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Is Israel a Settler Colonialist State?

The claim is made so often that it's hard to fault people for believing it without much thought.

Let's first look at what Settler Colonialism is, then look at the facts to see if Israel fits the definition.

What Is Settler Colonialism again…?

It’s a specific term used by historians and theorists (Patrick Wolfe and his whole "logic of elimination" thing). Features of Settler Colonialism include:

Expansionism, claiming land for its mother country/empire (monopole) and shipping natural resources back to the empire.

Foreign settlers move in to violently displace, erase, or replace the indigenous population.

Any other cultures in the land are suppressed or wiped out

Classic examples include: British Australia, French Algeria, Canada, and North America

Let’s see if the case of Israel demonstrates these features.

A Franchisee?

Settler colonialism is usually a franchise model. Some imperial HQ says, “Go forth and colonize!” and ships people over with guns, flags, and an expectation to reap wealth torn from the colonized.

The Zionist movement started as a grassroots effort by Jews who were tired of getting pogromed every other Tuesday. Sure, they got a nod from Britain in the form of the Balfour Declaration, but that’s a long way from imperial orchestration.

(While Britain controlled Palestine under the Mandate, it hardly coddled Zionist aims - especially after the 1939 White Paper, which locked Jews out even as the Holocaust raged. Zionists didn’t march under imperial flags; they were often clashing with them.)

Settler colonialism involves one imperial power shuttling in settlers from a single source. But Jewish immigration to Israel? It came from everywhere: Yemen, Iraq, Morocco, Poland, Russia, Ethiopia, Argentina, Brooklyn…everywhere in the Diaspora.

This wasn’t a colonial outpost of one empire. It was a chaotic, desperate, and diverse ingathering of people trying to survive and rebuild. Half the Jews in Israel today descend from communities that were literally kicked out of Middle Eastern and North African countries.

If it’s settler colonialism, it’s doing it very wrong.

Foreign Settlers?

Settler colonialism usually involves people showing up in a place they have zero connection to and declaring it theirs. Think: Europeans showing up in Australia and telling the Aboriginal peoples, “Nice continent—don’t mind if we do.”

Jews didn’t just randomly pick Israel from a drop-down menu. They’ve had a connection to that land for, oh, 3,000 years or so. Jerusalem isn’t just spiritually significant; it's central. They didn’t have to invent a historical claim—it’s literally baked into their religion, language, and identity. (Quick Hebrew lesson: “Zion” is kind of a giveaway.)

Jews have maintained a continuous presence in the Land of Israel for over 3,000 years, including communities in Jerusalem, Safed, Hebron, and Tiberias, long before modern Zionism emerged.

Calling Jewish return to Israel “settler colonialism” is like calling your grandma a squatter for moving back into her childhood home.

But What About Palestinian Displacement?

Let’s be clear: Yes, during the 1948 war, a large number of Arabs living in Palestine were displaced. That’s a fact, it's not disputable, and it’s not something to brush aside.

This wasn’t, however, some settler-colonial master plan with color-coded maps and a mission to erase or ethnically cleanse non-Jewish peoples.

The early Zionist movement was buying land legally (much of it from absentee Arab landlords) and building farms, schools, and towns. It was a messy nationalist project, like many others in the 20th century. The displacement of Palestinians came not from a blueprint for ethnic cleansing, but from a war.

The war was launched by neighboring Arab states who made no secret of their goal: to destroy the brand-new Jewish state before it could take its first real breath.

Five Arab armies invaded in 1948, and local Arab leaders, along with the invading forces, told many Palestinian Arabs to temporarily evacuate, assuring them they could return after the Jews were wiped out.

Things didn't go according to their plans, because Israel survived.

Historians like Efraim Karsh and Benny Morris document cases where Arab leaders advised evacuation and cases where displacement occurred amid battle. War is brutal, and real people paid the price.

The tragedy is real, but so is the context. The war wasn’t started by Israel. It was a war of survival that Israel fought while vastly outnumbered, outgunned, and surrounded.

And here’s a twist that is usually ignored in modern retellings:

The term Nakba - which today refers almost exclusively to Palestinian displacement, originally meant something else.

In 1948, Arab intellectuals like Constantin Zureiq used “Nakba,” meaning "catastrophe," not to mourn Palestinian suffering, but to describe the colossal failure of the Arab world to crush Israel. In his own words: “The defeat of the Arabs in Palestine is not a small downfall. It is a catastrophe in every sense of the word.”

The shame wasn’t just about lost land—it was about how a supposedly mighty Arab and Islamic world failed to destroy a state of Holocaust survivors and refugees.

The original "Nakba" was about that failure, not the displacement narrative that would emerge decades later.

History is a lot more complicated than hashtags suggest.

But Israel Sought to Wipe Out Local Culture, right?

If Zionism had been a settler colonial project, you'd expect to see that. Settler colonial regimes tend to come in hot with cultural carpet bombing: banning languages, crushing customs, bulldozing identities.

Israel? Not so much. Israel has official protections for Christian, Muslim, Druze, and Baháʼí religious sites. Ever heard of the “status quo” agreements? They govern holy sites like the Church of the Holy Sepulchre and the Al-Aqsa Mosque. Unlike classic settler-colonial cases like the US, Canada, or Australia where indigenous languages, religions, and identities were suppressed, Israel recognizes Arabic as an official language, protects Muslim and Christian holy sites, and integrates minorities into public life with equal legal rights for all citizens.

Is the situation always perfect? No. Does Israel have a Ministry of Culture Death? Also no.

But Israel stripped the land of its natural resources in the name of their imperial project and destroyed the ecology of the land!

First, there was no empire, no monopole to ship anything to because (again) Israel was not the outpost of a foreign empire - it was a desperate refuge for Jews fleeing pogroms, fascism, and a genocide which had wiped out a third of their people.

Second, what natural resources could they have stripped the land of? Mandate Palestine was not known for its abundant natural treasures. Oil? Nope. Gold? Nada. Fertile, easily farmed land? Not much.

What Zionists did find was malaria, swamps, desert, and the occasional Ottoman tax ledger. The region was, in the words of Samuel Clemens (AKA Mark Twain), "a desolate country whose soil is rich enough, but is given over wholly to weeds."

Not exactly a paradise ripe for exploitation.

Here's a twist: rather than destroying the ecology, Israel has spent 75 years rebuilding it. The country has planted over 240 million trees, turning arid hills green and reversing desertification. Israel pioneered drip irrigation - watering crops with scientific precision to conserve every drop. It recycles nearly 90% of its wastewater (second place is Spain at about 30%). The Negev Desert is now home to solar farms, sustainable agriculture, and research centers where scientists grow cherry tomatoes in saltwater and build fish farms in sand.

Israel’s environmental stewardship of the land is so advanced that experts have come from Africa, South America, and India to partner with Israeli experts to tackle their own climate challenges. If this is what settler-colonial ecological destruction looks like, the planet could use a bit more of it.

So no, Israel isn’t extracting the land’s bounty and mailing it to a mythical European mothership. It’s been reclaiming wasteland, reforesting hills, and creating the most efficient water system in the world. And it did all that while fighting seven wars and inventing the USB stick. Not bad for a country the size of New Jersey.

It's a Colonial Struggle!!

It’s a nationalist conflict, not a colonial one. Two peoples - Jewish and Palestinian - with deep historic ties to the same land, both claiming national self-determination. That’s tragic, painful, and hard to resolve. But it’s not the same as a bunch of white Europeans setting up a Starbucks on someone else’s sacred mountain.

Trying to squeeze this conflict into the settler colonial box doesn’t make it clearer—it flattens it. It erases Jewish history and Palestinian suffering in one fell swoop.

History Deserves Better Than Hashtags

Calling Israel a "settler colonial state" might feel like a tidy moral label, but history is messier than slogans. The story is way more complex than “colonizer vs. colonized.” It’s about trauma, return, identity, nationalism, war, and a shitload of of mistakes along the way by all parties involved.

But if you want to understand it, really understand it, you’ve got to ditch the buzzwords and look at the footnotes, because the truth won’t always fit in a meme.

Aforementioned Footnotes:

Wolfe, Patrick. Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native. Journal of Genocide Research, 2006.

https://www.kooriweb.org/foley/resources/pdfs/89.pdf

Veracini, Lorenzo. Settler Colonialism: A Theoretical Overview. Palgrave Macmillan, 2010.

https://link.springer.com/book/10.1057/9780230299191

Bickerman, Elias. From Ezra to the Last of the Maccabees. Schocken Books, 1962.

https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.59581

Biblical and archaeological records compiled in Israel

Finkelstein & Neil Asher Silberman, The Bible Unearthed, Free Press, 2001.

https://archive.org/details/bibleunearthedar0000fink/page/n5/mode/2up

Anita Shapira, Israel: A History (Harvard University Press): https://www.hup.harvard.edu/books/9780674047426

Jewish National Fund archives of land acquisition documents.

https://archives.cjh.org/repositories/3/resources/19702

Historical Aliyah data

https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/total-immigration-to-israel-by-country-per-year

Protection of Holy Places Law, 1967

https://www.bu.edu/mzank/Jerusalem/tx/lawofholyplaces1967.htm

Shapira, Anita. Yosef Hayim Brenner: A Life. Stanford University Press, 2014.

(Documents Jewish labor ethos and rejection of exploitative structures)

https://archive.org/details/yosefhaimbrenner0000shap

On the Nakba

Benny Morris, The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited:

https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300126969/the-birth-of-the-palestinian-refugee-problem-revisited/

Efraim Karsh, Palestine Betrayed:

https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt1npnkg

Efraim Karsh, 1948, Israel, and the Palestinians – the True Story, Middle East Quarterly (2008)

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/258996946_1948_Israel_and_the_Palestinians_-_The_True_Story

Constantin Zureiq, Ma'na al-Nakba (1948):

https://archive.org/details/zurayk-nakba

_____

If you want to argue with this in the replies, please do- but bring receipts.

ridne

Efraim Karsh is a terrible historian. Benny Morris has repeatedly stated how poor his scholarship is, and that it relies extensively on revisionism that does not hold up to reality.

Can we find better sources for that material, possibly?

I also don't think highly of Karsh. I included him because he's generally on the opposite side of Morris on most things, but on this point, they agree. In Palestine Betrayed, Karsh contends that the Nakba was not solely the result of Zionist actions but also stemmed from Arab rejectionism and decisions made by Palestinian leaders.

If I only cite Morris on this point, it becomes easy to accuse me of bias. Karsh agrees with Morris on this point, which makes this point rhetorically stronger.

Does that help, or would you like to suggest another source?

ETA: I think (anti-zionist) Avi Shlaim acknowledged this too. I'm looking for that now because I don't want to make that claim without being certain.

Here are more sources: In his 1955 book, The Arabs, Edward Atiyah, a British-Lebanese author and former secretary of the Arab League office in London, acknowledged the influence of Arab leaders and media in encouraging Palestinians to flee:

This wholesale exodus was due partly to the belief of the Arabs, encouraged by the boastings of an unrealistic Arabic press and the irresponsible utterances of some of the Arab leaders that it could only be a matter of weeks before the Jews were defeated by the armies of the Arab states and the Palestinian Arabs enabled to re-enter and retake possession of their country.

He later emphasized the "partly" part of this statement. Source:

Khaled al-Azm, who was the Syrian Prime Minister in 1948:

Since 1948 we have been demanding the return of the refugees to their homes. But we ourselves are the ones who encouraged them to leave.

Source:

Agenda item 27: Question of Palestine (continued): (a) Report of the Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Righ

Monsignor George Hakim observed that Palestinian refugees left their homes with the expectation of a swift return, based on assurances from their leaders:

The refugees were confident that their absence would not last long and that they would return within a week or two. Their leaders had promised them that the Arab armies would crush the 'Zionist gangs' very quickly and that there was no need for panic or fear of a long exile.

Source:

http://muqtafi.birzeit.edu/InterDocs/images/328.pdf

#jumblr #israel

chutzpahchesed

not here to discuss comparing the Knicks winning to a terrorist attack, it’s a silly quote even if you can understand what he intends by it, but the comments

“dancing Israelis” and “there is no unity with (((them)))” and “Israel did 9/11” continue throughout

can antisemites please get a new shtick

Can antisemites stop being antisemitic? Permanently?

I live in a city where everyone around me believes that Israel is a white genocidal ethnostate that executes anyone who is visibly muslim. Arguing with them is hopeless because anything you say is proof you have been "compromised by zionist propaganda". So I just have to pretend and live in their delusional world with them. I wonder what it would be like if I was visibly and unmistakably israeli. I feel like a coward but at the same time it's not worth getting stabbed over. And I kind of feel like a mossad agent bc they don't know i'm playing for the jew team >:)

You're not a "mossad agent", you just know they're wrong. Honestly, it's more of a jew hating dogwhistle.

Semantic Warfare

I always hated the way right-wing political creatures dishonestly redefined and demonized words. The best examples from the 60s through the 90s are probably feminism and liberal.

Feminism

Simone de Beauvoir articulated feminism in The Second Sex (1949) as the fight for women to be recognized as full human beings. Equal in dignity, autonomy, and opportunity. Not superior, not vengeful, jut fully human.

By the 1970s, this core idea had gained mainstream traction. Feminists were reshaping labor laws, family expectations, reproductive rights. Then came the backlash.

Phyllis Schlafly cast feminism as anti-family and anti-motherhood. Her campaign against the Equal Rights Amendment succeeded not just politically, but linguistically. "Feminist" began to imply a woman who hated men, hated babies, and wanted to force everyone into genderless conformity.

The Reagan era amplified this. Cultural conservatives and religious broadcasters doubled down. By the 1990s, Rush Limbaugh popularized the slur "feminazi," linking feminism with tyranny and genocide in one stroke. His listeners didn't need a definition, because they had emotional resonance.

It worked. By the early 2000s, many women, including progressives, said: "I'm not a feminist, but..."

A 2020 Pew study found that while most Americans supported feminist goals like workplace equality, only a minority -- including among women -- identified as feminists.

The word had been gutted.

Liberal

Before it was a slur, "liberal" meant something proud. Classical liberalism emerged from Enlightenment thinkers like John Locke and John Stuart Mill. In America, it evolved to mean belief in civil liberties, free expression, democracy, and activist government protecting the vulnerable.

Think FDR's New Deal. JFK's optimism. Even Eisenhower accepted the basic framework of liberal governance.

But by the Cold War, "liberal" became suspect. McCarthyists blurred the line between liberals and communists. As Vietnam split the left, conservatives seized the moment. Ronald Reagan built his career mocking the "liberal elite." Newt Gingrich made it toxic.

By the 1990s, liberal was an insult.

The right accused liberals of being soft on crime, big on taxes, hostile to religion, and obsessed with political correctness. Many liberals stopped calling themselves that, adopting "progressive" instead, hoping to dodge the landmines.

Until that word got the same treatment.

Language scholars and political analysts have tracked this retreat. Surveys show "liberal" triggers more negativity than "conservative" in many swing states. This is semantic warfare.

But the left learned from these experiences and started using the same dishonest weapon. The best example of this semantic distortion from the far left is obvious:

Zionism

Zionism began as a Jewish liberation movement responding to centuries of persecution, pogroms, and statelessness. Theodor Herzl and his successors defined it plainly: Jews, like any other people, deserve a safe and sovereign refuge in a portion of their indigenous homeland.

It was a broad tent. Socialist Zionists building egalitarian kibbutzim, religious Zionists dreaming of biblical restoration, liberal Zionists imagining a pluralistic Middle Eastern democracy. It was never monolithic and the sole commonality was the belief in Jewish national self-determination and self-defense.

But after 1967, and especially after the 1975 UN resolution declaring "Zionism is racism," bad actors sought to strategically redefine the word.

It wasn't conservatives this time. It was leftists taking a page from Klansmen.

That 1976 resolution, orchestrated by Soviet and Arab bloc nations, deliberately and dishonestly conflated Israel's political existence with apartheid South Africa (in the process also abusing the word "apartheid").

Though revoked in 1991, the damage was done. The Durban Conference in 2001 supercharged it. Zionism became colonialism, white supremacy, and genocide...all in one convenient smear, courtesy of dishonest, deliberate redefinition of all those terms.

Activist groups from Students for Justice in Palestine to segments of the Democratic Socialists of America adopted this framing. Zionism was no longer a liberation movement. It was an evil to be purged.

This is no less dishonest, calculated and vile than what the right did to "feminism" and "liberalism."

Jews on the left found themselves cornered. Either renounce Zionism (and by extension Israel's right to exist( or get branded a fascist. A settler. A baby killer.

They even imitated Limbaugh's FemiNazi with "ZioNazi."

Those who marched for civil rights, protested Vietnam, and campaigned for Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren were no longer welcome if they held fast to Jewish national identity, Jewish self-defense, and Jewish liberation.

"Zionist" is now a slur on college campuses, in activist circles, on social media. Young Jews are gaslit into thinking the movement that made their safety possible is inherently oppressive. They internalize the lie or go silent.

That's where we are today.

This isn't just about words, it isn't just about Israel, it isn't just about Jews.

It's about meaning, identity, power, and propaganda.

When the right poisoned "feminist" and "liberal," the goal wasn't debate, it was delegitimization. Making people ashamed of their ideals. Turning self-respect into self-censorship.

Now the far left is doing the same to "Zionist."

Same playbook. Same erasure. Same result. Silence the moderates, exile the liberals, and flatten the discourse until only extremists remain.

Call it what it is: a linguistic coup. A theft not just of words, but of the identities they name and the histories they hold.

We don't have to accept it, though.

We can reclaim the language, femand definitions, and refuse to let dishonest politics rewrite the dictionary.

---

You've probably noticed that this technique, once limited to the far right, is now used with tremendous versatility on the far left in a spectacular illustration of horseshoe theory.

A Sampling of Words the Far Left Has Been Redefining:

Zionism: From Jewish self-determination to colonial oppression

Genocide: From systematic extermination to any military action

Occupation: Used regardless of recognized borders or withdrawal (e.g., Gaza post-2005)

Resistance: Applied to indiscriminate violence against civilians

Ceasefire: Often meaning only Israeli restraint, not mutual de-escalation

Settler: Extended to any Jew in Israel, including Tel Aviv or Haifa

Indigenous: Claimed by groups with centuries of presence, denied to Jews with millennia of presence

Apartheid: Applied to Israel despite universal suffrage, citizenship and voting rights for the ~20% of Israeli citizens who aren't Jews.

Colonizer/Colonized: Framed as racial binaries, erasing Jewish Middle Eastern history

Liberation: Used to justify terrorism or annihilationist rhetoric

Each word, once precise, is being (or has already been) repurposed to serve a narrative. The goal isn't clarity. It's to win by distortion. Just as the right did to feminist and liberal.

The left learned how to do it from Phyllis Schlafly, Newt Gingrich, Ronald Reagan, and Rush Limbaugh.

But Words Mean Things.

War ≠ genocide.

Rape ≠ resistence.

National borders ≠ the walls of an "open air prison."

Suicide bombing ≠ heroism.

Terrorists targeting civilians ≠ "freedom fighters."

Civilian hostages ≠ "prisoners of war."

An indigenous people reclaiming a part of their homeland ≠ colonizers.

The colonizers of the Arab conquests ≠ "liberators."

Words Mean Things, and you can refuse to accept this dishonest tactic, whether it's being weaponized by the far right or the far left.

No, really. Words Mean Things.

girlactionfigure

The Neo-Jihadist movement is intent on pushing revisionist history to erase millennia of Jewish presence in Israel, deny the ancestry in Jewish DNA, demonize the Jewish people’s rightful need for independence and self-determination, and rerun a Nazi playbook rewritten in Arabic to call for a global intifada which is the new final solution.

stop_neo_jihadism

#Israel #Palestine

ollie-duck

“We left rhetoric about Jews poisoning wells in the Middle Ages!”

Modern rhetoric:

nitpickspot

I am...concerned as to what she thinks has been DONE to the goddamn cookie

vo-kopen

What, is it now safer to eat if you have Crohn’s Disease?

nitpickspot

Like, its an Oreo. It's not exactly a bastion of healthy christian living in the first place.

h4ganah

Hey, just saw your posts on my feed and I went into to your blog to see more of what you believe based of your tags. I was wondering while you were before anti Zionist what made you changed because most people who are Anti Zionist believe that the people of Israel and the Jewish people all over the world deserve to live safe and secure lives they just don’t believe that the government of Israel should be doing what it is doing right now.

While I agree that the Israeli people should be able to defend themselves against Hamas and other groups it just perpetuates more groups against them. When you kill people families and friends destroy their homes and kick them off their land they will become radicalized by it. So I believe the government of Israel should be disarmed by the U.S. and not be funded anymore or helped them because the U.S. gives them guns and defensive equipment either. I am American so I do not want my taxes paid to go and help them drop bombs and kill innocent people.

I also see that you wholeheartedly defend the ra*es that have happened on Oct. 7 but I don’t see you condemning the ones that are happening and have happened to the prisoners in Israelis prisons and what they are doing to children and before you say anything about that not happening I speak Hebrew and listen to Israeli media and that has been reported there and Israelis defended the IDFs soldiers and demanded they did not get tried in their court system.

1. If Israel is "disarmed", it will not continue to exist. That is a fantasy.

2. American taxpayer money is used for so much military support for allies that it becomes incredibly odd that only Israel is singled out as uniquely bad (not to mention that it mostly goes to, you know, the biggest military in the world). France badically maintains a quasi-colonial and military presence in West Africa, and when that leads to atrocities, no one even knows about it, becasue no one gives a fuck. If you want to minimize atrocities, you need to actually commit to preserving peace in areas like the MENA, which necessitates both a strong military presence by allies like Israel and extensive diplomatic work. Just because the former is less charming or comfortable, doesn't mean it isn't vital.

3. Of course regular Palestinians are radicalised by the horror and brutality of the wars between Israel and Palestine. That is a real, serious problem and an obstacle to peace, and I will argue for that point more than most people who share my politics on Israel. What everyone who brings up this point always omits, however, is that the exact same thing is true for Israelis. It's true for basically everyone who lives through decades of violence, humiliations, stress, and it makes people incredibly vulnareble to being radicalized by fanatics. Like Hamas, or the PLO. Or Otzmat Yehudit, or the violent West Bank settlers. If you look at how the politics of the Israeli population has developed since '48, this becomes incredibly obvious. Labor zionism dominated early Israel for decades. And after the first Intifada, the peace movement in Israel was incredibly strong. Now, Likud has been in power for decades, and support for a peace process or a 2-state solution is lower than ever. Because Israelis have grown disillusioned by years of constant terrorism and failures in diplomacy, just like Palestinians have been radicalised by constant incitement, islamist propaganda, extreme poverty, and death.

4. I talk about the rapes that happened on October 7th because it's rage-inducing and nauseating that such severe and thoroughly documented crimes are so widely denied without consequence in the west. I identify a lot with the victims, partly because of personal experiences, but also because I consider myself/want to become a part of the jewish people. That isn't strange in the slightest. If you're going to pretend that it's reasonable to demand from people that they be equally affected by the death of a friend and the death of a stranger, you're not being genuine. Most of the time when people do what-about-ism about the rapes during October 7th, they never actually talk about it themselves. It's only a rhetorical device to deflect from the horrors perpetrated against Israelis.

Secondly, I do care about the rapes and mistreatment that Palestinian prisoners face. I think the Israeli state and the IDF doesn't do enough to prevent such unhuman abuses of power. But once again: psycopathic behavior from soldiers is not unique to Israel in the slightest. You can look at the U.S. war in Adghanistan to see plenty of those cases - not because either military is "evil", but because this is the reality for every nilitary engaged in war, to different degrees, which is why every military needs institutionalised processes and competent military tribunal systems. Israel does have an actual, serious problem with not holding the perpetrators of this accountable, partly because of the current government not giving a fuck about it happening, but probably mostly because of some type of defensiveness-rooted worry about how it makes Israel look because of the current propaganda war. It also stems from the prevalence of dehumanization of Palestinians. No matter the reason for this problem, it's beyond inexcusable and evil.

But yet again - the severity of this problem is absurdly exaggerated by antizionists. I've seen enough cases of monsteous stories about abuse of Palestinian prisoners that turned out to be fake at this point. I can't even remember how many fucking made up stories about Israel training dogs to rape Palestinians I've seen at this point - perpetrated by "respectable" people. And when they turn out to be fake, there are never any apologies, or accountability. Lies like this about Israel are never treated with any sense of burden of proof or falifiability, because it relies on the dehumanization and demonization of not just Israel, but of jews. That's why I don't talk about this as often as October 7th.

I understand where you're coming from about not wanting to support the current government. But there are two major problems with that. The first is that you're magnifying the bad things about the current government beyond reason, because knowingly or not, we're all exposed to a torrent of propaganda demonising Israel on a daily basis. I agree that it sucks, but I wouldn't want to e.g. disarm Ukraine because of the Azov Battalion either. Only Israel gets treated like this, and we all know why that is.

The second problem is that you want to improve the world in terms of politics or international relations, you just can't use principles of pacifism or purity tests as a comfort pillow, because it leads to situations like the one where the world collectively (especially the EU) left Iran alone for decades. The result was not a pacified Iran - it was an emboldend Iran. And tens of thousands of people are dead because of it.

Hope that answers your questions.

Hey anon, if someone is being attacked, and the victim has a knife for self defense, why the fuck would you disarm the victim? Just a thought.

h4ganah

I mean, think about it, right. If the victim doesn't use violence to defend themselves and instead just die, the violence is over! And violence is yucky! 🥴

#jumblr #israel

I was on Instagram a couple of weeks ago and I saw that there was a group near me that was starting a club to play Rummikub. I was super excited. They had posted a story saying, “Hey, if you’d like to be updated on future club events, please reply to this story!” So I did. I got messaged back a couple days ago by someone from the club account asking me to “clarify” about the Israeli flag in my bio. I asked what that had to do with the club and got a response along the lines of, “This is a safe space and we don’t allow people who support perpetrators of a genocide or have harmful views here.”

Are you fucking kidding me? You want to take a game that was created by a Jewish-Israeli Holocaust survivor and popularized IN Israel and then say Jewish people who support Israel cannot join?

I just-I genuinely cannot anymore. You have the gall to take our culture and then ban us from participating because we aren’t the “right” kind of Jew you want?

I truly want to believe that things will get better, but I’m starting to lose hope, and that’s saying something.

Thanks for letting me type this out, I felt really alone at first, but talking about it here made me feel better.

#words of affirmation #affirmations #black people #black people with pets #black people pets #pets #dogs #dog lovers #dogs of tumblr #funny #black culture #animals

There's no "safe space", just Jew haters.

blackpeepswithpets

Affirmations for my Dog 🐕🙏🏿✨

Imagine receiving an award in an industry that Jews built (Broadway) and then using your acceptance speech to smear them as colonizers and vampires.

but I'm sure he only meant Israelis, so it's FINE then.

chutzpahchesed

#antisemitism

snovyda

And when you tell them that, they will make you pay for it.

An extremely good and important article, please read and share.

"There is a machine in Western liberal culture, and it runs on one specific fuel: the Good Russian.

The Good Russian is not a person, exactly. He is a function. He is the individual Russian who opposes Putin — usually through artistic or journalistic or activist means, usually having suffered professionally or personally for it, usually now residing in comfortable exile in Prague or Berlin or London or Copenhagen — who the Western liberal establishment elevates as proof that Russia is not irredeemable. That Russia contains, within its vast and complicated body, the seeds of its own moral reconstruction. That if we are patient and generous and appreciative enough of the Good Russians among us, the arc of history will eventually bend.

The machine is always running. It has been running for decades. Before Talankin there was the Navalny documentary. Before that there were the dissident artists, the exiled journalists, the human rights lawyers who became household names in Western capitals while remaining strangers in their own country. The cast rotates. The function does not change.

Here is what the function is.

The Good Russian releases the West from a demand it cannot tolerate: the demand for a reckoning with Russian society, not just Russian leadership. Ukrainians have been saying for four years — for longer, since 2014, since before — that this is not just about Putin. That Putin is the expression of something, not the cause of it. That Russian imperial culture, Russian colonial consciousness, the Russian refusal to acknowledge Ukrainian identity as real and distinct and sovereign — these are not the invention of one man and they will not die with him. That the poll numbers showing majority Russian support for the war are not manufactured by the Kremlin but reflect something real and deep and socially embedded about how Russian society understands its relationship to the territories it considers its own."

thecrushheb

I really hate the "Jerusalem is very important to three religions why would Judaism get full control of it" because its only important because thats where the JEWISH TEMPLE was and where the JUDEAN KINGS lived. just because people made religions out of fanficing Judaism means we have to give them equal slices of our own cultural history?