Thank you, Rima for inviting me to comment here. My thoughts...
There is much of interest in this piece. I would point out that Jews, even though a nation was created of us by Zionism, are not a nation of a land (Palestine, in this case) like others, but Jewish “peoplehood” is both a fundamental concept to Jewish identity that long predates Zionism (as is pointed out in the piece) but also an amorphous sort of idea that, whatever it may be, is not the same as a modern “nation” as Zionism created.
“Peoplehood” in this reading can be multicultural, multi-ethnic, and not at all tied to territory. But in any case, it must be understood distinctly from the concept of a nation, which is the concept that Zionism embraced and on which it formed its expression among Jews and in Palestine.
Zionism tried to do a multitude of things. One is to create a modern nation, which it succeeded at. Another is to bind that nation to a foreign territory, which it has not yet fully succeeded at doing, as Palestinians have resisted their wholesale expulsion from the land and have not simply drifted away as some Israelis hoped. Yet another is to simultaneously create the nation and maintain the much older concept of the "Jewish people." This it has utterly failed to do and one of the effects of that failure is a split between Zionists, in and out of Israel, and Jewish non-Zionists or anti-Zionists.
The concepts of "Am Yisrael," (which is translated as nation of Israel, but it doesn't necessarily mean nation in the modern sense—it can mean that, but it can mean a more ancient conception of something that looks similar, but is really different from a modern national community) or "Klal Yisrael," a term I prefer and which would be loosely translated as community of Israel (in both cases, "Israel" means Jews, not a state of any kind). These notions go back to the days of the Talmud in Jewish writings, liturgies, traditions, and cultures. That's true for Jews all over the world, not only from Europe.
But in practice, to me it's all academic. No matter how Zionism went about constructing its new nation in the 19th and 20th centuries, none of it justifies the displacement and dispossession of a single Palestinian, let alone the ethnic cleansing that occurred and is ongoing. So from my point of view (which is, of course, that of a Jewish, American, Ashkenazi, non-Zionist, and supporter of full Palestinian rights) the argument is self-defeating because even if you win it, you gain nothing. The success or failure of problematizing a "Jewish people" doesn't change the legitimacy of Zionist dispossession of Palestinians one bit. It was not justified, no matter the resolution of this question of Jewish peoplehood.
The issue, when we frame it in terms of rights, doesn’t depend either on the “nationhood” of Palestinians, in my view. I very much agree with Benedict Anderson’s axiom that all nations are, as he framed it, “imagined communities.” So, we can look back more than a century and see various political controls over Palestine, be it the Ottoman Empire, the British Mandate, the growing power of the Yishuv, or the state of Israel. All of them were unjustly ruling over Palestinians—Muslims, Christians, Jews, whomever—who deserved their rights and full freedoms, as do we all.
The Zionist nation-building project co-opted Jewish peoplehood, which is not an inherently anti-Palestinian concept. It did so not for the purpose of weaponizing that peoplehood against Palestinians, but for the purpose of creating what it calls “Jewish nationhood,” and what others might call a Zionist or even Israeli-Jewish identity. That was Zionism as building a Jewish nation, but Zionism as a settler-colonial project used that concept of Jewish peoplehood as a tool, or weapon, against Palestinians in building the state of Israel.
Jews could have remained in the “peoplehood” realm, or could have developed a modern national identity without it having a settler-colonial expression. But obviously, that is not what happened. Instead, Zionism used the existing bonds of a Jewish community as part of a program to build a Jewish ethnocracy, which quickly became a segregated, apartheid state that left millions of refugees dispossessed and homeless just kilometres away from their former homes.
But we don’t need to problematize Jewish peoplehood to defend Palestinians rights. I’d argue the contrary, that affirming Jewish peoplehood gives us a stronger path forward to move away from the discriminatory state Zionism created and toward a future of equality that allows for both Jewish and Palestinians cultures (a multiplicity of which exists within both groups, of course) to flourish.
