The Library Alcove @the-library-alcove - Tumblr Blog

New policy: No more arguing with Christianists, especially the ones who think that missionizing is a good thing. Autoblock on sight.

EDIT: Addendum: Antisemitic atheists too.

Less a DNI, and more just an exasperated sigh at this point, yes, I vet new followers for my own safety and I will automatically block missionaries, Christian apologists, antisemitic atheists, antizionists, Nazis (WTAF are you following me in the first place?), and TERFs.

mariacallous

We can’t unsee what we’ve been seeing in the last few years, writes the head of the Jewish Funders Network.

thelawfulchaotic

jsyk the op of the post about jewish music you reblogged is a zionist

Okay, sure, let's have it out. I imagine I'll pretty much piss off everyone with this.

First: the only confidence I have in my understanding of the political situation of the Middle East is that I have no fucking understanding whatsoever of the political situation in the Middle East. Sure, I've read plenty. I have friends of many many stripes. But I'm not a victim of the Dunning-Kruger effect here, folks: I know enough to know how much I don't know, and how much I know is tons.

Second, you say that person is a "zionist." There are three things I find pretty annoying about this as a defense attorney. One is that the term is not defined, and the other is that there is a complete lack of evidence. The third is the implicit assumption that being a "zionist" is enough to wholeheartedly condemn anyone.

Let's tackle these one by one. And, once again, I am neither a scholar of Jewish history nor Middle Eastern history nor anything except American criminal law.

First: definition. There are many possible meanings of zionist that I see people use. One potential meaning of "zionist" seems to be "is Jewish, but fails to disavow Israel as fast and loud as I personally want them to." Sometimes the meaning of "zionist" is just "is Jewish." Sometimes it's "a Jewish person who wishes for a return to a very distant ancestral homeland." Sometimes it's "wholehearted supporter of Israel's war crimes." A lot of pointless arguing, it seems to me, is centered around someone saying they are zionist, i.e., they would like Jewish people to someday have a nice homeland where they don't feel like a strange political chunk in another country, and another person hears that they are zionist, i.e. they enjoy wholesale slaughter of civilians.

Second: No evidence. Self-explanatory. You are an anon. I don't know why I'm supposed to trust your word. I read police reports for a living and I am supposed to be able to trust them, and let me tell you how many lies they contain.

Third: the assumption of condemnation. I literally defend the human rights of sex criminals in court. I defend murderers. What we are talking about, right now, at best, is a human person expressing an opinion, however potentially damaging and offensive (depending on definition of zionism and truth of accusation). Do you think I'm gonna say that Jewish people who express an opinion are inhuman and deserve segregation from the rest of us?

Do you think I'm ever going to stop reaching out my hand to people who use violence? Do you think I'm ever going to lose the hope that someday they will lose the fear that makes them resort to violence?

Finally, now that I've spent some time listing my problems with your case, so what.

Let's use an example closer to home. I'm an American, and I do in fact believe that America is a nation and will continue to be so, and that tearing down all government to give it back to indigenous people (something that is, to be clear, to my understanding, not comparable with any kind of political situation in Israel) is not possible as things stand. And yet nobody's here interrogating me about Donald Trump and his bombing of Iran or whether I support ICE's jackbooted thuggery.

A little further from home? If I met a Russian person, my first ask would not be "Tell me in detail your thoughts on Ukraine and Putin."

And in those two examples, I myself and this hypothetical Russian person are actually members of the country in question that is doing the thing. A Jewish person who is not Israeli isn't even that.

Listen. I think there's a lot to be unpacked about how the insularity of Jewish culture and the separateness of it from the countries where it lives is both in the interest of continuing the Jewish ethnicity and in the interest of the people who want Jewish people exterminated, and how the double-pull of those two interests maintain a tension that otherwise might dissipate. I think there's something real to be analyzed about how modern anti-semitism isn't a recurrence of medieval anti-semitism but a different thing, a sign of fascist thinking.

I think there is a horrific tragedy for everyone involved that the group who was decimated beyond belief in the blackest events in human history now has a very loud and visible nation channeling their survival into rage and violence.

I think that there are lots of Arab nations around Israel that would gladly see every person in it subject to that same rage and violence, and I'm not down with that shit either.

I think the history of who colonized who and when and what pogroms did what and how violence and why are all too fucking complicated to untangle.

I think the only way truly forward for Israel and Palestine is some kind of truth and reconciliation type thing and that Israel as it stands is too scared to see all their atrocities come to light.

I was raised atheist with college professor parents, so you can bet Jewish people in academia were part of my life from an early age. I don't understand antisemitism literally at all. It's completely incomprehensible to me. I also think Arab culture is gorgeous and studied Arabic in college. I don't discount the idea that I have subconscious biases; I've done my best to unpick them, but it's lifelong work.

The whole goddamn clusterfuck is a great example of why violence begets violence begets violence. I reject the idea that One Final Ass-Kicking on anyone's part will solve any one of these problems. The only thing that ends violence is not choosing violence. And that can't happen until enough people in and out of power want the violence to stop. There. Not here. There. It can't be imposed from outside. It has to come from within.

And that's a decision -- I must add -- that I seriously could not have less to do with. White Americans should not be making any of the related decisions.

Here endeth the essay, with one final note.

My Jewish friends are safe on this blog. My Arab friends are safe on this blog. That's all.

jadejedi

Okay, I want provide a bit of polite push back. I went through the replies and reblogs on this post last night and I did not see anyone provide what I thought was a satisfactory dissent to your statement here, and I feel like this is a subject that I, personally, do not feel like I can stand aside and say nothing about. I am not Jewish or Palestinian, but yet I think the only one who benefits from anyone staying silent on this issue is Israel.

I want to start by saying that I agree with your point that some random anon pointing a finger at someone and saying "zionist" is not, in of itself, a strong enough reason to condemn the person being pointed at. It is always good to do your own research as it were and make your own educated decisions on what behavior/actions/beliefs you are comfortable supporting or amplifying.

However, I want to push back on the idea that you have to be a Middle East scholar in order to fully understand what is going on right now between Israel and its neighbors. You do not. You simply have to open your eyes and see what is being done in Gaza. You don't have to crack a single history book to understand that the killing and injuring of more than 50,000 children in the Gaza Strip is wrong (x). You don't have to take a class to understand that genocide, which is what even the UN has said that Israel is doing in Gaza (x), is wrong. There is no amount of "well they started it" that will ever make me believe that what is happening in Gaza is morally correct. Now, they (the Palestinians) didn't start it, but I don't feel that I have to prove that to still be in the right here. Genocide is wrong. It doesn't matter who is committing it or why. It just is.

There is no way to make the Gaza Strip and the West Bank Israeli territory without state violence, just as Israel's current territory was only obtained through state violence. That is why I find your framing of these two definitions of Zionism as mutually exclusive as fundamentally incorrect. "They would like Jewish people to someday have a nice homeland where they don't feel like a strange political chunk in another country" versus "they enjoy wholesale slaughter of civilians", when they are in fact, the same idea. What you seem to be missing is that in order to have a Jewish state of Israel, the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people is a requirement. And let me tell you, if you have missed this fact, the Israeli government and early Zionists did not.

Last year, Israel's finance minister declared that "Gaza will be entirely destroyed" by Israel, and that its Palestinian inhabitants will "leave in great numbers to third countries" as a result of this destruction (x). Ethnic cleansing is "the attempt to create ethnically homogeneous geographic areas through the deportation or forcible displacement of persons belonging to particular ethnic groups" (x). That is what Israel is doing in Gaza to the Palestinians.

Ze'ev Jabotinsky, an early Zionist thinker and leader, said himself in his essay 'The Iron Wall' (x),

"There can be no voluntary agreement between ourselves and the Palestine Arabs. Not now, nor in the prospective future. I say this with such conviction, not because I want to hurt the moderate Zionists. I do not believe that they will be hurt. Except for those who were born blind, they realised long ago that it is utterly impossible to obtain the voluntary consent of the Palestine Arabs for converting "Palestine" from an Arab country into a country with a Jewish majority. My readers have a general idea of the history of colonisation in other countries. I suggest that they consider all the precedents with which they are acquainted, and see whether there is one solitary instance of any colonisation being carried on with the consent of the native population. There is no such precedent. The native populations, civilised or uncivilised, have always stubbornly resisted the colonists, irrespective of whether they were civilised or savage."

This is the problem with saying that Zionism is "they would like Jewish people to someday have a nice homeland where they don't feel like a strange political chunk in another country". This cannot be achieved without violence against the Palestinian people. Early Zionists were very aware of this. It is only now, that colonialism is viewed in a negative light, that Zionists are trying to pretend that their vision of a Jewish homeland can be achieved without violence against the Palestinian people.

To make myself clear, if you were to ask me if I think Israel 'has the right to exist', I would say that a) it doesn't matter. As it has been pointed out by people smarter than me, it does exist. There is no use arguing over a country's 'right to exist'. I would also say, b) no country has the right to exist as an unequal theocracy. If Israel tomorrow said "Alright, Palestinians (including those in Gaza and the West Bank) can be equal citizens. They can vote, run for office, own property, and receive governmental protections and benefits in the same way a Jewish citizen of Israel does, and we will not police the number of Palestinians in Israel nor those in political office in Israel, and formerly displaced Palestinians can return to their homes" then I would say great! But that is not the situation we are in right now. And I cannot and will not support an apartheid state currently committing a genocide.

I want to state that I agree that conflating Judaism with Zionism is both wrong and dangerous. Not only are not all Jewish people Zionists, not all Zionists are Jewish! Christian Zionism is a large movement among American Christian Protestants who believe we are living in the end times and as a part of that, the Jewish people will reclaim Jerusalem (x). I think anyone who uses the term "Zionist" to condemn all Jewish people is wrong and antisemitic. But I think ignoring what it really means to support a Jewish state of Israel is equally wrong and harmful.

I also want to look at out your last statement, that both Jewish people and Arab people are safe on your blog. Going through the replies and reblogs last night, I saw a lot of Jewish people and pro-Zionist people agreeing with you and thanking you. I did not see any Arab people doing the same. I wonder if your post really made them feel safe, when your statements were trying to disguise the fact (on purpose or on accident) that Israel is currently trying to ethnically cleanse the region to make a "Greater Israel" (x). I find that when you are tolerant of both the oppressed and the oppressor, you will find yourself only in the company of the latter.

Finally, if you want a longer, and more comprehensive look at this subject, I highly recommend YouTuber Shaun's video essay "Palestine".

extremely-tired-jew

youtuber shaun, the man who said on Oct8 2023, about Oct7 2023, "lots of reaping being condemned by the sowers"? Your moral character is showing.

thelawfulchaotic

Repeat after me, folks: we don’t get anywhere by judging each other’s moral character by fucking YouTube videos

extremely-tired-jew

I'm judging their moral character from stepping in and ~pushing back~ on 'maybe we shouldn't be antisemitic' and then suggesting you should go inform yourself about the conflict from a guy who goes about spouting nazi rethoric, but leftishly, actually. Because I'm an extremely tired jew, and the guy who's good video on palestine we should all watch thinks it's Normal For Arabs To Be Violent and no jew has ever been radicalised. Am I nice about it? No. Do you think I have to be, about people sending other people, publically, to watch a guy who thinks it's fine to murder my people? Because he's ~*nuanced*~??? He dislikes nazis, but murdering jews is fine? THE BLOOD WASN'T DRY ON THE GROUND.

the-library-alcove

And that video is so biased that it should legitimately count as a form of propaganda; he downplays THE HOLOCAUST in that video in the context of the founding of Israel. It's not an evenhanded examination of facts in the slightest.

mapswithoutwyoming

Starting to think all the backlash to the idea of the trolley problem is just people trying to hide the fact that, deep down, they know they would be too scared to pull the lever.

astra-the-dragon

I suppose one of the advantages I've gained from having been in the military is that I went from a suspicion I would have the conviction to make those kinds of calls, an absolute certainty that I do have it. I've held lives in my hands, but thankfully I rose to my training and my convictions. I chose the best of the options I had available to me at the time.

There is nothing shameful about being too afraid of making the decision, in my view. But yeah, it's cowardice to project your anxiety by claiming the philosophical quandary itself is meaningless.

zaprowsdower27

No reason to wonder. A ton of people openly bragged about how morally pure they were for not pulling the lever in 2024. They just hate it when you contextualize it like that and insist they were taking a third option to sound less terrible when their actions are 1:1 compared to the thought experiment.

nitpickspot

If anything, the reason I reject it is because I consider the thought experiment ITSELF to be cowardly.

All human lives are worth the same amount, and any LOSS of human life is as large a tragedy as any other amount of lost human life. You aren't doing a GOOD thing by condemning one person to die to save four more, you're not even doing a BETTER thing. It might be the more valuable thing in a coldly utilitarian point of view, but from my moral stance death is death. You don't get to compare and contrast your way out of that.

dappercat123

You’d be too scared to pull the lever huh?

darkladynyara

People hate the trolley problem because it is inherent to the problem that choosing not to act is an active choice. That's why they reject the problem itself rather than making an argument for choosing to not pull the lever. They aren't afraid to pull the lever- they're afraid to admit that their priority is keeping their own hands clean.

today-tastes-like-honey

I don't think you guys understand the trolley problem very well. I don't really see how it would be applicable to the 2024 election, for example. For starters, the key element of the trolley problem is that you can either let five people die by doing nothing, or sacrifice one person that would have been fine otherwise. This was not at all the situation of the 2024 election - the closest thing within the framing of the trolley problem would be "five people will die if you do nothing, but you can save four of them by pulling the lever". It is of course correct that the lever should be pulled in this scenario, and it is devastating that it was not because people complained that there was no option to save all five.

But the trolley problem is not just the one scenario of 6 people tied 1v5 on two train tracks. It contains a large number of variations of, for example, who these people are, what they have done with their lives, and so on - most importantly, it includes variations of the background scenario. Many people choose to pull the lever and sacrifice one person for the sake of saving five. So how does this change if you are not talking about train tracks? What if you are, instead, in a hospital? Here are five patients in need of organ transplants to live, as well as one healthy person. The doctors will kill the healthy person and save the five patients with their organs, if you tell them to. What's the matter, then? "Choosing not to act is an active choice", isn't it? It's still five lives for the cost of one, isn't it? If you say that killing this healthy person is the correct choice, would you advocate for this politically? For choosing healthy people by lot to kill them in order to get their organs?

You can expand it further - I don't know whether the original thought experiment does this, but the way I learned it does: If we're fine killing one person to save five, are we fine enslaving one person to benefit five? And so on. None of which works in the context of the bloody 2024 election because, as I said, there was no option where you would stop the killing of the people the trolley was going to hit by sacrificing uninvolved people that would otherwise have lived. There was only an option to have the trolley only run over some of the people tied to its original track.

myfootyrthroat

The million estimated deaths due to USAID cuts would like a word.

today-tastes-like-honey

I'm not American. I didn't throw anyone on any fucking tracks.

I didn't say the choice Americans made in 2024 was the correct or justifiable one. I did, in fact, call it "devastating". I don't know how you missed that. Here, I'll highlight it for you:

it's just not a situation comparable to the trolley problem. There were no two tracks. That's an integral part of the problem, that you either kill 5 people or 1 other person. There were no two tracks of separate people. It was "Palestinians" or "Palestinians plus a lot of other people". That's a scenario incompatible with the problem.

Most of the post was an explanation of why this is not how the trolley problem works and your comment proves pretty clearly that you either didn't bother to read or lack the necessary reading comprehension.

I really did my best to phrase my previous comment in short sentences so even people with low reading comprehension would be able to follow the line of reasoning, so I hope you were just too arrogant and full of yourself to bother reading it, because otherwise that really says something even sadder about you.

I'm being a lot more polite right now than you really deserve given the heinous shit you accuse me of in your tags.

myfootyrthroat

"It's not compatible with the trolley problem because it's comparing a huge negative outcome with a smaller negative outcome."

Do you also think it's not compatible with the trolley problem because it doesn't involve an actual train?

jewish-vents

A trans girl I know from turkeye just posted "debunking zionist propaganda" and the "propaganda" it was debunking was Being Jewish with Jonah Platt. I'm so sad. I don't want to unfollow all my friends. My face feels hot. I don't know how to react. Do I unfollow her? I love Jonah Platt. How are we ever going to fight back if our best speakers are smeared as zionist propaganda

.

chutzpahchesed

“How are we ever going to fight back if our best speakers are smeared as zionist propaganda” this is the point, sadly. it’s the point of utilizing the word as a slur, it’s the point of degrading and dismissing any Jew that can be targeted with it. it’s a silencing and delegitimization tactic. if our best and most effective and educated speakers can be instantly dismissed with shorthand for evil, genocidal, fascist, inhuman (which is what the usage of “Zionist” has become), then of course there’s no point in listening to them. in fact, paying them any attention at all, unless it’s to send them hate, is tantamount to a thought crime, and punishable by ostracization from the in-group as a traitor to the cause. it’s a very easy, very effective way to make sure Jewish creators will not be heard or taken seriously (unless, of course, they’re the ones who can be tokenized). making sure that it’s widely accepted that anyone who can be called (((Zionist))) is discredited is the best way to make that a reality, and it’s why we’re seeing it happen across every spectrum - the arts, academia, publishing, medicine, politics, and so on. we are not supposed to be able to fight back.

unsolicited-opinions

I'm a Millennial and in my late 30s. I distinctly remember the Bush years and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Kids got blown up, families died, hundreds of thousands died overall and yet NO ONE on the left was screeching about genocide. Not a single leftist during that era ever uttered the word because people back then understood what shit meant and that words can't be interchanged and randomly tossed around just due to vibes. I genuinely loathe the vast majority of Gen Z for being dead set on being just flat out fucking WRONG and maliciously ignorant. It would be laughable if it wasn't so dangerous to progress

Anon, while your frustration (and their dysfunction) is real and valid, please don't write off Gen Z or regard them as particularly broken or malicious.

Did you see the news a few moths ago about how Generation X has been disproportionately messed up by lead exposure?

Assuming that published lead-psychopathology associations are causal and not purely correlational: We estimate that by 2015, the US population had gained 602-million General Psychopathology factor points because of exposure arising from leaded gasoline, reflecting a 0.13-standard-deviation increase in overall liability to mental illness in the population and an estimated 151 million excess mental disorders attributable to lead exposure. Investigation of specific disorder-domain symptoms identified a 0.64-standard-deviation increase in population-level Internalizing symptoms and a 0.42-standard-deviation increase in AD/HD symptoms. Population-level Neuroticism increased by 0.14 standard deviations and Conscientiousness decreased by 0.20 standard deviations. Lead-associated mental health and personality differences were most pronounced for cohorts born from 1966 through 1986 (Generation X). [x]

Those of us in Gen X had our brains disproportionately poisoned by our environment. There's nothing we could have done to change what we were exposed to as children. The resulting uptick in difficulties we experience are not, scientists believe, the fault of Gen X.

Lead poisoning did this to us. It isn't a generational weakness, character flaw, or moral failing. We were poisoned and it damaged our brains.

So I find Gen Z sort of relatable - because they were also poisoned, and it isn't their fault, no matter how much those of us in elder generations act as though it is a generational character flaw in Gen Z.

Generations are different because their environments are different - so let's look at the media environments of Gen X, Millennials, and Gen Z.

Gen X was the first generation to embrace the internet, but we grew up in a pre-digital world.

Stranger Things isn't exactly right, but it's the portrayal which most matches my memories and photos (photos taken on film using analog cameras).

Gen X remembers rotary phones mounted or tied to the wall with cords and incredibly expensive long-distance rates if you made a call outside your area code. We grew up with large, deep CRT televisions with curved screens which looked like pieces of furniture with bunny ear antennae and no remote control. The really fancy homes had projection TVs.

VHS came out while we were kids, and we kept our teenage music collections in large binders of CDs.

Cable TV was the peak of our childhood media technology and a lot of people had it at home, but most people watched the three broadcast networks, listened to the radio, and read magazines/newspapers.

Almost everyone at school watched the same TV shows and knew the same top 40 pop songs.

Facebook and Gmail came into existence when Gen X was in it's 20s. We were young enough to embrace the new internet technology of the Web more quickly than our elders.

We started the first big blogs and big online forums and we read long-form articles online from mainstream media and new online-only outfits like Salon.com (which didn't suck at the time). We invented (for better or worse) early social media. We stayed on Facebook a long time, even after our parents joined.

You millennials mostly experienced computers and the internet early in life.

You witnessed the transition from analog technology to digital as kids. You had landlines, but they were definitely cordless and push-button. You saw the new flat-screen TVs come out. Cable was more ubiquitous for you, and you experienced on-demand viewing, an explosion of cable channels, and the advent of the streaming age.

Your media was much more fragmented and personalized. Someone else at school might not have heard of the music you loved. Yours was the first US generation to broadly experience that sort of thing.

Millennials were the first generation which had easy access to global content, and experienced much more connectivity to the internet than prior generations.

Millennials were into Facebook and Instagram for longer than most admit. Y'all read blogs, and very well may have had one. You still liked to some read long-form articles, but also got interested in more short-form content. You recognized how much of what you saw online was bullshit and prioritized authenticity over almost all other virtues. You were about 20 when the first smart phones were released.

Gen Z, though? They're the REAL first digital natives

They were born into a media ecosystem where smartphones, high-speed Internet, and social media were a given, totally ubiquitous from early childhood. They had constant, integrated connectivity which research suggests has made Gen Z more accustomed to rapid, always-on interactions and instant content gratification.

Gen Z, as a result, favors fast, engaging, and interactive content. They were the early adopters of SnapChat and TikTok. Short-form videos, memes, and ephemeral, quickly-forgotten content were the norm. Understand: This isn't how you or I grew up, Anon.

They consume media much faster and adopted the Millennial devotion to authenticity while adding a new twist. For Gen Z, authenticity and real-time engagement are highly valued over polished, edited works. They want it not only real, short and fast, but personalized.

They're grown up with their dopamine reward systems being constantly manipulated.

The content targeting them is designed to capture attention in a matter of seconds. Gen Z's social media usage is not just about consumption, it's also deeply tied to creating and shaping digital identity - and this isn't just me ranting, the research supports this.

Gen Z's experience has been packed with immediacy and interactivity, and they have high expectations for both authenticity and rapid change. Authenticity and relatability are prized over expertise. Moral resonance is prized over research.

These things satisfy the quick gratification their media environment has hacked their brains to need.

I know that my own attention span has taken a hit in recent years, and I didn't grow up online or with a smartphone. Imagine what the same media environment did to developing minds which never experienced anything else.

It's not a character flaw in Gen Z.

It's something that was done to them by the environment in which they have been raised.

Gen X was poisoned by lead exposure.

Gen Z was poisoned by their media environment.

Don't hate, my friend. Its not their fault.

The reward systems of their brains have been hijacked and they need our understanding. We need to try to help them.

unsolicited-opinions

It's not Gen Z's fault. This was done TO them by their environment. It's a media ecology problem.

hope-for-the-planet

California is installing zero-emission electric appliances and energy-saving upgrades at no cost to low-income households across the state u

Under the Equitable Building Decarbonization Program, California is providing no-cost, zero-emissions appliances like induction stoves and heat pumps to low-income households. The program covers single family, multifamily, and mobile homes and also include other efficiency upgrades like smart thermostats, LED lighting, and better duct sealing and insulation.

Worth noting, is that these appliances improve not only energy efficiency and reduce carbon emissions, but are also cheaper to operate and significantly improve indoor air quality.

mariacallous

me----irl

Reblog if you think the person you reblogged this from deserves to be happy.

thelawfulchaotic

In regards to this quote, I wanted to pull it aside and address it specifically:

In retrospect, I think probably there are a lot of American Jewish people on this post because they've been interrogated about zionism nonstop for months and they've been made afraid through acts of terror on American soil.

Years. We've been interrogated about it for years. It is the defining purity/litmus test for Jews of any affiliation. I have been kicked out of both real life and online spaces for refusing to denounce Israel as the source of all evil and the destruction of it and my entire ethnic identity as a prerequisite for the coming of peace on earth.

When I pointed out that it was not a genocide back in November of 2023, because of the actions being taken by the IDF to reduce civilian casualties, I had someone who I believed had been a friend for six years summarily block and ghost me. In the time since, I have seen them make the claim that I personally have killed Palestinian children "and laughed". How that's possible when I live in Europe and have never been to Israel is apparently left for the jury to determine.

We've all lost friends, social circles, entire political affiliations, jobs, financial opportunities, and more because we're Jews, and thus are treated with suspicion because of our ethnic heritage, and if we're not willing to bark "Israel Is The Source Of All Evil In The World And Must Be Destroyed And All Of The Israelis Murdered As Painfully As Possible In Order To Achieve Justice" without prompting, we're looked upon with suspicion of being "secret Zionists". Members of our community have been murdered and given a pass by the population at large because the murderer claimed that they're "not antisemitic, just antizionist". The legal system in Europe has given offenders who have engaged in conspiracy to assault and kill Jews benign sentences that were little more than slaps on the wrist. And more and more.

So seeing someone like yourself actually stand up and say, "Yeah, no, that's BS. There have definitely been crimes committed and they need to be investigated and prosecuted, but this histrionic labeling of people as 'Zionists' is just in opposition to everything I stand for," is something that practically drives some of us to tears. When people you once thought of friends, colleagues and allies show that they will abandon every principle they claimed they had on the altar of Jew-hate, seeing someone actually hew to their principles is worth cherishing.

I've gotten a couple asks like this and I want y'all to know I'm chewing on them.

I'm very good at poking my way through my own thoughts, so I've been doing a lot of thinking since that post about why I'm so sure that this is a bullshit purity test and not what many people believe it is -- a dogma of colonialist, racist, violent ideology.

Is it just because I know a lot of Jewish people? I mean, I do know a lot of Jewish people (lawyer, notorious Jewish prestige profession), and I'm like, those guys? Nah. That one's a Jewish lady with the biggest purse I've ever seen and we won a case together on behalf of some siblings; that one's an old Jewish guy who went to the same drama school as my mom like ten minutes after she left and knows all her friends and tells a great story.

I've felt for a long time that Jewish people are the canary in the coal mine when it comes to burgeoning fascism, but that's not all of it either.

I have posted a fair amount about liberal purity culture, the foolishness of driving off imperfect allies, the joy of embracing people where they are and broadening your own world as a result, so there's some inherent hostility to liberal and leftist exclusion.

Words and attitudes can certainly contribute to harm. Even across the globe. And I've seen things on here that speak to a defensiveness about Israel from Jewish folks that seems... well, honestly, seems just defensive. Reactive.

On top of this, there was a literal point when I knew that some of this debate was just a business that was none of mine, and that was when a Jewish friend of mine told me that zionists were missing the point of being Jewish because Jewish people were supposed to wander, that was what it was about. (PLEASE DON'T ARGUE ABOUT THIS, unless you are being respectful and informative. I'm only using this as an example of a thing that surprised me and showed me wow, I have only scratched the surface of understanding this shit.)

Then there's what I've done with my life and career. It took ages for me to start seeing the big picture in the criminal justice system, and start feeling out the shape of how state violence is creating the exact problems it's claiming to be solving. Whenever I read anything about Israel, it seems to me like I see the same thing happening there, like a perpetual motion machine: each side (speaking specifically of the ones making the violence-related decisions), in reacting with violence, ensures the future violence that will react to them, and in so doing perpetuates the need for retaliation, forever, forever. From what's happened over the last few years, it seems to me that Israel has given Hamas recruits for decades, and Hamas has inspired Israel to new atrocity.

But we can't forget the humanity in all of the killers and torturers and bombers. They see themselves as a guardian of the weak, an avenger of the fallen, a bringer of justice. That's why they do this. So what good do I do in calling someone an ideological enemy? What even is an ideological enemy? Is it someone I would kill in the name of ideology? That's no one. I'm a pacifist.

...That went a little far afield. But, also: the trappings of bullying include anonymous harassment and accusations without evidence, both of which are pretty telling. If you're on the side of knowledge and clarity, I'm gonna be kinda suspicious when you're apparently afraid to stand behind your words. (Anonymous questions are a totally different thing from anonymous accusations, that's about giving people an environment of openness without judgment where they can ask the things they're genuinely wondering about.)

Sort of a final note. I don't have an overriding theme here, as you may have figured out, I'm just sort of having thoughts.

People who have spent a while in one career or working hard on one hobby and who got good at it understand: when you interact in a space with certain concepts, you get skilled at dealing with those concepts. Talented costume designers understand the structure of the human body and how bits of things fit together in clothes in a way I don't know. Scientists have huge dimensions of knowledge where I can, at best, skim the surface.

The kind of lawyer that I am works with morals and ethics on a constant basis. Right and wrong and justice and violence and vengeance and forgiveness are concepts that we interact with day in, day out. We stare in to the abyss; the abyss stares back at us; we're like, hey, abyss, how's Tuesday, and it's like, oh, well, you know, samesies. I think maybe that my Guiding Principles (TM) Muscles are just really big and beefy because of all the crime I bench-press?

the-library-alcove

Well, first off, this is such a wonderful response.

Second, I don't know what else to say other than offer educational resources for you to learn more, if you wish, giving you more history and context, because you obviously have questions.

I will say to the associate of yours who said that "Jews are meant to wander"... *sigh* No, I'm not going to address them, because I know better than to try. So to you, the thing there is that, a hundred and fifty years ago, there were two general schools of Jewish thought regarding the Diaspora and our homeland in the Levant.

The first was Bundism--the idea that we were Germans/Frenchmen/Italians/Russians/Americans/etc who just so happened to be Jewish, and that our goal was assimilation and integration into those societies as part of rich, multi-ethnic, multi-religious cultures. This was the more popular view, especially in Western Europe.

The second was Zionism, named for Tzion, an archaic/poetic name for Jerusalem (Mount Zion is literally just a hill in Jerusalem, to give context there). This was the idea that Jews would always be an embattled, oppressed minority in the Diaspora, and that for our own safety, we would need a state of our own to be able to be safe.

The Bundists were pretty much all slaughtered by the Nazis, and the survivors became Zionists because it had been made abundantly clear, by the remains of six million dead Jews out of a population of less than 18 million worldwide, that the Zionist perspective was correct. Sadly. But when the Canadian response to Jewish refugees from the Holocaust on how many they would take was "None is too many" and the "Voyage of the Damned" was sent back to Europe because America refused to take them, and the 1943 Bermuda Conference had the Allies actively betray the Jewish refugees and survivors while they knew that the Holocaust was ongoing...

Yeah. The idea that "Jews were made to wander" because of the Diaspora is victim-blaming of the highest order, and even more revolting for having been said by a Jew.

thelawfulchaotic

I think it's probably just a young Jewish person who cares so much about being Jewish and who is so repulsed by the actions of Israel that they don't see any outlet there for their identity, honestly. It seems to me to be very human to have all the emotions you related above and come to a place of just really really wanting being Jewish to mean something completely different than a connection with Israel.

On a much smaller scale, I know what it's like to feel like you'd rather be rootless than have the root on offer. It's not a happy feeling!

I do appreciate the additional information though. I'm picking my way through The Origins of Totalitarianism by Hannah Arendt and I'll be honest, the entire section of Jewish history in the couple centuries before WWII is a struggle to keep up with. For all my fancy education in political science, I apparently do have some big gaps even in relatively recent world history!

(This is not surprising. I was taught AP European History by an ex-Navy officer who loooooooooooved wars. The part in between wars he sort of skipped over but by god the wars! His favorite! It wasn't all bad, though; he made us come up with mini-essays about bias for every single thing we read and that training actually formed the basis for a lot of my media literacy today.)

If you have good book recs, I'll take 'em, because I chew through those things at an astonishing rate and it might as well learn me something. Otherwise, I'm not too worried about applying myself to this because I'm working on my Spanish and also gathering my armament of psychology expertise so that even more social workers can tell me to stay in my lane. And also learning oil painting. And Russian literature. And-- well, the ADHD keeps life interesting.

the-library-alcove

I can see why you would come to that conclusion regarding that individual, but speaking as someone within that culture, it does not make their statement any less offensive or cruel to the rest of us.

I'll dig through my archives and see what I have to offer/suggest regarding book recs, and of course, I know that the rest of jumblr will be quick to offer their own suggestions. The big one I would suggest is "Anti-Judaism: The Western Tradition" by David Nirenberg.

thelawfulchaotic

Hey, reading over what I said: I'm legit sorry if I sounded like I was telling you what your emotional reaction should be. That wasn't my intent, but I can see how it could come off that way. Thank you for sharing your perspective and thoughts on it; I appreciate it.

the-library-alcove

Apology accepted; it's the sort of thing that's best summed up as "Cool motive, still victim-blaming," in response to your associate.

So, let me try to explain things here, and start with the basics: Do you know why we were in Diaspora?

Because the Romans conquered our homeland in 63 BCE, and spent the next two centuries oppressing us and squeezing us for every coin of tax revenue they could get. There were multiple uprisings against them, multiple messianic figures (including Jesus) being fomented because of the social strain, and they destroyed our Temple in the first rebellion, and then massacred half our population in the third. And then they took a bunch of the survivors as slaves to work on massive projects across the Empire, banned us from our own home city, and renamed it and our homeland as a way to give a big middle finger to us.

And then, when the Empire fell in the West, we couldn't go home, because the Eastern portion of the Empire still held it, and again massacred the ones who had managed to stay, and then the Arabs came and took it from the Byzantines, and they put the members of our population in a brutal form of second-class citizenship under Arab rule, where extra taxes and a bunch of legal disabilities were placed on us for the next thousand-plus years.

Meanwhile, under the Christians, we just kept getting massacred, expelled, exploited, brutalized, murdered, and marginalized. "We're meant to wander" is basically going, "You were meant to be treated like a piggy bank by Christian lords, who would let you build up wealth, and then throw you out and take the wealth for themselves."

My great-grandparents had a bakery in Lodz, Poland. We were Polish citizens prior to WWII. We had lived there for centuries. I have pictures of my great-great-grandparents. They were not "wanderers".

When the Nazis conquered Poland and sent my family off to die in the extermination camps, nearly the only survivor from that branch of my family who was still living in Europe was my grandmother. We have the paperwork showing that we have legal title to that property. When we made inquiries about possibly reclaiming it in the 1990s, after the USSR fell, the city of Lodz threatened us, saying, "We would not be able to guarantee your safety should you come here in person to press your suite." But, sure, "Jews are meant to wander".

You can understand why that statement makes me and others furious. It's akin to a certain black rapper saying that "Slavery was a choice." You don't have to agree with what the modern nation state of Israel is doing to say that we deserved our own persecution to your own kin.

I'm not aiming my anger at you--I'm angry at your associate, and doing my best to explain why this is a raw nerve.

judai-sm

I’m going to say it actually. It’s insane to call Israel genocidal for defending themselves against a terrorist group founded with the intent to kill Jews. Also insane to say you’re against genocide while advocating for the destruction of the country that houses half the Jews in the world.

Do you think the Jews in Israel will be allowed to stay in Palestine if Israel is dissolved? You’d do well to learn the history of what happens to Jews in Muslim countries.

notaplaceofhonour

There is one group consistently and loudly calling for the destruction of a national group, in whole or part, and that is Antizionists.

mariacallous

I think it’s kind of insane to think that blocking defensive aid like Iron Dome would mean that Israel would be *less incentivized* to engage in military offenses, or be more restrained in what it does.

mariacallous

inlowearthorbit

It's born of a severe lack of understanding of what motivates Israel and Israelis.

imyourbadjew

They really do believe that if not for the iron dome and bomb shelters Israel would just steamroll all over the Middle East and create the grand judean empire…

The only thing that will happen is that more innocents will die and Israel will be incentivised to more aggressively eliminate threats. The iron dome is what allows it to have MORE restraint.

But I guess it’s too much to ask AOC to actually understand geopolitics.

chutzpahchesed

The amendment to block military assistance failed, but partisan split cemented the increasingly polarized view of the U.S. ally.

mariacallous

thequeeranachronism

I left this as a comment but I wanted to add on. Without the Iron Dome Israel would need to be more aggressive not less. Israel would need to take out the governments trying to bomb them into oblivion. The Iron Dome allows them to be more moderate not less.

chutzpahchesed

I keep thinking about this quote from the Politico article:

that's fine, I even agree, but it's not what's being done.

for example:

x

Israel is not being treated like other countries, and not being held to a standard set for other nations, including for the United States itself. instead, it's being held to a much higher, much more exacting and demanding one, and the threats against it are minimized or legitimized as Israel itself becomes seen as a global pariah.

I don't absolve or excuse Netanyahu and his right wing government for their actions and contributions to that, but the problem is...even if he were a dovish prime minister, in the aftermath of 10/7, I believe what we've seen happen in the world would still be the response, no matter what Israel did. we saw this in the reactions beginning on 10/8. because it's not about Bibi, it's far more existential than that. if it weren't, these politicians would support defense apparatus (the Iron Dome isn't even a weapon, it's a shield. it just stops more civilians from being killed), and they wouldn't align themselves with virulent antisemites or support an isolationist's bill that would even negatively impact aid for the people they pretend to care about. the dignity and safety of Palestinians is not their driving motivation.

the symbolism here to appease the loudest of their constituents is not really about curtailing weapons or moral standards or a response to conduct in war or affordability (which foreign aid doesn't impact domestically at all) or whatever else they're pretending it is. they don't simply want Israel to "live up to standards" set for other countries, the problem they have is with Israel's existence.

mariacallous

I really don't like voting yes on the amendment "to send a message to Netanyahu and his government" because the message is "we'll give you what you want and not even realize it or think about it"

Removing restrictions on Israel's offensive and defensive capabilities *and* cutting/removing all aid to Palestinians? Tell me the part where the Israeli right is supposed to feel chastised or rethink how they operate?

Also, what happens if/when the current opposition win and there's different policies and staff in place? Because a lot of people sure seem to appreciate being able to hide behind Netanyahu and the Israeli right when making statements (when they aren't writing of Israel entirely).

mariacallous

A reset is overdue for a relationship that isn't building long-term security

Make no mistake, this vision will not satisfy the hardcore anti-Israel crowd on either side of the aisle. They want no aid and no partnership. They want to boycott Israeli products, artists and academics and arrest Israeli leaders. Their solution is the dissolution of the Israeli state.

Some of the Democrats who voted for the resolution no doubt belong in this category — among them the bill’s sponsor, Republican Rep. Thomas Massie, who was the sole House member to vote “nay” on a Nov. 2023 resolution affirming Israel’s right to exist.

But many Democrats who voted for the Wednesday resolution said they did so despite their ongoing support for Israel, as a way to lodge their dissatisfaction with Netanyahu’s policies.

“We simply cannot continue to condone Netanyahu’s actions that are against our moral conscience and our own national security interests by perpetuating the status quo,” said Massachusetts Rep. Seth Moulton, who has a long record of support for Israel.

Rep. Jake Auchincloss, also of Massachusetts, voted for the bill, but said it “should not impair the state of Israel’s right to defend itself against the atrocities of the terrorist regimes that threaten it.”

Both Auchincloss and Moulton pointed out the bill’s flaws, among them that it would deny Israel purely defensive weapons systems, as well as humanitarian aid that also serves Palestinians.

I really hate this perspective, because apart from the fact that all these people had serious issues with the amendment and *pointed out those problems and still voted for it purely to make a statement and on the gamble it wouldn't go anywhere*, it also makes it less likely that we can genuinely get to that "reset", which I don't deny is needed.

thelawfulchaotic

I really liked your blog but I'm going to go ahead and block you because if you can't say that you don't support genocide then you support genocide. It is that simple.

I did say that, several times in several ways, because it does happen to be the case.

Hey, folks: taking a daring stance here and coming down hard against genocide. Also not a fan of torture, war crimes, slaughter of civilians, rape, abuse, brutality, deprivation of necessities, removing people from their homes, destroying their homes, starving them, or denying them any human rights. Actually, I don't like bombs. Or drones. Or military organizations. Or the existence of controlled borders.

There's lots of other things I don't like, but I'm trying to keep it simple, because you seem like you've been perhaps not reading what I'm writing.

Hope that helps !

the-library-alcove

There's a reason why I've been saying for the last nearly-three-years that, with the way these people overuse, overextend, and exaggerate the definition of "genocide", then, by the same metrics, a traffic light counts as involuntary, state-sanctioned detention and prohibition of free movement.

I think, in particular, OP, there's a comparison that you'll agree with.

Do you remember when Derik Chauvin was charged with murder in the second degree for murdering George Floyd, and a bunch of the commentariat lost their minds at how it wasn't "Aggravated Murder In The First Degree With Extra Rehensibleness and pickles on the side!"? And there were a bunch of legal-minded bloggers like yourself patiently explaining that, no, "degrees of murder" has to do with premeditation and intent, not brutality? And they got blown off by said commentariat who were upset that the charges weren't using the most overblown and emotionally satisfying words possible, instead of accurate ones?

Yeah. Same thing here, I think. What do you think?