Hey man. Sorry about this, but I am arguing with one of my friends about Israel. I know you had some good posts on the arguments about the sterilization of the Beta Israel and the Nakba, but I'm struggling to find them. (I am looking for other sources, but your stuff was striking the first time I read it.) Do you know what you tagged those with? Alternatively, what sources do you recommend? Thank you!
Here are some posts I'm rather proud of, and hope you will find helpful. Tags are below.
There were no sterilizations.
What caused the Nakba?
Why the abandonment of the Jews made Zionism necessary.
There was no "peaceful coexistence before 1948".
Ottoman Muslim settler-colonialism in 1800s Palestine.
"Israeli apartheid" is a bad-faith lie.
"Palestine is a climate / environment issue" is an even bigger lie.
Was Nazism wrong, or just wrong when white people did it?
Killing Jews is not - and can never be - "liberation"
What did famous civil rights activists think of Jews and Israel?
How often did the media lie about conditions in Gaza?
BDS is the abstinence-only sex education of the Left
Palestine is the Confederate Lost Cause of the Left
hey. not sure if anyone will see this but just mostly looking to vent about a complex situation.
my partner (Jewish) and I (supportive goy atheist) have made a new friend (Arab Muslim), and we obviously have some different beliefs and opinions but also a lot of shared values, so the friendship has been strong thus far.
there are some instances where we have to bite our tongues, in regard to the I/P conflict mainly, though we are starting to push back in small ways such as, yes Hamas is an armed terrorist group, most Jews/Israelis don't support the government's actions, etc. this all came to a head last night when we made the *very* controversial statement: Jews are indigenous to the Levant.
I'm shocked at how she was unwilling to accept that, she became stubborn, defaulted to her mother's opinion, and started asserting that all Jewish prophets/architecture/holy sites are actually Islamic, and not Jewish, since they were sent/built/assigned by G-d. this, naturally, extends her opinion to that of modern day Jews being totally genetically unrelated to the ancient Israelites. blatant erasure and rewriting of Jewish history, centring Islam even though the Quran is demonstrably younger than the Tanakh. my partner understandably lashed out as their cultural ancestry was being disrespected. we tried to explain that there's a difference between respecting others' beliefs, vs one's beliefs directly erasing an entire group's existence from history, but she kept falling back on "history is written by the victors, we have no real way of knowing anything given that we didn't live back then".
it is the next day and there has been no hint of an apology, or even an acknowledgment. we left hers on good terms last night, but I know I need to bring this up with her, how the fuck do I even start. I just want to gently but firmly clarify that she is entitled to her beliefs, but her assertion that the Jewish prophets and architecture were simply Islamic all along is disrespectful and quite hurtful to Jews, particularly my partner
That is, unfortunately, Islamic doctrine (codified by the concept of Tahrif).
In essence, according to that doctrine, all of the Biblical peoples, sites, and narratives were actually Arab Muslims, but then the Jewish leaders/scribes/people/rabbis/etc got their hands on the texts and maliciously edited them for... reasons. And since this malicious editing meant that the word of god was being hoarded by the Jews, that then required Allah to send additional prophets (Jesus and then, when he "failed", Mohammad) to "correct" things back to where they "should" have been.
It's also the basis for a number of other really nasty bits of Islamic antisemitism--for example, apparently the Jewish tribes in Arabia were not there because of the Diaspora, but that they had moved there in anticipation of another divine prophet to fight against, and when they met Mohammad, they recognized him as their anticipated and intended enemy. (And I'm not exaggerating--that's literally what's taught by Islamists; it's given pretty much verbatim in this video at the ten minute mark). In terms of implications, just think of what that little narrative means--that all Jews, or at least Jewish leadership, knows the "truth" (that Islam is the actual origin and belief system) rejects it out of sheer contrariness, and work conspiratorially to keep it buried.
When that's what is taught to the average, well-meaning Muslim, like your associate, about Jewish history, identity, and culture...
Is that behavior you experienced really any surprise?
Question that I'm asking in good faith because I really do want to know about it: why does Herzl describe israel as a colony if it isn't one?
(All good faith questions are welcome, Anon - thanks for this one!)
TLDR: Because words change meanings over time and Herzl wasn't psychic.
In the 1890s, "colony" just meant a planned settlement or concentrated community. This included Jewish agricultural colonies in the Pale, temperance colonies in Colorado, and utopian communes everywhere.
It was basically the Victorian word for "intentional community," with absolutely no imperial baggage required.
The specific meaning activists now deploy (colony as racial domination, metropole extraction, indigenous suppression) is a 20th century framework that didn't exist when Herzl was writing in 1896.
So a reader of the 21st century finds the word "colony" in an old text and assumes it carries a technical definition that was coined decades later.
It's a little like finding the word "trauma" in a Civil War field report and concluding the surgeon was diagnosing PTSD.
Meanwhile, 'settler colonialism' as applied to Israel isn't a neutral analytical tool that happens to fit badly. It's a framework specifically constructed to exclude the features that distinguish Jewish return from actual settler colonialism...and it still fails on its own stated terms.
Jewish immigrants to the Levant were never agents of any empire. They were overwhelmingly refugees from empires who were fleeing Russian pogroms, Eastern European persecution, and later Nazi Germany. No metropole sent them. No metropole would take them back if the project failed.
That's not a minor quibble about definitions, either - it's the primary distinction between settler colonialism and every other form of large population movement in history.
There's also the matter of indigeneity. The Jews returning to the Levant weren't arriving in a place with which they had no connection.
Jewish presence in the region is documented continuously from ancient history, including in Egyptian records dating to roughly 1210 BCE.
The religious, linguistic, and ancestral connection to the land is what distinguishes this case from the British in Kenya or the French in Algeria, who had no such ties - and it is some of the best-documented, most indisputable history humans have ever gathered. (This is why they're so constantly engaged in historical revisionism.)
So when proponents of the settler colonialism framework of accusation encounter these objections, what do they do?
They move the goalposts.
The absence of a metropole gets explained away as an "exception."
The indigenous origin of the Jewish people to the Levant gets ahistorically dismissed or ignored, despite the fact that the Jewish people are the only group whose national identity, language, and religion originated in and remained oriented toward that specific land throughout their entire existence.
The framework gets rewritten and the history is revised until Israel fits the allegation.
So, one word in Der Judenstaat doesn't settle* any of this.
From The Atlantic: The False Narrative of Settler Colonialism (paywall bypassed)
Okay, there's actually a lot of interesting history around this, so let's dig into it.
It's completely correct that the semiotics of "colony", "colonization", etc., have evolved over time, and that back in the late 19th Century when Herzl was writing the connotation was more neutral than it became in the 20th Century. (I also need to stress that that one "it is something colonial" quote-mine you see shared everywhere is from a letter that was never even sent, because Herzl realized it was a bad idea.)
But more to the point: the old guard Zionists were fully aware of accusations they were European colonizers - and they actively refuted those claims.
— Jews and Muslims in the Arab World: Haunted by Pasts Real and Imagined (Jacob Lassner, Ilan S. Troen, 2007)
— Hebrew Repatriation to Eretz Yisrael (Samuel Kruglikoff, 1930)
— Eliahu Eliachar, Testimony to UNSCOP (United Nations Special Committee on Palestine) Regarding Jews in Arab Countries (1947)
— Ber Borochov, Poalei Tziyon Peace Manifesto (1917)
— David Ben-Gurion, Statement to the Elected Assembly of Palestine Jewry (1947)
Zionists wrote copious volumes about the indigeneity of Judeans to Eretz Yisrael, and denying accusations that they were merely pawns of an imperialist agenda (initially it was claimed they were Russian agents, and then later British colonists) or seeking to conquer or to exploit the land or its people. Contrary to the popular claim that Zionists thought (or promoted the concept) the land was uninhabited, a very substantial amount was written about the Palestinians (particularly from the perspective of class analysis), and how the return and liberation of Judeans must go hand-in-hand with class solidarity and the liberation of Arab workers. In other words: the exact opposite of colonialism. What we today would call decolonization - and specifically decolonization via proletarian revolution.
The simplistic quote-mining about "colonization" used today is a hundred years outdated: all such arguments were debunked before the state was even founded.
I say the same things to the Saudi backed Islamists, they just aren’t on Tumblr and instead infest YouTube comments. The people who want to kill Jews are going to try and do so no matter what.
The real battle is fighting everyone’s apathy to the pogrom. Which is hard to do when everyone, including a not insignificant portion of Jews, keep saying how important a personal theocratic ethnostate existing is to them.
Also you’re literally painting the DSA with a broad brush in your straw man post.
Once again, you are proving my point, because my original post was an exchange I, personally, had. How was I painting the DSA with any brush? Did I say the local Democrat was DSA or that this was an official DSA position? Did you assume the defensive progressive was DSA? Why are you repeating verbatim what the defensive progressive said? That is not a strawman, that is you.
Anyway, when progressives take antisemitic libels ancient and modern and merely substitute “Zionist” for “Jew”, that’s still antisemitic, since Israel is the only country in the world that is majority-Jewish, with the only cities in the world that are majority-Jewish. Of course it’s associated with Jews.
Israel is also home to half the world’s Jewish population, so there is good reason that the safety of Israelis and the preservation of Jewish self-determination there (AKA Zionism) is a priority for 90% of Jews worldwide. You should ask yourself why you think it’s reasonable to strip from a globally persecuted minority the sovereignty that is the sole representation of their right to self-defense. You should also ask yourself why you think it’s reasonable for a pogrom to be perpetrated against Jews in diaspora for caring about their family in the Eastern Hemisphere. You’ll find the answer is internalized antisemitism.
Anyway, Saudi Arabia hasn’t been promoting Islamism for years. They’ve reformed significantly under Prince Mohammed Bin Salman. He was curbed the power of Wahhabi clerics and granted women unprecedented (if still unequal) rights. Right now, the principal patrons of the Muslim Brotherhood are Qatar and Turkey. Get with the times.
If you keep associating Judaism with a theocratic ethnostate, that is actively making life worse for everyone, people are going to care less when violent crime is committed against Jews. Also even if I was anti-Semitic it wouldn’t matter because the core argument would still hold. That associating Israel with Judaism has only increased secular apathy towards hate crimes.
Anyway I hope your people find better orators if you’re going to keeping going down this path. Because guilt only works on people who care and less and less people do everyday, and the current rhetorical strategies don’t inspire much guilt but instead just kind of radicalize people the opposite way.
In short this isn’t a moral judgement it’s a strategic analysis and you have failed to convince me the Zionist strategy will result in anything but ruin.
Yes because the problem is that they want to be a theocratic ethnostate. I don’t like pointing this out because it makes it easier for people to make the “Jews are inherently evil” argument when the reality is that Israelites have been groomed to be hyper aggressive to fulfill the ambitions by external forces like the Evangelical church and various capital owners.
The reason those Middle East countries are mostly Arab is because rational people don’t move to the Middle East. You don’t move there if you’re not desperate, irrational, or running from something. If the people who founded Israel wanted to make a safe haven for Jews they would have done so on a bunch of unpopulated islands. But they didn’t want that they wanted a “white” ethnic group that would cooperate with their interests to conquer the Middle East.
Not the Middle East - the entire planet. I know and wholeheartedly support them in this.
This is Nuclear Strategy 101 and all nuclear-armed states have the same thing. It is only noticed for Israel because it harshes the buzz of traditional beloved Jew-killling fantasies. When your sense of social normalcy relies on Jews being gone, it sure feels like an affront that they might dare to take you down with them. I hope this seriously bothers you. I hope you lose sleep over it, because you just can't stop death-wishing Jews and now have to imagine some potential consequence of it.
BTW thank you for not attempting to deny your anti-Arab racism.
Really loving this whitewashing of the Free Palestine activists who were in the streets celebrating on 10/8. Everyone remembers how y'all were cheering when Israeli men, women, and children were being raped and burned alive, when Thai farm workers were getting the heads chopped off with shovels, when African students were getting their heads plugged with bullets.
You were all out and proud and cheering on 10/8. You were saying "This is what decolonization looks like." Where's that pride now? Why are you suddenly getting shy when your posts and videos are being played back to you?
Who'd you think will be better for Israel - Trump and his old-fashioned and harmless antisemites, or Clinton and her new and hungry and militant SJWs antisemites?
Forget the followers and look at the actual candidates. CLINTON will be a maintainance of bipartisan U.S. norms towards Israel (for better and for worse) by someone who actually understands the key players in the region and who knows how to do the homework. She’d probably be less antagonistic towards the Israeli govt than Obama has been (which I chalk up to Obama and Netanyahu personally disliking each other and Obama being too proud to delegate the relationship to underlings, as was done to save the U.S. / France relationship from similar personal snarling between Bush and Chirac). The worst thing we can expect from Clinton is more exposure on the DC cocktail party circuit for Max Blumenthal. Unless she starts a nuclear war over a no-fly-zone in Syria. TRUMP represents radical, destabilizing change, by someone who doesn’t really get the issues or the major players and has never shown much skill at learning stuff. On the one hand, he very well might tell the Palestinians to fuck off until they rise up and overthrow Hamas, and he very well might actually move the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem. He also very well might be so easily baited and taunted by a hundred other crises that he misses something vital to Israel. He also very well might decide one random Tuesday that he hates the Jews now because why not? If Jared Kushner divorces Ivanka, maybe her daddy would take it out on the rest of us. He also definitely would be an international humiliation to Israel. I don’t WANT us to get support from a guy who forcibly gropes women and mocks the disabled. If there are any Jews out there who think they can support a conspiracy-minded hyper aggressive racist because he’ll only be mean to other people and will leave us alone…. well, as Chris Rock noted, “that train is never late.” This is an election between Order and Chaos. Virtue didn’t make it to the finals.
so I was right about this and also how Bibi would turn out to be just trolling the world with fake annexation plans, where’s my thinktank gig already dammit
Since I was right in all of those predictions, here is what I am anticipating now:
Biden and the U.N. symbolically establishing some punishment or limitation for Israel before Trump’s inauguration, just like Obama and John Kerry did at the U.N. last time. Perhaps a call for establishing a Palestinian state by a date certain, or even recognizing one in advance.
Trump reversing this.
Trump’s close embrace of Israel / Netanyahu continuing to be used to shoehorn American Jews out of their natural home in Democratic / progressive coalitions, and justifying hatred, exclusion, and violence against us. Perhaps a mass casualty attack.
A much more aggressive stance against Iran, perhaps reaching the level of striking their nuclear sites.
The more aggressive stance against Iran not being worth the overall weakening of all worthwhile American institutions, moral credibility, expertise, continued leftwashing of antisemitism, and making Israel even more of a lopsided partisan issue.
Have you noticed how, both in Lost Cause and Nakba narrative, there is almost an attempt to role swap the racist elements?
Lost Cause idealizes the treatment of slaves, while portraying the North as the racists and aggressors. Like the movie Gods and Generals, where all black characters are happily supporting the Confederacy and their masters, while Northerners are the ones using racial slurs.
While Nakba removes Husseini, SS Handschar and various other Nazi sympathizing elements, so they can instead portray "Zionists" as being pro-Nazi through the use of some Herzl quotes, misinterpreting the Haavara agreement or doing the good ol' "Zionists helped in the Holocaust" conspiracy (hello Brezhnev).
The plaintiff, who filed his lawsuit under a pseudonym, claimed that he needs to remain anonymous because it puts his career and life in dan
“Plaintiff may have already survived an assassination attempt by Jewish agents. Through a series of unlikely events, seemingly contrived by apparently conspiring Jews, Plaintiff was enticed by an attractive, busty Jewess and wet his mouth with a drink of partially unknown provenance. Hours later, Plaintiff experienced overwhelming fatigue and ‘twilight consciousness’ for hours – an event never experienced by Plaintiff prior or since. Plaintiff suspects he was poisoned by Jews,” he wrote.
None of this convinced McAuliffe or the other judges.
Sorry team, I know i let everyone down. My busty self didn't use enough poison /j
That aside bro is literally using Hitler logic. He got denied entry to a school and is blaming jews for it.
i think hamas and hezbollah and the irgc and basically every terrorist organization hellbent on killing the jews makes a little more sense or is at least more morbidly interesting to look at when you view it under the lens of them being people who just don't know how much power they've lost. because the arab conquests happened so long ago that landback people refuse to acknowledge that colonization happened in the first place, and in that time across the entire world really there were basically zero consequences for oppressing jews. nul. efes. because sure there was that occasional pesky uprising but anyone but jews caring about antisemitism is a very very recent historical development. and at the end of the day these groups are religious extremists, and religious extremists more often than not are people so conservative they're basically stuck in the middle ages. so like yeah they're aware that the jews have a state and an army now and all that but just by the osmosis of the kind of culture they live in and absorb jews are still viewed as something very destructible. a century or two ago you could commit a massacre, you could commit many massacres against jews and walk away relatively unscathed. but now jews have actual agency in the world and we have the power to retaliate, retaliate hard even, and that simply doesn't register to the islamist mind. it doesn't compute.
"My mayor's Muslim, my bagel's Jewish..." is going viral in NYC right now and as a Jew who deeply loves bagels, I actually hate it so much. People will put our food in a pithy meme but when it comes to actually giving a shit about us as people... crickets. You're in NYC, a hell of a lot more than just your bagel is Jewish. And Jews are fighting tooth and nail to exist safely here right now because that same mayor has made securing our institutions an uphill battle.
Jews are built into the DNA of this city. We WILL live here freely and fuck anyone who tries to stop us.
i feel like. and this is something i have been thinking. the weird obsession with bagels or whatever stereotypical Jewish food being the end-all be-all of Jewish culture is such a deviation from how people treat any other culture. in most cases, basing your view of another ethnicity/culture on their most well-known food would be considered pretty offensive. not jews though.
then you add the layer of the non-Jewish view of Jews either being "assimilated and western" or "exotic and eastern". "white jews" and "brown jews". bagels are an Ashkenazi food. rings of dough are boiled in water. they were invented by Jews in Poland during a time when Jews were banned from baking challah. Many other Ashkenazi staples were a result of having to eat whatever we could, given that we were forced into poverty, banned from many professions and markets and activities, and living in a place that did not have the same climate (and therefore, food sources) as the place our culture originated from. when we began to immigrate to the Americas (mostly as refugees), we brought these foods with us.
Bagels are great. people love bagels. they love bagels so much they forget where bagels come from. they hardly even know how bagels came to be. hell, a lot of bagel places don't even boil them. they put all sorts of crap on bagels (i have a collection called 'goyische bagel crimes') and completely remove them from Jewish culture. they do not do this with other foods developed by Ashkenazi Jews out of survival necessities. they call those other foods "gross", "depressing", they say those foods are supposed evidence that Ashkenazim have no real culture compared to other Jews. Gefilte fish is the funniest thing they've ever heard of. Jews were called "garlic eaters" in a derogatory manner because we ate garlic. Ashkenazi Jews were eating "gross" types of meat (fish heads, anyone?), foraged plants and mushrooms, vegetables that were easy to grow in a rough and cold environment. because we had to. and now we have to hear our food be made into a massive joke.
and I think a large part of simplifying Jewish culture (specifically Ashkenazi culture) to just "bagels" and whatever comedian they hate the least is rooted in a refusal to contend with the antisemitism that is so deeply integral to modern society. it poses a threat to Christian hegemony, to this idea they all have (but will never admit to having) of Jews as being extinct, as being incomplete, primitive, and... rootless. their denial of our indigenous culture in Eretz Yisrael, the fact that two major world religions exist directly from the decontextualization of our mythology, the inability to truly make amends for centuries upon centuries of oppression, massacres, theft, sexual violence, genocide, forced conversions, expulsions, and murder. throughout thousands of years of Jewish history, we have maintained so many aspects of our ancient culture. we kept our native language alive to the point we could speak to Jews from other sides of the planets and revived it as a spoken language. we maintained a culture that was deeply connected to our native land. pomegranates don't grow in Poland, but you'll see iconography of them all over Ashkenazi art.
they do not love us. they do not love our culture. they do not love any of the context our cultural foods developed in. they do not respect the roots of our foods. they find the foods to be fucking hilarious.
There is also something to be said about the fact that many things seen as being only part of Sephardic or Mizrahi culture is... also definitely Ashkenazi. and that these distinctions mean something completely different to Jews than in how non-Jews use them. never let them create divides between us.
Okay. "My bagel is Jewish" not in the way this phrase is being used, but in the way that bagels represent my people's ability to survive, adapt, and invent lovely things, even when we are suffering. we are spiteful and stubborn. we are brave and persistent. we make good food. that is what a bagel being Jewish means to me.
(sorry for long ass rant, hope this is coherent in what i am saying. ive been thinking abt this for a while)
when ur such an insuffrable antisemite that even the antisemite you idolize can’t stand u
cartoons tankie then self reblogged with a rant which i will put under the cut to spare ur dash and bc honestly it is so pathetic it might be a bummer if u aren’t a schadenfruede enjoyer as i am.
if i made a bingo card of the characteristics that always describes these mfers, this post would hit all of it.
the same way loser men who hate themselves and are mad they cant be successful turn towards the manosphere and the altright, also applies to a lot of ppl who ascribe to the far left and identify as communists/tankies. like i cant even feel threatened by them bcuz its just so obvious they are upset at their own lives and are using politics to justify attacking others they see as doing better than them, which usually ends up being liberals due to the coastal liberal elites stereotypes that so many extremists believe applies to all liberals. at least the loser men who turn to the far right are actually poor vs the losers who turn to communism/become tankies who cosplays as being poor when being completely funded by their upper middle class parents
"I hate my life so I attack Jews to the point that other Jew-haters think I'm annoying." Holy shit, that is an incredible amount of cringe.
I don't think they'll notice that when they talk about how they were radicalized and how that hurt them that radicalization is a bad thing. They got radicalized to the point that it pushed other people away, and that's the point. That's why extremists rely on.
You get really into radical or reactionary politics and your regular friends don't want to hang out with you anymore. You feel bad because you're isolated. You feel bad and you feel like there's no hope for you. You have to do something for The Cause. Now that your life sucks, it's easy to give up your life for The Cause.
This is how people become suicide bombers and I am not exaggerating at all.
If you're into radical politics online and it makes you feel bad, it's because people are preying on that. People are trying to find people in shitty situations and radicalize them and use them for cannon fodder.
