I was at a pro-Palestine campus protest and there were times where I was instinctively uncomfortable because they were really hammering in the whole bit about reported ‘antisemitic action on campus’ being a non-issue and I had to remind myself that they aren’t talking about people acting against Jews, they’re talking about people acting against Israel.
It’s my most personal and privileged grievance against Israel. I no longer know if a supposed threat to my safety is a bullshit bludgeon to silence pro-Palestine voices or if the yank reich is actually in town and I need to commute for the rest of the week.
I’ll never forgive them for it. I’ll never forgive them for a lot of things, but this is the most personal grievance I have, and since I’m born and raised a cracker suburbanite, it’s the only one I truly, directly feel in my personal life.
I don’t want this to override, you know, the actually important grievances that are at stake for Palestine here, and I don’t want to make myself the center of this issue when I’m very much not at all, but I guess I’ve just been stewing in this for a bit, and I want to uncap it before it somehow causes me to become a weird crank through lack of addressing the root of the issue and it festering into my belief system 
this was always the problem with a country calling itself the ‘Jewish state’, putting the Star of David on their flag, and claiming to represent all Jews - all the while committing horrific atrocities. firstly, they use anti-semitism as a cudgel to silence support for Palestinians and trivialize the term. but there are also a non-trivial amount of people out there who are going to blame all Jews for Israel’s actions. Israel then benefits from creating this anti-semitism because more Jews think “maybe it’s true I’m not safe here” and either support Israel or decide to move there to further colonize it.
Israel then benefits from creating this anti-semitism because more Jews think “maybe it’s true I’m not safe here” and either support Israel or decide to move there to further colonize it.
which is doubly ironic, because the worst thing you could possibly do to avoid genocide is move all your people into one small place.
It’s interesting to me how, just like many other settler groups like the Boer republics and the founders of Rhodesia, the early zionists managed to huff enough of the
supremacist ideology that they thought trying to establish a small independent ethnostate surrounded by “hostile” neighbors would be feasible in the long run and not end badly. Doubly-so for the ones who convinced themselves that they could “resist imperialism” and get by without a superpower patron to shield them (all the nutters in Lehi and Irgun, Golda Meir initially), when that’s practically the only reason Israel stands today. Must have been quite the sobering moment when they saw all the settler-states they modeled themselves after fall one by one.
There is something very sick about an ethnostate crying antisemitism. These people have more in common with the Nazis that did genocide against the Jews than the actual Jews. Yet they’ll use their suffering as a shield. It’s messed up.
Reactionaries using the language of the oppressed to claim they’re the real victims is very common. :(
This anti-German rhetoric is getting out of hand!
-Adolf Hitler
He literally did say that. Nazis were going on about reverse racism generations before any CHUD.
Frankly I think everyone should be much more racist against germans
One thing I’ve been thinking of recently is the parallel between how much both Israel and Nazi Germany have and had a mythos of being victims as a major part of their identity. I will need to investigate other fascist societies to see if this is a common trend among them or if this is just coincidence
Fascists are always self-victimizing, it’s always the Jews or the British capitalists (for Italy) or the immigrants and/or Muslims (modern western fascists) that are supposedly attacking the homeland and giving a basis for revanchism.
It’s a silly reference, but I remember Jacob Geller’s video on the ideology of Call of Duty, where he does a decent job of demonstrating how it so centers on a politics of aggrievement by foreign enemies necessitating a response of brutal violence by the US, where all the atrocities committed by the latter are the “hard choices” and “dirty work” needed to protect the country.
It’s the kind of thing that if Israel didn’t exist and you read this in a book you would think the writer is being heavy handed and unrealistic
Most Jews aren’t Zionists.
Zionism is not Judaism.
Anyone who calls you antisemitic immediately and without evidence is probably a Zionist, or confused by Zionists.
Zionists are Fascists, or Fascist Adjacent.
Most Jews aren’t Zionists
Is there any actual research/data on this? Every time I search it’s a mixed bag between articles claiming over 90% of Jews are zionist to articles saying ‘a lot more Jews than you think aren’t zionists’ but with no hard numbers.
A lot of people define zionism differently so those surveys that tote 90+% can’t be taken at face value (https://www.jewishvoiceforlabour.org.uk/article/zionism-an-ideal-that-has-little-purhase-on-reality/ best resource that I’ve found on the matter).
I think it’s fair to say that most jews don’t like how Israel operates even if they might define themselves as a zionist due to personal/family complications (also a lot of zionist propaganda).
It’s entirely intentional on Israel’s part that Jewish diaspora are made to feel unsafe and should thus “return home” to fill in all the curiously vacant land they have just waiting to be claimed. So it’s two birds being knocked out with one stone.
Pro tip, when someone is actually being antisemitic everyone just says ‘wow, that nazi is a real piece of shit’
I’ve yet to encounter accusations of antisemitism in the wild that wasn’t coming from someone thar was also incoherently, unspeakably furious that every country in the middle east with edible hummus hadn’t been bathed in nuclear fire yet, or that enough children hadn’t been orphaned. A deeply sick culture
I have spent my whole fucking life punching Nazis, sometimes literally (do you know how hard nazis are on your nail polish? It’s a real sacrifice.) And every time, there’s some dumbass undergrad in the org who conflates support of Palestine with anti-semitism and has to be gently given a visit from cadre.
Israel’s continuing fall into mask off Fascism is amazing.
Even 15 years ago you could find many leftists who were, despite many reservations, willing to support a two-state solution with a right of return, and who acknowledged that Israel at least started with some utopian socialist ideals mixed in with the horrifying settler colonialism and ethnic cleansing of local inhabitants. Like, they had the fucking holocaust as a line of moral credit and successive Israeli governments have done everything they possibly can to burn through that goodwill.
I remember when BDS happened I was against it, not because I thought it was anti-semitic but because I thought it was counter-productive (it wasn’t, I was wrong). And the sheer volume of rhetoric against anyone who so much as didn’t immediately change their entire diet to Max Brenner hot chocolates was horrific. And it just keeps escalating as support for Israel crumbles among ordinary people.
(not going to debate-bro you, genuinely curious)
What was your reasoning at the time that made you think BDS is counterproductive?
It’s a bit hard to remember at such a remove, but there was more hope of pressuring leftist organisations inside Israel to support at least a right of return.
Also i was significantly more Council-com at the time and knew a lot of Syndicalists and Chomsky was against it, not because he thought it was bad but that support for right of return and other demands of BDS could backfire due to lack of public understanding of the conflict. His reasoning was that Israel was not an apartheid state, it was a genocidal state. South Africa needed the Bantustans to provide cheap labour, and was thus open to international censure on their existance. Israel would very much like Gaza and the West Bank to stop existing and increased international pressure might result in “May as well send in the tanks now and wait out the backlash” rather than a forced negotiation.
Also, the general opinion was that localised boycotts of vocally pro-setter businesses were appropriate, but that more robust boycotts would be tarred as a prelude to Kristallnacht by right-wing and pro-israel press (as, indeed, they were). In any case, the public education for a boycott wasn’t there.
So instead, efforts should be made to increase diplomatic censure and engage in anti imperialist action to reduce weapons shipments. The argument here being that Israel needed those shipments to maintain existence and were thus a single point of failure.
These were all dumb, because it turned out all Israeli political factions were pro genocide. The US will never stop weapons shipments to anyone, and BDS has in fact accomplished the public education effort Chomsky said was a precondition, despite a substantial propaganda effort against it.
It’s a serious problem and a criticism that doesn’t get levied at Israel enough. Antisemitism is a serious and rife problem still in the world, but so long as it keeps getting leveraged by a nation (that claims to speak both for an entire ethnicity and religion) that deliberately muddies the language to justify war crimes, the very real issue of antisemitic racism becomes ten-fold harder to address for the sole reason that it’s impossible to talk about in widely understood terms.
I think my least favorite aspect of this is being told it is in fact I, the anti-zionist jew, who is the antisemite and self-hating jew because I don’t want to support zionist genocide. just makes me see red. I don’t know how they justify it to themselves.
I feel the same way
It’s the same projection as when they accuse Hamas of war crimes, every one of their accusations is a confession
I get it. I’ve seen a lot of dismissal of antisemitism as a serious issue since the conflict started, which has led to some actual very concerning antisemitic garbage making its way into the discourse; thankfully not here of course.
I don’t think it’s priviledged to be worried about anti-semitism
anti semitism is a personal safety issue and everyone is always entitled to care about their personal safety
They usurped the term and made it exclusively a religious thing, while it used to be about the people that lived in that region in the world and spoke the semitic languages.
Them murdering and labeling palestinians as savage beasts is anti-semitism at its best.
anti-apartheid rap idea:
yo yo yo Zionists be the real antisemites
(but actually though, the idea that Jews have some homeland that’s far, far away from Europe while Christians are home wherever they find themselves is blantant antisemitism)
Stop making it about individual people, make it about an entire nation. Best way to do it, IMO.
Israel has excellent propaganda.
Just had this exact discussion in the bulletin thread.
Anti semetism means nothing any more. It’s a been used as a weapon for decades now and i think we are at the point where it just doesn’t hold weight.
nah, it still has its old (real) meaning. and i think europe’s gonna remind the world what real antisemitism looks like soonish. when the collapse really starts to hurt their fascists, they’ll rediscover their roots.
the Ukrainians for example are real anti-semites
also we’ve had anti semitism in Europe ever since the romans decided that anyone who won’t worship the roman gods is also unfilial and plotting against roman society it’s not going away easy
yep. as i like to say, antisemitism is an older “pillar” of european culture than christianity.
I call it the “boy who cried wolf” effect. There’s the old fable of the boy who cries wolf, gets the whole village to come out, he laughs at them, etc. They go back into their homes. He does this so many times they stop believing him. Then he gets mauled to death when a wolf really shows up. Of course that’s not how wolves behave, blah blah blah but you get the point.
It’s not really a good take on it because it’s not like Jewish people in general listen to this shit, it’s literally just zionist
When the wolves come it’s not the state of Israel that gets devoured, it’s the rest of the normal people that have had their terms misused that do
yeah, you’re right, it’s not a good analogy. I can’t think of a better one though.
It’s the boy who cried wolf except he’s doing it to a village actively being devoured by wolves, also the boy brought the wolves into the village
