i have a degree in history and a masters in information science. if you truly want to argue with me you’d best bring your sources. side blog to keep this off main because i don’t want death threats lmao
"Israel attacked first" I am begging you to look up what actions actually qualify as acts of aggression and uses of force beyond the literal "who shot first"
Just the basics of the international laws of war makes that talking point pretty silly - without even making any arguments about how broken and dated self defence as defined by art. 51 of the UN charter is (or how broken international law is in general.)
The 1967 war is a great example, because it's such a commonly accepted narrative that Israel started the war, which is laughable when you consider what actually led up to the start of the war:
Closing the Strait of Tiran to all Israeli shipping, a.k.a. a naval blockade? (see Rome statue art. 8) Not aggressive.
Constant rhetoric from Syria, Egypt, et.al. threatening and promising to invade Israel in order to exterminate the state? (see UN charter art. 2(4) Not aggressive
Israel's neighbours Jordan, Egypt, Syria and Iraq forming an armed alliance? Not aggressive.
Trying to - in a desert region - divert the Jordan river from Israel? Not aggressive.
Funding, training, supplying and facilitating Palestinian insurgency forces to attack Israel? (see UN charter art. 2(4), Rome art. 8) Not aggressive.
Mobilising Egyptian troops on the Israeli border? Not aggressive.
Expelling UN forces from Egyptian territory bordering Israel? Not aggressive.
Israel seeing all this, knowing that an existential war on all fronts is going to start any minute, knowing that Jordan's air force could reach Jerusalem in like 10 minutes, and therefore striking first as to not immediately get eliminated? Super duper aggressive
You'll forgive me for not taking your arguments about Israeli pre-emptive strikes seriously.
if you are a regular degular person—while i expect you to generally know what you're talking about if you're gonna be involved in the conversation, i don't need you to be able to outline all the particulars of what was discussed at the 2000 camp david summit.
if you are CO-CHAIR OF THE DSA, a political party that has made palestine its ENTIRE PLATFORM for the past THREE YEARS—yes, i expect you to have knowledge of the stages of the peace process. if you want people to listen to your solutions, i expect you to know what has and has not already been tried, and to know why you would or wouldn't have been happy with the major proposals made at each major step. including at camp david in 2000.
you just demonstrated for the ten thousandth time to the israeli right wing that even the most politically-involved and aware pro-palestine voices can be utterly ignored because you don't know anything and have no meaningful ideas. you're making things worse. hope this helps.
In 1993, the Oslo Accords were signed, creating the framework for a future Palestinian state. In 1995, Oslo II was signed, which divided the West Bank into three parts: Area A, Area B, and Area C. Area A is under full Palestinian control. Area B is under Palestinian civil control with Israeli security. And Area C is under full Israeli control. (It also divided Gaza into Areas A, B, and C. Gaza is supposed to be Area A, but due to a little thing known as "the government in charge of Gaza killed a thousand Israelis in one day", there is substantial Israeli presence.) Jewish Israelis are barred from entering Area A, for their own safety. (Arab Israelis are also theoretically barred, but this ban isn't enforced as strictly.) Area A includes most of the West Bank's population.
This was supposed to be temporary, renegotiated after five years.
So, five years pass, and Clinton gets together the leader of Israel, Ehud Barak, and the leader of the Palestinian Authority, Yasser Arafat, at Camp David to talk it out.
The Israelis really, really, want peace. Ehud Barak is begging for a deal.
As Robert Malley and Hussein Agha write in an article fairly critical of Israel and Barak, "Barak was eager for a deal, wanted it achieved during Clinton’s term in office, and had surrounded himself with some of Israel’s most peace-minded politicians." Malley and Agha continue later that "If there is one issue that Israelis agree on, it is that Barak broke every conceivable taboo and went as far as any Israeli prime minister had gone or could go". They criticize him for, seemingly, being too flexible and acquiescent: "Yet, at the same time, he gave clear hints that Israel was willing to show more flexibility if Arafat was prepared to “contemplate” the endgame" (in a negative context). According to them Barak made massive concessions: sovereignty over all Arab sectors of East Jerusalem, a Palestinian state in over 90 percent of the West Bank with land swaps to help compensate. These were huge and changing. According to them, Arafat demanded sovereignty over the Temple Mount, as opposed to Israel's proposal for Palestinian "permanent custodianship" -- the Temple Mount, the holiest site in Judaism (it now has the Al-Aqsa Compound on top of it), was to be in Palestinian hands, and that was a red line for him.
"Barak apparently took the view that, faced with a sufficiently attractive proposal and an appropriately unattractive alternative, the Palestinians would have no choice but to say yes. In effect, each successive Palestinian “no” led to the next best Israeli assessment of what, in their right minds, the Palestinians couldn’t turn down." Agha and Malley write. This was to be a dangerous mistake. Arafat turned down offer after offer after offer, making no counter-proposals and suggesting, contrary to the archeological, historical, and even Muslim record, that the Second Temple was in Nablus. (Previously, I have referenced him as saying it was in Hebron; this was in error, and I apologize for saying so. I do not know how the two got mixed up in my mind.) Shockingly, this did not suggest to Barak and the Israeli negotiating team that he was a reliable partner.
In late September 2000, a few months after the talks collapsed, Ariel Sharon, the leader of the right-wing party Likud (who would later unilaterally withdraw from Gaza, paving the way for Hamas' rule, but that's another story), visited the Temple Mount. Again: this is the holiest site in Judaism, and is, as basically all accounts agree, the site of the destroyed Second Temple. Sharon did not pray there. Sharon did not do much of anything there. He merely existed on the Temple Mount as a Jew.
That is what started the Second Intifada (which was, at best, tolerated by Arafat), in which over a thousand Jews died. A Jew existing on the holiest site in Judaism.
As Hussein and Agha continue, in late December, in the middle of the Second Intifada, Clinton and Barak made yet another proposal, which they summarize as follows: "Palestine would have sovereignty over 94 to 96 percent of the West Bank and it would as well have land belonging to pre-1967 Israel equivalent to another 1 to 3 percent of West Bank territory. Palestinian refugees would have the right to return to their homeland in historic Palestine, a right that would guarantee their unrestricted ability to live in Palestine while subjecting their absorption into Israel to Israel’s sovereign decision. In Jerusalem, all that is Arab would be Palestinian, all that is Jewish would be Israeli. Palestine would exercise sovereignty over the Haram [Temple Mount/Har HaBayit] and Israel over the Western Wall[.]"
Israel gave and gave and gave so much, and what it got in return was suicide bombings.
That is the environment in which Sharon came to power. That is, in many ways, what destroyed the Israeli left and its promise of peace. Because they tried peace, they tried so very, very, hard for peace, they gave up so much that no one else would be expected to give up -- and what they got in return was death and terror and fear. That is what Israelis think of when they hear intifada.
And I am not excusing Benjamin Netanyahu or his actions, nor the abandonment of the peace process, nor Israel's admittedly heavy-handed response to the Second Intifada.
But if you don't understand why Israelis are skeptical of peace, if you don't understand the cause of this view, if you don't understand what caused the collapse of the peace talks -- why the hell should I listen to you? Why should I care?
You don't need to know the precise details of the negotiations. What you need to know is this:
In 2000, Israel tried peace and was rejected, and then a Jew visited the holiest site in Judaism, and a thousand Jews died for that, and, as that was happening, Israel still tried again with even better terms for Palestinians, and was still rejected.
I feel like I should note here, because I didn't clarify:
The reason Oslo is still what the West Bank operates under today is because of the collapse of Camp David 2000. The reason the West Bank is all patchy and pockmarked is because it was supposed to be temporary and revised later. But then what I described above happened, and now we're stuck with it. This wasn't supposed to be the status quo for thirty years.
New York Magazine spent an issue mapping Southwest Asian and North African New York and could not find the Jews of Aleppo, Baghdad, or Sana'
It’s something that you can only do in New York City. At least, that’s my opinion. Explore any culinary scene in the world, and you can do it within the five boroughs. When I lived in the city, I ate my way around the Middle East without once thinking about the politics. It was my way of being in the region from afar.
Miznon or Taim on the way home, Miss Ada or Laser Wolf when someone else was paying, 12 Chairs when I wanted jachnun on a weekend. Not only Israeli places. There was also King of Falafel and Shawarma in Astoria, the most Palestinian establishment I have been to in North America, where I was careful not to talk politics.
Israeli food tells the story of where Jews were forced to leave and where they found new homes. It might be the only cuisine where someone thought to put hummus on an Austrian schnitzel, and it works. Not only does it work, but it’s delicious.
There is also kubbeh in beet soup, which you have to eat with rice, at a spot on Sixth Avenue called Kubeh. Iraqi Jewish food, my family’s food, sold in Manhattan to people who mostly had no idea. It reminded me of my grandmother’s kitchen, though hers was always better.
I was once brave enough to try rolling kubbeh in our apartment on the Upper East Side, but the dumplings came apart in the pot. I wanted to impress my girlfriend (now, my wife) and failed miserably.
That was when I understood I did not have my savta’s technique, and neither does my father. He settles for the occasional omelet and challah French toast.
Melanie Shurka, who opened Kubeh, did the smart thing. After she looked for that technique in cookbooks and found almost nothing, she flew to Israel to learn it from Kurdish, Iraqi, and Persian women, because their kitchens are the only places it survives. Their expulsion is the reason it does.
New York Magazine has now published an entire issue about that world, and it has a rule about which Jews belong to it.
The issue is called Habibi City, and the cover story is by Zaina Arafat. Partway through, she stops to define the term on which the whole package rests. Belonging to the SWANA community (Southwest Asia and North Africa), she writes, meant holding a set of common beliefs: Palestinian human rights, Gaza as a genocide, social justice over capital, caring as nonnegotiable.
Only one of those beliefs is a test. In the piece, Arafat describes Kimia Zakerin’s Farsi Club, which started after the Woman Life Freedom marches in Washington Square. She also interviews El Atigh Abba, the owner of a Crown Heights café, who cannot return to Mauritania because a fatwa was issued against him for his writing about the Arab Spring.
Neither Kimia nor El Atigh risk their place in the SWANA community by speaking out against their regimes, nor would they lose it by staying silent. Israel is, of course, the only country where that determines membership.
In the essay, every Jew is described as anti-Zionist, an Arab Jew, or as someone’s non-Zionist partner. That label comes first and is what lets them be included. To be a Jew in Habibi City, you have to answer the Israel question the ‘right way.’ Criticizing the Netanyahu government isn’t enough for Arafat; most Israelis I know do that all the time. The real test is about the state itself, whether it should exist at all, and no other group faces that kind of standard.
Arafat knows this. She grants that Israel is geographically part of the region, but that is where it ends: topographic acceptance. Whether Israelis can claim a connection depends on the politics surrounding SWANA, and on a person’s ethnic background. She has just raised the Mizrahi question, and she leaves it where it fell.
About 75,000 Syrian Jews live half an hour from Abba’s café. They came from Aleppo and Damascus in the early 1900s and settled along Ocean Parkway in South Brooklyn. Syrian-American writer Joseph Sutton called what they built Aleppo in Flatbush. Later, the community took in Egyptians, Moroccans, and Persians as each of those countries forced out its Jews. Shaare Zion is a synagogue on Ocean Parkway, with a dome visible from the street.
Many Ocean Parkway families are more religious and keep to themselves, which someone will point out. Tens of thousands of Israelis in New York City do not, many of them Mizrahi, running restaurants, throwing parties, and filling the same rooms Arafat counts as a scene. They are not in the essay either.
My family was forced out of Iraq in 1951, along with almost all of the country’s Jews, a community that had been there for 2,500 years. Their belongings were confiscated on the way out. They moved to Be’er Sheva in the Negev Desert; the city was built mostly by immigrants who arrived the same way
Arafat writes about exile and expulsion throughout the piece. El Atigh Abba, who cannot go home to Mauritania. The Yemenis picked up at the airport and fed on Atlantic Avenue, but not once about the 850,000 Jews displaced from “SWANA.”
Listing what SWANA New Yorkers still face, Arafat names xenophobia, Islamophobia, and Zionism. Two bigotries and a national movement, filed together without comment.
About half of Israeli Jews have roots in the Middle East and North Africa, and they are in Israel because the region threw them out. Netanyahu’s government is a disgrace, and there are things Israel has done in Gaza that are unacceptable, and growing settler violence in the West Bank is a disgrace to Zionism and to Jews. I can hold all of that and still notice exactly what listing Zionism beside Islamophobia is.
The one person I felt a connection to in the piece was El Atigh. He is different. He hosted a Hebrew-Arabic language exchange only to see his comments flooded with people telling him to cancel. He refused.
In July, he hosted a Palestinian singer and an Israeli musician on his stage together. He spends the essay pushing back on his own side. Arafat clearly admires him, but she does not seem to notice they disagree.
So 20 pages celebrating the SWANA diaspora in New York City. The Jews of those countries appear only if they publicly disown the state that took many of them in.
And that brings us back to the Syrian families living on Ocean Parkway in South Brooklyn. They have lived in New York longer than most SWANA countries have existed, and are not mentioned at all. I don’t think it was intentional; they were simply not considered, and most would not have passed Arafat’s test anyway.
Arafat ends her piece on sumud, the Palestinian Arabic word for steadfastness, referring to a quiet refusal to disappear. She should know she has spent thousands of words asking us to do just that.
The Jews of Baghdad had a word for it too. In their Judeo-Arabic, ḏ̣all meant to stay, and when put in front of another verb, it meant to keep doing something. Staying and persisting were the same word. They were there for 2,500 years, and spoke Arabic for the last 1,300 of them. They were in Baghdad before the language was.
Pakistan has accelerated its drive to expel Afghans who are undocumented or had temporary permission to stay.
Pakistani authorities have sharply escalated abusive raids, arbitrary detentions, and forced returns of Afghan refugees following renewed bo
Democratic candidate for New York City mayor, Zohran Mamdani, delivers remarks while campaigning at the Hanson Place Seventh-Day Adventist C
New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani has drawn backlash for attending the city’s annual parade celebrating Pakistan — after refusing to attend a parade commemorating Israel over alleged human rights concerns.
“Yesterday, I gathered with residents at the Allama Iqbal Community Center’s Mela to commemorate Pakistan’s Independence Day and honor the contributions Pakistani New Yorkers have made to our city,” Mamdani posted on X/Twitter on Monday.
“Today and everyday, we celebrate this community whose open arms, determination, and dreams for a better life have helped shape the city they call home,” he added.
Pakistan Day Parade in New York City typically takes place in Manhattan in late August to commemorate Pakistan’s Independence Day. The parade featured live music, speakers, community leaders, and cultural programming.
Mamdani’s presence at the parade raised eyebrows among observers due to his refusal to attend the city’s annual Israel Day Parade in late May, pointing to what he repeatedly described as Israeli human rights abuses.
“I said on the campaign trail that I wouldn’t be attending the parade, and I’ve made my views on the Israeli government abundantly clear,” Mamdani said in May.
The mayor has repeatedly accused Israel of committing “genocide” against civilians in Gaza and erecting an “apartheid” regime in the West Bank. He also stated in a CNN interview last month that he won’t express support for Israel because he can’t “support any state that privileges one religion over another, whether it is Israel, Saudi Arabia, or anywhere else.”
Israel does not have an official state religion, and non-Jewish Israelis enjoy the same equal rights throughout the country as Jews. In contrast, Islam is the official state religion in Saudi Arabia, and non-Muslims face certain legal and religious restrictions.
New York Gov. Kathy Hochul, City Council Speaker Adrienne Adams, City Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch, State Attorney General Letitia James, and former City Mayors Eric Adams and Michael Bloomberg all attended the parade.
Critics of Mamdani questioned why the mayor attended the Pakistan Day Parade, given the country’s human rights record.
Religious minorities such as Christians, Shi’a Muslims, Hindus, and Ahmadis are often the subject of persecution within Pakistan.
Pakistan, officially an Islamic state, imposes strict blasphemy laws, which criminalize any commentary about the Prophet Muhammad contrary to the Quran, effectively restricting public expressions of non-Muslim faith. Pakistan’s constitution discriminates against the Ahmadi minority specifically, banning the group from self-identifying as Muslims, preaching their faith, or inviting others to join their faith.
Under the Illegal Foreigners Repatriation Plan initiated in 2023, Pakistan has expelled a reported 2.68 million Afghans from the country, alleging that the minority group represents a security threat. Human rights organizations have called on Pakistan to cease the forced deportation of Afghans.
Pakistan is also accused of maintaining strict restrictions on speech and media, having allegedly arrested journalists and targeting media organizations critical of the government. This year, the government implemented a new policy restricting foreign journalists from reporting outside of Islamabad without securing government approval.
Mamdani’s decision to participate in festivities commemorating a country embroiled in a variety of human rights scandals raises further scrutiny as to whether the mayor imposes a double standard on Jewish people. The mayor has been accused by several local Jewish leaders of fomenting antisemitism through his incessant anti-Israel rhetoric.
Anti-Jewish hate crimes continued to dominate New York City’s bias-crime landscape in the first half of 2026. The police recorded 178 confirmed anti-Jewish hate crimes — 55.3% of all confirmed hate crimes citywide — even though Jews comprise only about 10% of New York City’s population. By comparison, police confirmed 21 anti-Muslim hate crimes and 33 targeting sexual orientation, meaning anti-Jewish incidents outnumbered anti-Muslim incidents by more than 8 to 1.
I’m going to say that I couldn’t care less that he refused to attend the Israel parade. I do care that his standards and his criticisms are discriminatory and hypocritical and inconsistent.
On the magazine’s map of Middle Eastern food, my grandmothers’ kitchens has no right to exist.
My surname, Mazzig, comes from Amazigh, the name of the indigenous people of North Africa. You probably know them as Berbers, which comes from the same root as barbarians. For obvious reasons, they prefer the name Amazigh, the name they call themselves, which means ‘free people.’ At the end of the seventh century, when Arab armies swept west across the Maghreb, colonizing every land, an Amazigh queen named Dihya led the resistance against the conquest. The Islamic armies called her a Jewish witch, Al Kahina. Even after the conquest, my father’s family carried the name Mazig through thirteen centuries in Tunisia, through every empire that claimed the place, until they were forced to leave to Israel with what little they could carry. My last name is older than the Arab presence in the land where it was given to me.
I’m telling you all of this because New York Magazine has just devoted its cover story to defining my region, and by its definition, I am not from it.
The piece is called Habibi City. Its centerpiece essay celebrates the rise of what it calls SWANA cuisine in New York, restaurants of Southwest Asia and North Africa, a region the magazine maps as running “from Palestine to Iran to Sudan.” And, don’t get me wrong, parts of this piece certainly deserve praise; the reporting on Little Syria in the 1880s is lovingly done. The portraits of the Persian and Afghan chefs are warm and informational, and those chefs have earned every praise. The history of Arab restaurateurs having to hide behind the word “Mediterranean” to survive post-9/11 suspicion is real injustice that ought not to be forgotten.
I also understand the reasoning behind using the acronym. SWANA exists because older labels erased people. The term “Middle East” was coined in naval strategy to denote a region defined by its distance from Europe. “The Arab world” swallows the Amazigh, the Kurds, the Copts, the Assyrians, the Yazidis, the Druze, the Christians the Zoroastrians, and every people who lived in the region before the conquests and never stopped living there. The magazine notes that letters keep getting added to the acronym so that no one is left out.
But the magazine is wrong. Every indigenous people of the region gets a letter, except one.
One million Jews were driven from Southwest Asia and North Africa in the twentieth century. From Baghdad, where my mother’s family had lived since the Babylonian exile. From Tunisia, Cairo, Sana’a, Tripoli, Aleppo, and Tehran. It was one of the largest forced displacement in the modern history of the region that the magazine has just spent a full issue celebrating— and the essay does not mention it once.
The omission is clearly intentional, and it’s not the only part I have a problem with.
Consider what the essay does say about Jews from the region. It quotes an old joke, “To succeed in Israeli cooking you need a Moroccan grandmother and if you don’t have one you better invent one.” It’s a subtle dig that implies Israeli identity is invented. But I did not invent the taste of my grandmother’s homemade hummus or the way her amba stings my tongue with just enough spice. Those meals she spent hours to prepare were not an illusion, but memories I hold dear. Maybe the food wasn’t first invented by a Jew in Israel, but Israel is the one place Jews can make it in peace, without headlines tearing us apart for stealing our own recipes.
The ridiculous gatekeeping of “Arab” cuisine is a structure that exists only to exclude certain people, in this case Jews. Think about the reality of food, for a minute. Let’s look at Shakshuka, a food my grandmother has made for me many times and a food people have said I have “appropriated” many times. The Tunisian food historian Rafram Chaddad traces it to the Amazigh triangle, the stretch of southern Tunisia and its borderlands where the indigenous people of North Africa simmered vegetable stews centuries before the Arab conquest. Before Amazigh people were forced to learn to pronounce the word “Habibi.”
It is also a dish whose most prominent ingredients are eggs and a tomato sauce. Tomatoes are, of course, from South America. So, obviously, it isn’t an ancient Arab dish, is it? And yet millions of Arabs enjoy it every day because, of course they do. It’s food; it exists to be shared and enjoyed, and when we discover ways to make it better, we make it better. Yet with Jews, our enjoyment is seen as nothing more than a diabolical scheme to steal what isn’t ours.
The essay even profiles an Israeli chef and describes her “Persian and Yemeni Jewish roots” without ever pausing to consider why the chef ended up in Israel. The answer is, obviously, that Jews were exiled from numerous Muslim countries simply because they were Jewish. But the essay fails to acknowledge the history of the region it is trying to educate on because it does not fit a narrative they are trying to spread.
‘Palestinian tartare’ is highlighted in the piece, too. A Levantine dish that Syrian Jewish families in New York have been serving for a century. One of the largest Syrian Jewish communities on Earth lives there, in fact. But the essay doesn’t mention them when it goes on about Syrian food. I wonder why.
Once you see the gatekeeping, you can’t unsee it. What seemed at first like a wonderful deep dive into Middle Eastern and North African history is instead a purity test that the author is determined to pass. Where it once mourned the harsh reality of Arab restaurants rebranding to “Mediterranean” to avoid harassment and violence, it subtly makes jabs at Israeli restaurants doing the same.
Diverse cuisine staying alive and being passed down for generations is great, unless a Jew is doing it.
And, of course, the justification is that it has nothing to do with Jews. Oh no, the New York Jews having their restaurants boycotted and vandalized aren’t suffering because of antisemitism; it is because, as the article claims, “Israel is committing genocide.” A statement made as if you were saying the sky is blue: an undeniable truth. For the record, Israel hasn’t been convicted of any such thing. The International Court of Justice has not once ruled that such a thing is true. But if the article left even any room for the question “Is this being done because of antisemitism,” then they would have failed the purity test they are so desperate to pass.
This isn’t the first time New York Magazine has engaged in the erasure of Jewish people. In early 2024, the magazine published an essay asking whether America was implicated in genocide in Gaza. The cover story came next: Israel indicted for the crimes of the century, published the very week that Iranian ballistic missiles were falling on Israeli apartment buildings, meters from my home. Media watchdogs documented its factual errors, and the editors corrected four of them. But the direction stayed the same.
To pretend that a people don’t have food is a way to dehumanize them. No nation lacks cuisine. Deprive Jews and Israelis of a culture, and you deprive us of our humanity.
We all have memories of tables with food, smiles, and family. It’s the most basic human experience there is. That is why it is turned into something else when it comes to Jews. I wasn’t eating a recipe that my grandmother’s grandmother perfected; I was devouring stolen food for the joy of having stolen it. It’d be comical if it wasn’t so hateful.
The only possessions my grandmothers could take with them from Iraq and Tunisia were the clothes on their backs and their recipes. I will die protecting them, as it’s the only inheritance I have, and I will be damned if I allow New York Magazine to steal it.
i feel like anti-zionists are just opposed to the existence of synagogues and jewish community centers as a whole. they perceive a coherent, unified jewish identity as inherently threatening. it's why they keep trying to rewrite judaism and jewish culture and universalist and inclusive of everyone. i had a big lunch and am really sleepy so i lack the brainpower to elaborate on this, but even if every synagogue/JCC to ever exist in the diaspora had no ties whatsoever to the state of israel, they'd still justify anti-zionist terror attacks targeting synagogues and jewish community centers bc they serve as a kind of symbol for a unified jewish identity
fixed it. antizionism is antisemitism. the "antizionist" movement is genocidally aimed at destroying the jewish people. just like the antisemitism movement was. like all other genocidal anti-jewish movements though they come up with "justifications" to make themselves feel righteous. whether it's claiming that jews killed jesus or are corrupting purer races or some other nonsense it's all the same evil propaganda.
I swear the radical lefties must be delusional because they hate on trump and magas so much (which I do too) but then go on to treat mamdani like he’s some god who came down to earth to save them. No politician should be treated like they’re the messiah. The double standards are insane. I saw people making fanart of him!!!! With rainbows and sparkles like he’s Barney the dinosaur or something. Every second video is about how this man is saving America, they can’t be serious, do they not see the resemblance to maga? I never trust people who treat politicians like this, even if I agree with someone’s policies it doesn’t mean I’ll glaze them like this. And this is without even getting to how truly horrible this man is. I try to grasp on hope but the way the world is going is driving me insane.
They need to get into their head this man is not their blorbo, and this isn’t a fandom…
Something which a lot of antizionists don't get, is that at least a sizable chunk of you are participating in fascism targeted at jews.
Dehumanizing people whose political opinion is different than yours, regardless of if you view the opinion as abhorrent, is a key aspect of fascism. And it also leads to another key aspect of fascism which is thinking its okay to wish death upon those whose political opinion you disagree with.
This is happening at an alarming rate to jews, zionist and antizionist, and even non zionists. Jews who aren't zionists still get the accusation of being a zionist thrown at them and all the fascism that comes being being a zionist, when they aren't even a zionist. And ofc zionist jews get people being fascists towards us too.
There are so many political opinions which disgust me, but I still view the person who has that opinion as human. Dehumanizing people is never good, even if they are a terrible person, they are still a person.
And this is not to say that you have to be friends with people who's political opinion you disagree with. I'm not. You can and should surround yourself with people who respect you and that you like. Not dehumanizing a person doesn't equal being friends or liking them.
People also need to realize that by unfairly targeting jews with fascism is fucked up. A) because fascism bad but also because B) we've seen this story before and how it plays out. It never ends well for us. And ofc we are going to be on high alert FOR GOOD REASON.
I do not care if me being a peaceful two state solution zionist turns people off from the message of this post, as I know there will be people whose dash this comes upon who will let it make them ingore the message in this post. In fact, I hope it reaches people who do have a guy reaction to it, so they can evaluate how they are viewing me, and if they truly view me as a human.
one of the most deranged things I’ve had the displeasure of reading that doesn’t come from a Neo-Nazi or a pro-terror outlet like Dropsite. no. this comes from NY Mag.
(nitpicking SWANA is not the issue, although the term seems to be deployed here instead of MENA very intentionally, as part of the effort to erase Israelis).
tabletmag:
The media is at it again, and the latest NY Mag is way worse than it looks. Naturally, we read the main articles so you don’t have to.
Yes, these are real.
I don’t know how we’re supposed to combat this or impress upon non-Jewish audiences how completely bonkers, frighteningly discriminatory, and nefariously antisemitic and xenophobic a piece like this. its entire purpose isn’t to uplift anyone, it is to cast suspicion upon and attempt to ostracize and force out and culturally erase one specific people.
I’ll say again: 70% of hate crimes in NYC are perpetrated against Jews. articles like this are working to perpetuate that.
I shouldn’t be, but I’m still shocked that this has been so thoroughly accepted with barely a reinvention, it’s not even a fresh coat of paint.
“the Jews are not a part of us. no matter where they live, they are foreigners. unwelcome. inhuman. invaders. their existence victimizes ours. they have no culture, unlike us. they are puerile and violent. they are thieves. they have no food that isn’t stolen. they create no meaningful art. they don’t contribute, they just leech off of the rest of us. we are subjected to them and forced to do business with them, and it’s harmful to our morals and our society. we must not normalize tolerating them.”
it should be harder to distinguish the subtext of NY Mag in 2026 from the messages of Mein Kampf.
As we have now reached the stage of discourse that I and other Jews have been jokingly predicting for a while...
I think at this point the claim that "antizionism is not antisemitic" can now be safely buried and have a slab of fresh-poured reinforced concrete put on top of it.
Because there is literally nothing more Jew-hating than the claim that the foundational prayers and texts of Judaism are politically unacceptable to "antizionists".
Mind you, it's been "fun" watching Leftists bend over backwards to do everything they can to rewrite Jewish history and redefine Judaism in increasingly offensive ways, but we've literally reached the point of self-parody now.
Point 1: The Antizionist movement is full of unexamined antisemitic tropes, canards, and other pieces of anti-Jewish hatreds; blood libel, well poisoning, world domination conspiracies, and various other pieces of classic antisemitism are all alive and well in the movement.
Point 2: While there are many, many, many legitimate criticisms to make of the Israeli government, most people within the Antizionist movement don't bother to educate themselves on internal Israeli politics and problems, but instead reach straight for a maximalist stance of "Israel needs to be destroyed", often indulging in those above antisemitic beliefs as they do so.
Point 3: Most significantly, there is no accountability and no internal policing within the larger movement. There is no large scale pushback in the Antizionist movement against making it safe for Jews in general, only isolated voices (often indulging in antisemitic statements in the process, ironically), and only for those Jews who are willing to debase themselves into tokens for the larger movement. Even then, that acceptance is so conditional that literally the Jewish token pointing out antisemitic tropes being used by their fellows is enough to have their acceptance and safety revoked, which is something I've seen happen online multiple times, and it's honestly something I'm scared about happening at a protest. Being blunt, I'm pretty sure it would turn into a lynching if that were to happen.
Point 4: As a result of all of this--the rampant antisemitism, the group-think, and the desire to delegitimize Israel at any cost--Antizionists will label any Jew who disagrees with them as a "Zionist", so that they don't have to listen to the Jew in question. They are to be ignored and destroyed, just as Israel is, per Point 2.
Point 5: And since there is practically nobody pushing back within the movement, and there is an overreliance on antisemitic beliefs and conspiracy theories, combined with a desire to delegitimize Israel... all of Jewish history, religion, culture, and society is looked upon with suspicion and an urge to redact Judaism to fit the narrative that is desired. And there is no braking mechanism to stop that. Not in the movement as it currently stands. There is nobody willing to stand up and say, "That is going too far. We can't say that. That is bigoted and racist against the Jewish people." Because, to the mindset common in the movement, there is no such thing as the Jewish people.
In essence, there is no way to keep the Antizionist movement as it currently stands to eventually--and likely quickly--look at a Jewish prayerbook or Torah Scroll from centuries past, and say that it needs to be destroyed, because it uses Hebrew and mentions "the Land of Israel".
This is 100% accurate. If anyone has links to specific examples from #3, I’ll add them. It’s late where I am now so I’m not going to link specifically to the other points.
But they are all verifiable with even the barest glimpse at wider discussions happening on this website about the I/P conflict. I am confident every element of this post will stand up to scrutiny.
As always, if you want to be an activist and actually help Palestinians and leftist Israelis to form a peaceful future in the levant, try one of the 160 organizations from AllMEP
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When I was a lawyer at Gibson Dunn in D.C., we took our summer associates to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. A survivor spoke to us and said something that stuck with me:
Lawyers need to know the holocaust did not begin with camps. It began when Jews were removed from institutions - above all, legal institutions. Judges stripped of their robes. Lawyers disbarred. Then, when law-groups were Judenrein, they codified laws that made discrimination systematic and "legal."
First, you remove the Jews from the institutions. Then, Jews can be discriminated against without representation.
On Monday, Mayor Mamdani announced his 18-member Advisory Committee on the Judiciary. The Committee was promised to be "truly reflective of New York City."
Not one of the 18 is Jewish.
Not one Jewish attorney, former judge, or law professor - in a city where one in eight residents is Jewish and even Justice John Leventhal, recommended by the State's Chief Judge, was rejected.
It is estimated that over 50% of the New York bar is Jewish. That means there is a 0.0004% chance of no Jews being selected to the Committee.
Mamdani’s marginalization of Jews has been ongoing, and few voices on the Left have spoken up.
On Day 1, Mamdani revoked the IHRA antisemitism definition (top priority); he changed the NYPD guidance protecting houses of worship, eliminated Jews from the City's immigrant-heritage map, called for the arrest of the prime minister of the only Jewish state, and now created a Judenrein Judiciary Committee.
My grandmother, Leah, survived Nazi Germany. Before the laws, before the violence, she told me how she was pushed out of her high school groups. Then, once excluded from all activities, she was bullied and marginalized.
We are already seeing Step 2 in NYC. Two weeks ago, on a Jewish Holiday, two men were stabbed outside Upper West Side synagogues - one wearing a kippah- and yesterday, Jewish students were attacked. Every 26 hours, there is a hate crime against Jews in NYC.
In NYC, there is a concerted effort to disappear Jews from public life and leadership.
No one on the Left is speaking out. If this discrimination was happening to any other group, the chorus would be deafening.
To be clear, Jews will find a way. Many are already taking their talents elsewhere. When white-shoe firms shut Jewish lawyers out, they built firms that now dominate. Cardozo, Louis Marshall, and Ruth Bader Ginsburg all found a way despite discrimination.
But NYC will be worse off without us. A city government that is judenrein - cleansed of Jews – does not just hurt the Jews, but hurts the city.
The tragedy is not just that Jews were left out of the institutions. It is that the institutions were left without the Jews.
If you see this and have not yet spoken out, I encourage you to do so.
not a nice jew @angryjewishsideblog - Tumblr Blog | Tumgag
