Just wanted to say I hope everyone is taking care of themselves to the best of their abilities. Admist everything going on in the world right now, I hope everyone I follow, who follow me and I've chatted with are safe, healthy* and in good spirits.
I'll be back on here eventually(it's been 10+yrs already smh lol). In the meantime: Free Palestine and speak up/organize for Congo, Yemen, Sudan, Armenia and Afghan peoples 🇾🇪🇸🇩🇨🇩🇦🇲🇵🇸
(not sure how many of my mutuals are around but 😘)
As Israel continues its brutal repression, murder, and colonial domination of the Palestinian people a fruit has become a surprising symbol of Palestinian resistance. Following the aftermath of the 1967 Six-Day War, the Israeli authorities banned all public displays of the Palestinian 🇵🇸 with the possibility of imprisonment for those who defied the ban. Instead of flying their national flag, Palestinians are increasingly using 🍉 as a form of public defiance against the occupation.
[ID: An undated tweet by Tara Connolly (@/TaraConnollyEU) that says, “A Jewish museum guide working in the Jewish Museum in Berlin was fired yesterday for calling the situation in the West Bank apartheid. [Paragraph break.] Germany in 2023.”
This was a quote retweet from a German account Jüdische Stimme für gerechten Frieden [“Jewish Voices for a Just Peace,” with end of account name cut off.] Connolly’s tweet, minus its final paragraph, is a translation of the German tweet, which also notes that the museum guide was a member of their organization.
Following the tweet screenshot are two screenshots of long paragraphs, from the article which the previous commenter on this post has linked to. Text below:
When they tangle with left-wing Jews in Germany, canceling their events and attacking them as antisemites in the pages of various newspapers, they suggest what Germany’s antisemitism commissioner Felix Klein has said directly: That the Jews are not being sensitive enough to what antisemitism means to the Germans—that, in fact, these Jews do not understand antisemitism at all. In a perverse twist, the fact that the Germans were the most successful antisemites in history has here become a credential. By becoming the Jews’ consummate protectors, Germans have so thoroughly absorbed the moral lessons bestowed by Jewish martyrdom that they have no more need for the Jew except as symbol; by the logic of this strange supersessionism, Germans have become the new Jews. This is not only a matter of rhetorical authority on Jewish matters but is also often literal, as this self-reflexive philosemitism has led to a wave of German converts to Judaism. According to Tzuberi, “The Jewish revival is desired precisely because it is a German revival.”
If Jews are negated by this formulation, Palestinians are villainized by it. Last year, when the German state banned Nakba Day demonstrations, only days after the murder of Palestinian journalist Shireen Abu Akleh, police justified this suppression by claiming, in a familiar racist trope, that protesters would not have been able to contain their violent rage. Indeed, in Germany Palestinian identity itself has become a marker of antisemitism, scarcely to be spoken aloud—even as the country is home to the largest Palestinian community in Europe, with a population of around 100,000. “Whenever I would mention that I was Palestinian, my teachers were outraged and said that I should refer to [Palestinians] as Jordanian,” one Palestinian German woman speaking of her secondary school education told the reporter Hebh Jamal. Palestinianness as such has thus been stricken from German public life. In The Moral Triangle, a 2020 anthropological study of Palestinian and Israeli communities in Germany by Sa’ed Atshan and Katharina Galor, many Palestinians interviewed said that to speak of pain or trauma they’ve experienced due to Israeli policy is to destroy their own futures in Germany. “The Palestinian collective body is inscribed as ontologically antisemitic until proven otherwise. Palestinians, in this sense, are collateral damage of the intensifying German wish for purification from antisemitism,” wrote Tzuberi. /end ID]
gran fury for ACT UP, "the new york crimes" (march 28, 1989) // writer's bloc, "the new york war crimes" (november 9, 2023)
ACT UP "day of desperation" takeover of grand central station (january 23, 1991) // jewish voices for peace "ceasefire now" takeover of grand central station (october 27, 2023)
ACT UP "political funeral" procession to the white house (october 11, 1992); throwing ashes on the white house lawn // the people's forum "free palestine" national march on washington (november 4, 2023); bloody handprints on the white house gate
South Africa’s Bantustans, areas where black residents lived without autonomy, inspired many in the Israeli elite as a viable model for Palestine. This was the desire to isolate “undesirable” Palestinians in noncontiguous enclaves, Bantustans cut off from the rest of the country—in other words, like today’s West Bank, where 165 Palestinians “enclaves” are strangulated by Israeli colonies, the IDF, and violent settlers.
During the apartheid South African era, Israeli diplomats were instructed around the world to tell the media that the Jewish state didn’t recognize the Bantustans. This was a lie, as a telegram by the deputy director of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Natan Meron, on November 23, 1983, proved: “It is no secret that Israeli political figures and public figures are involved in one way or another, directly or indirectly, in economic activity in the Bantustans.”
Antony Loewenstein, The Palestine Laboratory: How Israel Exports the Technology of Occupation Around the World
There was no better political, military, diplomatic, and ideological alliance between like-minded nations than Israel and apartheid South Africa. The apartheid regime in Pretoria took power in 1948 and soon put in place Nazi-style restrictions on nonwhites, from forbidding marriage between the races to barring blacks from many jobs. The South African Jewish community was strongly pro-Israel and became the biggest financial backer of Israel per capita after 1948. A majority of these Jews benefited from South African apartheid and supported its continuation. A small but notable minority bravely opposed it and joined the African National Congress (ANC) in its campaign for liberation.
By the time the South African and Israeli governments cemented a political, ideological, and military relationship in the 1970s, often centered on weapons that had been developed and tested by the Israeli military, many in the ruling Israeli Likud party felt an affinity with South Africa’s worldview. As journalist and author of The Unspoken Alliance Sasha Polakow-Suransky writes, it was an “ideology of minority survivalism that presented the two countries as threatened outposts of European civilisation defending their existence against barbarians at the gate.
Antony Loewenstein, The Palestine Laboratory: How Israel Exports the Technology of Occupation Around the World
For all the unspeakable horrors happening to Palestinians right now, it's not the time for despair. Palestinian liberation has never been so close at hand; in fact, it is the Zionist entity that is desperate to maintain its colonial grip. Keep that in mind.
Just wanted to say I hope everyone is taking care of themselves to the best of their abilities. Admist everything going on in the world right now, I hope everyone I follow, who follow me and I've chatted with are safe, healthy* and in good spirits.
I'll be back on here eventually(it's been 10+yrs already smh lol). In the meantime: Free Palestine and speak up/organize for Congo, Yemen, Sudan, Armenia and Afghan peoples 🇾🇪🇸🇩🇨🇩🇦🇲🇵🇸
(not sure how many of my mutuals are around but 😘)
