#i-p

[cardassiangoodreads]

The important thing is that yes, I-P as a conflict and the state of Israel as a nation are heavily in the shadow of European imperialism, but the imperialism in question is "European countries (Britain especially) playing Jews and Palestinians against each other by making them contrasting broken promises." It is not "well some Jews had migrated to Europe and intermingled with non-Jewish Europeans, therefore their well-documented cultural and genetic ties to the Middle East are made-up and they are exactly the same as white Christian European empires taking over the area" nor is it "well Arabs were not originally from and colonized that area in the Middle Ages therefore all their descendants forever after, even nearly a millennium and a half later, are colonizers" (unspoken in both case: "interesting how we don't apply this to white people in the USA, we take into account that they've lived in this place for decades/centuries even if the way they got here was wrong. weird how we don't think this applies to largely non-Christian and non-Western groups")

[grinleysspa]

Although I don't agree with the vast majority of the content of this manifesto/book*, I feel like this point is really relevant to the whole I/P "debate" on both sides. People need to acknowledge that Jewish indigeneity to the Southern Levant does not negate Palestinian indigeneity** to the same land and vice versa.

**Friendly reminder that Palestinians are indigenous to the Southern Levant and not the Arabian Peninsula because they are Arabised indigenous Canaanite people. A cultural genocide against these Canaanite cultures under various empires (Arab, Roman, Ottoman, etc.) does not change their genetics or the elements of culture that did manage to survive colonisation and imperialism.

The Red Deal: Indigenous Action to Save Our Earth by The Red Nation

[desidarling123]

so joe biden has just laid out the terms for a ceasefire in gaza. it is not perfect by any stretch of imagination, but it will put an end to the daily casualties and bring in much-needed humanitarian aid, as well as closure to the families of hostages who will receive their loved ones' remains.

can you guess which part of the political spectrum is, for some insane reason, vocally opposed to it rn?

[corvidcrybaby]

Being a leftist Jew rn is so fucked up. I still hold true to these principles because I believe they hold up to the most ethical and logical scrutiny but I look around at all my colleagues and find next to none of them are executing the critical thinking that I consider a necessity to be a proper leftist. I see them falling into the same logical traps as the liberals they insist they are so different from, engaging in the same snooty better-than-you attitudes that democrats who share memes calling Trump "the Orange" think are hysterical, espousing effectively the same attitudes as the alt-right memelords you find on 4chan, but doing it while parroting leftist ideology that they clearly do not understand. I never once believed in horseshoe theory before this time in my life. I do now. For what other conclusion can one draw when they realize that radical political spaces of either stripe are now equally dangerous? If not the leftist ones being arguably moreso at this time? Reconciling with my Judaism, truly, has shifted my perspective on things into a space I never thought I would embrace and will never come back from, I do not think. I feel like Emma Goldman during "My Disillusionment In Russia." Are these my people? Is this the revolution I believe in? No, and no. Idk man, I'm just tired.

[cardassiangoodreads]

Posts warning about the Gaza scams: “a lot of these are suspiciously similar to each other, recycle the same photos over and over, and suspiciously similar to past gfm scams regarding Ukraine and other atrocities on this site. if you want to actually help the people of Gaza here is a website that ACTUALLY vets these and tells you how they do, and you can donate to one of their links on their database, here are some charities that operate in gaza. It’s commendable to want to help but if you really want to you should make your dollar is actually going there, luckily here are several ways you can! I’ve done it myself!”

Posts arguing with those: “evil (((zionists))) are suggesting that all Palestinians are scammers!!! If you doubt the ability of individual bloggers on here to vet hundreds of gfms and want them to explain how they are vetting, you are saying they don’t care!!!!! WHY are you setting our WHOLE movement back months!* Having critical thinking skills about where your money goes is racist and Islamophobic and possibly terfy! These blogs saying otherwise are cruel white colonizers and UNSAFE so here’s a blocklist so you can block preemptively and slur them all over tumblr without looking at their posts!”

Idk, I think it’s just pretty obvious which of these “sides” is showing genuine concern for both the cause and everyone involved, and which is irrational guilt tripping strawman nonsense. If someone has to resort to the latter, perhaps consider it’s because they have nothing to go on? If anyone is telling you the better, more “socially just” thing to do is to turn off your brain, perhaps that should be a giant red flag to you that they are full of shit? Why tell people that unless it’s because any application of brain to what you’re doing means they’ll notice something that you don’t want them to?

The same rules apply to this as anything else involving money: the more dishonest the marketing is, the more likely they are being at least somewhat dishonest about where your money is going. Honest charities and fundraisers don’t do this shit, because they don’t have to.

(*actual wording from a post I just saw! Like do you really think the WHOLE palestinian liberation movement is just a bunch of gofundmes on a dying microblogging site??? Really just making the whole “I don’t know about any activism outside of tumblr discourse” thing obvious right out of the gate!)

[cardassiangoodreads]

I'm usually one to push back against the idea that "my teachers didn't cover this" is an excuse for grown adults not to know something, and also that it's not usually true (it's that the people in question don't remember/weren't paying attention). That said, when I think back on my own high school education, it does really piss me off how much my teachers deliberately tried to avoid the Israel-Palestine conflict as much as possible and how they outright said it was because they thought that we couldn't handle it or it would "lead to a fight." And the reason they thought this was precisely because my magnet school in metro Detroit had a large number of Jewish and especially Arab and Muslim (not fully overlapping in either direction) students. That was why they thought that. So they taught us the bare minimum about the Balfour Declaration that we were required to know for our IB exams (it was an all-IB school) but otherwise skimmed over it. And in retrospect, just how enormously insulting - and racist, antisemitic and Islamophobic - that was toward everyone involved. None of the teachers making this determination were Jewish, Muslim or Arab btw.

Anyway, given certain.... recent electoral trends in Michigan, I hope they feel really fucking bad for deciding that class after class of high school students just shouldn't learn about an important and sensitive and ongoing sociopolitical conflict because of their racism!!!

(Also, probably something interesting to note about how a group of white culturally Christian people who are largely interacting only with other white culturally Christian people outside of their jobs, projecting their 9/11-era anti-Arab racism onto a group of young people who had grown beyond that ourselves)

[cardassiangoodreads]

This all makes plenty of sense if we were talking about some obscure cause but not something that has been constantly in the news all over the world for over half a year now. If you have nothing new to add, you in fact should probably keep quiet rather than potentially spread misinformation! People treat lack of response the same as a wrong one like this is a standardized test but it isn’t. Wrong info makes shit worse! Celebs staying silent rather than say something incorrect because they feel like they’re not the most informed are doing the right thing actually!