Auxiliary Opposition

This Shadowgame is the crossroads of time where the past and future meet. Enjoy my Ao3: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AmerValk

[amervalk]

Suddenly…when the modern day left is dancing with scapegoating ‘the Jews’ of the world start sounding like fascist bullies to the minorities in their party demanding submission, politics becomes a terrifying play you’ve already seen the end of.

Of course, history does not repeat itself, but it does rhyme.

[mobydyke]

being an adult is just dragging urself kicking and screaming to things that you will enjoy and that will be good for you

[mobydyke]

clenching my teeth and muttering under my breath "you'll be happy you did it you'll be happy you did it you'll be happy you did it" as I physically force myself out the door to go Do Things

[mobydyke]

being very firm with myself every time I think about bailing and saying "no. you committed to this. it will improve your quality of life. you will enjoy it. now put on your big boy pants and go."

[ironmaidenhead]

THE LION IN WINTER (1968) — Dir. Anthony Harvey

[thelawfulchaotic]

In regards to this quote, I wanted to pull it aside and address it specifically:

In retrospect, I think probably there are a lot of American Jewish people on this post because they've been interrogated about zionism nonstop for months and they've been made afraid through acts of terror on American soil.

Years. We've been interrogated about it for years. It is the defining purity/litmus test for Jews of any affiliation. I have been kicked out of both real life and online spaces for refusing to denounce Israel as the source of all evil and the destruction of it and my entire ethnic identity as a prerequisite for the coming of peace on earth.

When I pointed out that it was not a genocide back in November of 2023, because of the actions being taken by the IDF to reduce civilian casualties, I had someone who I believed had been a friend for six years summarily block and ghost me. In the time since, I have seen them make the claim that I personally have killed Palestinian children "and laughed". How that's possible when I live in Europe and have never been to Israel is apparently left for the jury to determine.

We've all lost friends, social circles, entire political affiliations, jobs, financial opportunities, and more because we're Jews, and thus are treated with suspicion because of our ethnic heritage, and if we're not willing to bark "Israel Is The Source Of All Evil In The World And Must Be Destroyed And All Of The Israelis Murdered As Painfully As Possible In Order To Achieve Justice" without prompting, we're looked upon with suspicion of being "secret Zionists". Members of our community have been murdered and given a pass by the population at large because the murderer claimed that they're "not antisemitic, just antizionist". The legal system in Europe has given offenders who have engaged in conspiracy to assault and kill Jews benign sentences that were little more than slaps on the wrist. And more and more.

So seeing someone like yourself actually stand up and say, "Yeah, no, that's BS. There have definitely been crimes committed and they need to be investigated and prosecuted, but this histrionic labeling of people as 'Zionists' is just in opposition to everything I stand for," is something that practically drives some of us to tears. When people you once thought of friends, colleagues and allies show that they will abandon every principle they claimed they had on the altar of Jew-hate, seeing someone actually hew to their principles is worth cherishing.

I've gotten a couple asks like this and I want y'all to know I'm chewing on them.

I'm very good at poking my way through my own thoughts, so I've been doing a lot of thinking since that post about why I'm so sure that this is a bullshit purity test and not what many people believe it is -- a dogma of colonialist, racist, violent ideology.

Is it just because I know a lot of Jewish people? I mean, I do know a lot of Jewish people (lawyer, notorious Jewish prestige profession), and I'm like, those guys? Nah. That one's a Jewish lady with the biggest purse I've ever seen and we won a case together on behalf of some siblings; that one's an old Jewish guy who went to the same drama school as my mom like ten minutes after she left and knows all her friends and tells a great story.

I've felt for a long time that Jewish people are the canary in the coal mine when it comes to burgeoning fascism, but that's not all of it either.

I have posted a fair amount about liberal purity culture, the foolishness of driving off imperfect allies, the joy of embracing people where they are and broadening your own world as a result, so there's some inherent hostility to liberal and leftist exclusion.

Words and attitudes can certainly contribute to harm. Even across the globe. And I've seen things on here that speak to a defensiveness about Israel from Jewish folks that seems... well, honestly, seems just defensive. Reactive.

On top of this, there was a literal point when I knew that some of this debate was just a business that was none of mine, and that was when a Jewish friend of mine told me that zionists were missing the point of being Jewish because Jewish people were supposed to wander, that was what it was about. (PLEASE DON'T ARGUE ABOUT THIS, unless you are being respectful and informative. I'm only using this as an example of a thing that surprised me and showed me wow, I have only scratched the surface of understanding this shit.)

Then there's what I've done with my life and career. It took ages for me to start seeing the big picture in the criminal justice system, and start feeling out the shape of how state violence is creating the exact problems it's claiming to be solving. Whenever I read anything about Israel, it seems to me like I see the same thing happening there, like a perpetual motion machine: each side (speaking specifically of the ones making the violence-related decisions), in reacting with violence, ensures the future violence that will react to them, and in so doing perpetuates the need for retaliation, forever, forever. From what's happened over the last few years, it seems to me that Israel has given Hamas recruits for decades, and Hamas has inspired Israel to new atrocity.

But we can't forget the humanity in all of the killers and torturers and bombers. They see themselves as a guardian of the weak, an avenger of the fallen, a bringer of justice. That's why they do this. So what good do I do in calling someone an ideological enemy? What even is an ideological enemy? Is it someone I would kill in the name of ideology? That's no one. I'm a pacifist.

...That went a little far afield. But, also: the trappings of bullying include anonymous harassment and accusations without evidence, both of which are pretty telling. If you're on the side of knowledge and clarity, I'm gonna be kinda suspicious when you're apparently afraid to stand behind your words. (Anonymous questions are a totally different thing from anonymous accusations, that's about giving people an environment of openness without judgment where they can ask the things they're genuinely wondering about.)

Sort of a final note. I don't have an overriding theme here, as you may have figured out, I'm just sort of having thoughts.

People who have spent a while in one career or working hard on one hobby and who got good at it understand: when you interact in a space with certain concepts, you get skilled at dealing with those concepts. Talented costume designers understand the structure of the human body and how bits of things fit together in clothes in a way I don't know. Scientists have huge dimensions of knowledge where I can, at best, skim the surface.

The kind of lawyer that I am works with morals and ethics on a constant basis. Right and wrong and justice and violence and vengeance and forgiveness are concepts that we interact with day in, day out. We stare in to the abyss; the abyss stares back at us; we're like, hey, abyss, how's Tuesday, and it's like, oh, well, you know, samesies. I think maybe that my Guiding Principles (TM) Muscles are just really big and beefy because of all the crime I bench-press?

[the-library-alcove]

Well, first off, this is such a wonderful response.

Second, I don't know what else to say other than offer educational resources for you to learn more, if you wish, giving you more history and context, because you obviously have questions.

I will say to the associate of yours who said that "Jews are meant to wander"... *sigh* No, I'm not going to address them, because I know better than to try. So to you, the thing there is that, a hundred and fifty years ago, there were two general schools of Jewish thought regarding the Diaspora and our homeland in the Levant.

The first was Bundism--the idea that we were Germans/Frenchmen/Italians/Russians/Americans/etc who just so happened to be Jewish, and that our goal was assimilation and integration into those societies as part of rich, multi-ethnic, multi-religious cultures. This was the more popular view, especially in Western Europe.

The second was Zionism, named for Tzion, an archaic/poetic name for Jerusalem (Mount Zion is literally just a hill in Jerusalem, to give context there). This was the idea that Jews would always be an embattled, oppressed minority in the Diaspora, and that for our own safety, we would need a state of our own to be able to be safe.

The Bundists were pretty much all slaughtered by the Nazis, and the survivors became Zionists because it had been made abundantly clear, by the remains of six million dead Jews out of a population of less than 18 million worldwide, that the Zionist perspective was correct. Sadly. But when the Canadian response to Jewish refugees from the Holocaust on how many they would take was "None is too many" and the "Voyage of the Damned" was sent back to Europe because America refused to take them, and the 1943 Bermuda Conference had the Allies actively betray the Jewish refugees and survivors while they knew that the Holocaust was ongoing...

Yeah. The idea that "Jews were made to wander" because of the Diaspora is victim-blaming of the highest order, and even more revolting for having been said by a Jew.

[thelawfulchaotic]

I think it's probably just a young Jewish person who cares so much about being Jewish and who is so repulsed by the actions of Israel that they don't see any outlet there for their identity, honestly. It seems to me to be very human to have all the emotions you related above and come to a place of just really really wanting being Jewish to mean something completely different than a connection with Israel.

On a much smaller scale, I know what it's like to feel like you'd rather be rootless than have the root on offer. It's not a happy feeling!

I do appreciate the additional information though. I'm picking my way through The Origins of Totalitarianism by Hannah Arendt and I'll be honest, the entire section of Jewish history in the couple centuries before WWII is a struggle to keep up with. For all my fancy education in political science, I apparently do have some big gaps even in relatively recent world history!

(This is not surprising. I was taught AP European History by an ex-Navy officer who loooooooooooved wars. The part in between wars he sort of skipped over but by god the wars! His favorite! It wasn't all bad, though; he made us come up with mini-essays about bias for every single thing we read and that training actually formed the basis for a lot of my media literacy today.)

If you have good book recs, I'll take 'em, because I chew through those things at an astonishing rate and it might as well learn me something. Otherwise, I'm not too worried about applying myself to this because I'm working on my Spanish and also gathering my armament of psychology expertise so that even more social workers can tell me to stay in my lane. And also learning oil painting. And Russian literature. And-- well, the ADHD keeps life interesting.

[the-library-alcove]

I can see why you would come to that conclusion regarding that individual, but speaking as someone within that culture, it does not make their statement any less offensive or cruel to the rest of us.

I'll dig through my archives and see what I have to offer/suggest regarding book recs, and of course, I know that the rest of jumblr will be quick to offer their own suggestions. The big one I would suggest is "Anti-Judaism: The Western Tradition" by David Nirenberg.

[thelawfulchaotic]

Hey, reading over what I said: I'm legit sorry if I sounded like I was telling you what your emotional reaction should be. That wasn't my intent, but I can see how it could come off that way. Thank you for sharing your perspective and thoughts on it; I appreciate it.

[the-library-alcove]

Apology accepted; it's the sort of thing that's best summed up as "Cool motive, still victim-blaming," in response to your associate.

So, let me try to explain things here, and start with the basics: Do you know why we were in Diaspora?

Because the Romans conquered our homeland in 63 BCE, and spent the next two centuries oppressing us and squeezing us for every coin of tax revenue they could get. There were multiple uprisings against them, multiple messianic figures (including Jesus) being fomented because of the social strain, and they destroyed our Temple in the first rebellion, and then massacred half our population in the third. And then they took a bunch of the survivors as slaves to work on massive projects across the Empire, banned us from our own home city, and renamed it and our homeland as a way to give a big middle finger to us.

And then, when the Empire fell in the West, we couldn't go home, because the Eastern portion of the Empire still held it, and again massacred the ones who had managed to stay, and then the Arabs came and took it from the Byzantines, and they put the members of our population in a brutal form of second-class citizenship under Arab rule, where extra taxes and a bunch of legal disabilities were placed on us for the next thousand-plus years.

Meanwhile, under the Christians, we just kept getting massacred, expelled, exploited, brutalized, murdered, and marginalized. "We're meant to wander" is basically going, "You were meant to be treated like a piggy bank by Christian lords, who would let you build up wealth, and then throw you out and take the wealth for themselves."

My great-grandparents had a bakery in Lodz, Poland. We were Polish citizens prior to WWII. We had lived there for centuries. I have pictures of my great-great-grandparents. They were not "wanderers".

When the Nazis conquered Poland and sent my family off to die in the extermination camps, nearly the only survivor from that branch of my family who was still living in Europe was my grandmother. We have the paperwork showing that we have legal title to that property. When we made inquiries about possibly reclaiming it in the 1990s, after the USSR fell, the city of Lodz threatened us, saying, "We would not be able to guarantee your safety should you come here in person to press your suite." But, sure, "Jews are meant to wander".

You can understand why that statement makes me and others furious. It's akin to a certain black rapper saying that "Slavery was a choice." You don't have to agree with what the modern nation state of Israel is doing to say that we deserved our own persecution to your own kin.

I'm not aiming my anger at you--I'm angry at your associate, and doing my best to explain why this is a raw nerve.

[woman-becomer]

imagine a goat with a hat

STOP-

what hat did you give the goat what is the instinctual hat you gave to this goat

[eliyahu613]

i found the image without the ugly instagram overlay!

[todaysjewishholiday]

Shabbat Shalom, ketseleh.

[jewishmuppet]

Adult b'nai mitzvahs I love you so much. I love that the reasons for them are as varied as the Jewish people. You can do it if you converted. You can do it if you already had one at 13 but now you've reached another milestone year in old age. You can do it if you were born Jewish but raised secular and never had one. You can do it if you fled the Soviet Union or anywhere else you weren't free to practice Judaism growing up. Holocaust survivors had them if they were in camps or in hiding at the age they should've been having theirs. Trans Jews can have them as a way to affirm their gender. Women can have them if they grew up in a time or community where it was only for boys. Anyone who's had an adult b'nai mitzvah, you're an inspiration to me and you form the links in the chain that will pass the Torah down to me when I have my own bat mitzvah one day.

[amervalk]

This was my first attempt at a self portrait since grade school! Honestly, I like how it turned out . I worked from memory, ie what my self image is.

[hatikvah-shalom]

I read I Shall Not Hate: A Gaza Doctor’s Journey by Izzeldin Abuelaish yesterday. It was a breath of fresh air to finally read something by an actual Gazan instead of Americans projecting their country’s problems onto their hazy concept of Palestine. I was incredibly moved by Abuelaish; his writing reminded me a lot of Rachel Goldberg-Polin. Both of them lost their children to this endless, senseless conflict; they of them went through the worst possible tragedies imaginable, and it resolved them to hold true to their principles and to share the necessity for peace and coexistence. I don’t have much to add in the way of analysis; I think his writing speaks for itself, and there were entire chapters I wanted to quote. If you have the opportunity to read the book, I highly recommend it.

- Abuelaish was raised in Jabalya refugee camp in the Gaza Strip. Something that I think gets glossed over in the Western understanding of Palestine is that there’s a deep status divide among Palestinians between those who already lived in Gaza and the West Bank, and those who came there as refugees in 1948. The Palestinians who already lived there tend to have better housing, better jobs, and better education; the refugees usually remain trapped in the camps and told by those who already lived there that to resettle outside the borders of Israel is a betrayal of their nation. In this way, they face two injustices: the first expulsion, and the continual confinement to refugee camps without any hope to improve their conditions.

- I was actually reading Return to Zion at the same time as this, and reminded of Golda Meir’s initial impression of the refugee camps in Gaza: “I was appalled by what I saw there, and by the fact that these miserable people had been maintained in such degrading condition for over eight years only so that the Arab leaders could show the refugee camps to visitors and make political capital out of them. Those refugees could and should have been resettled at once in any of the Arab countries of the Middle East — countries, incidentally, whose language, traditions, and religion they share. The Arabs would still have been able to continue their quarrel with us, but at least the refugees would not have been kept in a state of semi-starvation, or lived in abject terror of their Egyptian masters.”

- Abuelaish describes horrific living conditions and overcrowding. He recounts the morbid death of his baby sister Noor: without room for a crib, his mother put her to sleep in the dish basin at night; one day, his brother, trying to escape a punishment, jumped into the basin to hide and crushed the three week old baby.

- He has a low view of intidafas generally. The second one he largely blames for the collapse of the peace process, but even the first one he sees as reprehensible. He says the fight against the Israelis was just as much a fight against other Palestinians, and quickly devolved into a witch hunt. Of the 2,000 dead, half of them were killed by other Palestinians who accused them of disloyalty and insufficient devotion to the cause; this disgusts Abuelaish, who has a deep reverence for life over death.

- “Many Palestinians couldn’t see any future for themselves — they began to see their lives as useless. And then, when one person goes crazy and becomes a suicide bomber, no one around him tries to prevent the act. Instead they call him a hero. That’s the way things get worse.”

- “I felt as if we’d been so close to peace [before the second intifada]. Like many others, I had been full of hope. I’d been conducting tours, and had even opened clinics in Gaza with the help of Israeli doctors (which all had to close). I find it astonishing that the two sides could be so close to a peace agreement and then see our relationship deteriorate so rapidly. As the second intifada raged, each side was focusing on its own pain and blaming the other instead of realizing we have to recognize the rights of both peoples to live in harmony and peace; the alternative is war and distrust. I wished then that I could close my eyes and open them to where we had been before the second intifada began, when we were still talking to each other.”

- Abuelaish becomes a doctor specializing in obstetrics and fertility; this allows him to move his family out of the Jabalya camp and gives him a permit to work in an Israeli hospital in Beersheba, which means he has to cross the border from Gaza twice a week to get to work. He describes this as an agonizing, humiliating, arbitrarily difficult process where he was randomly turned away or searched on the whims of the Israeli and Hamas border guards. “People often tell me they admire my patience and ability to be calm. I tell them I learned all of it while waiting in line at the Erez checkpoint.” Because there is no way of knowing how long a border crossing will take, he rents an apartment in Beersheba to try and prevent work absences and tardiness, keeping him away from his family for most of the week.

- His commitment to life comes through in everything he does. When Gazan object to his helping Israelis, he tries to force an understanding of common humanity. “Some have suggested I am helping to deliver a new generation of occupiers. I try to tell them that these Israeli babies could grow up to be doctors.” He strongly believes in health care as a unifying force.

- In the second intifada, a woman named Wafa al-Biss was caught trying to cross the Erez checkpoint with explosives for a suicide bomb, in a plot to destroy a hospital where she was receiving medical treatment — the same hospital that Abuelaish worked at in Beersheba. He wrote an open letter to Times of Israel: “She should have been a messenger for peace among her people, and should have been bringing flowers and appreciation to the Soroka doctors for healing her burns.… Is this a reward for kindness? Is this an advertisement for Islam, a religion which respects and sanctifies human life? This is aggression and a violation of humanity." He adds that many Gazans were pleased that he wrote the letter, and they said it spoke for them. “As for Biss, she’s in an Israeli prison and I doubt she’ll be getting out any time soon.” This book was published in 2010; she was released months later in exchange for Gilad Shalit’s body.

- “I was heartbroken by [Hamas’s takeover] in Gaza. How could we heal this new wound and cope with the resulting scar? The Israelis were the enemy, but we’d become enemies inside our own house, too.”

- “The last decade has been a particularly disappointing period in this grinding conflict that keeps us apart. Our leaders bicker like children, breaking promises, behaving like bullies, keeping the kettle of trouble boiling. The people I talk to — patients, doctors, neighbors in Gaza, friends in Israel — aren’t like our leaders. They worry about my family as I worry about theirs. We all lament the lost decades, the uncertain future. And as amazing as it may seem to someone watching us from afar, we believe in each other, in our ability to share this Holy Land.”

- “Trust in the Middle East is such a rare commodity today, it's gasping for air. The thing is, you cannot ask people to coexist by having one side bow their heads and rely on a solution that is only good for the other side. What you can do is stop blaming each other and go after a dialogue with one person at a time. Everyone knows that violence begets violence and breeds more hatred. We need to find our way together. I feel I cannot rely on the various spokespersons who claim they act on my behalf. Invariably they have some agenda that doesn't work for me. Instead, I talk to my patients, to my neighbours and colleagues — Jews, Arabs — and I find out they feel as I do: we are more similar than we are different, and were all fed up with the violence.”

- “One of my Israeli friends at Soroka told me, ‘Izzeldin, I heard that you were afraid to come back. I want to tell you, I am ready to sacrifice my life for your safety if any Israeli tries to do harm to you.’ What more can one do than this?”

- Abuelaish’s wife dies suddenly and unexpectedly of leukemia. She’s treated at an Israeli hospital, which means only one family member is permitted to cross the border with her. Abuelaish’s travel visa randomly flags him as a security threat and he spends a full day in detainment before he’s able to see her; he describes it as the most stressful and helpless day of his life.

- With his wife dead and Hamas restricting life in Gaza, he makes plans to take his eight children to Canada. One of his main ideas in this book is the empowerment of Gazan women, who are often put into arranged marriages as teenagers and confined to the home under their husbands’ rule.

- “One of the ways to alter the status quo is to look to the women and girls. It's easy to find a thousand men in favour of war; it's difficult to find five women who are inclined that way. I feel it's time to empower Palestinian women and girls, to give them respect and independence and let them take the lead. Too many girls cannot get an education because of financial and cultural considerations…. I grew up watching the way women in Gaza raised their children. I saw the decision making and the perseverance, but I understood that the women weren't being given the opportunity to bring their own expertise to the table. Women and girls are not able in Gaza to rise to their potential, and as a result they cannot participate to their fullest.”

- I’m reminded a lot of Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib; Abuelaish has a similar medical background and regard for life, and understands the necessity of uplifting women. I saw an interview with Alkhatib a few months ago, where he said that even before the war, Hamas was severely curtailing women’s freedom of movement, and harassing women who left their homes without male accompaniment.

- “A healthy society needs wise and educated women. An educated and healthy woman will raise an educated and healthy family. We need to link education with health care, and the most effective way to do that is to make sure that education and health care are available to women. It's an investment that can shift not only the thinking but power in the Middle East. Removing the barriers that confront our women and girls could very well lead us to peaceful coexistence.”

- In 2008, Israel and Hamas have a twenty-two day war that begins with a suicide bombing at a checkpoint and a volley of Qassam rockets. Abuelaish’s home is hit by two shells. Three of his daughters and his niece are killed instantly, and two others are gravely wounded. Content warning for gore: He describes walking into what was once his daughters’ bedroom and seeing one of them decapitated, another’s body crushed, dismembered limbs, and his surviving daughter standing in the middle of the room holding her eye out of its socket. [END]

- Abuelaish calls an Israeli news reporter friend of his to try and stop the shelling and get medical care to his daughters. Shlomi Eldar answers live on Israeli television, and Israelis mobilize to expedite an ambulance crossing. His family spends the next three weeks in Israel with a daughter and a niece in critical condition; after many surgeries, both survive, and the family misses the funeral of the four girls who died.

- “The Quran says the deceased must be buried quickly, and it was impossible for me to get a permit to cross the border in time to be there for them. Even in death we are separated from our beloved ones.”

- “We struggled together, my children and I, and I tried to respond to the chorus of people calling for Israeli blood to atone for the deaths of my girls. One said, ‘Don't you hate the Israelis?’ Which Israelis am I supposed to hate? I replied. The doctors and nurses I work with? The ones who are trying to save Chaida's life and Shatha's eyesight? The babies I have delivered? Families like the Madmoonys, who gave me work and shelter when I was a kid? But the cries for reprisals didn't stop. What about the soldier who fired the deadly volleys from the tank — didn't I hate him? But that's how the system works here: we use hatred and blame to avoid the reality that eventually we need to come together. As for the soldier who shelled my house, I believe in his conscience he has already punished himself, that he is asking himself, ‘What have I done?’ And even if he doesn't think that now, tomorrow he will be a father. He will suffer for his actions when he sees how precious is the life of his child.”

- “To those who seek retaliation, I say, even if I got revenge on all the Israeli people, would it bring my daughters back? Hatred is an illness. It prevents healing and peace.”

- “Shlomi Eldar told me later that our few minutes together on television had left an indelible impression on his viewers. He said: ‘The broadcast had a huge effect on Israelis who until then didn't want to hear about anything from Gaza because they were so angry about the eight years of rockets being fired into Israel by Hamas. The majority of Israelis were in favour of the incursion. Now, for the first time, they understood what was happening inside Gaza. I'm told it was Izzeldin's voice and my face that made the story. I was very close to crying as I listened to his agony. That same agony affected the Israelis who were watching the program. Even the Prime Minister of Israel told me he was crying when he saw this on TV. It wasn't prime time, but even six and seven months later people tell me they saw it live on TV. I believe those five or seven minutes of television led to the ceasefire.’”

- “As much as I reached for calm and a larger mission during those terribly dark hours, my thoughts kept drifting back to the girls — those beautiful, innocent daughters of mine. I sat in the hospital, imagining their futures, their weddings, the contributions they would have made to the world. And I thought about how a dream of happiness can turn into a nightmare in a matter of seconds. A person you've nurtured for years is lost to you in a flash of destruction. It felt as though they'd been kidnapped from me.”

- “That's how things happen in the Middle East — the size of the rhetoric trumps the facts on the ground. In my experience, the vast majority of Israelis and Palestinians were horrified by the terrifying events of the three-week war. The reaction of ordinary people strengthens my case about our need to talk to each other, to listen, to act. And it reinforces my lifelong belief that out of bad comes something good. Maybe now I really have to believe that: the alternative is too dark to consider. My three precious daughters and my niece are dead. Revenge, a disorder that is endemic in the Middle East, won't get them back for me. It is important to feel anger in the wake of events like this, anger that signals that you do not accept what has happened, that spurs you to make a difference. But you have to choose not to spiral into hate. All the desire for revenge and hatred does is drive away wisdom, increase sorrow, and prolong strife. The potential good that could come out of this soul-searing bad is that together we might bridge the fractious divide that has kept us apart for six decades.”

- “This catastrophe that killed my daughters and niece has strengthened my thinking, deepened my belief about how to bridge the divide. I understand down to my bones that violence is futile, a waste of time, lives and resources, and has been proven to beget more violence. It does not work, just perpetuates a vicious circle. There's only one way to bridge the divide, to live together, to realize the goals of two peoples: we have to find the light to guide us to our goal. I'm not talking about the light of religious faith here, but light as a symbol of truth. The light that allows you to see, to clear away the fog—to find wisdom. To find the light of truth, you have to talk to, listen to and respect each other. Instead of wasting energy on hatred, use it to open your eyes and see what's really going on. Surely, if we can see the truth, we can live side by side.”

This is one of the best books on the conflict I’ve read. I have great respect for pragmatic peace activists; at every turn, you can feel his frustration and exasperation with the leaders who have no regard for life and are willing to sacrifice everything to gain nothing. Laying it all out like this makes it so clear how futile and senseless violence really is in matters of justice against justice, and need against need against need. I want to share the foundation that he started in memory of his daughters, to uplift and empower women in the Middle East through education:

About

Our Story In January 2009, an Israeli tank shelled the home of Dr. Izzeldin Abuelaish in the Gaza Strip and killed three of his daughters

[chutzpahchesed]

it is so embarrassing and demoralizing that the left cannot seem to dig up a candidate to endorse that isn’t either virulently antisemitic, virulently racist, virulently misogynistic, or a combination of all of the above. the way to combat the right is not by putting in representatives who are every bit as repugnant but in a different hat. racism dressed up in progressive trappings is still racism.

[chutzpahchesed]

Former pro-Palestinian activist explains leaving movement | The Jerusalem Post

Thomas said that October 7 marked a turning point, not immediately because of what she saw in the media, but because of what she did not see

Festival exhibit turned Stanford activist Taryn Thomas to Israel

The Nova Music Festival Exhibition, which recently opened in London, convinced a pro-Palestinian student to change her view of the October 7

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2026/05/27/received-death-threats-abandoning-pro-palestine-movement/

It wasn’t long after Hamas carried out its attack on Israel in Oct 7, 2023, that Taryn Thomas found herself swept up in the chorus of pro-Palestine activists mobilising against the Jewish state.

Even before Israel’s ground invasion of Gaza following the Oct 7 massacre,“I was scrolling through social media, and I only saw support for Palestine,” she recalls. “People I know, whether it was activists or people I look up to, were already posting their thoughts.”

Then aged 19 and studying biomedical science at the elite Stanford University in northern California, Thomas, an African American, was first introduced to the anti-Israel movement at Black Lives Matter protests in 2020, where Palestinian flags were flown by some activists. “I never really understood why, but we were told that in order for us to be free, Palestine has to be free,” she says.

She subsequently helped lead large protests against Israel and, within two weeks of Oct 7 2023, had joined an encampment of activists on campus protesting against Israel’s invasion of Gaza. Like many others, she donned a keffiyeh, the headscarf worn to demonstrate solidarity with Palestinians. “I really loved it because of the sense of belonging and the sense of purpose,” she says of the encampment. “It was like an instant community.”

Besides fellow students, Thomas was encouraged by “faculty members like history professors” who “validated the movement”. “It seemed like everyone was a lot more educated than me and very certain and sure of themselves that this is a genocide,” says Thomas, who is now 21. “The only safe position was the more radical one in the encampment.”

‘I was confused by what our mission was’

Thomas grew up in Riverside County, one of the few Republican counties in the otherwise “very liberal California”. That, together with racist abuse at school, influenced her political outlook. “I thought going further to the Left would be the solution to the extremism I was seeing from the Right,” she says.

Huge demonstrations took place at universities across the US in the months that followed Oct 7, with protesters confronting the educational institutions with their demands – including to divest from Israel and cut ties with counterpart Israeli institutions.

While the movement was largely peaceful, some demonstrations turned violent and led to clashes with police. “One of our protests got out of hand, and that kind of made me take a step back,” says Thomas.

This was in June 2024, when several militant students broke into the office of Stanford’s president, causing hundreds of thousands of dollars of damage. “They spray-painted disgusting things, such as ‘Pigs taste best when dead’, ‘Death to America’, ‘Death to Israel’, and ‘Kill cops’,” Thomas recalls.

“I was confused by what our mission was. At what point did the pro-Palestine movement turn into this anti-Israel, anti-America movement? We completely lost sight of the victims we were claiming to be supporting and fighting for.”

Yet those behind the vandalism “doubled down”, she says, and justified their actions, “even though Jewish students said they felt unsafe”. She explains: “They felt like they couldn’t go to their classes, they were getting harassed and doxxed [having personal information published online] and things like that. Essentially, we completely lost our minds.”

A drastic change of heart

Then, in October 2024, Thomas was one of many students who received an open invitation to the Nova Music Festival Exhibition in Los Angeles. Recently opened in London, the exhibition aims to recreate the festival site where 413 people were murdered by Hamas, and many more were injured or taken hostage.

Nova exhibition

The recently opened Nova exhibition in London commemorates the 413 young people murdered by Hamas at the festival Credit: Jeff Gilbert

“Initially, I laughed, thinking, ‘What’s this propaganda?’” Something piqued her interest, however, so she decided to go. “I’d heard about the festival and was curious, but I’d only really heard the reasoning, ‘Well, why would you have a festival next to a contested border? Essentially, they were asking for it.’

“I was hoping it was going to reaffirm my position, that I would find Zionist lies and whatever. I went with a very closed mind.” Three hours later, Thomas emerged feeling “so lost”.

“I experienced a lot of cognitive dissonance – what I was seeing versus what I’d been told. It was like I arrived a year too late to a funeral. I had so many questions, but I really had no one I could talk to about this. All of my friends were from the encampment. I’d never met an Israeli or talked to them about their experiences – I was fluent in the state’s sins, but I was illiterate in its people.”

Seeing pictures and footage of the young festival-goers hit home for Thomas. “They were kids my age, just dancing, and then fleeing for their lives the next moment. I could see myself in them. I could have been sending a last ‘I love you’ message to my mum. I felt so much empathy and sadness.”

One element in particular changed everything – an audio clip of a jubilant Hamas fighter phoning his father to let him know he’d killed 10 Jews. “My heart sank because these [were meant to be] our martyrs. [This was] the resistance we were claiming we wanted. When we called for any means necessary, I didn’t realise that’s what it meant.”

Months later, Thomas was invited on a trip to Israel organised by a group combatting anti-Semitism on campus. “I knew if I was going to continue to speak on this, I needed to see it for myself,” she says.

During the 10-day trip last March, she met with Israelis, Ethiopian Jews, Palestinians, Druze and Bedouin. “I was shocked at how much diversity I saw – I didn’t even know Israel had black people,” she said.

On the fourth day, the group had to take cover during a missile attack. “Our guide told us to get on the ground, and I put my hands over my neck and prayed. “I thought about the irony of how I’d called for the divestment of the very system I was praying for,” she says. “It [the missile] didn’t care about my politics or what I posted or any of that. I was a target, a body on the ground, and I felt utterly useless.”

Fortunately the missile was intercepted and the trip continued, but the experience left Thomas shaken. She says it made her realise “how cushy and comfortable a life” she had in America, and that she’d not realised the “real consequences” of what she’d been calling for.

‘It felt like being stoned publicly’

Back home, she posted a picture of her trip online – a decision that cost her dearly. “My best friend of three years asked, ‘Is this in Israel?’ I said, ‘Yeah, do you want to talk about it?’ She immediately blocked me. I hadn’t even expressed anything. I literally said I went. Period.”

Her post opened the floodgates. “I lost every single friend”, while her classmates “posted really disgusting things”, including labelling her a “genocidal apologist”. Thomas says she was doxxed, and received death threats and racist abuse – and that her family was also targeted. “It was like a crusade and felt like being stoned publicly.”

She now takes a dim view of the encampment atmosphere. “It completely insulates you in this echo chamber and indoctrinates you. If you had any questions, you’d lose your social belonging – the last thing you wanted to be called was a Zionist.”

She adds that the protesters’ “attention turned into this hatred” and there were constant calls for the “normalisation of violence”. Some activists, for example, celebrated the assassinations of Charlie Kirk, the Right-wing political activist, and Brian Thompson, the UnitedHealthcare chief executive, she says.

The mental toll had become so heavy on Thomas that she stepped away from her studies late last year. What helped get her through this tough period is the new friendships she has formed, including some with Jewish students.

“They knew I came from the encampments and they engaged with me, intellectually argued with me, disagreed with me, but we still broke bread on Shabbat,” she says. “I learned from my [now] best friend that she was doxxed because of people within our movement. I know I have to repair some of those damages.”

‘Open your heart and put down those megaphones’

Thomas says her family are not politically engaged in the issue of Israel and Gaza and she has faced questions from her mother about her involvement. “She was just like, ‘Why are you doing this? It isn’t your burden to shoulder.’ She just wants her family to be safe and protected.”

But Thomas hopes that by sharing her story it will encourage others to experience the Nova exhibition. “I hope the people who are protesting will come – I just want them to go inside,” she says. “None of this is political. Just look and learn the stories – you don’t have to agree. Come in with an open heart and an open mind and put down those megaphones.”

As for Thomas, she hopes to return to university in September, but in the meantime, she is determined to do what she can to increase cross-community understanding. “A lot of us on the pro-Palestine side were recruited through empathy, so I think we can be reached through it too. Because of this unique perspective I have of what changed my heart, I think I can hopefully change other people’s.

“I’m not Jewish. I’m an African American woman. But a lot of our struggles are parallel,” she says. “We’re seeing an increase in anti-Semitism, we’re seeing an increase in extremism and political violence. There’s just no way that I can now sit back, kick my feet up and call it a day.”

[entomologist-of-abraham]

One of the things I've been highly critical of as a politically homeless Leftist is that I've watch the majority of the political movement and associated groups become radicalized by accelerationists who have slowly been taking over for the last decade. This article by one of the founders of the DSA, Maurice Isserman, happened across my feed about this very type of radicalization, what it inevitably leads to, and why he left the DSA soon after 10/7 occurred. You see, Isserman was a member of a group prior to the DSA known as SDS that fell apart for similar reasons that we see other political organizations and movements collapse; factional infighting and attempted coups. In short, the SDS collapsed due to entryists. In political vernacular "entryists" are persons belonging to another group, government, organization, or state that infiltrate another with the intent to subvert, damage, and/or takeover. Their origin is often said to be the 1930s in Trotskyist political strategies (it is also known as "The French Turn" in some circles) but the tactic itself predates the formalization of the term itself. As such, this is not a term a lot of people are familiar with, but are familiar with the tactics. As Isserman puts it -

What do I mean by “entryists”? In left-wing parlance, the term refers to tightly organized groups who, without sharing the beliefs of larger and more loosely organized bodies, join and proceed to either wreck or, where possible, capture them for ends at odds with the spirit and purpose of the original members. Without descending too deeply into the weeds of sectarian history, entryism has been a recurring phenomenon on the American left since the 1930s.

While not a traditional entryist group, I think back to the Tea Party Movement and how they took over the Republican Party during the Obama administration (technically they were an insurgent political faction that radicalized within the party rather than an outside faction that joined in order to capture it, but there are similarities in their methods). I also think back to the Occupy Wall Street Movement and entryists took over before it could even be organized into something cohesive. I remember the infighting from different factions who wanted to push different messages in Philly, the confusion that happened due to said infighting, and the abandonment of the movement by people not members of said factions because they did not agree with the intended escalation of the messaging by factions/faction leaders and the disorganization that resulted from the politicking. Ironically, Isserman talks about this type of phenomenon in regards to how the SDS collapsed.

All told, in that last frantic year of SDS’s existence, the factions in the organization (PL’s “worker-student alliance,” Weatherman, one or two others) amounted to no more than a few thousand members. The other 98,000 rank-and-filers (including me, and most of the small chapter to which I belonged) helplessly watched the unfolding disaster that left us politically homeless.

Isserman talks about how this pattern has repeated multiple times for Left Wing movements in the USA. I've personally seen this same pattern repeat ad nauseum with Leftist movements and political groups I have been a part of or aware of. As soon as something starts to get momentum then the entryists show up and try to take it over. This results in the collapse of the entire thing before any meaningful work can actually get done. The persons who took over and caused the collapse then return to shrieking about how this is proof that their radical beliefs are valid and the entire system/government/world/etc needs to be thrown out and that you can't trust "normies".

Isserman then makes this statement which is truly poignant -

When DSA was founded in 1982 it represented the merger of two groups, one based in the remnants of the labor/socialist left, the other drawn mostly from veterans of the New Left, both determined to learn from the political disasters of the 1960s.

The founders of the DSA were persons who watched the SDS collapse from factional infighting due to entryism. They were veterans who knew how bad factions were and put it into the bylaws. From Isserman -

Tens of thousands of eager young recruits were energized by the 2016 presidential bid of democratic socialist Bernie Sanders (although Sanders was not a member of DSA), and the election to Congress of DSA members Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Rashida Tlaib in 2018, joined by Cori Bush and Jamaal Bowman in 2020.

All well and good—except for the return of the entryists. Suddenly, in the eyes of revolutionary purists in a host of small competing sects, DSA was no longer to be sneered at as just a reformist swamp. “Why rob banks?” career criminal Willie Sutton was once allegedly asked by a reporter. “Because that’s where the money is,” he replied. The exchange is apocryphal, but substitute warm bodies for cold cash, and it offers a concise explanation for DSA’s sudden attractiveness to sectarian strategists. Unknown numbers—hundreds, perhaps more—started joining in 2016, some of them former members of defunct Marxist-Leninist groups, others (in violation of DSA bylaws) still belonging to and carrying out the agendas of such groups. They proceeded to quarrel and compete among themselves, splitting and recombining under various banners like “Red Star,” “Marxist Unity Group,” and even the “Communist Caucus.” But they remained united in one overarching shared aim—to take a well-meaning, not particularly well-organized, and essentially social democratic organization still committed in practice to the original DSA vision of creating “the left wing of the possible,” and reinvent it as the mass vanguard party of the proletariat that somehow they had never been able to pull off while operating under their own banners of deepest red.

The founders of the DSA knew how dangerous factions and caucuses were. They knew how entryists worked because they all saw it happen in real time. But, and I think this is key, the new members were young and distrusting of their elders because in their minds nothing has been done. As such, the bylaws, rules, SOPs, and procedures were and are just ignored because "they know better". If you have any experience in queer spaces as an elder queer it's not unlike younger queers dismissing anything their elders say or advise them about because "they know better", and then having the exact problem that the older individual was trying to help prevent. As such, entryists and their ideologies were allowed to take over the DSA, all that it stood for, and change it into a monstrously antisemitic organization that demands purity and adherence to certain factions and their ideologies. All of their candidates have horrid foreign policy positions and the national organization (and local chapters) have all put out lip service messaging that barely hides the factional ideals that have subverted the organization from what it once was. Isserman closes out his article with this -

So why am I quitting DSA? There are many reasons. But in the end, the most important comes down to the Sarah Silverman Rule #1 for Judging One’s Political Associates. An organization that can’t take a stand condemning a right-wing terrorist group that set out to murder as many Jewish civilians, including children and infants, as it can lay its hands on, has forfeited the right to call itself democratic socialist. It has, as Sarah says “lost me forever.”

Personally, I was once a DSA member. I still consider myself a demsoc and agree with the majority of the political beliefs. But I do not consider myself a DemSoc or DSA member anymore. They lost me years prior to 10/7 because I watched the factions take over and antisemitism become a norm in local and national meetings since 2018. I heard antisemitic conspiracy theories regularly from DSA members that were couched in Left Wing jargon constantly, things that I had heard constantly from both sides of the political spectrum with just different dog whistles attached (e.g. "Rothschilds" for the Left and "Soros" for the Right). Inevitably the DSA will collapse from factional infighting, as do all groups that experience this type of takeover. Eventually the momentum of the Omnicause will wane and the factions will realize their political alliances were temporary. But until then we stuck watching it produce candidates who say things right out of the Nazi playbook, but in a Left Wing fashion. (Please go read the entire article, it's very well written and goes in to more detail).

[tvirusresearchlabs]

A pro pal tried to debate me irl and I destroyed them in one shot. They started talking about how the Jews "were thinking of settling in other places like Argentina", and I replied,

"You love open immigration and open borders, why would you care where they choose to settle."

I completely oneshotted them and they changed the topic immediately.

I mean, yeah, Jews have always lived in the land of Israel, and it is where those in the diaspora historically originated. So why would they decide anywhere but Israel is their homeland? This argument never seems to work on people though.

[swfan144]

A note to Tumblr people, especially the dirtbag leftists: supporting Israel and supporting Netanyahu and the Likud party are two entirely different things. I want Israel to be mended, not destroyed. And I want the Palestinians to have a homeland. You know how that happens? By getting Yair Golan and the Democrats into power instead.

[sword-wielding-sapphic]

first rule of fandom is everything goes back to destiel

second rule of fandom is everything goes back to kirk/spock

third rule of fandom is everything goes back to holmes & watson

fourth rule of fandom is everything goes back to achilles & patroclus

[sword-wielding-sapphic]

the funny thing is. I originally typed out "fifth rule of fandom is everything goes back to gilgamesh & enkidu" but then I thought 'no, I can't trust that people will be familiar with the epic of gilgamesh'

I should have known. nerd ass website.

[featherweightwing]

You know when it comes to Graham Platner I’m glad that a lot of women on the left are finally waking up to how blatantly misogynistic a lot of leftist men truly are. They’re seeing the way these men are talking about Platner’s accuser: calling her a liar, calling her a “Zionist plant”, saying that she was asking for it, and a lot of women are rightfully horrified and fed up.

But I also think a lot of these women need to ask themselves a simple question: why were you ok with them doing this to Israeli women? When Hasan Piker said that he “didn’t care” if women were raped on Oct 7th, when they called Israeli women who came forward about their assaults liars, when they mocked the suffering of the hostages and said that Hamas “treated them well”, when they said they deserved it, when they joked that they were “too ugly to be raped”, where was your outrage over that behavior then? Why were you silent when it was Israeli women, and why did you think it would stop there?

What starts with Jews never ends with Jews.

[aurora-eos]

maimonideznuts is a pretty blatant zionist

Why the fuck are you going after random Jews though? Do you seriously believe that Aussie Tumblr user Maimonideznuts has a lot of influence on Israeli politics?

Maimonideznuts supports a two state solution and peace between Israel and Palestine. If you actually care about the civilians affected by this conflict, that is objectively the best outcome to reduce the amount of suffering and harm in the region and it has the best chance to create a more lasting peace for both Israelis and Palestinians. Also, go do some reading and learn about why Jews live in Israel.

I also gotta point out that their pinned includes a call for peace and a fundraising link for Palestinian and Lebanese civilians affected by the war. Your bio says that you support terrorists and want Americans to commit suicide. You also have only ever interacted with me once and it was to complain about a random Jew who is objectively doing more to heal the world than you are doing, given that they post about disability awareness and cool dinosaurs while you post about…lesbians supposedly harming trans men, being mad at the entire concept of transfeminism, and hating religious people.

Go home and rethink your life.