killing or the transfer of children—undertaken with "intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial, or religious group." Historically, courts have struggled to prove the relevant intent, which is not just murder but a concerted policy to destroy a people as a whole. For South Africa to win this case, it will need to find and provide evidence that the Israeli government's intent was not merely to prevent attacks such as those of October 7 or to degrade the capability of Hamas, but rather to annihilate the Palestinian people as a whole.
Illouz	February 2024	Professor of sociology	The Forward	"The people who surround him —Ben Gvir and Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich — are more overtly fascist. They believe in violence. Their camp murdered Yitzhak Rabin. They hold and defend Jewish supremacist views. Their declarations after Oct. 7 amounted to calls to genocide (even though I do not think Israel is committing genocide)."
Posen	February 2023	Political scientist and security analyst	Foreign Policy	"One answer is simple. When war is fought among civilians, civilians are killed.", "Western militaries, including the IDF, try to live by these laws, though the law of armed conflict does not proscribe them from waging war. They try to follow these rules in part because they reflect the values of the societies that they serve and in part because of an expectation of reciprocity, but also because pragmatically, they know that lots of civilian casualties can become a political liability at home and abroad. Hamas spends the lives of Palestinian civilians as ammunition in an information war."
Charny	March 2024	genocide scholar	Genocide Watch	"Israel is fighting back legitimately in Self-Defense in Response and in Self-Defense against Future Genocidal Attacks that Employ Citizens as Human Shields. The Geneva Conventions specifically outlaw use of human shields and justify fighting back in response. Self-Defense does not include genocidal intent."
Feldmann	March 2024	Professor of international law	Time	"Israel's efforts to defend itself against Hamas, even if found to involve killing disproportionate number of civilians, do not turn Israel into a genocidal actor comparable to the Nazis or the Hutu regime in Rwanda. The genocide charge depends on intent. And Israel, as a state, is not fighting the Gaza War with the intent to destroy the Palestinian people.", "These relevant facts matter for putting the genocide charge into the context of potential antisemitism. Neither South Africa nor other states have brought a genocide case against China for its conduct in Tibet or Xinjiang, or against Russia for its invasion of Ukraine. There is something specifically noteworthy about leveling the charge at the Jewish state—something intertwined with the new narrative of the Jews as archetypal oppressors rather than archetypal victims. Call it the genocide sleight of hand: if the Jews are depicted as genocidal—if Israel becomes the very archetype of a genocidal state—then Jews are much less likely to be conceived as a historically oppressed people engaged in self-defense."
Donoghue	April 2024	President of the ICJ during the hearing on the SA case	BBC News	"The court decided that the Palestinians had a plausible right to be protected from genocide and that South Africa had the right to present that claim in the court. It then looked at the facts as well. But it did not decide – and this is something where I'm correcting what's often said in the media – it didn't decide that the claim of genocide was plausible. It did emphasize in the order that there was a risk of irreparable harm to the Palestinian right to be protected from genocide. But the shorthand that often appears, which is that there's a plausible case of genocide, isn't what the court decided."
Walzer	April 2024	Professor/well known philosopher and political scientist	Die Zeit	"No. There is no genocidal intent on the Israeli side. Some members of the Israeli government want to drive the Palestinians out of Gaza and relocate them. But fortunately, they are not the decisive force in government."
Bauer	April 2004	Genocide scholar	Kan 11	"Of course this is not a genocide. It is absolutely clear. But it doesn't mean that I justify what Israel does in Gaza."
McDoom	April 2024	Professor of comparative politics	Journal of Genocide Research	"while there exists widespread consensus within the HGS community that Hamas' civilian-targeted violence should be condemned, this is not the case in respect of the Israeli government's violence. Many Holocaust and Genocide Studies (HGS) scholars have remained steadfastly silent or else uncritical of the Israeli government despite the rapidly-mounting civilian death toll", "a section of the HGS community chose not to acknowledge this possibility when voicing their views – as genocide experts – on the violence. To the contrary. Some charged Hamas with genocide against Israel. Some published further opinion to deny the Israeli government's actions constituted genocide"
Goldmann	April 2024	Professor of international law	Junge Welt	"The law professor does not expect a clear conviction of Israel in the South Africa-Israel case, nor a clear dismissal of the lawsuit." "According to Article II of the Convention, a breach occurs when an actor implements the intention to destroy a group of people in whole or in part by killing, injuring or restricting the living conditions of said group. In the case of Israel, there is no "smoking gun" that clearly proves such an intention, explained Goldmann. Statements by Israeli politicians in the media are "non-authoritative sources""
Sassoli and Diggelmann	May 2024	International Law Professors: 1; 2	SRF	"«Certain statements by Israeli politicians were genocidal». There was talk of extermination. «But the actions of the Israeli army are, in my opinion, directed against Hamas and not against the entire population»"; "He does not believe that the International Court of Justice will find a generational[sic]intent to commit genocide in the South Africa v. Israel case."
Hartwig and Müller	May 2024	Scholars of international law: 1; 2	digital news partnering with big newspapers	"I ultimately do not see sufficient grounds for genocide if one takes the legal term seriously."; "Even if individual actions by the Israeli armed forces can be described as war crimes, they do not at the same time constitute genocide."
Illouz	May 2024	Professor of sociology	Haaretz	"A fierce military response facing unprecedented challenges in the history of warfare – because of a highly densely populated urban area, an underground city built below a civilian population – has become in the eyes of many a bona fide case of genocide", "Jews, Zionists and moderate people from all political parties and religions have watched the campus protests unfold in amazement, unable to believe the unselfconscious double standards, the baselessness of the historical parallels", "these protests give me no choice but to ask myself if, after all, something like the phantasmagoric irrationality of antisemitism is at work here."
Lévy	May 2024	Philosopher	France Info	"Il n'y a pas de génocide à Gaza, il n'y a pas de massacre délibéré des populations civiles" [There is no genocide in Gaza, there is no deliberate massacre of civilian populations.]
Khan	June 2024	Professor of international law	ZDF	"The defining element is above all the intent to destroy, which, however, can currently hardly be proven by the Israeli leadership"

Scholarly sources on Israeli fears of imminent Arab attack in May 1967

Golan, G. (2006). The Soviet Union and the Outbreak of the June 1967 Six-Day War. Journal of Cold War Studies, 8(1), 3–19. MIT Press.

"Egypt had secretly devised plans to attack Israel on 27 May. On the basis of Israeli intelligence, the United States informed the Soviet Union about the Egyptian plans while Badran was still in Moscow."

Glickman, G. (2017). Rewriting the Six-Day War. Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies. http://www.jstor.org/stable/resrep04552

Vegan416 (talk) 08:08, 8 April 2024 (UTC)

References to SJP calling for the ending of Israel

The SJP “points of unity” state that "It is committed to ending Israel’s occupation and colonization of all Arab lands", and some SJP members and chapters explicitly refer to the Israeli occupation as having started in 1948, when Israel was founded. In July 2018, Tulane’s SJP chapter wrote that “Israel’s occupation [of Palestinians land] began seventy years ago”. In May of 2018, SJP at DePaul University distributed fliers claiming that Israel has engaged in “70 years of occupation.

Also: "it is an ideological fantasy to really believe that progress is possible so long as the state of Israel exists [..] The goal of Palestinian resistance is not to establish ‘love’ with those who are responsible for the suffering of the Palestinian people; it is to completely dismantle those forces at play." https://theaggie.org/2018/07/06/students-for-justice-in-palestine-kill-and-expect-love/ Also: "We identify the establishment of the state of Israel as an ongoing project of settler-colonialism that will be stopped only through Palestinian national liberation." https://nycsjp.wordpress.com/points-of-unity/:

https://www.jpost.com/diaspora/antisemitism/sjp-has-ties-to-terror-is-antisemitic-force-on-campus-report-606415

Vegan416 (talk) 08:12, 8 April 2024 (UTC)

UNZ Review

In the years 2015-2017 Finkelstein published at the Unz Review. This site was later described as a "white-nationalist" site by the SPLC and Mother Jones, and "a website that has published Holocaust denialism" by CNN. This site is owned by Ron Unz, whom The Guardian later called a "holocaust denier". In 2014, in the preface to one of his books Finkelstein thanked Ron Unz for his "friendship and support".

• The Guardian: "carries columns from avowed neo-Nazis and racists... a one-stop shop for hate from many different vantage points"
• Seattle Times: "a far-right website criticized by the Anti-Defamation League as hosting racist and antisemitic content"
• Rolling Stone: "antisemitic blog"
• Anti-Defamation League: "a fringe platform that regularly hosts bigoted content"
• CNN: "a website that has published Holocaust denialism and columns in support of White nationalism"
• Southern Poverty Law Center: "white nationalist publication"
• Mother Jones: "white nationalist publication"
• Kansas City Star: "a website that includes white nationalist and anti-Semitic content"
• New York Times: "far-right"

https://books.google.co.il/books?id=BUTREAAAQBAJ&pg=PT108#v=onepage&q&f=false

https://books.google.co.il/books?hl=en&lr=&id=QxHMc3hwCqMC&oi=fnd&pg=PP1&dq=unz+finkelstein&ots=9pj_rl_un3&sig=rLsGtC4OPEuUmi-1tkHqwmVl1mk&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q=unz%20finkelstein&f=false

Einstein

https://m.jpost.com/j-spot/einsteins-1948-letter-praising-jewish-resilience-on-sale-598276

Mohamed Hassanein Heikal claimed that in 1952 when he met Einstein, he repeated his view that Begin was like a Nazi, but stressed that "Ben-Gurion is different than Begin" and that Begin doesn't embody "the Jews or the concept of Israel".

https://web.archive.org/web/20071121073946/http://www.momentmag.com/Exclusive/2007/2007-04/200704-Einstein.html

AS and AZ

https://www.google.co.il/books/edition/Nazis_Islamic_Antisemitism_and_the_Middl/XB3EEAAAQBAJ

https://www.google.co.il/books/edition/Making_David_into_Goliath/3ErLCgAAQBAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=%22zionist+cancer%22&pg=PT49&printsec=frontcover

Opinions

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shashi_Tharoor%27s_Oxford_Union_speech