Tag: end the occupation
Gaza and the Question of Culpability
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This attempt to assign responsibility for the actions of the Israeli military to Hamas is a distraction on two counts. The first is that even though the march was supported by Hamas, it was organized primarily by independent activists who were largely non-violent and unarmed. Although Hamas officials have claimed that many of its members were killed during the demonstration, it is beside the point: Israel chose to shoot these unarmed protesters by the dozen anyway.The second count is that even Israel’s own military leadership has long predicted that a day like Monday would arrive. “The economy in the Strip is on the verge of total collapse, like from zero to below zero,” a senior Israeli official told Haaretz this past January, warning of an imminent “uncontrollable blow-up.”
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Imo it is reactionary to discourage people who do not have a stake in I/P from learning about and speaking against Israeli settler colonialism and its ethnic cleansing of Palestinians.
At the same time, I think non-Jewish white leftists need to be mindful about *how* they speak about this when they do not have any stake in the matter.
The evil the state of Israel commits is not a free pass for you to be antisemitic.
(non-Jewish white leftist here and if I’m out of line at all, please tell me)
However, being called anti-Semitic because you’re critical of Israel’s policies in regards to Palestine is wrong, right?
One of my friends is Palestinian. She’s lived through three wars. She’s told me horror stories. She makes light of it but she’s seen some serious shit and I know it’s killing her that she can’t go home. It can’t be anti-Semitic to be against the hurting of innocents?
I only say this because I’ve heard Jewish people on the radio compare any criticism of Israel today to people supporting the Holocaust, claiming that Jews can’t be doing something bad now because something bad happened to them 70 years ago. (I also recognise that not all Jewish people will share this opinion, but it is something that has been claimed)
Listen to me when I say this is EXACTLY the kind of comment I did not want to get on this post because now you’re positioning me, a Jew, to guide you on the proper way to morally field this, when I think we both know that objectively no, it is not antisemitic to be generally critical of Israel…
But that’s literally all an affirmation you wanted and frankly that’s not a good enough critical self-examination and is a very shallow evaluative way to ask yourself whether or not you’ve been antisemitic in the way you advocate for Palestine.
Further
Invoking your Palestinian friend and saying “it can’t be antisemitic to be against the hurting of innocents” sounds like you’re both obfuscating an accusation of antisemitism to be both wildly absurd and morally repugnant, and I’m not gonna give that to you…
Further.
Stop homogenizing What Jews Think And Feel regarding I/P by a few people you heard on the radio with the caveat: “but I know not all Jews feel that way.” This is a classic example of antisemitically positioning Jews as incapable of understanding that “the hurting of innocents” is wrong. You’re trying to, implicitly at best, position all Jews as monsters for you, the benevolent white leftist, to ideologically correct with your Unique perspective that the killing of innocents is wrong. It’s not your job to morally evaluate the entirety of the Jewish people by a metric of how much they do or do not support the liberation of Palestine and the absolishment of the state of Israel.
You’re not Jewish, you’re not even Palestinian, you are white and simply an ally. Remember that you have *no* material stake in this lol.
Gonna be honest that you are the type of white leftist that probably gives me anxiety about the way you talk to Jews generally and are not interested in conversing with/seeing us as people, let alone people who can be flawed and grow and change in their perspective… and are more interested in branding every run of the mill liberal Jew you come across as a Zionist for woke points, after maybe your only engagement with said Jew is: “do you support Israel?” Or similar questions… You are not your Palestinian friend, need I remind you that you LITERALLY have no stake in this.
Further..
It’s disrespectful to refer to the Holocaust as just “something wrong,” and is indicative to me that you have no solid grasp on its devastation or the complicated ways this trauma has shaped Jewish consciousness generally because you have already morally positioned Jews in your mind as nothing more than absolute monsters that levy their own trauma to justify Israel. (Except some good ones of course!) lol
FURTHER!
Yeah I know this response seems rather over-the-top and your question was well meaning… (as are most white goyishe leftists who ask these sorts of questions). But I’m begging you not to use The Good Jews as your moral guide while already positioning the rest as Bad… this is a reaction generally speaking to the prevailing attitude I’ve seen among white non-Jewish leftists whose engagement with the matter starts and ends with the simple idea that those who support the state of Israel are my enemy because I support Palestinian liberation, and most Jews do, so most Jews are my enemy (and the enemy of all liberation!) until I ask/harass/impose the question about it to them in which I fundamentally and casually judge their humanity for a social justice cause I have absolutely no stake in.
Further…
Consider that most Jews are actually not blathering idiots about I/P (we may actually know more than you, shocking! I know) or blood hungry monsters. But all you wanted to ask me was whether or not [x] was antisemitic, and I’m just going to tell you that’s not a sufficient enough engagement with yourself regarding whether or not you are antisemitic/being antisemitic about the way you engage with Jews regarding I/P.
Gaza: Avoiding a Greater Blood Bath
Given the current human rights disaster in Gaza, and the fact that Shavuot is coming up and it is therefore yet another opportunity for Jews to be charitable, I have attempted to compile a small and handy list of organisations working towards peace or related goals in Israel and Palestine, in the hope that all you people (including non-Jews: this is for you too!) who want to help in some small concrete way will be able to find an organisation you’d like to support.
B’Tselem: The Israeli Information Centre for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories, working to end the occupation by documenting human rights abuses in the occupied territories.
Breaking the Silence: An organisation of veterans of the Israeli forces, publishing testimonies of the realities of life in the occupied territories, in the hope of ending the occupation.
Medical Aid for Palestinians: Delivering health and medical care to Palestinian communities affected by conflict, occupation and displacement, including providing emergency medical aid at times of crisis.
Combatants for Peace: An organisation of Israeli and Palestinian former combatants, working to promote dialogue and non-violence, with the aim of ending the occupation and finding a peaceful solution to the conflict.
Gisha: The Legal Centre for Freedom of Movement, working to protect the freedom of movement of Palestinians, especially Gaza residents, by promoting rights guaranteed by international and Israeli law.
The Galilee Society: The Arab National Society for Health, Research and Services (R.A.), working to achieve equitable health, environmental and socio-economic conditions, and to increase development opportunities for Palestinian Arabs inside Israel.
Jewish nationalism reliant on foreign money and bloody conflict to sustain itself has lost all claims to being Jewish in nature. It’s is nationalism and only nationalism.
Zionists will call me, an ethnic, cultural, and spiritual Jew, an antisemite for my radical belief that it is unwise and immoral for us, the Jewish people, to adopt the methods and mindsets of the people who oppressed us, who forced us out to begin with.
It is obtuse and displays a massive lack hindsight to think anything good will come of attempting to modify the definition of a Jew to include loyalty to the state.
Nationalism is terrible. It is a force of terror. Zionism is toxic to our cultural, a smoldering nickel ball dropped onto the delicately carved casing around our souls, melting us down to exposure. It is a plague, an infected limb that must be removed before the whole body (Judaism itself) is infected and dies.
Being neither Jewish nor Palestinian, idk what to think about the Israeli-Palestinian situation. It doesn’t seem entirely like the typical oppressor-victim, privileged-oppressed dynamic- while the oppression of the Palestinians is indefensible, Jewish people are also “victims”, and for many Israel was the only place they could be safe.
I’m on the outside too but I never felt a second of hesitation about being pro-Palestinian and against the Israeli occupation. Maybe it’s easier for me because here in the US we have the clear example of whacko Christian Zionists who are basically everything any moral person DOESN’T want to be: they’re pro-Israel, anti-Palestinian and Islamophobic and anti-semitic and anti-Christian (because Palestinian Christians are on their shit list too).
So I believe criticizing the Israeli occupation of Palestine is a moral imperative for US citizens (since so much of our money goes to Israel’s military), and is not in itself anti-semitic. Many Jewish Israeli citizens have harsh criticisms of the occupation too! That being said, a lot of people use Palestinians as an excuse to be anti-semitic and equate all Jewish people with the actions of the Israeli government. Conversely, a lot of people also use Israel as an excuse in order to hate on Palestinians and all Muslims in general. And some far right people even do both of those things at the same time. There’s massive amounts of disinformation going around.
But even if there wasn’t such a ton of disinformation, the conflict still wouldn’t fall under a neat “oppressor-victim dynamic” because a neat oppressor-victim dynamic only exists in textbooks and abstract models, not in the real world. Yeah, it’s complicated, but all large-scale geopolitical conflicts are complicated.
I think what makes it especially complicated is that Middle Eastern countries have expelled their own Jewish citizens to Israel numerous times, essentially making most Jews of MENA descent in Israel also refugees or descendants of refugees. In their case it was “go to Israel or die.” The Holocaust survivors essentially became stateless refugees also and many were massacred when they tried to return to their home villages. “for many Israel is the only place they could be safe” has quite a bit of truth to it. But I think there’s a difference between a people living someplace and them occupying another people’s place and controlling their way of life. I get Zionists telling me “aha you think Israelis should have a place to live that means you are one of us!” which kind of reminds me of when people used to say “feminism is equality between men and women therefore anyone who thinks women and men are equal is a feminist.” It’s a tactic movements use to try to broaden their appeal but it runs up against reality and when I say…pretty much anything else about the occupation, Zionists don’t like it.
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