Israel/Palestine
In reply to the discussion: Rightists Award Student Who Persecuted 'Left-Wing' Teacher [View all]Scootaloo
(25,699 posts)And Tafwik Hamid is... well, he's a hoax. There's this whole "Ex-terrorist" industry that seems to exist. Sort of a Coptic / Maronite scam subculture. Show up in the US, tell some churchgoers "I was a terrorist until I found Jesus!" and then rake in the dough. It works because Americans tend to think all Arabs are both Muslims and terrorists by default.
I focus on these two because their inclusion is head-slappingly dumb; John Adams isn't that bright an example either, for the same reason found in the title of this post. It seems clear to me that the list is using the absolutely loosest definition of "Zionism" possible, and from there is only cherry-picking the "good guys" that would then count (though again, with Napoleon and Hamid, that filter seems pretty damned loose as well.) Queen Victoria's another funny inclusion - as is Henry Dunant, given how Israel is in standing violation of those very same Geneva Conventions, in the name of Zionism.
The list you provided is shoddy at best, provides no detail, no context, and contains despots, criminals, people who predate Zionist theory, and in the cases of Moses Montefore and Chaim Weismann at least, persons whose only claim to fame is being a Zionist in the first place. In other cases, such as Albert Einstein, the list contains people who held some level of Zionist belief but which would be unrecognizable as such under the modern rubric of political Zionism.
Finally the whole thing is an attempt at argument from authority. "These famous people believed, so should you!" - I could come up with a much longer list about Roman Catholicism, would you abandon Judaism and take up the true path of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost under the authority of the Bishop of Rome? You're probably no more inclined to do so than I would be, correct? Even if JFK, Simon Bolivar, and Dan Akroyd are all Catholics. I'll bet you'd be especially dubious if I included Napoleon, the Borgias, and each pope in the list.
Interesting commentary on Haaretz there. I think it's more a case of that being the overwhelmingly dominant strain available.