What a fascinating comment.
This would be a much more convincing distinction - Zionism may be moral in principle but is immoral in practice - if the eastern hemisphere wasn't mostly Judenrein, with Jews more comprehensively erased from Arab and Muslim spaces than from even genocidal Europe.
The Israeli Jew is more or less the last living Jew outside the Anglosphere. (Apologies to the large and thriving French Jewish community - which is 90% Sephardi because it's mostly composed of Jews who fled North Africa 60 years ago; i.e., even the largest exception to the rule emphatically proves it.)
Iraq, whose capital was once maybe a quarter Jewish, then 30 years later 0% Jewish, is in that tragic sense far more Zionist than America.
Zionism "can be a noble idea," says Khalil, but only somewhere else. He neglects to suggest where. Where might this empty land be? The British offered "Uganda," by which they meant present-day western Kenya, where the British themselves built a short-lived imperialist-colonialist project. Is that where you meant, Khalil?
As he assesses Zionism, Khalil is extremely representative of other Arab and Palestinian elites in one specific way. It is par for the course among these elites to refuse to notice (could he really not know?) that by the time Jews were moving en masse to Palestine, all other doors had been closed to them by nearly every government on Earth; that Jews didn't start arriving in large numbers until the world left them no other choice; that until the American Emergency Quota Act of 1921, 98% of the millions of Jewish refugees fleeing pogroms and war and oppression went westward and only 2% (roughly 1,000/year average) went to Palestine - and that, again, this trend only flipped when everyone everywhere imposed quotas to keep the Jews out.
In other words, this faux nuance is just sophisticated avoidance. It's not a grappling with the Jewish experience but a refusal to grapple with it, with the history that transformed modern political Zionism from a minority opinion among Jews to the overwhelming majority view, a history in which Arab decisions play as big a role as those of Czarist Russia or Nazi Germany.
The Arab chattering classes (and to be fair, also that breed of Western intellectual who's spent two decades quote-mining Herzl into oblivion) don't need to approve, accept or validate our story. They can despise and hate and dismiss us all they want. But the cost of that willful ignorance is high. It is why they so consistently misunderstand us, miscalculate what they might do about us and fail to predict how we will respond to their efforts. Or in other words: Why every Palestinian campaign against us has failed for a century.
Here's the rub: To an Israeli Jew, there's no such thing as an "anti-Zionist." To those who actually know our history "anti-Zionist" isn't a coherent term.
I mean, what's the argument?
That we should have died? If your anti-Zionism is the wish that we, too, like most of the rest of the hemisphere's Jews, had been killed in the 20th century, then congrats, you're a genocidaire. Own it.
Or is your argument that Jews should have had other options, that these "undeportable" people (as Hannah Arendt put it when the world turned down the Nazi offer of expulsion elsewhere) had had somewhere safe and welcoming they could flee or be expelled to? That cruel quotas should not have been imposed by the US, Britain, Canada, Brazil, South Africa, Australia, and de facto or de jure just about everywhere else? If that's your argument, then I'm with you. If that's anti-Zionism, consider me an anti-Zionist. But that's a complaint you need to take to literally everyone on Earth except me. The Jews are the only party not at fault for that.
So what's left? The comforting embrace of ignorance, of course.
And, well, in one version or another, Zionism.
In the Israeli Jewish experience, you're either Zionist, historically ignorant or genocidal. What's the fourth option?
Thank you Twitter
For making this Elite Founder Bootcamp with a Navy
SEAL happen
Hundreds of people reached out to attend after brainstorming this on Twitter. Glad we decided to do it.
25 strangers came together in the middle of nowhere Wisconsin where the schedule was very simple:
Work Out
Eat
Work
Repeat x 2
(and sleep for a little)
Everyone is sore, energized, and has 24 new ambitious friends in their lives.
Def going to host again.
1/7
Had a fun weekend experiment โ the "Little Retrieval Test for" (LRT)!
It's a simple test to assess basic retrieval capabilities for LLMs in long contexts.
I prompted @AnthropicAI's Claude with a long list of numbers, and hidden somewhere... a sneaky instruction!
From now on I am going to lie to people and tell them I worked as a healthcare consultant at McKinsey and see if they treat me with an ounce of kindness