Orushka

This is Orushka. These are things Orushka made. (and some cool things other people blogged) Flickr | Soaps #my art

[girlactionfigure]

As seen today, universities are not always centers for higher learning, but can serve as breeding grounds to mainstream extremist ideologies.

This day (May 10) in 1933, at 34 university tows across Germany, students and professors gathered for a spectacle.

They built massive bonfires and burned more than 25,000 books in a single night.

This was not random vandalism. It was a coordinated purge of “un-German” thought - you know, whatever went against “the narrative.”

Works by Albert Einstein, Sigmund Freud, Franz Kafka, Thomas Mann, and countless Jewish and liberal authors were condemned as “Jewish intellectualism” and “cultural Bolshevism.”

Einstein — then safely in California — was specifically targeted. The Nazis seized his property, put a price on his head, stripped him of his academic posts, and publicly burned his books. He never set foot in Germany again.

The message was crystal clear: certain ideas were no longer permitted. Universities became instruments of ideological enforcement. If this description is making you uncomfortable, you’re on the right track.

The extremism that eventually led to the Holocaust didn’t start with gas chambers.

It began with students and professors publicly shutting down speech that went against the new orthodoxy.

Fast forward to today.

Since October 7, 2023, we have watched elite American and Western universities become breeding grounds for the same kind of ideological intolerance and open Jew-hatred. Jewish students have been harassed, assaulted, and forced to hide their identities. “Globalize the Intifada” and “from the river to the sea” have become mainstream chants on campuses that once prided themselves on enlightenment.

The parallels are chilling.

When universities stop being forums for open debate and instead enforce ideological purity — when certain perspectives (especially Jewish and pro-Israel ones) are shouted down, censored, or declared illegitimate — they create the perfect intellectual soil for dangerous extremism to take root and flourish.

The book burners of 1933 didn’t think they were the bad guys. They believed they were on the side of "justice and progress" too.

The lesson of May 10, 1933, is not ancient history.

@CptAllenHistory

[girlactionfigure]

I WAS LIED TO ABOUT ISRAEL

I spent years hearing that Israel was an "apartheid state."

Then I went there.

What I saw with my own eyes was completely different from what many politicians, activists, and media outlets wanted me to believe.

I saw Muslims praying freely.

I saw Christians worshipping openly.

I saw Jews, Muslims, Christians, Druze, and people from every background working together, studying together, serving in hospitals together, and building a future together.

As a Muslim, I was welcomed with warmth, kindness, and respect everywhere I went.

The love I received from ordinary Israelis was overwhelming.

The Israel I experienced was not a land of segregation. It was a vibrant democracy filled with people of different faiths and ethnicities living side by side.

No country is perfect. But the caricature of Israel that is sold to the world bears little resemblance to the reality I witnessed.

The greatest lesson from my journey was simple:

Never let activists, politicians, or media personalities tell you what a country is like.

Go. See it yourself.

Talk to the people.

Discover the truth firsthand.

Because once you experience the real Israel, many of the myths begin to collapse.

As a Muslim Zionist, an American veteran, and a human rights activist, I returned home with even greater conviction that peace will never be built on lies.

Truth matters.

And the truth is that I found friendship, coexistence, hope, and humanity in Israel.

Mansoor Hussain Laghari is a Muslim, Zionist, U.S. Army veteran, human rights activist, founder of Nabisar Films. A survivor of multiple assassination attempts he has spent his life standing against extremism and fighting for truth, justice, and human dignity.

[eretzyisrael]

A Jewish History Heist at the British Museum

The British Museum just postponed a Jewish Culture Month lecture, but it’s been erasing Jewish history long before that.

by Roy K. Altman

I have witnessed the way the British Museum has been quietly participating in the erasure of Jewish history for some time now. A few years ago, I visited the British Museum with my wife to see the Lachish bas-reliefs and the Kurkh Monoliths—ancient stone carvings from the Assyrian empire, centered in what’s now northern Iraq—which provide unambiguous evidence of ancient Jewish rule in the Land of Israel. The Lachish bas-reliefs depict the siege of Lachish—an ancient Israelite town, a few miles from Jerusalem, destroyed by the Assyrian king Sennacherib in 701 BCE. The mesmerizing scenes, carved in gypsum, progress from the initial invasion of the Kingdom of Israel on the far left to the siege and battle reliefs in the center, culminating in the destruction of Lachish and the enslavement of its Jewish inhabitants on the extreme right.

Archeologists have now corroborated this Assyrian depiction of the destruction of Lachish—which is described in the Bible, twice—by excavating in and underneath Lachish itself. Geologists have established that a fire consumed (and then destroyed) the settlement toward the end of the eighth century BCE—which is consistent with the Assyrian destruction of the town in 701 BCE. In addition to uncovering the telltale signs of an ancient battle—arrows and spears, for instance—at that specific historical layer in the underground sediment, archeologists have shown that the civilization the Assyrians vanquished was indisputably Jewish. In fact, Lachish is one of the only places (outside Jerusalem) where archeologists have unearthed the now-famous LMLK seals, bearing the Hebrew letters Lamed Mem Lamed Kaf, meaning “belonging to the King.” The king these seals refer to is Hezekiah, the ancient Israelite monarch who ruled toward the end of the eighth century BCE in Jerusalem, when Sennacherib’s Assyrian army came knocking.The Black Obelisk of Shalmaneser III, depicting military campaigns and receiving tribute, 858–824 BCE. (PHAS/Universal Images Group via Getty Images)

You would be hard-pressed to find any connection to Jewish history in the museum’s labels—and the Lachish bas-reliefs are not the only example. The Kurkh Monoliths—giant limestone stelae—provide even older evidence of Jewish indigeneity in the Land of Israel. They record the Assyrian king Shalmaneser III’s account of defeating Ahab, the king of Israel, at a battle fought near the ancient city of Karkar in 853 BCE. And Shalmaneser’s Black Obelisk depicts a long procession of enslaved Israelites, their king bowing before his Assyrian conquerors—what most scholars consider the oldest image of a Jew anywhere in the world, a Jewish prince who lived not in Poland or Belarus or Brooklyn, but in Israel. But most of the descriptions I’ve provided here cannot be found on any of the museum’s inscriptions. And these priceless items of ancient Jewish history don’t appear in a wing dedicated to Israel or Judaism at all. Instead, they’re all on display in the Assyrian section of the museum—far removed from any mention of Israel or its pesky Jewish inhabitants.

Which brings us to the heart of the matter. In all its many rooms and floors, covering thousands of years of human history—and featuring plenty of now-extinct peoples like the Etruscans (Room 71), the Lycians (Room 20), and the Anatolians (Room 54)—the British Museum doesn’t actually have a dedicated wing to the people who brought us monotheism, Jesus, and the Bible. There are, it’s true, individual items of ancient Jewish origin. They just aren’t displayed with descriptions that make clear the ancient and continuous connection between the Jewish people and the Land of Israel. Here’s a photograph I took of an absurd sign at the entrance to a room full of ancient Israelite artifacts:Phoenician sign at the British Museum. (Courtesy of author)

That opening line should shock anyone who knows even a little bit of ancient Levantine history: “By the beginning of the first millennium BC,” the museum’s curators wrote, “the Israelites occupied most of Palestine.” But that’s a historical anachronism. There was no such thing as Palestine at the beginning of the first millennium BC. The Land of Israel wouldn’t be renamed “Palestine” until a thousand years later, after Rome crushed the Bar Kokhba Revolt in 135 CE, after which the Emperor Hadrian renamed Judea (Hebrew for land of the Jews) Palaestina for the Philistines—a Greek people who had invaded the area of modern-day Gaza in ancient times, who had gone extinct long before the Romans arrived, and who had absolutely nothing to do with Muslim Arabs, who wouldn’t exist for another 500 years. Palestine was thus a name Hadrian concocted to punish the Jews for their treachery and encourage the world to forget the Jews’ ancient connection to their homeland.

[weirdtranssexual]

yeah gotta be honest every time i think about how the dome of the rock was literally built on top of the holiest site to judaism and that jews are actually literally banned from going there i wonder how the jewish people haven’t set the world on fire with justifiable rage

[weirdtranssexual]

and not only that but the people whose religious structure now sits on top of the temple mount have historically fear mongered about jews supposedly plotting to take over the site and used these misinformation campaigns to justify violence against jews — the hebron massacre for example — and yet the jewish community is expected to not be pissed about any of this

[girlactionfigure]

On This Day — June 1, 1941: The Farhud

Seven years before Israel’s independence, Arabs carried out a violent pogrom against the ancient Jewish community in Baghdad.

As the pro-Nazi coup of Rashid Ali collapsed, Iraqi soldiers, police, and local mobs — incited by the Grand Mufti Amin al-Husseini and fueled by Nazi propaganda — unleashed two days of murder, rape, and looting.

Hundreds of Jews were slaughtered — babies murdered, women raped in front of their families, homes and synagogues burned. Official counts recorded 187 dead, but many estimates put the toll closer to 400, with over 2,000 wounded. Jewish shops were looted, infants were killed, and the streets ran with blood for two full days.

There’s this theory that the Arab and Muslim world only turned on its Jews after Israel declared its independence (as if this is a rational excuse) in 1948. Well the Farhud took place seven years earlier.

This was pure, medieval-style antisemitic violence — Jews targeted simply for being Jews — inspired by Nazi propaganda and the Mufti’s calls to “kill the Jews wherever you find them.”

The British forces nearby delayed intervention, allowing the slaughter to continue.

Long before 1948, long before any “occupation,” Arab and Muslim leaders aligned with Nazi Germany were already carrying out genocidal violence against Jews. The Mufti wasn’t just a collaborator — he helped import Nazi hatred into the Middle East, where it fused with centuries-old local Jew-hatred and never went away.

The hatred and violence against Jews didn’t begin with Israel.

It didn’t begin with “settlements.”

It didn’t begin with “nakba.”

It began with the simple desire to exterminate or expel Jews from lands they had called home for 2,500 years.

@CptAllenHistory

[girlactionfigure]

The claim that “Arabs and Jews lived peacefully before Israel” is one of the most useful myths in modern politics.

Not because there were never peaceful moments. Of course there were. There were friendships, business ties, shared cities, neighbourly decency, and even Arabs who saved Jews during massacres.

But that is precisely what makes the myth so dishonest.

Because “some people were decent” is not the same as “Jews were safe.”

Before Israel, Jews (like Christians) in the land did not live as equal sovereign citizens. Under Islamic rule, Jews were historically dhimmis - tolerated, sometimes protected, but subordinate. Their safety depended less on rights than on rulers, local power, mood, extortion, clerical incitement and the willingness of others to restrain the mob.

Israel Joseph Benjamin, the 19th-century Jewish traveller who visited Jewish communities across Asia and Africa, described the Jews of Palestine in devastating terms. He wrote of “deep misery and continual oppression”, saying they were “entirely destitute of every legal protection and every means of safety”, subject to arbitrary taxes, robbery, plunder and violence. In Hebron, he wrote, Jews had been murdered and plundered, women treated with “brutal cruelty”, and survivors left in misery. That was not "Zionist propaganda". That was a Jewish eyewitness writing decades before the State of Israel existed, and many of the people in the land were religious and were not Zionists. 

And then came the pogroms.

Safed, 1834: during a revolt against Egyptian rule, the Jewish community was attacked for more than a month. Homes were looted. Jews were robbed, assaulted and left defenceless. 

Jerusalem, 1920: during the Nebi Musa riots, five Jews were killed and hundreds wounded. Amin al-Husseini and other Arab nationalist figures were associated with the anti-Zionist agitation around the festival; Husseini and Aref al-Aref were later sentenced in absentia for incitement after fleeing to Syria. 

Jaffa, 1921: riots that began in Jaffa turned into attacks on Jews, leaving 47 Jews dead and 146 wounded. The British Haycraft Commission identified Arab hostility to Jews as a fundamental cause. 

And then Hebron, 1929.

Hebron is where the lie dies.

The Jews of Hebron were not aggressive secular Zionist pioneers with rifles and flags. Many were old Yishuv Jews. Deeply religious. Non-Zionist or not politically Zionist in the modern sense. They had lived among Arabs for generations. They believed their neighbours and local Arab notables would protect them. When Haganah representatives offered to help defend or evacuate them before the violence, the leaders of the Hebron Jewish community refused, trusting the local Arab elite. 

That trust was repaid with slaughter.

On August 24, 1929, Arab mobs attacked the Jewish community of Hebron. Between 67 and 69 Jews were murdered. Dozens more were wounded. Homes were looted. Synagogues were desecrated. Women, children, rabbis and yeshiva students were killed. Twenty-four of the murdered were students from the Hebron yeshiva; several were American or Canadian. Some victims were tortured or mutilated. British High Commissioner Sir John Chancellor wrote that “the horror of it is beyond words”. 

And yes, the comparison to October 7 is unavoidable.

The pattern is chilling: rumours about Jews threatening Al-Aqsa; religious incitement; mobs attacking unarmed Jewish families; murder inside homes; cruelty against the defenceless; and a world eager afterwards to explain, contextualise or minimise the massacre. The 1929 riots were fuelled by claims that Jews were trying to seize Muslim holy sites; Hamas even named its October 7 massacre “Operation Al-Aqsa Flood”. 

There is one important detail we must include: some Arabs in Hebron did save Jews. Some Jews survived, because they were sheltered by Arab families. It proves individual courage existed. It also proves the larger point: Jewish life depended on whether a neighbour chose to hide you from the mob.

But that is not safety, and not living together in peace.

The Hebron massacre shattered something, especially for religious Jews who had believed that being pious, apolitical and locally rooted would protect them. Many still did not become ideological Zionists overnight. But the basic Zionist argument became harder to deny: if Jews cannot rely on empire, neighbours, clerics, kings or policemen to protect them, then Jews must be able to protect Jews.

That is what Zionism means at its most basic level.

Not supremacy.

Not conquest.

Not revenge.

A Jewish state means Jews are no longer permanently dependent on the mercy of others.

Then came the 1930s and 1940s, and the picture became darker. Haj Amin al-Husseini, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, became one of the most important Palestinian Arab leaders of the period. He met Hitler in Berlin on November 28, 1941. In the official record, he told Hitler that Arabs and Germany had the same enemies: “the English, the Jews and the Communists”. The US Holocaust Memorial Museum records that he worked as a Nazi propagandist, opposed Jewish immigration to Palestine, and helped spread Axis propaganda in the Arab world. 

He collaborated with the Nazis, campaigned against Jewish refugees reaching Palestine, and in 1944 broadcast: “Kill the Jews wherever you find them”, propaganda that spread throughout the Arab world, that never underwent the marshal plan and are now re-importing the same old ideas to Europe.

At the very moment Jews were trying to flee Europe, Britain, betrayed the Jews and the mandate they received from the league of nations and slammed the door. The 1939 White Paper limited Jewish immigration to Palestine to 75,000 over five years and said that after that, further Jewish immigration would require Arab consent. In plain English: Jews fleeing Hitler needed the permission of those collaborating from Hitler to escape the persecution, while Arab immigration was unlimited.

Jewish refugee ships were intercepted. The Struma, carrying nearly 800 Jewish refugees from Romania toward Palestine, was blocked from entering and later sank in the Black Sea in 1942, killing almost everyone aboard. The Exodus 1947, carrying more than 4,500 Holocaust survivors, was intercepted by the British and its passengers were forcibly returned to Europe, including Germany. 

So when people say Jews and Arabs lived peacefully before Israel, ask them: peacefully compared to what?

Compared to Hebron?

Compared to Safed?

Compared to Jaffa?

Compared to the Mufti collaborating with Hitler?

Compared to British ships turning Jewish survivors back to Nazi extermination camps?

Compared to centuries in which Jews survived not as equals, but as tolerated minorities whose fate could change the moment power changed hands?

The Jewish lesson from history is memory.

Spain expelled the Jews. Europe emancipated the Jews and then produced Auschwitz. The Arab world once had ancient Jewish communities from Baghdad to Cairo to Damascus, and most of them are gone. Today, Jews are again discovering that even in Europe, police protection, elite sympathy and liberal slogans are not the same as safety.

That does not mean Jews cannot have allies. They can, and they do. It does not mean every Arab was an enemy. Many were not. It does not make every Israeli policy correct.

But it does destroy the infantile fantasy that everything was peaceful until Zionism arrived.

Zionism did not emerge because Jews were bored.

It emerged because Jews studied history and noticed the pattern.

When Jews had no power, they wrote petitions.

When Jews had no army, they buried children.

When Jews had no state, they begged empires to open gates - and the gates closed.

The world keeps asking why Jews need Israel.

The answer is brutally simple:

Because every other arrangement was tried first and failed.

@destinationXIX

[girlactionfigure]

This is inversion so callous it's hard to believe.

The Holocaust had a survival rate of about 30%. Millions of people disappeared from European cities and towns over several years. Everybody knew because it was happening all around them.

Gaza has a survival rate, despite the worst and most deadly and horrible periods of the war, of 97%.

All the dead Jews were noncombatants. A large percentage of the dead Gazans were combatants.

And the Jews of Europe, even as their millennia-old civilization was being systematically wiped out, wanted nothing from the societies that surrounded them except to be allowed to live in peace.

Gaza's leadership of religious fanatics, meanwhile, wants every last Israeli dead and gone, is willing to fight to the last Gazan to achieve that aim, has said so publicly and worked for decades to blow up every peace attempt -- and even now believes that Gaza's destruction would be a worthwhile sacrifice to lay on the altar of Israel's destruction, because their god told them so.

So Israelis can reasonably believe, given those features of the Gaza war that aren't true about any genocide ever, and were pretty much the opposite of what was happening in the Holocaust, that Gaza's suffering is a bad and painful war, but not remotely a genocide.

But the point of it all, of course, is not to analyze Gaza, but specifically to lump it together with the Holocaust -- to cast the Jews as the new Nazis.

The only reason this person would dare to make such an insanely ahistorical and immoral parallel is because this is the heart of the bigoted propaganda campaign in which he enthusiastically participates: The point of it all is to make the Jews into the Nazis.

A culture that obsessed about Jews being evil and was then shocked by the Holocaust into obsessing about dead Jews as the apotheosis of righteous victimhood is now obsessively engaged in knocking Jews off that moral pedestal they themselves put them on.

That's why they don't care one whit about Hamas massacres of Gazans, about genocidal wars in Syria or Yemen (even when they've funded and armed the sides), about flotilla activists currently held by the Libyans...literally nothing triggers a response except Jews.

They still, even after all these generations, no matter what else is happening in the world or in their own societies, can't stop thinking about Jews.

And as we Jews learned in the 1940s -- the actual, historical 1940s, not the weird fantasies conjured up by these bigots -- a whole society can be in the grip of a callous, destructive bigotry and still believe it is true and righteous.

@havivrettiggur

[our-blood-is-our-ink]

I wonder how many non Jews are aware that we did try to go back after the Holocaust. There's plenty of stories about someone's grandmother or grandfather trying to return home in Poland or Germany to find strangers living in their houses, using their silver kiddish cups or their Shabbos candlesticks. Using their tables and homes and clothes, as if everything was simply abandoned by choice and was free to take. Some of us DID try going back.

We were not welcomed to. There was nothing left because they ensured there wouldn't be.

[girlactionfigure]

To have a state, there's a simple test. It's called the Montevideo test. It comes from the Montevideo Convention in 1933, and it's a four-part, four-element test. The four elements are: 1. Do you have a defined population? 2. Do you have defined borders? 3. Do you have the capacity to conduct foreign relations?  4. Do you have a single effective government?  There's a couple things to understand about this. The first thing is that Israel, despite being called an illegitimate state, is actually a very old country. I don't mean ancient Israel. I mean, the Israel that was founded in 1948 was founded at a time when there were only 58 countries in the world. It became the 59th state.  So people always say, "Oh, this newfangled creation, Israel." No, no, no. Israel's older than roughly two-thirds of all the countries in the world. And in fact, it was created in precisely the same way and at about the same time as many of the decolonized states in the world that were just drawn as lines on the map by European colonialist powers. It's the same thing with many of the Arab countries. Iraq was drawn up that way. Lebanon was definitely drawn up that way. Syria was drawn up that way with no regard for their indigenous, in many cases, local minority populations.  Lots of countries in Africa were created this way. Cameroon was created this way. Part of South Africa and Botswana were split off this way. We could talk forever about the dozens of countries that were created just the same way Israel was, and nobody ever protests them because there's no Jews there, right? So there's nothing to protest. The point here is that Israel met in 1948, and has met every second of every day since then until today, all four of the Montevideo Factors.

@RoyKAltman

[unsolicited-opinions]

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.

Why Israel is Not a Settler Colonial State

From The Atlantic: The False Narrative of Settler Colonialism (paywall bypassed)

Much more in this post.

_______________ *(See what I did there?)

[girlactionfigure]

Last week I was sent an image of a pro-Palestine stall at Cambridge Market Square.

Not angry students. Not masked radicals. Rather elderly white women encouraging strangers to boycott Israel.

So yesterday I went to Cambridge to hear what they were selling.

Thread ⬇️⬇️

The stall was bigger yesterday - but the same women were also there. I looked over the material and listened for a while - as one activist tried to explain to people how the Arabs had always considered themselves Palestinians - 

Newsflash - this was a big fat lie. 

Eventually the same woman came over to me. I did not want to confront her - I did not seek an argument.

I just wanted to understand what it was she was selling - so I played as someone there to be educated. 

We spoke for about twenty minutes. Everything I was told was false.

I was told the Arab armies in 1948 only entered the areas allocated to the proposed Arab state. This is false.

I was told the Palestinian Arabs in 1948 were “completely disarmed” passive victims. This is false. 

She called Israel an Apartheid state because of "65 discriminatory laws". I asked for an example. She stuttered and could not give me a single one. 

They do not exist, of course. It is empty propaganda where Jewish holidays and state emblems are seen as signs of Apartheid. 

By the same token - the UK would be apartheid because of Christmas day and the crosses in the flag and emblems.

But that is really not the point. This is the activists' reason for boycott. The point of her activism - and she did not have a single concrete example. 

Their literature was no better.

A newspaper on the stall was still promoting the false claim that Israel bombed the Al-Ahli hospital in Gaza - despite it becoming clear years ago that the explosion was caused by a failed Islamic Jihad rocket. 

I was told Hamas was “created by Israel.” More lies. This is how propaganda works.

Israel maintained ties with Islamic organisations in Gaza after 1967. Hamas did not exist.

That understandable reality later became twisted into conspiracy mythology to smear Israel. 

The conversation became darker:

I heard Holocaust revisionism, conspiracies about Iraqi and Yemenite Jews, claims that “Zionists” hated weak and brown-skinned Jews, and repeated attempts to portray Israelis as alien European colonists with no authentic connection to the region. 

Eventually the mask slipped completely.

She compared Israeli Jews to white Europeans in Africa - told me they were foreign colonists - and implied they deserved whatever comes to them when forced to take down their walls.

The reality behind all their slogans. 

This is what Palestinianism is:  History must be distorted. Violence erased. Jihadism excused. Conspiracies created. Jews transformed into demonic outsiders.

This is what was on sale at Market Square in Cambridge. 

Elderly grandmothers spreading lies about the Jewish state, demanding its boycott, and pressuring it to surrender to people who openly call for its destruction.

Rarely has antisemitism dressed so sweetly. Rarely has it been so dangerous.

@mishtal

[hillsofspices]

this was literally published in a polish-jewish studies journal by the polish government's institute of national remembrance

[shofarsogood]

Fuck all the way off, you lying bastards.

[spacekike]

The countdown to "Oświęcim was a work camp for Poles, some of whom were Jewish" ticks down another digit.

[cheetz0]

Iran is slowly coming back online, but by "online," I mean they've moved from whitelisting some websites to blacklisting everything. I had no idea what these terms meant, but living in Iran forces you to know about technical network and connection stuff. Basically, instead of banning everything except for a few shitty malware apps posing as "social media platforms", they have now moved to filter out and ban the same usual things as before (like Telegram, Instagram, YouTube, everything). So what does that mean? It means more IPs will be available to bypass the ban, and VPNs will be more affordable. So more people can access the internet, STILL ILLEGALLY and THROUGH A PAYWALL.

It's currently close to 4 AM now that I'm posting this, and I've been crying non-stop since midnight because my friends came back online one by one through an unstable connection and said: "Hi, I'm alive." I had prepared myself for the funeral of so many of my friends. Some haven't come back online yet, and we've formed small "search and rescue" groups to find their contacts or families to check if they're okay.

What remains a fact amidst all of this is that nobody in the world ever gave a single fuck about us. I was one of the lucky ones to connect during the complete shutdown via some newly invented way we were too scared to even publish on GitHub for fear of getting arrested. In the time I was connected, I felt immense guilt for having access to the internet, and I begged you all on my socials to be the voice of the people who were about to get executed.

Not even once did I see someone talk about the internet blackout in Iran, and it enrages me.

We've been massacred, mass executed, and then silenced by getting our only way of communicating with the world shut off and the world treats it as some background noise, some irrelevant news that isn't even worth spending time hearing about.

So I'm asking you again, please, be the voice for the people in Iran. We are barely surviving.

[girlactionfigure]

On This Day — May 28, 1939

 100,000 people packed the opening of the Jewish Palestine Pavilion at the New York World’s Fair. 

That’s right, the Palestine Pavilion wasn’t Arab. 

It was Jewish. In 1939, “Palestine” was the internationally recognized English name for the Jewish homeland, and “Palestinians” almost always referred to Jews. 

The massive crowd waved thousands of Jewish flags and sang Hatikva. Albert Einstein spoke. Chaim Weizmann addressed the crowd by radio from London. Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia attended. Every piece of architecture, art, and display came from the Jewish Yishuv in Eretz Israel. 

Meyer Weisgal, the driving force behind it, placed it proudly on the Avenue of Nations. Over the course of the fair, more than 2.25 million people visited. 

This was American Jewry at its most hopeful — just months before the outbreak of World War II and the Holocaust. In the shadow of Britain’s restrictive White Paper that blocked Jewish immigration, they built a bold, public vision of Jewish statehood and renewal. 

Important historical note: When people today casually call Arabs from the region “Palestinians” as if it’s an ancient national identity, they erase this reality. In the 1930s, the Palestine Pavilion was Jewish. The Palestine Symphony Orchestra was Jewish. The Palestine Post was Jewish. The name referred to the Jewish people and their ancestral homeland. 

This moment captured the Zionist dream in full color — right before the storm. Yet even in the face of rising global antisemitism and British betrayal, Jews kept building, kept dreaming, and kept declaring their right to a state in their ancient land. 

The Palestine Pavilion wasn’t just an exhibit. It was a declaration: the Jewish people were coming home.

@CptAllenHistory

[girlactionfigure]

There is a sound no other people on earth owns.

It is not music.

It is not a song.

It is not a melody you can hum on your way home.

It is older than melody.

It is the sound of a horn — a curved, hollow horn from a ram — pressed to human lips for three thousand three hundred years.

The shofar.

When you hear it, something inside you stops moving. You can be religious, secular, halfway, lost, returning, doubting, broken — it does not matter.

The shofar passes through all of that and reaches the part of you

that was at Sinai.

Because every Jewish soul was there.

The Torah says so.

The kabbalists explain it.

The shofar proves it.

That sound is the only sound on earth that has not changed in three thousand three hundred years.

Languages have shifted.

Instruments have evolved.

Music has been reinvented a thousand times. 

But the shofar — no electricity, no strings, no keys, no improvements — sounds exactly as it sounded when our ancestors stood at the foot of the mountain and trembled.

The same vibration.

The same air.

The same trembling.

A Jew in Tetuán in the year 1300 heard it.

A Jew in Cordoba before the expulsion heard it.

A Jew hidden in a cellar in Warsaw in 1943 heard it — and risked his life to blow it anyway.

A Jew at the Kotel in 1967, the day Yerushalayim was reunited, heard it — and the soldiers wept.

A Jew this Rosh HaShanah will hear it in a synagogue in Mexico, in Buenos Aires, in Brooklyn, in Marrakech, in Tel Aviv — and somewhere deep inside them, without being able to explain why,

they will feel that they have heard this sound before.

They have.

Every Jewish soul was at Sinai.

Every Jewish soul has been listening for the echo ever since.

The shofar is that echo.

It is the only voice that has spoken to our people in every century, in every land, in every exile, in every return, without ever needing to be translated.

You do not learn the shofar.

You recognize it.

Alain Nahle

[girlactionfigure]

THE WANDERING JEW TROPE

As early as the second century CE, over a hundred years before the Roman Empire officially adopted Christianity, some Christians argued that Jews would be cursed to be “fugitives and wanderers (upon) the earth” as punishment for “taunting Jesus on the cross.”

By the Middle Ages, the Wandering Jew legend, which alleges that Jews are cursed to wander the earth, homeless, until the Second Coming of Jesus, had been deeply cemented into Christian thought.

According to the myth, the Wandering Jew is an evil, mythical, immortal creature. Between the 16th and 19th centuries, Europeans would report “sightings” of this mythological being, often as a pretext for Christians to go into Jewish quarters to massacre the local Jewish population.

While the Wandering Jew myth originated as a legend, over the centuries, it morphed into an antisemitic trope and a metaphor for the plight of the Jews in exile, as Jews were expelled from village after village as punishment for their rejection of Christendom.

THE FIRST ANTIZIONISTS

The Jewish community fiercely debated the merits of the modern political Zionist movement around the time of the First Zionist Congress, but save for some Christian Zionists, the conversation was, generally, of little interest to the outside world. 

There was, however, one glaring exception: antisemites were veryinterested in the developments. Some, like Wilhelm Marr or the anonymous authors of the Protocols of the Elders of Zionism, derided Zionism as part of a greater Jewish international conspiracy. 

But others, like the Catholic Church, opposed Zionism not out of concern for the Arab population, but on the basis of the Wandering Jew antisemitic trope. They believed that Jewish statelessness was divine punishment.

"According to the Sacred Scriptures, the Jewish people must always live dispersed and wandering among the other nations, so that they may render witness to Christ not only by the Scriptures...but by their very existence."

Civiltà Cattolica's response to the First Zionist Congress, 1897

"We cannot prevent the Jews from going to Jerusalem—but we could never sanction it... As the head of the Church I cannot tell you anything different. The Jews have not recognized our Lord; therefore we cannot recognize the Jewish people."

Pope Pius X to Theodor Herzl, 1904

SCIENTIFIC RACISM

Though scientific racism is associated with the 19th century, its origins can be traced all the way back to the Middle Ages, especially where the treatment of Jews is concerned.

In the Middle Ages, Europeans believed that all Asiatic “races,” including Jews, descended from Shem, one of the sons of Noah. The term “Semite” comes from Shem. By the 19th century, the prevailing belief is that Jews were members of a distinct “Semitic race.”

Infamous and highly influential race theorist Arthur de Gobineau posited that three distinct races existed: white, black, and yellow. Among the “white” races was the “Aryan” race, which had remained “the purest” over time. Meanwhile, other “races,” such as the Jews, were a “dirty,” mixed race made up of white, black, and yellow ancestry. 

This idea was later adopted by the Nazis and applied to the Nazi theory of blood and soil, which dictated that, as a “polluted” race, the Jews were incompatible with a homeland.

FROM THE WANDERING JEW TO THE JEWISH QUESTION

As all antisemitic tropes, the trope of the Wandering Jew, too, evolved over time to adapt to its new environment: Enlightened Europe, which now held science and intellect, rather than religion, as the pinnacle of human morality. 

During the French Revolution, Napoleon Bonaparte and other French revolutionaries argued in favor of emancipating French Jewry on the condition that they abandon their Jewish “national sentiments.” 

As other European countries began discussing the emancipation of their Jewish populations, this gave rise to “the Jewish Question,” the question being “what should be the fate of the Jews?”

In 1843, German historian Bruno Bauer published a book titled “The Jewish Question,” which argued that, in order to qualify for emancipation, Jews should abandon their “Jewish consciousness” and “baseless” and “chimeric” ideas of Jewish nationalism, both of which Bauer denounced as a “primitive stage of development.”

BLUT UND BODEN

"[The Jew] has never had what we might call a state. It’s a mistake which is spreading widely today to say that Jerusalem was a capital of a Jewish state of a Jewish nation."

Adolf Hitler, in a 1920 speech titled "Why We Are Antisemites"

“Blut und boden,” meaning “blood and soil,” was a Nazi concept that dictated that a person’s blood, or racial makeup, dictated whether a person did or not belong to a particular territory. The Nazis promoted the ideology of blood and soil to depict Jews as a foreign, alien race, seeing so-called “Jewish blood” as biologically incompatible with Germany.

It’s interesting to see the resurgence of blood and soil nationalism in antizionist circles today, through the promotion of conspiracy theories like the (incorrect) conspiracy that Israeli Jews suffer from skin cancer at the highest rate in the world because their skin is biologically incompatible with the Levantine sun, or the (also incorrect) conspiracy that Israeli Jews or allergic to the natural flora in Israel.

AN IDEA ROOTED IN CENTURIES OF ANTISEMITISM

There is absolutely nothing progressive, new, or groundbreaking about the idea that Jews alone, as a collective, should be denied a national homeland. Instead, it is a concept rooted in centuries of antisemitic conspiracies, tropes, stereotypes, and religious intolerance. 

Following the emancipation of Jews in Europe, some, Jewish and non-Jewish alike, have argued that it’s not that Jews are meant to aimlessly wander; it’s that Jews, as individuals, are meant to make a home where they are. But this denial of Jews’ collective national aspirations, too, is rooted in old antisemitic sentiments.

"The Jews should be denied everything as a nation, but granted everything as individuals."

French revolutionary Count Stanislas de Clermont-Tonnerre, 1789

For a full bibliography of my sources, please head over to my Patreon.  

Nothing new or progressive about the idea that Jews, as a collective, should remain stateless. 

rootsmetals

[infiniteglitterfall]

Everything I learn about Jewish history opens up at least a dozen more things I never knew.

This one just about kneecapped me, though.

For context: I'm researching a list of every pogrom and massacre and anti-Jewish riot in the past 200 years.

It's already just annual mass murders peppered with, "At the time, this country had limited Jews to only 6 years of school, and school exams were purposely held on Shabbat, and also they were just getting beat up in the streets all the time?"

And yet, one bullet point still managed to jump out and sucker-punch me a lil bit.

Those examples I just gave were ALL from Syria.

Now, first of all: In 1947, Syria had a 2,500-year-old Jewish community.

Aleppo: The Crown Jewel of the Jewish Levant

Aleppo. Tragic images of wounded children and bombed houses come to mind. After over 6 years of a brutal Syrian civil war, it is hard to ima

This painting of Moses parting the Red Sea is from the Dura-Europos synagogue in Syria that was in use about 1,800 years ago.

Then the United Nations voted to create Israel and Palestine. And Aleppo rioted against its own Jews.

Rioters killed at least 75 Jews; set ten synagogues, five Jewish schools, a Jewish orphanage, a Jewish youth club, several Jewish shops, and 150 Jewish homes ablaze, destroying them. Thousands of Jews illegally fled Syria, including half of those living in Aleppo.

The Aleppo Codex, also called the Crown of Aleppo, disappeared for a decade. It was the earliest known Hebrew manuscript comprising the full text of the Torah. And, as the Israel Museum puts it, it was also "the most authoritative, accurate, and sacred source document, both for the biblical text and for its vocalization, cantillation and Masorah (literally, 'transmission' of the Bible, the oral and written tradition by which the Holy Scriptures have been preserved and passed on from generation to generation).... It was probably the manuscript used by Maimonides when he set down the exact rules for writing scrolls of the Torah."

When it resurfaced, 40% of its pages were missing.

But that's nothing.

You see, Arab Palestine was plagued by a godawful fascist the Brits had installed as a leader in 1921 -- before anyone knew what a Nazi war criminal was, much less that this guy would become one.

His name was Amin al-Husseini. And instead of having Palestine declare independence alongside Israel in 1948, he got all the surrounding countries to invade en masse and try to destroy it. To reclaim the land for the Arab world. Including Syria.

Syria was not a hard sell. It was voluntarily harboring a major Nazi war criminal: SS captain Alois Brunner, who rounded up and deported the Jews of occupied Austria, Greece, Macedonia, France, and Slovakia.

A Nazi Taught Interrogation Tactics to Syrians and Egyptians

The fugitive found a safe haven among Arab nationalists and then went on to share torture methods that last to this day

In fact, Syria was SO on board with al-Husseini's plan that it ALSO introduced a whole bunch of new laws for Syrian Jews!

It stripped them of Syrian citizenship. It shut down Jewish schools. They couldn't have driver's licenses. Or passports. Or buy real estate.

In 1949, it seized Jewish bank accounts. The following year, it banned them from working in agriculture too.

They had to be inside by 10 pm. They couldn't work in public service, in public institutions or in banks. People who worked in the government/military were forbidden from buying anything in Jewish shops.

And Jews were very much forbidden to leave Syria.

They could travel for business or health... if they received permission from the Mukhabarat (secret police), left family members behind to essentially serve as hostages, and left a deposit of $6,000 with the government.

Many people managed to flee the country anyway.

If your kids managed to flee, the Mukhabarat would torture you, and possibly imprison you for several years. Some people died from torture long before it got to that point.

Flight From Syria

The 5,000 Jews left in the country couldn’t get out, even with passports, and needed written permission just to travel from city to city.

There were repeated instances of Jews getting caught escaping the country and being not only murdered, but dismembered.

(In 1958, when Egypt and Syria briefly joined forces, the curfew became even worse. Now it was at 7 pm. And the Mukhabarat would arrest and torture any Jews who didn't make it home.)

You might wonder why Syria kept them there if it hated them so much. The answer is twofold.

First, along with the rest of the Arab League, it had invaded Israel in an attempt to reclaim the land for the Arab world, and failed. It didn't want its Jews to go strengthen Israel.

And second: for a while, it was more profitable to keep them there and exploit them.

In 1953, and again in 1958, Syria temporarily allowed Jews to emigrate.

But only as long as they handed over all their property to the Syrian government first.

(See?)

All of this mirrored not only what other Arab countries were doing, but much of what the Nazis had done in the 1930s. They stripped Jews of their citizenship, their businesses, their jobs, their bank accounts, and forced them to leave their money and property for the Nazi government if they managed to flee.

In 1964, Jews were prohibited from going further than 3 km (less than 2 miles) from their homes without getting special permits from the Mukhabarat.

In 1973, Jews were forbidden to own radios or telephones, or to maintain postal contact with outside world.

Plus, there was constant intense violence against them.

One Syrian Jew described going to the funeral for a neighbor who had been shot, point-blank, by a random Arab man who just knocked on his door and immediately killed him. (And also described having been aggressively questioned by secret police at that same funeral.)

There were many, many murders of Jews which went unremarked and uninvestigated.

The Jews of Syria's Qamishli: Short History, Lasting Legacy

The history of Jews in the majority-Kurdish city of Qamishli in northeast Syria is less ancient than in other Kurdish regions across the Mid

But what got me was one last twist.

When Jews died, their property was confiscated by the Syrian government. If their heirs could afford to lease their homes from the government, they were allowed to.

If they couldn't, the property was handed over to the Palestinian refugees in Syria.

So just to summarize:

The Syrian government, along with every other surrounding country (plus Iraq) invaded Israel to reclaim the land for the Arab world. It failed.

It took revenge on the Syrian Jews, who by definition weren't in Israel.

The Syrian government targeted a Jewish population that had been there for at least 2,500 years.

There was widespread, extremely violent antisemitism. Intense restrictions on who could buy from Jewish shops. On what jobs Jews could have.

Jews were demonized. Deliberately forced into poverty and out of their family homes. They were isolated from the world. They were killed for everything from leaving the country to answering the door.

And once they left their homes, left the country, or were killed, it gave their homes to Palestinian refugees.

There were as many as 35,000 Jews in Syria and Lebanon in 1928 - almost entirely in Syria. The population dropped rapidly when the persecution started: by 1957 there were 5,400. In 1989, only 4,000 were left: 90% had fled. Today, there are somewhere between 4 and 100, depending on whose guess you go with. Syria has successfully ethnically cleansed over 99% of its Jews.

But here's the thing about that plot twist.

At most, 75,000 of the Palestinian refugees went to Syria. The numbers are impossible to fully track; there's great research about how many people left, but not so much on where they each ended up. It could have been significantly lower.

In fact - setting aside, for the moment, the fact that at least four other countries had invaded with it, and at least - hang on, let me count -

at least 10 other countries Acting Like This who hadn't even been involved in the 1948 war -

Basically, Syria started a war to yeet the Jews that displaced hundreds of thousands of Palestinians. And then it turned around and yeeted and attacked its own Jews, confiscated their homes, and gave those to Palestinians.

You can kind of see this as compensation. Maybe. If you squint real hard, tilt your head 39 degrees to the right, and see the presence of Jews as the sole actual problem here.

This is why the social media version of this history is such a successful mindfuck.

It's so far off from the truth, and leaves out such an incredible amount of what happened, that it's almost impossible to counter.

People confidently claim that the Zionists invaded in 1948; that the Zionists attacked in 1948; or that Britain gave Jews the land as some kind of pity gift for the Holocaust.

Nobody has any idea that Britain watched every other country on earth agree that the Jews were about to get killed off if someone didn't take in Jewish refugees - someone else, not any of them - and then turned around and effectively banned Jewish immigration to Palestine in 1939. That it even made boats full of Holocaust refugees turn around and go back to Europe. That sometimes, it just unloaded them and put everyone in its own detention camps.

That if it had followed the League of Nations Mandate for this little chunk of former Ottoman Empire land, and encouraged Jewish immigration, it could have taken in all the 6,000,000 Jews who were instead slaughtered.

Yes, fine, that would have quadrupled the population of the entire country, caused immediate food rationing and massive refugee camps, and terminally pissed off Amin al-Husseini, but it would also have saved six million lives.

Nobody knows, somehow, that Palestine was supposed to be, mandated to be, a place where both Arabs and Jews lived in equality and shared in governing. Or that (if you prefer a two-state solution) it was supposed to be partitioned into Israel and Palestine in 1947. After al-Husseini attacked enough people that Britain gave up on the Mandate.

Nobody knows or wants to believe that no, there wasn't a good fucking reason for all these countries to invade. That THIS was where colonialism and imperialism came in.

When 1,300 years of empire ends, and people who have been marginalized under it get rights, there is an inevitable backlash.

The backlash uncoiled for thirty years while the people in power fought to keep all of the power they'd had. And then, like a whip, it snapped.