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Copying my response to an unlisted communication. Highly recommend reading Ora Herman's "The Furnace and the Reactor: Behind the Scenes at the Eichmann Trial"

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@[…] you raise important questions but I’m not sure what you mean by building bridges. Israel, in a way, is the #golem Europe created and now is in full control, destroying everything in its wake and it’s not limited to Palestinian resistance.

Apropos investment in Israel’s economy, science and military, in the 1960s #Germany used #Holocaust guilt to justify funding Israel's nuclear program while demanding the #Eichmann trial not implicate ordinary Germans in genocide. Today's Europe uses "shared values" rhetoric to justify continued research cooperation.

Ben-Gurion insisted on "Nazi Germany" versus "Germany" to protect German sensibilities and secure nuclear funding. Today's discussions about Horizon Europe carefully avoid confronting Europe's role in enabling Israeli capabilities used against Palestinians. The program has provided Israeli institutions with billions in research funding, much of which has enhanced dual-use technologies, surveillance systems, and military applications now deployed in Gaza and the West Bank.

IMHO Suspending Horizon Europe participation wouldn't just be about current Israeli actions - it would force Europe to confront how its historical and ongoing support has made those actions possible. The current framing avoids this uncomfortable truth about European complicity.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

See Ora Herman's "The Furnace and the Reactor: Behind the Scenes at the Eichmann Trial"

Maybe the solution is to encourage brain drain. Support Israeli scientists who will come and work in Europe, make them sign a cooling-off period preventing them from working with any industry complicit, supporting or enabling the occupation in any way. The world will benefit from continued investment in research, and #Israel will be left to deal with the consequences of adopting messianic #Zionism.

Regardless, polling shows that most Israelis support the continued occupation, and now more than ever, they also support population transfer - I believe the figure is around 86% of the Jewish population. There's little reason to assume that scientists and academics are somehow exempt from these broader societal attitudes.

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The books that helped me most in the last year (and that I would have loved to hear about sooner) are

Patrick Dunleavy's "Authoring a PhD.
How to Plan, Draft, Write and Finish a Doctoral Thesis or Dissertation" for setting up a suitable structure and argumentation plan.
(thanks again so much @metacramer for pointing this out!!!)

and

Joli Jensen's "Write No Matter What. Advice for Academics" helped me get into the flow of writing.

#phdlife #histodons #bookstodons #recommendation
#writing

#history #reference / Peretz, Dekel. 2022. Zionism and Cosmopolitanism: Franz Oppenheimer and the Dream of a Jewish Future in Germany and Palestine. De Gruyter.

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Introducion: Zionism for the Diaspora: Bridging the Gap between German
and Zionist Historical Narratives [p. 6]

An important step towards interlinking these narratives is to contextualize Oppenheimer and like-minded Zionists in a period when Germany’s colonial and imperial aspirations were peaking. It seems to go without saying that historical research needs to consider contemporaneous geographical, political and intellectual conditions. Yet this basic staple of the historian has been often neglected by researchers of German colonialism and of German Zionism in respect to the correlation between these two coetaneous affairs. It is not the purpose of this book to examine the causes of this neglect. Nevertheless, I would like to make some hypothetical suggestions.

First, Germany did not have a long-established colonial apparatus of the size and quality of France and England. There were certainly fewer Jews active within the German colonial service and, apart from a few prominent protagonists mentioned in this book, research into this matter is sparse. However, the lack of active service within the colonial bureaucracy alone is not indicative of the level of enthusiasm and advocacy of German colonial ambitions among German Jewry. There were other spheres in which support for colonial undertakings could manifest themselves

Second, due to the racialist and outright racist aspects of colonialism as well as the ultimate devastation that German colonial and imperial ambitions brought on the Jews during the Second World War and the Holocaust, it retroactively seems unfathomable that Jews could have ever been involved in any way with
German colonialism.

Third, the Zionist narrative is shaped by a teleological perspective. The focus of Zionist historiography on the contributions made to building the state of Israel, together with the ideology of diaspora negation¹⁷ – preaching total separation and distancing from Europe – blurred out conceptions of Zionism in which the establishment of Jewish sovereignty did not contradict a continued Jewish life in Europe or even envisioned realizing this sovereignty in places other than Palestine. During the First World War, Oppenheimer and his Zionist contemporaries proposed the establishment of Jewish cultural sovereignty or autonomy within (Eastern) Europe, in remarkable affinity with the anti-Zionist Bundism prevalent in Eastern Europe, revealing the diversity of opinions within early German Zionism. Furthermore, the Balfour Declaration and the subsequent British endorsement of Zionism overshadowed earlier attempts by German Zionists to integrate
Zionism into a broader German colonial scheme.

Fourth, further clouding the vision is the tension in Zionist historiography between the depiction of the intellectual origins of the Zionist movement within the context of European nationalism on the one hand, and the conceptualizing of Zionism as an anomaly of nationalism with independent roots in the ethnic, messianic character of Judaism on the other. The international nature of the movement makes it from the start a difficult object for comprehensive study.¹⁸ Finally, and probably most importantly, the negative association of colonialism with violent subjugation, foreign transgression, and unjustifiable occupation made it an unlikely candidate for integration by a Zionist historiography charged with constructing the national narrative of a Jewish state in a long-running conflict with indigenous and neighboring populations.

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#hisotry #reference / Between Prague and Jerusalem : the idea of a binational state in Palestine. Dimitry Shumsky (2010). [Hebrew; German edition 2013]

Prof. Dimitri Shumsky, a Russian-born historian at Hebrew University, argues that the Zionist vision prior to 1948 was for a bi-national political entity in Israel/Palestine, not an ethnic Jewish nation-state as exists today.

Most early Zionist thinkers and leaders, across ideological camps, advocated some form of bi-national framework that would provide collective rights for both Jews and Palestinian Arabs. This view changed drastically after 1948.

Shumsky says the bi-national vision broke down due to the Holocaust, World War II, and the 1948 war, which led to Jewish sovereignty and control rather than a power-sharing agreement.

He sees reviving the civic currents in Zionist thought as a way to "re-Zionize" and make more inclusive the Israeli state today, though he recognizes the challenges given dominant Zionist nationalism that resists such change.

Shumsky situates himself as trying to uncover suppressed Zionist intellectual streams that were responsive to the reality of a land shared by two peoples, not just idealistic notions. Bringing these to light can impact views today.

Hebrew haemori.wordpress.com/2011/06/

בין פראג לירושלים: ציונות פראג ורעיון המדינה הדו לאומית בארץ ישראל"

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ארץ האמורי · ציונות היא לא-ציונות? שיחה עם דימיטרי שומסקיבבית ספר, כשהמורה הצביעה על תמונתו של חוזה המדינה, היא הסבירה לנו שהמדינה שבה אנו חיים נהגתה על ידי הרצל בסוף המאה ה-19. הגרסה הרשמית של ההיסטוריה, שימנים ושמאלנים יודעים לספר, היא שהתנועה הציונית …

I'm neutral on ebooks vs physical. I love books as physical objects but I like that I can change font size and screen color based on the mood of the ebook. I like audiobooks, as well, but only nonfiction. I bounce hard off of audio fiction, I'm not sure why. I think it's because the narrator is in the way of me connecting directly with the story.

This is incredible. I'm reading A.S. Byatt's second novel, The Game, published in 1967, and realized that the two main characters, rival siblings, have invented a role playing game using cards, maps and figurines--a full seven years before D&D was first released! &D