Another terrible analogy for Israel-Palestine

Over on Bluesky, someone challenged me over my insistence that “Zionism” means neither more nor less than wanting Israel to continue to exist in some form with a pointed analogy:

I think the states South of Mason-Dixon should be able to have the right to resist Federal imposition of human equality in some form. The only forms I materially support exactly conform to the Confederacy, but how dare you imply that I support the Confederacy!

I’m impatient with anti-Zionists offering bad metaphors for the Israel-Palestine conflict, but I have to admit that the challenge in that had real edge. I thought it was recoverable into a useful form.

But I was wrong; it is rotten at the core, and trying to reframe it into a better form only had me wading out into a revisionist history which is easily misread as apologetics for the Confederacy, which I certainly do not want to do. I should have remembered my own warning against analogizing the history of Israel to the history of the United States.

Retaining it here to keep myself accountable for putting my foot in my mouth.

An alternate history

To try to really work the analogy, one must break the parallel between Israel and the Confederacy by first recognizing how the oppression of Palestinians in Gaza, the West Bank, and inside Green Line Israel are brutal, and the Nakba was a genocidal horror, but antebellum Southern slavery was even worse than that. We should be wary of mapping the oppression of Arab Palestinians inside Green Line Israel directly to Jim Crow (or to other inequities like South African apartheid), but it is similar enough to accept for the sake of the allegory. We must also register how the Confederacy was defined by its project to preserve that nightmare in a way that Zionism is not.

That blunts the analogy, but it still very sharp. Jim Crow was profoundly unjust. With that, we can conceive a loose dystopian alternate history parallel to the history of Israel-Palestine:

1862 — The Confederacy successfully secedes with Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, South Carolina, and Florida. Black people fleeing & driven from their homes escape to the Louisiana & Tennessee territories of Mexico and the USA.

Late 19^th century — Mexico & the US fight a series of wars trying to destroy the Confederacy. It is clear that if they win, they will genocide the Confederates.

1885 — The Confederacy seizes Louisiana, Tennessee, North Carolina, and Virginia in one of those wars. They start establishing settlements and repress the Black people there even more brutally than in the CSA itself.

1890 — The wars end because the Confederacy hint that they have dynamite technology.

1900 — The USA & CSA sign a major peace treaty which ends their border conflicts. The USA gets North Carolina & Virginia back. The Confederacy retains Louisiana & Tennessee, under military occupation.

1915 — After lengthy, bitter negotiation, the Confederacy makes weak concessions to Black people in Louisiana & Tennessee, which become a pseudo-sovereign state of the South. Confederate settlements remain, and the South remains subject to military policing. But there are free elections, which leaders of the formerly-terrorist Southern Liberation Organization win.

1930 — Conditions have diverged between Tennessee and Lousiana.

In Tennessee the Confederacy has expanded their settlements, making it a fragmented mess under de facto Confederate control. They are still governed democratically, under a corrupt party which evolved from the SLO.

In Louisiana the Confederacy have retreated, sort of: they abandon their settlements but blockade the state, creating grinding poverty. They have elected the authoritarian, theocratic Nation Of Islam to power … who never allow another free election again.

“Liberal Confederates”?

Let’s stop in 1945, before the Nation Of Islam conducts a brutal attack on Confederate civilians which produces an immense, genocidal response by the Confederacy, so we can look across this long, terrible history without that final horror consuming the story.

This less bad alternate Confederacy is still very bad.

It has liberal Confederates who say, “For generations we have fought for full sovereignty for the Southern states of Louisiana & Tennessee, full equality for Black people inside the Confederacy, and reparations for Black people in recognition of the Confederate history. The CSA is guilty of countless wrongs which we oppose, but we still love our home and want it to be far better.”

Would I count myself a liberal Confederate? Heck no. I don’t want the legacy of the Confederate project. I would want a just, unified, liberal democratic South encompassing all of the Confederacy plus the Southern states of Louisiana & Tennessee.

Would I count myself an anti-Confederate? Not quite. I would grant that liberal Confederates held a legitimate position which I respectfully disagree with. It is good to dream of a better version of one’s country.

Would I respect people less sympathetic to liberal Confederates than I was? Of course. Especially I would cut a lot of slack for Black Southerners saying that liberal Confederates are only rationalizing the white supremacy of the CSA. They would have good reasons, and their analysis would have a lot of truth to it, with plenty of “liberal Confederates” unwilling to really face the depth of the injustices they have an obligation to correct. And I would insist that sincere liberal Confederates dedicated to justice really existed, even if I was pessimistic about how many there were and the viability of their dream.

I’d also pointedly wonder how anti-Confederates imagined a harmonious United South working if they found themselves unable to imagine sincere liberal Confederates.

Some people would argue that animosity between white Confederates and Black Southerners is so intense that a two-state resolution would be better than a United South. I would not agree that it was better, but I would grant that they had a good case that it was more achievable.

One last thing

To properly parallel the history of Israel-Palestine, we would also need to imagine a Confederacy founded not by white people but by Native Americans fleeing genocide in the USA & Mexico, populated mostly with more Native Americans who arrived in the decades after succession — to parallel the Shoah, the Jews already in Palestine before Zionism, and the migration of Mizrahi Jews unwelcome elsewhere in the Middle East.

Wait, this is all terrible

So. Ugh. So I end up recruiting the genocide of Native Americans into this analogy, inventing a Confederacy without slavery, inventing an ahistorical Nation Of Islam as an anti-Confederate equivalent to Hamas, and more which is bananas if not ten kinds of racist. That is awful. Let’s … not.

So to the original point: the Confederacy is not a good analogy for Israel.