I don't agree with everything written by this author in the following article. But his basic conception of Jewish nationalism is a sound one.
The Search for Jewish NationalismBy Miron Fyodorov
Nationalism holds that a nation, i.e. a distinct group of people of common descent, is the basic unit for human social life, and thus takes precedence over any other social and political principles. Traditional Zionism, therefore, is not the same as Jewish nationalism, as it equates a nation looking back on two millennia of dispersion with a territory it came to inhabit only half a century ago, and asserts that territory’s sacral precedence over the nation. Whether secular or religious, Zionism, by claiming that all Jews should “repatriate”, subdues the Jewish nation to external forces – to history, geopolitics, and religion. But to do this means to place ideology before biology, for it is the concrete genetic code that determines one’s Jewishness, not, as many would have us believe, the vague abstractions of “culture” and “religion”. Contrary to wild speculations such as Koestler’s ‘Khazar theory’, genetic evidence (e.g. Hammer’s recent haplotype study) indicates that despite considerable exogamy, both Ashkenazi and Sefaradi Jews are still fairly homogenous genetically and of a clear Middle-Eastern origin. A Jew is simply a person descended (fully or partly) from a particular Semitic ethnic group. Zionists may agree, but their approach puts that which is primary (blood kinship) after that which is secondary (geopolitics). Such a confusion of priorities is the exact opposite to what Jewish nationalism asserts: blood first, soil second; blood first, politics second. Zionism is not Jewish nationalism.
Nor is Israeli patriotism the same as Jewish nationalism; in fact, it is not even the same as Jewish etatism, for a Jewish state could have technically be founded anywhere, not necessarily Eretz Yisrael (Argentine, Uganda and the Russian Far East have all been considered at some point, and the early 20th century Jewish Territorialist Organisation actively advocated establishing Jewish homelands wherever possible). Let us imagine for a second that PLO/Hamas Arab Muslim Nazis would, by means of a slow demographic takeover, become the majority population in Israel – a scenario not that improbable, considering that almost 1.5 million Arabs are now citizens of what was designed as a Jewish state. In that case, Israelis of Arabic descent taking pride in their mostly Arabic state could be rightly called Israeli patriots. So to be an Israeli patriot, one does not even have to be a Jew – and yet under no circumstances could an Arab be a Jewish nationalist. Clearly, Jewish nationalism is not Israeli patriotism. So what is it then?
The answer is simple. Jewish nationalism (JN) holds that the optimal structure of the Jewish nation around the world is a decentralised network of democratically run, armed, secular communities of kinsmen. Thus it is based on four principles:
1.
Kinship: To be a Jew is to have Jewish blood. Kinship ties come first, everything else second.
2.
Democracy: To be among one’s kin is to be among equals. One Jew, one vote.
3.
Defence: Kinship holds if kinsmen are strong. Democracy works if voters are armed.
4.
Secularism: A Jew must be his own Lord, or else a slave.
Let’s look at these in more detail.
Continued:
http://www.rosenoire.org/articles/jew_nat.php
Topic: Do you support Jewish Nationalism? (Read 697 times)