'Well, there's no shortage of tribal place named ethno deities in imperial societies.' - it's a fair point, though they lose their relevance when taken out of the original context and/or imposed on other peoples. I'd still maintain that the universalising religions, especially the missionising ones (does Islam do this? I'm pretty ignorant on the subject tbh...) facilitate the spread of empire more effectively, and undermine the survival of indigenous traditions & identity more effectively. I doubt fanatical servants of Minerva were motivated to travel deep into Africa to set up religious institutions to convert the natives because otherwise their souls would have been lost to eternal damnation.

'the issue being exclusivity: the "We are the people"...of the football chant...you, unfortunately for you, are not. [...] You can never be "the people": you're the "other". That exclusive mindset is by it's very nature supremacist and as the Palestinians know well to their cost, people of that mindset unfortunately aren't going to "...leave you the fuck alone."'

You aren't 'the people' in their eyes, but as a member of your own tribe you very much are. If you look at the names of Native American tribes, when they don't refer to particular characteristics of their culture (eg: 'the people of the longhouse' - Haudenosaunee) or of their territory ('people of the flint country' - Kanienʼkehá꞉ka) oftentimes the name they chose for themselves simply meant 'the people' or 'the true people'. Frustratingly for them the names that they get called often originate in how their enemies referred to them (eg: Haudenosaunee known as 'Iroquois', Algonquian for 'snake people'; Kanienʼkehá꞉ka known as 'Mohawk', also from Algonquian, meaning 'man eaters' or 'flesh eaters'). See here for more examples: https://indianreservation.info/native-american-tribal-names-original-meanings-and-colonial-mistranslations/

So, unless these were descriptions of neighbouring tribes that were distorted by the colonial period that played them off one another, this seems pretty universal. Yet these people didn't generally overrun or exterminate one another. They had long-running conflict, but maintained a balance over thousands of years, again generally speaking (I have come across counter examples, mostly from the post-contact period). European colonists, along with their universalising tendency, smashed that all to pieces in a matter of centuries. Zionists appear to be following that pattern, maybe because their 'ethnic exclusivity' isn't actually ethnic at all, but based on a religious ideology that has been invasively planted in a place where it doesn't belong (even if technically that's where it originated!), and supported by the colonial powers who have done the same thing all around the globe.

cheers,
I