You will say "it's gross af to call enormous groups of people 'plagues' even if tumblr gives you woke points" and wake up to a bunch of people fighting about how it is fine to call enormous groups of people plagues and get an accusation that saying you shouldn't do this is proof you're going to shoot up a synagogue. (?)
A lot of you guys are like really really nasty people and I'm so glad I don't know you in real life.
“safety through solidarity” and “solidarity is not transactional” contradict each other. for there to be safety through solidarity that solidarity cannot only go one way
"How does an Israeli-American separate himself from Israel? For many Jews, Israel and Jews are linked together as a simple fact of history – and the ones who aren’t have enough humility and self-awareness to understand that they easily could have been. What humiliation ritual must I enact in order to overturn the judgement that renders me guilty until proven innocent? How much shame must I perform over the fact that the Holocaust happened to my grandparents? What spell can I cast to undo the events of the past? And who exactly is the judge, jury, and executioner that will determine whether Jews have sufficiently disentangled themselves from “Zionism”? The person burning them to death in their own city?
Can you speak to any similarities or differences between the illegal Israeli settlements in the West Bank and the situation of Israelis in Gaza 20 years ago? I really think that Israel needs to do more to discourage the settlements, ideally get rid of them altogether, and definitely crack down on the attack by settlers on locals.
At the same time, I feel that the example of Gaza, where Israel withdrew to its borders and was rewarded by 20 years of Hamas launching attacks culminating in October 7th is the worst possible way to persuade Israel to withdraw from areas it’s currently illegally occupying. How did the Israeli withdrawal from Gaza even come about?
(For context, I’m not Jewish so I wouldn’t call myself a Zionist but I’m a liberal two-state supporter. I actually used to be quite anti Israel, I believed the simplistic and offensive idea that “they settled there because the holy book told them to”. I’m probably one of the few people who was made more pro Israel by October 7th, it made me research Zionism, the archaeological and cultural history, and the fact that some Jews have always lived there. So now I see it as a land back project, albeit one that’s become sadly right wing.)
There's a lot to unpack here, but since you're asking these questions in good faith, let me start with some foundations before we get to your actual questions.
On "illegal settlements"
I'll bet you've never actually looked into why you call Israeli West Bank settlements illegal and that it's simply a phrase repeated so often it feels like established fact.
Jordan's 1948–1967 military occupation of the same land was not labeled "illegal" even though it lacked legal title and involved a change of sovereignty. The international community ignored the "illegality" of the Jordanian occupation because it served a specific political status quo, and then weaponized it against Israel.
The "international legal system" is consequentialist in that it applies the label of "illegal" based on the actors (Jews) rather than the act (taking control of territory in a defensive war). This is a conspicuously selective application of international law and a double standard with a very limited number of explanations, none of which are flattering.
It's also worth noting that Israel didn't cling to the West Bank out of expansionist ambition. After 1967, Israel actually offered to return the territory to Jordan. The Arab League's response came at the Khartoum Summit later that year: "no peace with Israel, no recognition of Israel, no negotiations with Israel." That's the Arab League's own document.
Israel took control of the West Bank from Jordan in 1967 in a war Jordan started by joining Egypt's attack.
So what's the legal theory that made Jordanian occupation fine but Israeli control illegal?
The legal status is genuinely contested, and the confident "illegal" framing you've absorbed deserves more scrutiny than it usually gets. If you're actually interested in the facts, start with the sources at the end of this post. If you have specific questions after that, feel free to send them my way.
On Zionism
You say you're not Jewish so you wouldn't call yourself a Zionist.
This means that you don't actually know what "Zionism" means, likely because your understanding of the term comes from social media.
Zionism is the belief that Israel has a right to exist as a Jewish state.
If you support a two-state solution, you support Israel's right to exist and are in fact a Zionist.
The word has been so thoroughly demonized that people like you are now disavowing positions they actually hold.
You say October 7th inspired you research Zionism, but if you'd really researched Zionism, Anon...you'd be able to define it.
I think what's more likely is that you're conflating research with encountering content tagged #Zionism on social media.
[Media literacy pro tip: Unless you're a scholar studying social media, nothing you learn on social media is "research."]
On why Jews settled there
You say you used to believe they settled there "because the holy book told them to," and I'm glad you've moved past it, but I want to make sure you've replaced it with something accurate rather than just a softer version of the same misconception.
Jews didn't flood into Palestine because of a religious text. They went there for two reasons:
It is where they are from (Jews are from Judea...hence the name) and there has been continuous Jewish presence in the region for millennia.
The world kept making it lethally clear that Jews had no future anywhere else.
European Jews fled to Palestine because Europe was in the process of wiping them out, eventually succeeding in murdering 2/3rds of Jews in Europe.
But the founding narrative that focuses exclusively on European Jewry leaves out roughly 850,000 Mizrahi and Sephardi Jews who were expelled or forced to flee from Arab countries (like Egypt, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Yemen, and Morocco) in the decades following 1948, most of them stripped of their citizenship, their property, and their assets. Most of them ended up in Israel not because of Zionist ideology but because Israel was the only place that would take them. (I'll bet you don't know what the Farhud was, but do know a false narrative about the Nakba.)
The Israel that exists today, as a result, is probably a bit more than half Mizrahi. Their ancestors never lived in Europe, never spoke Yiddish, and had lived in those countries since well before Islam existed. Baghdad was once 30% Jewish. (Think about that for moment: New York City is only 12-15% Jewish.)
When people talk about Israel as a European colonial project, they are entirely erasing them. Erasing their history, their expulsion, and their thousands of years of lived experience. Like their cousins who survived WWII in Europe, they weren't people from a powerful empire claiming distant territory to reap resources to send back to imperial overlords. They were a stateless people, from many places, returning to or arriving at the only homeland that would have them. Israel is made up of the Jews who survived Europe and the Eastern hemisphere. To be antizionist is to say that they were supposed to have died at the hands of the Nazis and the Islamists.
On Gaza and what it means for the West Bank
Now, your actual questions, which are good ones.
The Gaza withdrawal in 2005 is a huge topic, but the short version: it was essentially Prime Minister (and former General) Ariel Sharon's decision, driven by the argument (associated with strategist Dan Schueftan and others) that Israel couldn't simultaneously hold Gaza's territory and avoid either a demographic crisis or permanent military occupation of a hostile population. Sharon forcibly removed roughly 8,000 Israeli settlers (many of whom had been there for decades, and did not go quietly), dismantled every settlement, dug up every Jewish grave, and withdrew completely to the 1967 border. The international community called it a promising step.
Hamas then won the 2006 Palestinian elections, violently ousted Fatah from Gaza in 2007, and spent the next 17 years building the infrastructure for October 7th.
So when you ask whether this is the worst possible advertisement for further withdrawal...? The answer is yes....and that's not a right-wing talking point.
Any serious discussion of West Bank settlements has to grapple with the fact that Israel tried the full withdrawal approach and was rewarded with two decades of Hamas rockets, then a massacre. The people asking Israel to do it again need a much better answer to that problem than they currently have. (This doesn't even start on the fact that the PA couldn't provide security guarantees even if they wanted to...and they don't.)
Why the West Bank is not Gaza, and why 2025 is not 2005
They're not really comparable situations.
Start with geography. Gaza is a coastal strip, flat, self-contained. The West Bank is a mountainous plateau that literally overlooks Tel Aviv and Jerusalem.
When Sharon withdrew from Gaza, he was making a painful political concession. If Israel withdrew from the West Bank under current conditions, it would be handing an enemy the high ground above its own capital.
Then there's the question of who would actually govern a post-withdrawal West Bank. In Gaza, the Palestinian Authority was at least nominally in charge before Hamas violently removed them. In the West Bank today, the PA totally controls Area A (which contains the major Arab cities) with Israeli security forces still operating in Area B, and total Israeli control in Area C.
It's worth knowing what those zones actually represent:
In square miles, Area A is roughly 18% of the West Bank, but contains approximately 55% of the West Bank's Arab population.
Area B covers another 22% of the land and roughly another 40% of the population.
Area C, the remaining 60% of the land (where all the Israeli settlements are located), has a relatively small Palestinian population, somewhere around 5% of West Bank Arabs, mostly in rural and Bedouin communities.
So the PA nominally governs the areas where most West Bank Arabs actually live, but it does so with Israeli security forces operating alongside and often inside those areas because the PA cannot secure them on its own.
This isn't Israeli propaganda, it's something PA officials have effectively acknowledged. The PA is financially insolvent, deeply unpopular with its own population, and has no answer to the armed militant factions like Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, the Lion's Den, which have been growing in cities like Jenin and Nablus. If Israel left tomorrow, the most likely outcome isn't a Palestinian state. It's a violent Hamas takeover of the West Bank, with the difference that this Hamas would be sitting on those ridges above Tel Aviv rather than behind a fence in a coastal enclave.
Then there's the Israeli electorate, and this is important context for understanding why the political situation looks the way it does. In 2005, Sharon could sell the Gaza withdrawal to a significant portion of the Israeli public because the Oslo process had created at least the theoretical framework of a negotiating partner and there was a plausible story about what peace might look like. Throughout the 90s and 2000s, a majority of Israelis supported trading land for peace - even after the Second intifada's ~140 suicide bombings..
Twenty years later, Israelis have watched that withdrawal empower Hamas, seen the Oslo Accords set the stage for the Second Intifada, and witnessed every major peace offer (including Camp David in 2000, and Olmert's extraordinary offer in 2008) get rejected or ignored. The Israeli center-left, which was once the dominant force in Israeli politics and the driver of the peace process, has been essentially obliterated as a political force. It didn't lose because Israelis became cruel or indifferent. It lost because its central argument that territorial concessions would produce security and peace failed visibly, repeatedly, and lethally.
October 7th didn't radicalize the Israeli electorate. It confirmed what the electorate had already concluded.
On settlements specifically
You want Israel to crack down on settler violence against Palestinians, and I think you're 100% right. Settler attacks on Arab villages are indefensible, frequently go unpunished, and are a genuine moral catastrophe for Israel. The current Israeli government's tolerance of this violence is disgusting. Terrorists should be treated like terrorists, regardless of their ethnicity, nationality, or motives.
The broader settlement question is harder. The circumstances under which Israel could realistically dismantle settlements include:
a credible Palestinian negotiating partner
security guarantees that don't rely purely on faith
Neither of those conditions currently exist. That's not an excuse for an indefinite status quo, but it's the actual situation.
On "land back, but sadly right wing"
You're saying the project is legitimate but you're troubled because the current governing coalition is right-wing.
I want to push back on this framing with a thought experiment:
Imagine the Ojibwe recover some of the territory stolen from them by European settlers and the governments of both the US and Canada:
Then, 50 years later, they democratically elect center-right leaders whose priorities are free markets, strong national defense, and the belief that individual rights are the foundation of human freedom and achievement.
Does the Ojibwe's landback project suddenly become illegitimate because you don't care for the government they democratically elected?
The political character of a particular government doesn't retroactively invalidate the underlying claim. You can think Netanyahu is a disaster (I do and many Israelis do) without it meaning the entire project of Jewish self-determination in the Jewish homeland is tainted. (Interestingly, when the socialist Labor party ran Israel for decades, many used it's leftist government to delegitimize it.)
That aside, the landback framing you've arrived at is pretty solid.
Some sources are below, follow-up questions are welcome.
The West Bank as Occupied Territory: The Irrelevance of the Mandate and the Lack of Jordanian Sovereignty
Until a peace treaty is concluded, Israel is entitled, under international law, to continue the settlement of the territories of Judea and S
Jordan formally annexes the West Bank and East Jerusalem, allowing the Palestinian inhabitants therein to obtain Jordanian citizenship.
Truly fascinating how “Israel/Zionism≠Jews” until synagogues are attacked and then Israel’s actions reflect on all Jews, and obviously synagogues are indoctrinating Jews into Zionism anyway. Really interesting
anon is also...kind of wrong. using the language "fundraising for the IDF" suggests that funds are being sent for military purposes, like weaponry, which is not the case. synagogues might raise funds and donate to organizations like Friends of the IDF and LIBI, but none of these funds go directly to the IDF. they go towards the soldiers, like providing funds to soldiers (especially lone soldiers, who dont have any family in israel to act as a support net), providing education and funding scholarships, offering grief counseling, PTSD, and mental health services to soldiers as well as bereaved family members, and funding construction for housing or gyms on IDF bases.
if someone's inherently opposed to the state of israel even existing (and, by extension, the IDF serving as a way to defend and maintain that existence) this probably isn't going to make much of a difference for them, but the presence of cozier lodging on IDF bases, or bereaved parents, siblings, children, and spouses receiving grief counseling is a far cry from "supporting an Israeli death cult full of pedophiles."
no actually now that i think about it milf-king is right. if only Itay wasn't able to pursue a degree in Sports Medicine due to a scholarship funded by FIDF and go on to become a physical therapist. he is atlas carrying the existence of israel on his back. if Itay wasn't out there helping old women learn how to walk again after falling and breaking their hips on the ever-present tiled floors in israeli houses and apartments, israel would have surely ceased to exist yesterday. damn you Itay!!!
Also, sending money and support to an institution that is directly keeping us alive and preventing us from being murdered is normal and good.
The genocide libel is just that, a libel. I’d prefer a more moral military, but I’m not going to sacrifice my life and that of my family because the institution keeping us alive does bad things, and I’m not sorry about that.
My children don’t deserve to die at preschool because I try to keep them from dying in the military.
Babysitting a toddler is a lot like being the narration in a point-and-click adventure game. Watching him knock on the doors of empty rooms and saying "hmm. I don't think anyone's in there". Watching him attempt to use [spoon] on [cat] and saying "I don't think those things go together". Watching him throw a cup of water onto the floor and just commenting "the floor is wet now" when he looks up at me to see if I approve.
prior authorization, if you've never heard of it, is your doctor asking your insurance to cover a prescription/procedure/what have you that they want to give their patient. the insurance company can decide that they don't wanna and deny authorization, forcing the patient to cover the cost themselves or cancel the prescription/procedure and continue dealing with whatever brought them to their doctor, without the treatment they need.
in other words, people with no medical degrees or experience can decide that you don't need medical care because profits, even if it would save your life - if you're not dying right this second, you're fine, right?
kiiiiiinda sounds like practicing medicine without a license to me, but what do i know? i'm sure those rich guys are so much smarter than me about how health works. totally not just profiting from people's suffering. noooo.
Prior authorizations are supposed to be handled by a doctor. Often, you have no one doing that or one doctor "reviewing" an unreasonable amount of cases and just rubberstamping thousands of cases a day. That's why one of the best ways to handle a PA being denied is to ask for the license number and name of the person who reviewed your request. In the US, this is information to which you are entitled.
Usually, rather than admit that they are breaking the law - which everybody fucking knows they're doing - they will then just approve your PA.
I highly recommend Matthew Cortland's Patreon for a lot of info on how to handle health insurance. They're a literal pro at health law in the US and a chronically ill person themself & for a couple of bucks a month, you get access to a huge archive full of how-to & disability/health news.
Hi my name is Mordechai ben Yair ben Shimei ben Kish, ish Yimini and I am from the tribe of Binyamin (that’s how I got my name) with a long white beard that reaches my mid-abs and icy blue eyes like limpid tears and a lot of people tell me I look like King Saul (AN: if u don’t know who he is get da hell out of here!). I AM related to Queen Esther which is great because she’s a major fucking hottie. I’m a prophet but I'm humble and scholarly. I’m also a Jew, and I was a member of a respected group called the Sanhedrin in the Hall of Hewn Stones where I learned seventy languages (I’m one hundred). I’m a vizier (in case you couldn’t tell) and I wear mostly royal blue. I am second to the king and I get all my clothes from him. For example today I was wearing royal robes of blue and white, and a mantle of fine linen and purple wool. I was wearing a magnificent gold crown and riding a royal horse. I was sitting by the castle gates. A counter-decree had been issued so the Jews were not in mortal peril, which I was very happy about. A lot of antisemites stared at me. I put up my middle finger at them.
With military action against the Iranian regime starting 3 days before Purim I can only think of the three days of fasting the Jews did in ancient Persia before Esther met with the king and delivered us from a terrible fate. I will be fasting during daylight until Purim and praying that by the time we are done reading the megillah we will hear news that the people of Iran will have taken back control of their country and delivered themselves from the oppression they have faced for decades.
I ask that any who are able to fast in whatever way they can and spread the word through your local and online communities, both so that our fast may aid their struggle and so the Iranian people will know the Jews are with them.
“I grew up proud to be Jewish, and on Purim we remember something powerful: they tried to destroy us, but we’re still here — celebrating, laughing, and living. Am Yisrael Chai! Happy Purim!”
Rob Schneider:
“Every generation faces its own Haman, but the faith and identity of the Jewish people never fade. Purim is proof that we survive and we overcome. Happy Purim!”
Gene Simmons:
“They tried to erase us from history… but history proves the opposite. The Jewish people live, create, build, and conquer fear with courage. Am Yisrael Chai!”
Steven Spielberg:
“Purim reminds us that even in the darkest moments, there is purpose and redemption. Our story didn’t end with Haman… it was only beginning. Happy Purim!”
Gal Gadot:
“I’m Israeli, I’m Jewish, and I’m proud. On Purim we celebrate that evil doesn’t have the final word. Life does. Am Yisrael Chai!”
Sarah Silverman:
“Purim is resilience, identity, and joy. They tried to silence us… and here we are making noise with groggers and pride. Happy Purim!”
Scarlett Johansson:
“Celebrating Purim means honoring the strength of the Jewish people. We survived, we persisted, and we continue to shine. Am Yisrael Chai!”
Pink:
“The story of Purim inspires me: when fear tried to rule, courage answered. And we’re still standing. Happy Purim!”
Barbra Streisand:
“The voice of the Jewish people will not be silenced. Purim reminds us that dignity and faith sustain us generation after generation. Am Yisrael Chai, today and always!”
Happy Purim — may joy and Jewish pride fill every home.
The giant aoyu鳌鱼 flower-lantern balloon from the National Games opening ceremony also appeared during the Spring Festival. (cr飞略大广东)
Aoyu is an auspicious creature from ancient Chinese mythology, with the head of a dragon and the body of a fish. It is the transitional form of a carp that has leaped through the Dragon Gate but not yet fully transformed into a Loong aka Chinese dragon. Featuring a multi‑chamber balloon design with a bionic structure, it is equipped with color‑changing sensors, appearing light and elegant, capturing the mythical imagery of roaming freely across the sky and sea.
tangentwithtanner
andulkaphoto
vaporwave
janainaart
jacobvanloon
