I haven't been on Tumblr since last autumn because I haven't been on any social media. I am not staying back here on Tumblr permanently, but I am logged back in briefly in order to:
a) clean up anything necessary for potential future employers who somehow find my Tumblr
b) go through my likes and tags to find anything I saved, like recipes or lifehacks or book recs (and reblogging all the posts I wanted to reblog)
c) reconnect with my beloved mutuals and friends from here and find ways for us to communicate that are not Tumblr, Twitter, or Instagram
FAQs section:
How long are you staying? As long as it takes me to complete the above tasks. However, I will be avoiding scrolling down my dashboard as much as possible, and trying to stick only to the above tasks, so I may miss out on any posts you make.
Why are you leaving Tumblr? It's complicated, and I don't want to get into why right now (in order to avoid any random user who stumbles across this post deciding to start discourse with me while I'm trying to just sort through recipes and shit). I'll leave a longer explanation here before I log off for good. SHORT ANSWER: Social media is really, really bad for my mental health, and I'm trying to not do things that are bad for my mental health.
Are you OK in real life? Yes, I'm fine. I have a good support network, I finally got a full-time teaching job, and there's no immediate personal crises or whatever.
How do I know whether I count as a beloved mutual or friend or whatever? I'm gonna reach out to some of you, but if you want to stay in touch, please feel free to just message me or reply to this post. If I know you (aka, you're not a random stranger or bot I've never met) (and also, if you changed your URL a bunch, you may need to remind me who you are lol), I'll probably be down to stay in touch. If you feel uncomfortable messaging me but you still want to stay in touch in some way, my AO3 (same user name) still exists and I still check it and if I ever write another fic, I'll post it there.
What's going to happen to your existing posts? The whole blog as it is will stay up. My account will still exist. I just won't be logged in.
Any other questions: Put them in my ask box or messages, I'm happy to answer them.
OK, I'm done with all the stuff I was planning to do on here, and I said I would make a longer post explaining why I'm leaving. I don't owe anyone an explanation but I figured I would give a brief one (it turned out not so brief though).
I'm putting it under a read-more and giving the trigger warning now that I'm discussing bullying, suicide, self-harm, descriptions of mass violence, war, and various forms of bigotry.
It's very long. If your thought is "hell no I'm not reading all that shit" then you have one of two options: you can put me out of your mind and accept that you will never fully understand me and as such cannot really make judgments on who I am, or you can go apologize to your English teachers for being unable to read. (Or you can simply not read it but just, like, don't be a dick about what you assume I may have written.)
Tumblr is not good for my mental health. No social media is. I left Twitter years ago, and then Instagram, and then Tumblr. The only social media I really use is that I watch YouTube and I check Facebook for my handful of IRL friends and family on there.
I'm a member of the LGBT+ community and I have generally leftist politics. This means I was involved in the LGBT and leftist online communities on social media websites. They were probably the worst possible thing for my development as a lesbian and as an actually effective force for progressive change, and as a person with what is likely OCD, and who survived bullying (which, yes, is a serious issue and traumatic, fuck off). This website, combined with my own issues, and the community at Sarah Lawrence College, is what led me down a very dark path in college with trying to "prove I was a real lesbian and not a cringe freak who deserved bullying". The same for "trying to atone for my toxic, evil, problematic existence as a privileged person". Instead of embracing the beautiful complexities of queer identity and life, I made a new version of the closet to torture myself within. Instead of working to help my community with positive change, I stayed inside self-harming and planning suicide and refusing to seek help because I didn't deserve it because I was inherently marked with evil as a sinful member of the bourgeoisie, etc. etc.
I already, as a result of so many things, have issues where I am terrified to make mistakes, terrified to be seen as annoying or "bad". The culture on social media has made me so much more terrified to make any mistake, because mistakes = proof of Intentional Evil and apologies are just fake attempts to win back brownie points that I don't deserve. This attitude has hindered my recovery process so much. I think of it as like Statler and Waldorf, the hecklers from the Muppet Show, only instead of two old guys, it's two college students that I call Sarah and Lawrence (after my delightful fucking alma mater) who tell me that I should be first in line to the guillotine because I'm a teacher and teachers are "child cops" (I once read a post on here saying that "in a world with any real justice, teachers would be shot and dumped in mass graves", and I'd love to say that that was just one crazy outlier of a post) or that my food sensitivities are proof that I'm a toxic privileged demon because some people can't afford food so I should just die or whatever. Being on this website feeds Sarah and Lawrence with a thousand new hot takes they can use to torture me. And you know what, I don't deserve that. And if you think I deserve that, then you're wrong, and I don't care.
I do not like the form of leftism on this website. If this is what real leftism looks like- romanticizing gulags and guillotines, trying to figure out who the "Bad People" are and then sending them to those gulags and guillotines, carceral logic, cult-like communities- then feel free to call me a pathetic, spineless, centric, milquetoast liberal. My form of social justice looks like getting up every morning, driving to my job at a public high school, and teaching literacy and critical thinking to teenagers who need it. And when I come home, I rest and work on myself so I can learn more about the world I live in (about which I know woefully little, since I spent years educating myself on goddamn tumblr.edu instead of out of books and reputable news sources), and gain the energy to make my school community and larger community a safer, more inclusive place for everyone. If that's too fucking liberal for you, then I'll see you at the guillotine when the revolution comes and you're chopping my head off. Until then, leave me the fuck alone.
Now let's get to the actual part that may alienate me even from my friends. I hope this isn't the end of our friendships, and I hope you have the patience to read all of this before deciding to cut me off, and if you do decide to cut me off, I wish you all the best.
I am a Jew. Both my parents are Jewish. My mother is an Ashkenazi Jew whose parents narrowly escaped the Holocaust in Poland. My father is an Iranian Jew whose family had to escape Iran when he was eight because of the Revolution. Both sides of my family had been in those countries for as many centuries back as it is possible to trace. They were forced to escape or die. My maternal grandparents were both babies during the Holocaust, and their families took them to Russia. My maternal grandfather was shipped to a displaced persons camp and his family had no choice where they were taken. My maternal grandmother's family went back to Poland after the war, where they were treated so horrifically, due to being Jewish, that they chose to leave. My father's family, on the other hand, had been relatively prosperous in Iran (notwithstanding every couple of decades when a new regime would force them to go underground with their Judaism or be killed), but realized that the revolutionary government would likely mean death for them.
My maternal grandmother's family, my maternal grandfather's family, and my father's family all fled their countries of origin and went to the recently formed state of Israel. My mother and father grew up there. They met there, married, and moved to the United States, where I was born. They raised us as Jews. Many of my relatives on both sides, however, stayed in Israel and still live there.
As an adult, I do not think I am anywhere close to an expert on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but I have studied it a bit (I recommend Rashid Khalidi's The Hundred Years War on Palestine especially, and the work of Benny Morris). I certainly think I have more knowledge about it, based on what I've seen, than 95% of the fucking assholes on here posting about it. I'm not an expert on public policy or war, but my general opinion is that Israel was formed using settler-colonial tactics (which, to be clear, is bad), that the Palestinian refugee crisis never should have happened and that in a just world it would end and Palestinians would have right of return and right to safe and equal citizenship in their homeland, and that the current government of Israel is, I don't like saying the word evil (because I'm not a child watching a superhero cartoon) but they should be taken down, and their actions in Gaza are despicable.
HOWEVER. I do not think that every citizen of Israel is responsible for the crimes of its government. (Kind of like America is a settler colony but I don't think every single American citizen should be killed?) I do NOT fucking think that Israeli civilians deserve to be killed, bombed, tortured, or raped, because I do not think that any human deserves that, even "evil" ones, even if those actions are "resistance". I do not think that Jews in the diaspora deserve to be considered suspicious, to be interrogated for potential Zionism lurking beneath our skin, to be cast aside as problematic if we so much as suggest that we are frightened of antisemitism, to be told to shut up and suck it up if our synagogues and cultural centers are vandalized, threatened, shot up, because we deserve it for sharing heritage with Benjamin Netanyahu, and anyway it's sending a message and that's what revolution looks like, so maybe stop whining. That we need to stop whining about the Holocaust and that if any of us supports Israel or Zionism (which apparently means not wanting our family- our relatives who escaped MENA countries that no longer allow their Jewish citizens to live- to die horribly- apparently not cheering for the painful deaths of my family makes me a Zionist?), then maybe we deserve another Holocaust, and Hitler was right. That idk maybe there's something suspicious about the fact that Jews keep getting kicked out of countries, like maybe there's just something inherently vermin-like about us like idk if *I* kept getting oppressed I'd wonder if something was wrong with me, but idk I'm just a leftist who supports revolution and punch Nazis or whatever... That "NO ONE IS EVEN SAYING THAT, STOP WHINING" even though I have seen every one of those posts on this website, from nearly everyone I follow. (And the people who harassed my sister, who has been less frightened than I am over the past 7 months to admit she's Jewish on social media, and was told some truly vile personal things). (Oh, and the ten-year-old children I used to teach in Hebrew school, who got told "Hitler was right" on their TikTok accounts and got swastikas painted in their middle school in liberal New Jersey).
I am not just angry and frightened as a Jew, but as a teacher. Even those who don't spout antisemitism have not seemed to bother to educate themselves about the conflict before running to hit the reblog button because the post said that posting is the most important thing you can do, and I see y'all who don't reblog and that's really suspicious and if you don't reblog you must support genocide. If you studied the history of this conflict for five fucking seconds, you would not be saying shit like "We stand with Hamas", at least not if you give a shit about Palestinian rights. I was gonna write up a whole explanation of that but to be honest, while I hate the old Tumblr axiom "it's not my job to educate you! Google is free!" I honestly do stand by it in this case- I'm not gonna word these explanations well. I'll point you instead to the two authors I recommended above- Rashid Khalidi and Benny Morris. Khalidi is a Palestinian scholar and Morris is one of the Israeli "New Historians" who believes in telling the truth, not Israeli propaganda. I, on the other hand, am just some idiot who cares about things like Palestinian lives, Palestinian autonomy, Jewish lives, Jewish autonomy, Arab independence, fighting antisemitism, fighting Islamophobia, education, and the stupidest thing of all, according to this god-awful website: peace. So don't listen to me. But don't just listen to whatever Internet user is angriest.
And stop advocating for mass deaths and tortures. And stop just hitting the reblog button because you're being guilted into it. I am not saying that posting CAN'T be helpful. In my week of being back on this website briefly, I've seen people sharing verified links to sources to donate to Gazans in need, or support for solidarity movements between Israelis and Palestinians.* That's a great example of posting being helpful. And despite my personal distaste for political discussion on social media, I know there are people capable of doing it well- sharing news thoughtfully, discussing the best methods of dealing with it, etc. But seeing my own people being tossed into the fucking machine of "There's A Certain Heritage That Are All Either Oppressors Or On Thin Ice, and We Need To Guillotine Them, Or Else We're Oppressors Too And Should Die" has shown me even more clearly than before that something is deeply wrong about the way we approach social justice on social media.
(*yes, solidarity between Israelis and Palestinians. Israelis are not a monolithic oppressor block, and Palestinians are not required to lie down and just take their oppression until Americans save them with posting. They are all human beings and are allowed to work together to stop what I think is the true problem, the governments treating their lives as pawns.)
I don't know enough about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. (Or quite honestly, a lot of the real-world issues I used to "just reblog" about). Chances are, neither do you. But I at least know that I will never give in to hatred and prejudice and thirst for violence. I will never sit back and be fine with the acts of the Israeli government and military simply because they share my heritage, and even with the terrible burden of knowing with more and more clarity every day how viciously the world, even my friends and allies, view my people. That will never excuse what Israel is doing, and I know that I disagree with many of my fellow Jews on this point. But I will also not be bullied into giving up my values- kindness, equality, peace, love for humanity- by somebody telling me that if I value nonviolence, if I don't believe in the dichotomy of "enemy race vs. good race", I must be a secret Zionist/neoliberal/etc, and thus an oppressor. I know who I really am and I know what my values are. If you don't like that, and we used to be friends, please do me the justice of at least letting me know before blocking me or whatnot.
I'm sorry this post was so long. I tend to ramble. I plan to log off. If you would like to contact me about this post, I suggest you don't unless we were already mutuals/friends and I gave you my contact anyway. If you aren't my mutual/friend but you truly must tell me something, I've created a blog called arielmagicesi.blogspot.com and there's one post on there and you can comment there.
FINAL THING:
Most of this post is me appealing as a leftist, a Jew, a human being. I'd like to appeal as a friend. I have been terrified, like constant-nightmares-and-panic-attacks-for-months terrified, of my friends turning on me if they found out all of this. I'm pretty sure there's at least one or two old friends of mine who, because they know that my parents grew up in Israel and I haven't disowned my parents, probably no longer want to be friends, and maybe even think of me as an enemy. If you do want to stop being friends with me because of this, please be direct. If you don't, just keep it in mind- not in a "develop an anxiety complex about Ariel's hurt feelings" way but in a "be careful how you talk about Jews on social media, if possible" way.
Posting this again to give context to my reblogs and my leaving! OK goodbye everyone! If you need to contact me you can leave a comment on the first post on arielmagicesi.blogspot.com
I personally feel that every Jew should be allowed to flick the ear of every NYT employee for this.
Ah yes, a "disturbance." That is certainly a correct way to use that word 🙃. And "religious gathering"? Oh you mean shabbat services that overlap with a holiday (Tu Bishvat) and this means that more people than normal would be there? Also looooove how they've decontextualized this from the greater atmosphere of antisemitism in the world. And this is only a week after the attempted fire bombing of a New Jersey synagogue 🙃🙃🙃
Update: apparently hate crime charges were dropped because being a literal Nazi isn't convincing enough evidence of a prejudice against Jews??!???! Hello?!?!!?!?
In my experience it has never been about if a Jew is a Zionist or anti-Zionist it’s just been about acceptable ways to hate Jews. The fact that as a leftist Jew I have to allow myself to be interrogated by goyim over and over about my thoughts on a country I don’t live in and never will is fucking hateful bs. I have no control over Israel and my political ideology doesn’t fit with Zionism and yet I can easily just be called a Zionist and be exiled from leftists.
There doesn’t even need to be proof either. The fact that some gentile that has an issue with me can just claim I’m a Zionist and then wait for the hate to be thrown at me shows it. The fact that I and other Jews who aren’t Zionist have also been accused of being secret Zionists just because we either don’t talk about it or understand that it’s a fucking complex situation is such bullshit.
You can’t use antisemitic talking points and then claim to not be antisemitic. Double loyalty and blood libel and shit isn’t negated by using progressive language. Anyway I’m so fucking tired
the israeli state and its backers have managed to effectively trap Palestinians as well as their own citizens into a whirlwind of violence and torture. everything about it is truly disgusting. and for what. political interests. regional control. this situation didn't need to begin and be carried out in such an ugly way from the beginning.
we knew Jews and Muslims could live together in peace before the Nakba. I don't know if we will ever get to see that again.
i think you mean well here but jews and muslims (and christians and samaritans and druze) did not all peacefully coexist in harmony until 1947. the levant is the link between three continents, an important trade route, and the location of some of the holiest sites in the world for the main three abrahamic religions. the roots of this conflict go back more than a century. if you’re really interested in understanding the history of the israeli-palestinian conflict then you have to look at the british mandate and ottoman periods.
and if you’re really interested in understanding the broader context in which all of this violence arose, zoom out and look at broader trends in the 20th century. the arab-israeli conflict is distinct from but very much informs the israeli-palestinian conflict. if you want the tl;dr here, it’s that there are very few heroes in international politics and plenty of leaders happy to drag this on for as long as possible.
i’m not trying to be unkind here. there are many places in the world where jews and muslims live together in peace. one day all of israel/palestine will be one of them.
I HIGHLY recommend Arabs and Israelis: Conflict and Peacemaking in the Middle East by Abdel Monem Said Aly, Shai Feldman, and Khalil Shikaki
for everyone to understand the complexities of pre-1948 Palestine and the entire conflict. It’s 2022 edition just released.
The authors are frank in they are not attempting to give people the answer(s) they may want to here, only to offer a scholarly comprehensive analysis of the conflict.
Notably, Abdel Monem Said Aly is an Egyptian scholar who offers the broader Arab perspective; Shai Feldman is a Jewish Israeli scholar offers the Jewish and Israelis perspectives; and Khalil Shikaki is a Palestinian scholar who offers the Palestinian perspective of the conflict.
Essential reading.
Unfortunately since it’s an academic work it can be pricey (the paperback new & ebook are 53.95) to buy outright, but your libraries, universities and colleges can get it for you. Also I’m sure there are PDFs of older versions out there just saying.
i appreciate the clarification anon. i will say that “jews and muslims lived in perfect harmony in the levant pre-1947” is a very common historical misconception/oversimplification that jews often come across, and it is frustrating to see the historical nuance flattened.
@amymarched made a great recommendation, and i would also suggest Between Crescent and Cross: Jewish Civilization from Mohammed to Spinoza by david b. ruderman if you’re interested in the history of jewish coexistence with christian and muslim communities. it’s a deeper historical dive that doesn’t address the modern era, but it’s interesting to see periods of peaceful coexistence contrasted with eras that were not. i’ll be honest and tell you i haven’t finished it yet.
oh and then you get posts about deconstructing carceral logic, opposing prisons, and honoring the human rights of every person, reblogged by the same people who reblogged the one about how some people do deserve to violently die because that's how you make oppression end
i do think there is an issue on tumblr of caring about stuff in media when its ultimately irrelevant, minor, or not antisemitic at all while letting real dangerous antisemitism slide. like you see people getting worked up about idk goblins or witches and then a few weeks later will reblog a post that says jewish people use the holocaust to guilt trip people or recycles old rothschild conspiracy theories.
and it’s easy to see why this happens. this obsession with media purity has people looking for ways to deem media they don’t like as “problematic” and since so many aspects of european folklore have been used in an antisemitic way at some point it is quite easy to find SOMETHING that could be called antisemitic. and it really is not a hard thing to do. It carries 0 reputational risk, gives you an opportunity to dunk on fans of That Thing You Don’t like, and gets you allyship points. but when it comes to calling out antisemitism in your political movements, that’s less convenient. It takes effort and carries a risk of pissing people off, or getting you accused of “distracting from the real issues.”
this isn’t to say anti-semitism in the media isn’t a problem because it is. But it’s much less of a pressing issue than antisemitism in our culture and politics. i’m sick of people getting credit for being allies only when there are no stakes. you have no right to get on your high horse about tolkien dwarves if you’re letting people get away with spouting talking points from the protocols of the elders of zion.
*taps sign* bc there have been multiple terrorist attacks against jews in recent weeks and proliferation of antisemitic conspiracy theories and the only antisemitism anyone wants to talk about is Harry Potter Game
Yikes so you don’t approve of getting rid of Bad People by attaching them to a nuclear bomb and detonating it in a populated area? You don’t *approve of* and *excuse* those Bad People do you???
There are just two kinds of Jewish representation in media:
1) barely there, a character has a Jewish last name, makes a comment or joke about Bar/Bat mitzvah money, or their bubbe and thats it, thats all
2) Judaism as a huge oppressive, terrible, burden they seek to get away from.
outward shows of Judaism, like yarmulkes, Tzitzit, kosher, Magen David, or mezuzot, are almost always missing, unless its to show them as oppressing/burdening characters
I don't really have a point to this rant other than to say the Jews are tired and we'd really like some representation where our ethnicity isn't a passing joke or our religion an oppressive semi-cult
Do you know what this is? This is The Heart from Auschwitz.
An act of defiance.
A statement of hope.
A crime punishable by death.
On December 12, 1944, locked inside Auschwitz, Polish teenager Fania turned twenty. After spending a year in a concentration camp, Fania didn’t expect her birthday to even be remembered - but her best friend, Zlatka, risked everything to make her a birthday present, a paper heart.
Simply making the heart - or carrying it - could get either of them killed.
The heart was signed by many of their friends, bearing notes in Polish, German, French, and Hebrew that announced "When you get old, put your glasses on your nose, take this album in your hand and read my signature again,“ and “Freedom! Freedom! Freedom!” It was an act of great sacrifice and love for a friend.
Less than 40 days later, they began the Death March from Auschwitz to Ravensbruck, and from Ravensbruck to freedom. Fania carried the heart under her arm the whole time. And survived.
Fania donated the heart to the Montreal Holocaust Memorial Center in 1988, where it is a featured piece of their exhibit. You can read more about the story of Fania and Zlatka Meg Wiviott’s Paper Hearts, coming September 2015.
the 75th aniversary of the liberation of auschwitz is in a couple of days (jan 27 2020) so I feel this is a good thing to have on your dash. Remember that every single victim and survivor of the holocaust was a person with so much love in their heart and so many storiees and interpersonal relationships like this.
leftists: ALWAYS listen to minorities when they're discussing their experiences with racism
leftist jews: exactly, good point! and personally I've seen a rise in antisemitism in the le-
leftists: except that one. that one is actually the global elite. the left's criticism of jews is always valid and antisemitism only comes from my cartoon version of alt-right nazis. Here's a list of nazi dog whistles, but also remember that israelis are training dogs to-
OK and now, in the context of that post I just made, I am about to reblog a bunch of posts about antisemitism, reblog the post I just made again for more context, and then log off for what I hope is the last time (unless I log back on to view the horny content in my likes lmaoooo God bless all you lesbian thirst trap creators)
OK, I'm done with all the stuff I was planning to do on here, and I said I would make a longer post explaining why I'm leaving. I don't owe anyone an explanation but I figured I would give a brief one (it turned out not so brief though).
I'm putting it under a read-more and giving the trigger warning now that I'm discussing bullying, suicide, self-harm, descriptions of mass violence, war, and various forms of bigotry.
It's very long. If your thought is "hell no I'm not reading all that shit" then you have one of two options: you can put me out of your mind and accept that you will never fully understand me and as such cannot really make judgments on who I am, or you can go apologize to your English teachers for being unable to read. (Or you can simply not read it but just, like, don't be a dick about what you assume I may have written.)
Tumblr is not good for my mental health. No social media is. I left Twitter years ago, and then Instagram, and then Tumblr. The only social media I really use is that I watch YouTube and I check Facebook for my handful of IRL friends and family on there.
I'm a member of the LGBT+ community and I have generally leftist politics. This means I was involved in the LGBT and leftist online communities on social media websites. They were probably the worst possible thing for my development as a lesbian and as an actually effective force for progressive change, and as a person with what is likely OCD, and who survived bullying (which, yes, is a serious issue and traumatic, fuck off). This website, combined with my own issues, and the community at Sarah Lawrence College, is what led me down a very dark path in college with trying to "prove I was a real lesbian and not a cringe freak who deserved bullying". The same for "trying to atone for my toxic, evil, problematic existence as a privileged person". Instead of embracing the beautiful complexities of queer identity and life, I made a new version of the closet to torture myself within. Instead of working to help my community with positive change, I stayed inside self-harming and planning suicide and refusing to seek help because I didn't deserve it because I was inherently marked with evil as a sinful member of the bourgeoisie, etc. etc.
I already, as a result of so many things, have issues where I am terrified to make mistakes, terrified to be seen as annoying or "bad". The culture on social media has made me so much more terrified to make any mistake, because mistakes = proof of Intentional Evil and apologies are just fake attempts to win back brownie points that I don't deserve. This attitude has hindered my recovery process so much. I think of it as like Statler and Waldorf, the hecklers from the Muppet Show, only instead of two old guys, it's two college students that I call Sarah and Lawrence (after my delightful fucking alma mater) who tell me that I should be first in line to the guillotine because I'm a teacher and teachers are "child cops" (I once read a post on here saying that "in a world with any real justice, teachers would be shot and dumped in mass graves", and I'd love to say that that was just one crazy outlier of a post) or that my food sensitivities are proof that I'm a toxic privileged demon because some people can't afford food so I should just die or whatever. Being on this website feeds Sarah and Lawrence with a thousand new hot takes they can use to torture me. And you know what, I don't deserve that. And if you think I deserve that, then you're wrong, and I don't care.
I do not like the form of leftism on this website. If this is what real leftism looks like- romanticizing gulags and guillotines, trying to figure out who the "Bad People" are and then sending them to those gulags and guillotines, carceral logic, cult-like communities- then feel free to call me a pathetic, spineless, centric, milquetoast liberal. My form of social justice looks like getting up every morning, driving to my job at a public high school, and teaching literacy and critical thinking to teenagers who need it. And when I come home, I rest and work on myself so I can learn more about the world I live in (about which I know woefully little, since I spent years educating myself on goddamn tumblr.edu instead of out of books and reputable news sources), and gain the energy to make my school community and larger community a safer, more inclusive place for everyone. If that's too fucking liberal for you, then I'll see you at the guillotine when the revolution comes and you're chopping my head off. Until then, leave me the fuck alone.
Now let's get to the actual part that may alienate me even from my friends. I hope this isn't the end of our friendships, and I hope you have the patience to read all of this before deciding to cut me off, and if you do decide to cut me off, I wish you all the best.
I am a Jew. Both my parents are Jewish. My mother is an Ashkenazi Jew whose parents narrowly escaped the Holocaust in Poland. My father is an Iranian Jew whose family had to escape Iran when he was eight because of the Revolution. Both sides of my family had been in those countries for as many centuries back as it is possible to trace. They were forced to escape or die. My maternal grandparents were both babies during the Holocaust, and their families took them to Russia. My maternal grandfather was shipped to a displaced persons camp and his family had no choice where they were taken. My maternal grandmother's family went back to Poland after the war, where they were treated so horrifically, due to being Jewish, that they chose to leave. My father's family, on the other hand, had been relatively prosperous in Iran (notwithstanding every couple of decades when a new regime would force them to go underground with their Judaism or be killed), but realized that the revolutionary government would likely mean death for them.
My maternal grandmother's family, my maternal grandfather's family, and my father's family all fled their countries of origin and went to the recently formed state of Israel. My mother and father grew up there. They met there, married, and moved to the United States, where I was born. They raised us as Jews. Many of my relatives on both sides, however, stayed in Israel and still live there.
As an adult, I do not think I am anywhere close to an expert on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but I have studied it a bit (I recommend Rashid Khalidi's The Hundred Years War on Palestine especially, and the work of Benny Morris). I certainly think I have more knowledge about it, based on what I've seen, than 95% of the fucking assholes on here posting about it. I'm not an expert on public policy or war, but my general opinion is that Israel was formed using settler-colonial tactics (which, to be clear, is bad), that the Palestinian refugee crisis never should have happened and that in a just world it would end and Palestinians would have right of return and right to safe and equal citizenship in their homeland, and that the current government of Israel is, I don't like saying the word evil (because I'm not a child watching a superhero cartoon) but they should be taken down, and their actions in Gaza are despicable.
HOWEVER. I do not think that every citizen of Israel is responsible for the crimes of its government. (Kind of like America is a settler colony but I don't think every single American citizen should be killed?) I do NOT fucking think that Israeli civilians deserve to be killed, bombed, tortured, or raped, because I do not think that any human deserves that, even "evil" ones, even if those actions are "resistance". I do not think that Jews in the diaspora deserve to be considered suspicious, to be interrogated for potential Zionism lurking beneath our skin, to be cast aside as problematic if we so much as suggest that we are frightened of antisemitism, to be told to shut up and suck it up if our synagogues and cultural centers are vandalized, threatened, shot up, because we deserve it for sharing heritage with Benjamin Netanyahu, and anyway it's sending a message and that's what revolution looks like, so maybe stop whining. That we need to stop whining about the Holocaust and that if any of us supports Israel or Zionism (which apparently means not wanting our family- our relatives who escaped MENA countries that no longer allow their Jewish citizens to live- to die horribly- apparently not cheering for the painful deaths of my family makes me a Zionist?), then maybe we deserve another Holocaust, and Hitler was right. That idk maybe there's something suspicious about the fact that Jews keep getting kicked out of countries, like maybe there's just something inherently vermin-like about us like idk if *I* kept getting oppressed I'd wonder if something was wrong with me, but idk I'm just a leftist who supports revolution and punch Nazis or whatever... That "NO ONE IS EVEN SAYING THAT, STOP WHINING" even though I have seen every one of those posts on this website, from nearly everyone I follow. (And the people who harassed my sister, who has been less frightened than I am over the past 7 months to admit she's Jewish on social media, and was told some truly vile personal things). (Oh, and the ten-year-old children I used to teach in Hebrew school, who got told "Hitler was right" on their TikTok accounts and got swastikas painted in their middle school in liberal New Jersey).
I am not just angry and frightened as a Jew, but as a teacher. Even those who don't spout antisemitism have not seemed to bother to educate themselves about the conflict before running to hit the reblog button because the post said that posting is the most important thing you can do, and I see y'all who don't reblog and that's really suspicious and if you don't reblog you must support genocide. If you studied the history of this conflict for five fucking seconds, you would not be saying shit like "We stand with Hamas", at least not if you give a shit about Palestinian rights. I was gonna write up a whole explanation of that but to be honest, while I hate the old Tumblr axiom "it's not my job to educate you! Google is free!" I honestly do stand by it in this case- I'm not gonna word these explanations well. I'll point you instead to the two authors I recommended above- Rashid Khalidi and Benny Morris. Khalidi is a Palestinian scholar and Morris is one of the Israeli "New Historians" who believes in telling the truth, not Israeli propaganda. I, on the other hand, am just some idiot who cares about things like Palestinian lives, Palestinian autonomy, Jewish lives, Jewish autonomy, Arab independence, fighting antisemitism, fighting Islamophobia, education, and the stupidest thing of all, according to this god-awful website: peace. So don't listen to me. But don't just listen to whatever Internet user is angriest.
And stop advocating for mass deaths and tortures. And stop just hitting the reblog button because you're being guilted into it. I am not saying that posting CAN'T be helpful. In my week of being back on this website briefly, I've seen people sharing verified links to sources to donate to Gazans in need, or support for solidarity movements between Israelis and Palestinians.* That's a great example of posting being helpful. And despite my personal distaste for political discussion on social media, I know there are people capable of doing it well- sharing news thoughtfully, discussing the best methods of dealing with it, etc. But seeing my own people being tossed into the fucking machine of "There's A Certain Heritage That Are All Either Oppressors Or On Thin Ice, and We Need To Guillotine Them, Or Else We're Oppressors Too And Should Die" has shown me even more clearly than before that something is deeply wrong about the way we approach social justice on social media.
(*yes, solidarity between Israelis and Palestinians. Israelis are not a monolithic oppressor block, and Palestinians are not required to lie down and just take their oppression until Americans save them with posting. They are all human beings and are allowed to work together to stop what I think is the true problem, the governments treating their lives as pawns.)
I don't know enough about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. (Or quite honestly, a lot of the real-world issues I used to "just reblog" about). Chances are, neither do you. But I at least know that I will never give in to hatred and prejudice and thirst for violence. I will never sit back and be fine with the acts of the Israeli government and military simply because they share my heritage, and even with the terrible burden of knowing with more and more clarity every day how viciously the world, even my friends and allies, view my people. That will never excuse what Israel is doing, and I know that I disagree with many of my fellow Jews on this point. But I will also not be bullied into giving up my values- kindness, equality, peace, love for humanity- by somebody telling me that if I value nonviolence, if I don't believe in the dichotomy of "enemy race vs. good race", I must be a secret Zionist/neoliberal/etc, and thus an oppressor. I know who I really am and I know what my values are. If you don't like that, and we used to be friends, please do me the justice of at least letting me know before blocking me or whatnot.
I'm sorry this post was so long. I tend to ramble. I plan to log off. If you would like to contact me about this post, I suggest you don't unless we were already mutuals/friends and I gave you my contact anyway. If you aren't my mutual/friend but you truly must tell me something, I've created a blog called arielmagicesi.blogspot.com and there's one post on there and you can comment there.
FINAL THING:
Most of this post is me appealing as a leftist, a Jew, a human being. I'd like to appeal as a friend. I have been terrified, like constant-nightmares-and-panic-attacks-for-months terrified, of my friends turning on me if they found out all of this. I'm pretty sure there's at least one or two old friends of mine who, because they know that my parents grew up in Israel and I haven't disowned my parents, probably no longer want to be friends, and maybe even think of me as an enemy. If you do want to stop being friends with me because of this, please be direct. If you don't, just keep it in mind- not in a "develop an anxiety complex about Ariel's hurt feelings" way but in a "be careful how you talk about Jews on social media, if possible" way.
