Zionism is an extreme form of Western assimilation despite rejecting assimilationism

Evidence

Despite the Zionist rejection of “assimilationist trends,” it can be read as an extreme expression of the desire to assimilate the Jews into the Western narrative of enlightenment and redemption. The condemnation of assimilation was, in fact, the rejection of the ambiguity and “in betweenness.” Generally, Zionist thought, in spite of very important differences from assimilationist ideologies, did not challenge the dichotomy between Europe and the Orient; rather, it was based on the desire to assimilate into the West. The process of Jewish colonization embodied the perspective of both the colonized and the colonizer, by transforming the colonized and assimilating the perspective of the colonizer. — Ivan Davidson Kalmar, Derek Penslar, Orientalism and the Jews, 638

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The paradox that a movement defined by rejecting assimilation is itself a maximal assimilation into the Western narrative is genuinely paradigm-bending and resists one-sentence summary.
• XREF: Connects to postcolonial critiques of nationalism (Chatterjee, Anderson) and to the reading on the veil as both tradition and revolutionary instrument. — connects to: Zionism rose on Holocaust sympathy to become a leading Western ideology — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures, 144; Zionist return to the East functioned as identification with the West against Arabs — Nadim N. Rouhana and Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, When Politics Are Sacralized:…, 344
• SEED: Potential essay: ‘The Anti-Assimilationist as Assimilationist’ — how movements that define themselves against assimilation often embody the deepest assimilation. The claim produces both a definitional payoff and a sweeping claim connecting the chapter to ongoing debates about who ‘counts’ as Western.