Early Zionists as Pioneers. posted by Richard Seymour

So, anyway, I knew something wierd was on the way when Jonathan Freedland suggested a comparison between Hamas and the early Zionists:

Hamas's best bet might be to learn not from Fatah or the IRA, but from the early Zionist movement. Living under colonial military rule from the 1920s to the 1940s, it focused its energies on building the institutions of statehood: schools, bureaucracy, even an embryonic national health service. When independence came in 1948 they were ready. Israeli rule is not the British mandate, I know. But there is a lesson there all the same - and Hamas would make a revolution by seizing on it.

Okay, replace "living under" with the phrase "colluding with"; replace "building the institutions of statehood" with "expropriating the Palestinian peasantry"; replace "When independence came in 1948" with, "When the Palestinians were murdered and driven off their land by the hundreds of thousands" etc., and you begin to have an inkling of what Freedland really means. He's saying that what was visited on the Palestinians should be visited on the Israelis. He's saying Hamas should drive Israel into the sea! (Even as I write this, I hear Professor Geras' gums beating together in the distance: "Apologists among us!"). Either that, or he's eulogising about the "early Zionists" while carefully excising the more - ahem - embarrassing moments from their history. Yes, Freedland looks like an idiot, and writes like an idiot. But don't let that fool you - he really is an idiot.