Rafi DeMogge רפי דמוג
@HeTows
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Israeli post-7/10 liberal. Demography enjoyer.
Joined November 2020
An afterthought: this also explains why the Israeli right’s European outreach mostly fails. European nativist rightists don’t see them as their ideological kin, but as alien brown people and weirdos in religious garbs.
@tamritzblog As I wrote, this isn't my theory; I took it from a friend, but since he's not on X, I got his permission to share it here. According to his theory, a sizeable chunk of secular Ashkenazim do vote for the local equivalent of the European far-right. But they're on the left. /25-end.
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@tamritzblog As I wrote, this isn't my theory; I took it from a friend, but since he's not on X, I got his permission to share it here. According to his theory, a sizeable chunk of secular Ashkenazim do vote for the local equivalent of the European far-right. But they're on the left. /25-end.
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@tamritzblog What Israeli secessionists are demanding is exactly what Geert Wilder's voters will demand if autochthonous white Dutch people become 30% of The Netherlands' population. Ditto for Le Pen voters. /24.
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@tamritzblog two countries: a backward, religious and conservative Judea and a secular, free and prosperous Israel. Their mini-Israel would be, in effect, a revival of the "decaying Ashkenazi ethnostate" described by Non-Zionism. /23.
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@tamritzblog It's worth noting here that the secessionist instinct (present among American white nationalists, Afrikaner nationalists and to some Maronites) is also well and alive among Israel's Westernizers. At the peak of the judicial reform, many of them demanded dividing Israel into /22.
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@tamritzblog for Israel, an enemy state, against their Shia co-citizens. But they aren't left-wing at all. Rather, they are nationalists for whom the state of their citizenship is no longer an adequate vehicle of self-determination. /21.
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@tamritzblog Last example: Maronites in Lebanon. Their parties are "Maronite nationalists", not left-wing in any European sense. However, they see themselves as losing or already having lost what was once their state. Many support disarming Hezbollah and a minority is even cheering /20.
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@tamritzblog Or think of Afrikaner nationalists in South Africa. They are as right-wing as it gets there. But they don't identify with statist (let alone ethnic Black) nationalism, whatever that is in South Africa. If anything, they want to carve out a separate statelet from the state. /19.
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@tamritzblog Think of the white nationalist stream in the American alt-right. American white nationalists are as right-wing as it gets, but they don't like the existing United States at all. They are also quite friendly to Putin's Russia, and sometimes even to Iran and other adversaries. /18.
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@tamritzblog If this is how Westernizers see themselves, the dovishness against external adversaries makes perfect sense. They are alienated from the state in its present form, and their behavior follows the same pattern as other right-wing nativists who experienced state loss. /17.
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@tamritzblog But here's the rub: as Non-Zionism writes, Western Jewish nationalism (if it was ever tried), has failed. Israel's founding stock and its descendants are a minority in the country. A very important and powerful minority, but still a minority. It's not "their" country anymore. /16.
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@tamritzblog Such nationalism takes the culture of European-oriented, secular Ashkenazi sabras, as normative and as "core". Outsiders (Mizrahim, liberal-religious and immigrants) are allowed to join, but they are expected to restrict what's different about them to the private sphere. /15.
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@tamritzblog In "The Looming War over Israel's War of Return", I wrote that the Israeli left's implicit ideology is a kind of civic nationalism. But two years later, I'm not sure this is entirely true. I think what it really is, is a kind of cultural nationalism. /14
ideas.tikvah.org
Over the coming years, Israel's most famous law will become an object of political gamesmanship and a potential tool for demographic engineering—no matter who will be in power.
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@tamritzblog But Israel is also, according to the same blogger, "the bin of the Jewish people". I don't agree with this sentiment, but I think it's widely shared among Westernizers, even if it's rarely expressed so blatantly. /13
nonzionism.com
Full of sound and fury.
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@tamritzblog Israel, the blogger Non-Zionism writes, "is two things: The first is the decaying remnants of an ethnostate built by and for the Ashkenazim of the Russian empire. [. ] I know about this country, truth be told, more from books than real life." /12.
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@tamritzblog This is where - according to my friend; I'm typing down the ideas of someone else here, mind you! - the "state loss" aspect of the Israeli experience becomes relevant. According to this interpretation, Westernizers are in effect the nationalists of a lost (or losing) cause. /11.
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@tamritzblog However, one important difference with the European populist right remains, and this requires more explanation. Unlike the European far-right, the Westernizer stream on the Israeli center-left is dovish toward external adversaries, at least compared to the Israeli right. /10.
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@tamritzblog from Islam-influenced religious conservativism, whereas Le Pen in France has significant support among gay voters and has also in recent years leaned into the threat posed by Muslim immigration to French secularism. /9
apnews.com
A party that would abolish same-sex marriage _ whose founder wanted people with AIDS rounded up and branded homosexuality "a biological and social anomaly" _ is now winning LGBT votes in France.
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@tamritzblog The Westernizer stream on the Israeli center-left is socially liberal, but this isn't a deep disanalogy with the European far-right. Social conservativism isn't a dominant trait on the European populist right; Wilders explicitly campaigns on protecting Dutch liberal traditions /8.
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