White supremacist Richard Spencer says he deserves sympathy from Zionists because he is a “white Zionist.” He told an Israeli interviewer on Aug. 16:
“As an Israeli citizen, someone who understands your identity, who has a sense of nationhood and peoplehood and the history and experience of the Jewish people, you should respect someone like me who has analogous feelings about whites.”
Analogy? There is no analogy. Zionism has brought white, brown and black Jews to Israel. Race is neither a Jewish nor a Zionist nor an Israeli category. Even to call the Zionist outreach as embracing “whites, browns and blacks” is an oversimplication. As any visitor to Israel knows, every imaginable shade of skin pigmentation is represented among the Ashkenazi, Sephardi, Yemenite and African citizens there, who, by the way, are not only Jewish. Citizens of Israel include Christians (Protestant, Catholic, Coptic, Orthodox, Armenian, Ethiopian), Druze, Muslims (Sunni and Shiite), Baha’is, Circassians and others.
When Richard Spencer says that Zionism = Racism, he is looking at Zionism and Israel strictly through his own racist, white supremacist lenses. In its history, demography, ethnicity, religion and countries of origin, Zionism has created the most diverse country on the face of the globe.
Spencer said: “You could say that I’m a white Zionist.” Make that a false, fallacious Zionist.
Copyright © 2017 by the Intermountain Jewish News
