But here let me contradict myself and agree with you. I feel that there are contexts that become symbolic to the rest of the world's struggling people, and Israel/Palestine is one of them. On the one hand, I believe that there are lots of terrible things taking place, and that Zionism is as much an echo of other nationalisms as it is a departure from them. On the other, I don't want activism around Israel/Palestine to let up. I see it as a kind of privilege that other people's homes don't get. Lots of people want to fix this really fundamental problem in my part of the world! So I guess it's about drawing the connections and parallels between Israel/Palestine and other parts of the world while encouraging even more Israel/Palestine activism in the spirit of solidarity rather than say that Israel/Palestine has more problems than, say, the United States or Honduras.

I have one concern that I will hopefully have the time to expand on in another post. It resides in this passage:

"A lot of people simply make Zionism a private case of nationalism, and then continue to debate whether nationalism itself is a good idea. I think this is unnecessary, because Zionism is an unusual and a-typical kind of nationalism. When the French, or even the Palestinians, began talking of themselves as a nation, this meant a transition from local or religious identities into a more comprehensive one (in the late eighteenth and mid-twentieth centuries, respectively)."

Though I believe that Zionism is 'atypical' for the reasons you mentioned, I think that the problems of Zionist statehood, nonetheless, are classic problems of any implementation of the nationalist idea. Turning Zionism into an aberrant nationalism in this way has the potential to preserve other nationalisms and sideline the powerful critiques of nation-statehood. And even the idea of a social phenomenon being 'atypical' brings up the question of what IS typical.

For example, one of these critiques posits that all nationalisms are deeply concerned with territorial borders and with Others that may be found both within and without these borders. I don't need to tell you that American nationalism has a lot in common with Zionism as a settler, ethnicity based national movement which racialized non-nationals in the name of territorial expansion and capital accumulation. But perhaps this nationalism is also atypical? Let's go to the example of France and Germany, the two examples of 'normal nations' that Israeli leaders sometimes reference to justify their aspirations for ethnically-pure statehood (i.e. France for the French, Germany for the Germans, Israeli for the Jews, Afghanistan for the Afghans). In fact, I've read about the process by which these nation-states were formed, and it doesn't seem to have been an obvious transition to a "more comprehensive identity." On the contrary, the creation of the French state and French national identity required the cultural and political subjugation of what are now France's provinces, and I imagine that similar (yet historically specific) things happened in Germany.

Certainly, there is a difference between a project of assimilation and centralization and a nationalist project that by definition excludes an indigenous group of people from full membership within it, and I think this is the point that you are making. But are there nationalisms that don't create outsiders? Is there one national movement today or in history that has not excluded others by definition, formally or informally?

So to sum it up, I believe that it's harmful to artificially separate the problems of Zionism from the problems of nationalism since they are totally bound up in each other. It strikes me as similar to trying to separate colonialism from nationalism, a belief that allowed people to ignore more 'domestic' forms of colonialism.

About place – do you think it's the same idea of highly local identities in Israel today? not sure about that one…