Jews are not systemically oppressed anymore but clearly certain reactionaries sure do want them to be.
Collective punishment is always wrong. You can’t just make your whole ideology out of fuckinslammer memes or you turn into this person.
Parenti fucking rolling in his grave rn. You do not get to invoke a foundational modern marxist while doing the opposite of material analysis.
Would you apply the same logic to Christians? Arguably Christians have done far more harm. Or are you defining Jews as an ethnicity? How is that better? Is there something genetic or is it religious?
These may seem like silly semantic differences but they are actually important and the people that make either argument are wrong for the same reason: Collective punishment and collective guilt is always reactionary.
Ironically some of these same people would say I am doing Jewish exceptionalism but are they not doing the same thing claiming this is an exceptionally Jewish form of fascism.
I do not believe such distinctions are productive but rather only serve to excuse one’s own participation in similar relations. By invoking some sort of Jewish exceptionalism you are only absolving yourself of guilt and complicity. By definition when you claim there is some sort of Jewish exceptionalism at play you are implying they are a special uniquely bad group apart from the international white supremacist project that enables and requires the existence of Israel.
You claim to be denouncing special treatment of Jewish persecution and overcorrect into actual Nazism. Or to be more accurate I guess Strasserism.
I no longer care if people want to call me a zionist for pointing this out. You are just embarassed white supremacists trying to offload your crimes onto Israel, there is nothing Israel has done that the rest of the west has not done tenfold, all are complicit and blaming it on Jews is just Nazi shit. I will fight to the death for the Palestinian people but I will not tolerate any single person implying collective guilt. This goes for everyone, white, black arab, persian, etc.
Please at least link what you are talking about. https://lemmy.ml/post/52069875
you did not understand what they are saying at all it seems like.
Would you apply the same logic to Christians?
a lot of people already do and with good cause! Especially those that have to suffer under christian supremacism. It’s silly to try to make a distinction between the colonisation of the americas and christians as if the colonisers weren’t explicitly using christianity for genocide. Zionism is a jewish supremacist movement and trying to pretend it has nothing to do with judaism is only muddying the waters. The supposed country is even called “israel” for crying out loud
I think something that constantly gets lost in these back and forth arguments is the conditions that those in West Asia are affected by Zionism/Jewish Supremacy.
Telling them they’re being reactionary because they believe in Jewish Supremacy is like telling a person of color suffering under colonialism/neo-colonialism that they’re being racist because they believe in White Supremacy.
Obviously not all Jews are Zionists, but when you start to dictate to a victim of Israel that they are wrong even though the Judaism, as an institution, is responsible for their material conditions then you become the one ignoring material reality.
We’ve had West Asian comrades chased off because their perspectives (and material realities) are looked down upon because too often people are quick to react and conflate that with Nazism/White Supremacist thoughts on Judaism. But if we have members here asking those same West Asian comrades to consider that not all Jews are Zionists, would we not apply the same logic and realize that when they speak about Jewish Supremacy it is not in the same way a Nazi would talk about Jewish Supremacy?
Telling them they’re being reactionary because they believe in Jewish Supremacy is like telling a person of color suffering under colonialism/neo-colonialism that they’re being racist because they believe in White Supremacy.
Unfortunately the same people also love doing that
I’m definitely not here to do that and I frankly don’t care if Jewish people are upset about antizionist memes that stray over that line. What i am concerned about is the amount of energy other white people put into making this about Judaism. That is where it starts to raise my hackles.
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No I was simply replying to the premise of the op which was criticizing people for saying we probably should not conflate Jews as a whole with zionists. The only thing I could take from that was op demanding the opposite which is ridiculous.
No one is trying to conflate jews as a whole with zionists in the conversation you are talking about. The screenshot that post is about is even listing statistics explicitly oulining how it’s “not all jews”. The point is not “all jews are zionists” it’s pushing back against the idea of zionism being distinct from judaism. It isn’t. It’s a part of judaism and it’s history in the same way that the crusades or the inquisition are a part of christianity. And the statistics are supposed to highlight that it’s not a small part of contemporary judaism either, but the vast majority and certainly the most powerful jewish institutions understand zionism as a core part of judaism.
What you’re doing however is heinous. You aren’t just misrepresenting the argument, which could be handwaved as you not understanding it, but you are putting a screenshot of their modlog as the picture to your post. Not the argument, which you didn’t even link, but you’re trying to underhandedly paint them as a transphobe without outright stating it. I don’t know if they are, but it is immaterial to the current conversation. This is not a good faith approach but an attempt at character assassination.
why are westerners always clinging to this disgusting zionist narrative that jews are special little gems whose suffering and oppression is worth more than anyone elses? why do they always insist on portraying the anti-jewish portion of the nazi genocide as an evil in its own league, despite it not even constituting the majority of the hitlerites crimes?
how come that the suffering of jews is considered the crime of crimes, while everything else the fascists did gets either ignored, excused away or even celebrated?
i’m starting to suspect that many western “leftists” would have had no problem with hitler murdering domestic and foreign communists, as well as waging genocidal warfare on the peoples of the ussr. in fact, i’ve seen equivalent ideas getting celebrated more and more openly nowadays.
the slavic or romani victims, or the political prisoners who suffered the same or even worse abuses in the same camps by the same fascist parasites as the jews, do not get to be immortalised in western literature, film, music, or other arts.
despite the fact that racism against slavic peoples was (and is) at the very core of hitlerite ideology, many westerners never bother acknowledging it, instead celebrating the current death of hundreds of thousands of slavic people in a conflict caused by western capital. and despite the crimes that the nazis perpetrated against the romani population, anti-romani racism remains as common as life itself.
the role of communists resisting the hitlerite tyranny is also consistently played down, if not outright ignored, with some reactionaries even growing brazen enough to call them traitors. the goal is to portray communism as something foreign, from which “the nation” needs to be protected.
the average european zionazi apears to be taught from birth to never admit that slavs and communists, not jews, were the primary victims of nazism, both in numbers as well as chronologically.
the slavic or romani victims, or the political prisoners who suffered the same or even worse abuses in the same camps by the same fascist parasites as the jews, do not get to be immortalised in western literature, film, music, or other arts.
Within Nazi ideology, Jews, Slavs, Romani, and so on are vectors of ideological disease, and their extermination is within the framework of exterminating a population that’s a carrier of disease due to greater susceptibility. But the ideological disease itself is communism. If certain members of the carrier population demonstrate that they have not been infected (eg Banderites, Ustashe, various other fascist collaborators), Nazis are more than happy to accept them, albeit within a lower level, of their fascist order. But any blue eye blonde hair German communist has been infected and must be exterminated, Aryan ubermenschness be damned.
oppression is worth more than anyone elses?
I never made any such claims. On the contrary I was asking why their settler colonial state requires its own special designation.
I think they are agreeing with you and making similar points, not saying that YOU are making that claim
Geneva_Convenience has really gone off the deep end with this Bad Empanada shit. There’s zero point to any of this discourse except to stir up controversy and alienate people. I genuinely think people are just bored and looking for hot takes to keep things going. They blocked me for “supporting Zionism” immediately after I explicitly said I’m completely opposed to the genocidal, apartheid state of Israel. It’s ridiculous.
Antizionist Jews exist and are not the problem. Non-Jewish Zionists exist and are part of the problem. This is because the problem is the Israeli state and not the Jewish ethnicity. This is not remotely complicated and should not be at all controversial to say.
“B-b-but a lot of Jews are Zionists!” Yeah, so? The problem is still the part where they’re Zionist and not the part where they’re Jewish. Take a Jewish Zionist, convert them to Christianity without changing their political beliefs, you haven’t fixed anything. Take a child who is ethnically Jewish and another who is not, teach them both to be Zionists, one is no better than the other. So what exactly is the point?
It’s unfortunate but it always felt like this was bound to happen, to an extent. People watch an ethnostate do genocide for long enough and the lizard brain starts reacting against the ethnicity the ethnostate is based around, instead of the ethnostate itself and it’s supporters.
“B-b-but a lot of Jews are Zionists!” Yeah, so? The problem is still the part where they’re Zionist and not the part where they’re Jewish.
So? So the problem is you’re thinking too individualist. As a Marxist, I don’t care about passing moral judgement. Here’s a cold, factual material analysis instead. Jewish institutions are overwhelmingly Zionist and support the genocide materially. Temples hold auctions for stolen houses and collect money for the IAF. Real existing Jewish religion in the world today has a systemic, structural problem with Zionism. Or rather, the problem is that it doesn’t have a problem with it. It has many material benefits and privilegees interlinking it with the imperialists, colonial genocide machine.
The minority of Jews who aren’t Zionists have a hard time finding communities and places of worship, where they feel welcome and aren’t excluded based on their principled rejection of the real white Jewish privilege to have the option to be able to move to my families area, kill them, steal their house, steal their land and get lots of state support to build a new live there. They are in the minority, they don’t get any funding, they need outside support to affect real structural change inside institutionalized religion. But they are also in the best position to affect this change, to lead the reforms. If they don’t take responsibility, there’s no hope for institutionalized Jewish religion to move away from it’s currently majority fascist, hegemonic class position.
If we were to ignore this real systemic issue, by focusing only on individual beliefs, we’d commit the error of classic idealism.
I don’t disagree with any of that. But I am struggling to figure out what part of that should cause anyone to shift their criticism away from Zionism and towards Jews instead.
Of course anti-Zionist Jews are a minority. They also happen to be a minority that’s on our side. Why on earth should I include them in my criticism? And why on earth would I not include non-Jewish Zionists in my criticism? If I simply talk about Zionists, I am accurately labelling my enemies and not including any allies. If I talk about Jews, I am including only some of my enemies, and also including some of my allies. This is complete and total nonsense. There is literally no upside. It’s controversy bait and nothing more.
I don’t disagree with any of that. But I am struggling to figure out what part of that should cause anyone to shift their criticism away from Zionism and towards Jews instead.
Not against Jews, but against the majority of Jewish institution.
They also happen to be a minority that’s on our side. Why on earth should I include them in my criticism?
Exactly. We shouldn’t. We should do everything to support them.
And why on earth would I not include non-Jewish Zionists in my criticism?
Yes, definitely criticize them too, and it is all one flight. But those two fronts still require different strategies. The fight for reform of zionist Jewish institutions needs to be lead by Jews. Zionist evangelical institutions need to be reformed by Christians. They face different obstacles and circumstance. This makes it necessary to offer tailored strategical critique to each of them, to build and support their struggles.
If I talk about Jews, I am including only some of my enemies, and also including some of my allies.
Yes, I completely agree. We should avoid generalizing language. But also avoid a critique that is to broad in its targets to be strategically useful. “Zionists” is to broad. “Jews” is anti-semitic. “Zionist Jewish institutions”, is better. I always try to critique institutions, not individuals. Even, for example, capital instead of capitalists. It’s not about the moral character of individuals, but about systemic forces.
I have no problem with critiquing Zionist Jewish institutions. This is not at all what genocide_convenience is going around saying, nor does it contradict anything I have said here or elsewhere.
They are in the minority, they don’t get any funding, they need outside support to affect real structural change inside institutionalized religion. But they are also in the best position to affect this change, to lead the reforms. If they don’t take responsibility, there’s no hope for institutionalized Jewish religion to move away from it’s currently majority fascist, hegemonic class position.
why should “change it from the inside” work for these organs when we don’t think it works (nor that anyone has an obligation to try) when it’s police or democrats etc?
There’s zero point to any of this discourse except to stir up controversy and alienate people. I genuinely think people are just bored and looking for hot takes to keep things going.
Yea this is a huge problem with online communities, most of these communities revolve around streamers or YouTubers and the algorithms favor drama over actual content. The end result is everyone looking for dunks instead of actually having a conversation.
Every fucking streamer has to carve out their little niche with hot takes designed to appeal to one specific type of guy and being hostile to everyone else, they’re all grifters and opportunists with no interest in contributing to a mass movement or actually accomplishing any material change. It’s like Jimmy Dore all over again.
I wish people would just read a book.
the Jewish ethnicity.
there are several of these
You can be against the Zionist entity in every way, but if you don’t support someone going into a synagogue to randomly murder congregants, they call you a Zionist.
Never mind how the typical megachurch is a much bigger supporter of Isra*el than the typical synagogue in America is.
Antisemitism is the last refuge for people that treat white genocide like a real thing, treating western Jewish people as if they’re exceptional targets for reactionary violence as if they didn’t genocide their way into the white privilege pantheon over the last 8 decades
You’re right we should treat people that follow Judaism the exact same way that we treat Christians/evangelicals. With zero respect.
We should treat people with the respect all deserve based on a right to religion. I’m a vehement atheist, but we’ve seen the harm that comes from outright banning or discriminating against people based on religion alone. Christians are not a monolith—I would be much more considerate and patient with a liberation theologist than I would a reactionary, same as I would be for any other religion.
If you disrespect all religions equally I’m not out here to yuck your yum. But trying to synonimize Judaism with Zionism is doing the Zionists work for them.
Internal anti-zionist organizing in Western Judaism is so thoroughly crushed it’s basically a non factor not having any more of an effect than a cool parish or two have on Christianity.
The fact that Jewish anti-zionists can use their identity to protect other anti-zionist protestors from state and non-state zionist violence is a good example of Jewish people not being oppressed by in the West or a vulnerable identity.
we’ve seen the harm that comes from outright banning or discriminating against people based on religion alone
The thing to unlearn is that nobody is suggesting to do any kind of discrimination towards Jewish people. My comment didn’t suggest that either. That this feeling gets centered at all and erupts autonomously is a consequence of ambient liberal zionism. Judaism and Jewish people are not under attack.
Hexbear has not unlearned the fact that Jewish people are just as reactionary as Christians. They are not special - and the fact that saying that can feel like an attack is a symptom of how deeply hegemonic liberal zionism is. Like being fish not understanding water or a liberal not understanding that they also have an ideology, it’s hegemonic. 90% support the state of Israel. Wasting precious oxygen on antisemitism during an ongoing genocide when Palestine can can be centered feeds into their genocide.
As a side note there is no liberation theologist equivalent in Judaism here. Any attempt at doing so would be forcibly mutated into the same reactionary force in the same vein as the Communist Party of America. Jewish people and Judaism are It’s not cool or progressive or liberal any moreso than Christians and Christianity are.
If you are an antizionist Jew every attempt will be made to rip your Jewish identity from you because that identity now thoroughly and materially belongs to reaction. You can post, you can protest, but you’re trying to take Catholicism back from the Pope.
The fact that Jewish anti-zionists can use their identity to protect other anti-zionist protestors from state and non-state zionist violence is a good example of Jewish people not being oppressed by in the West or a vulnerable identity.
This is incredibly well put, comrade
Kapos of fascist violence get privileges. That the kapos have been racialized as a caste of sorts by the tools of reaction does not entail that they are not still oppressed themselves, they are simply the human weapon wielded by the actual power to harm others with. Anti-zionist Jews should be considered as kind of like the based kind of class-traitor, I guess. Someone may not choose to be born into wealth privilege, but how they choose to use it matters. Nobody chose to be born into a Jewish family/faith/community, and to have the entailing advantages that come with it. It does not make their position less precarious in the grand scheme for things, though, if reactionary forces are willing to kick them out and exclude them from whiteness again just as soon as it’s convenient. The culpability chiefly lies on the forces of reaction orchestrating that larger dynamic.
I think what’s happening here is a mistake in trying to turn a lesser contradiction into a non-contradiction. I’m going to repost a few comments I had about this a month ago because I think they’re useful for grounding at least my thought. Whether it is accurate or appropriate, we can critique together. To be clear—This is not intended to be a reopening of a struggle session and I do not want to re-litigate the interpersonal conflict around the theoretical discussion. I am simply trying not to completely retype a comment I put some appreciable effort into in the past.
Schisms don’t happen in a day. Hard to organize when your entire cultural identity is weaponized against you by both your own community AND opportunistic reactionary outsiders. Jews have a long spiritual tradition of sticking together in order to survive, too, so it’s doubly harsh to try and organize what is essentially a schism within the faith, and it’s not even just a faith but an ethnicity/culture. How the fuck are secular Jews supposed to kick people out of a congregation? It’s incoherent to suggest it.
This comment I am still developing my thinking on now, but I think it captures the complications in the problem and the frustration around it, at least. Some thoughts on this specifically; contemporary Judaism is, religiously, highly influenced by Zionism. This is in part survivorbias. The anti-zionist Jews were the ones not rushing off to form a settler-colony in Israel, so instead were systematically and industrially slaughtered. This goes for many working class and communist Jews too, who had a very different picture for the future of Judaism than the Zionists. The Holocaust probably killed many of the best Jews at the time, and the repugnant tools of empire willing to let themselves be used survived. What a sad, contingent historical fact. Added to this ugly narrative is that Zionists got to go, “See! we told you so!” and convince many that it was in fact necessary for Jews to have a state for them to be safe. Many jews have intergenerational trauma that shapes the figures we are discussing around the issue at hand, and I think a reasonable fear of rising reactionary sentiment. More on that later. For now, my next quoted comment gets into how we ‘ought’ to characterize Zionist Jews today and the culpability for their actions.
I appreciate a thoughtful and educating exchange. I maintain my commitments that Jews= /=Zionists, and that evocation of religiously based hatred is a bad thing.
That it is happening may be sensible, that does not require our uncritical support. Words are not void of the context they are used in or the history that precedes them–coconut trees and all that. There is a meaningful disanalogy between Christianity and Jews simply based on the power differential given numbers, Capital, and so on. What I actively do is accuse the Jews in Israel of allowing themselves to be “Kapos” for the kind of white supremacy and genocide the West wants to enact upon the global south.That’s just about the most vicious word any jew can say to another. It’s not equivalent of the N word because it lacks the historical context of oppression and dehumanization the N word has, but it’s bad enough that I’d bristle to hear any non-jew say it. Kapos of course were the death camp inmates given special status and privilege for being willing to brutalize other Jews by the Germans.
As grotesque as Kapos malice may have been, it was an artificially permitted phenomenon by greater powers pitting oppressed people against each other. The most culpable were of course the Germans. In our current situation, that would be European Capital, the British specifically as the colonial power at the time of “hand of”, and substantially more the Americans in the modern era than any other. Our language should help us clarify and understand and coordinate the world better, though, not conflate when unnecessary. I think that’s exactly what The Sarkha does as it moves from a cry of pain to a political slogan outside of that original context. It would be easy and far more accurate to say “Curse upon Zionism” or whatever, than to broad brush against all Jews. It doesn’t matter what the intent of the original utterance was when it starts getting repeated outside of that context. It gets flattened and weaponized by ignorance and misapplied. More precise language is better, and we have more precise language available to us.
Let me turn your thought experiment around a bit. Was the islamaphobia and hatred expressed by victims of ‘terrorism’ warranted after 9/11? What about queer folks who continue to be put to death in many Islamic countries? Would it matter that an arguably innocent person had been killed and their loved ones were mourning? Would that entitle their loved ones to begin repeating and evoking phrases like “Damn the Muslims?” I would hope you’d say “of course not, that would viciously flatten an entire non-homogeneous people and propagate an ignorance that will harm many more innocents in the long run.” This is of course it’s own imprecise analogy because Islamaphobia has its own history and context in the world, just like anti-Semitism does. But my point stands. More precise language is better, and the cries of the oppressed are not above criticism when they transcend the utterance of the directly hurt and become a rallying cry for a larger political project.
Ansar Allah is perhaps entitled to evoke that phrase given their direct experience with Zionist violence, I’m not out here to tone police the victims of genocide expressing their pain, but that doesn’t make the phrase “incorruptible” or worthy of uptake in anyone else’s mouths. It’s obviously corruptible given how many words have to be spent to justify and contextualize it against misuse, and all this essay writing won’t happen every time it’s repeated and passed along.
I have edited the rest of the comment out to avoid needless hostility or unproductive interpersonal criticism on my end.
So what’s this wall of text have to do with a lesser-contradiction vs non-contradiction? You say that the Jews are not oppressed, if anything they are protected. I argue that, maybe, but that is only so far as they are useful as a cudgel against other minorities. There is a rise in actual, good ole fashioned reactionary anti-semitism and the permissiveness/pervasiveness of it in the public sphere across the west. Many Jews live in the west, so they feel this viscerally and are not wrong. They are conflating it with Leftist criticism over Zionism and Palestine, and that is indeed in error, but the larger picture is a result of colonialism using a minority to impose violence and establish a casus belli against the majority it wishes to dominate more brutally. It does not cancel out the rising anti-semitism from reactionary sources as a real phenomenon with material effects—Jews feel less safe, so they circle up to protect themselves. They become over-sensitive to threat identification, and quicker to make excuses for ‘self-defense’ when they are actually being used as a weapon against others in a way that is not defending themselves.
We have the major contradiction, imperialism, and the minor contradiction, anti-semitism, interacting on different levels. Imperialism pits the jews against other would-be or actively oppressed people, and anti-semitism scares them into staying in place and thinking in “survival” mode instead of solidarity. To simply deny that there is a rising tide of actual reactionary anti-semitism is to simply deny our eyes and ears. The alt-right, far right, and major figures in western politics and business are increasingly indisputably anti-semitic, and rising in power. I think that is a contradiction that is worth consideration instead of erasure, and it helps us understand why the primary contradiction of Imperialism is working the way it is with the minority in question to begin with.
Can’t say I blame them. You are still misrepresenting that conversation.
I support all corrective action against bad empanada fans.
The whole argument about whether or not the Zionist entity is white supremacist or jewish supremacist seems pointless to me. Neither ideology is the cause of the genocide, which is caused by material relationships and conditions. What material condition? European settler-colonialism. So in one way I strongly agree that crying about “jewish supremacy” and focusing on the jewish character of Israel is stupid because it accomplishes nothing but signaling to antisemites that we share common ground, which we do not. But in another way, whining that Judaism is separate and distinct from Zionism, and most Zionists aren’t jewish and so on, is centering jewish feelings and crybully behavior that protects Zionist jewish institutions and people from anti-Zionism. There are many jewish institutions in the US and more in the UK that are linked to and materially support the Zionist entity and we can’t be whining about needing to protect them from anti-Zionism.
The synthesis is probably to not worry about whether streamers or youtubers (the source of the argument was Hasan slop) are conflating Zionism with Judaism or centering jewish feelings and to organize with anti-Zionist jews against Zionist institutions, but I know it’s annoying to yell “stop listening to streamers and do materialist analysis”
The whole argument about whether or not the Zionist entity is white supremacist or jewish supremacist seems pointless to me.
it’s very obviously both
The whole argument about whether or not the Zionist entity is white supremacist or jewish supremacist seems pointless to me. Neither ideology is the cause of the genocide, which is caused by material relationships and conditions. What material condition? European settler-colonialism.
I feel the need to make a pedantic but necessary correction. Ideology is an objective force, is itself a material condition to the extent that it influences human activity. White supremacy and Jewish supremacy are not only ideology. In the apartheid, they are the social reality. Constructing a Jewish apartheid state creates Jewish supremacist ideology which then reproduces itself through further material and ideological development. It cannot be reduced merely to European settler-colonialism because it is not an abstract European settler-colonial state, but a specifically Zionist one. In my opinion we must take care to understand Ideology, not simply reduce it to material conditions or to class.
This is a good point to think about. You’re right that it has its own particular character as the Zionist instance of European settler-colonialism and isn’t simply settler-colonialism in the abstract. And you’re right that in the apartheid, supremacy ideology is a social force that impacts the oppressed and not a mere belief. Hrm.
I agree, the whole argument between the two of them only made me lose braincells. Of course a streamer like Hasan isn’t going to aim for semantic correctness when he’s pushing for an election win for a Muslim candidate. So dont put that much weight on what he says.
The thing is, you do eventually have no choice but to interface with the cultural side along with the material side. Religion and culture are powerful things, and just by taking a side in this conflict for the longest time it meant seeming anti-jew to most of the Jewish and Christian population. This sucked because you then had to answer for bigots and the some of the most bigoted opinions in history. So the recent effort to decouple Judaism from Zionism in the media has been useful for getting around this bs.
I think the bitterness coming from the geneva_convention and fuknslammer types comes from the electoral candidates piggybacking on this success. They are vindicated by the failure of campaigns like Platner and betrayals of AOC and so making the Palestinian cause less appealing to western leftists is seen to them as “helping”.
They also may be too bitter now from viewing too many settlers videos and when you see that kind of violence perpetrated by mostly one religious group, the conclusion is you become bigoted towards that group. Combating that should be a main priority for Jewish activists. They should be involved in their synagogue and advocate for canceling Zionist activities like going on birthright. If they aren’t currently the face of Jewishness, they should start becoming the face of Jewishness. It isn’t all on us to forgive and forget.
That was really basically what I was trying to get at. It sucks all the air out of the conversation trying to attribute blame.
whining that Judaism is separate and distinct from Zionism, and most Zionists aren’t jewish and so on, is centering jewish feelings and crybully behavior that protects Zionist jewish institutions and people from anti-Zionism. There are many jewish institutions in the US and more in the UK that are linked to and materially support the Zionist entity and we can’t be whining about needing to protect them from anti-Zionism.
What are you saying? Obviously Zionist institutions, Jewish and gentile, all need to be crushed. If a synagogue is holding auctions for Palestinian land, everyone and thing involved in that needs to be mercilessly torn down. Same with those Zionist Jewish summer camps and all the other ways Zionism has sought to hijack all Jewish culture and pervert it into something strictly oriented toward supporting Israel.
There’s nothing “crybully” about observing this hijacking and not doing actual antisemitism by treating the religion of observing Jewish people as synonymous with a genocidal colonial project, because the logic of that would be fundamentally that we need to ban Judaism and put every Rabbi in prison, which we both understand is absurd. A meaningful number of Jewish people are antizionists – personally, the most dedicated antizionist activists I’ve known are Jewish – and that number is only growing. Conflating their religion or ethnicity with the project of Zionism like AIPAC and the ADL are literally working every day to encourage people to do is ideologically extremely backwards, whether you think any kind of victimhood of Jews is currently meaningful or meaningless (a point that I am not arguing).
Comrade I’m saying that if someone replied to your first paragraph by saying “How DARE purpleworm say they want to crush synagogues? What an antisemite!”, that would be crybully behavior.
I see, perhaps I misunderstood and conflated your position with those of a few others in this thread. Are you saying that we therefore should distinguish Judaism from Zionism? If so, I apologize, though I can’t tell if it was written unclearly or my reading comprehension failed me.
Judaism and Zionism are separate, and not all Jews are Zionists. There’s a great anti-Zionist community of Jews on reddit that I remember from before I left.
But in the media and the wider internet, I usually see “we have got to separate Judaism from Zionism and stop making all Jews responsible for Israel” deployed to disguise the nature of lone-wolf destructive acts of resistance against Zionist institutions that are synagogues. When a Zionist synagogue is graffiti’d or even attacked, separating Judaism from Zionism is the immediate brainless media reply and no one bothers to investigate whether the synagogue was sending money to the IDF or hosting West Bank land sales. In the media and parroted by the general discourse, the Zionist synagogue becomes just a synagogue free of all context, and therefore the graffiti or attack can only be an antisemitic hate crime. This comes even from nominally leftist libs like Hasan when he goes to the wider media to try to prove he isn’t an antisemite, which is what prompted the original discussion.
So I could definitely have been more specific about what I meant to avoid confusion, that’s on me. I meant that it’s not useful to belabor the separation between Judaism and Zionism when discussing about anti-Zionist actions and we should not use it to police anti-Zionism. However unfortunately that also means we need to critically scrutinize media reports of antisemitic hate crimes at Jewish institutions that may actually be anti-Zionist actions. I definitely didn’t mean to say that we should be conflating Judaism and Zionism, or that we shouldn’t be on the watch for genuine antisemitism to fester out of hatred of Israel’s actions.
I realize now in saying this that this is tough because I’m grappling with a contradiction: we shouldn’t be policing anti-Zionism and feeding the conflation of anti-Zionism with antisemitism, and yet we can’t let antisemitism fester in our spaces so language and attitudes need to be scrutinized. I don’t know what a synthesis looks like yet.
Too much poor quality empanada
Aren’t a lot of Jews anti-Zionist? Why would I blame all Jews for the actions of Zionists? That would be silly. Hell, there are a lot of Christian Zionists. I see Zionism as more of an oppunistic imperialist offshoot. An excuse for western capitalists to have a stronghold in the east they can use to expand their imperialist interests and threaten the rest of that geographical area with.
Aren’t a lot of Jews anti-Zionist?
In terms of percentages it’s around 10-20 percent of them outside Israel, on the higher end in the US and on the lower end in Europe. Not that many in relative terms - especially when accounting for Jewish institutions being near-universally Zionist - but still hundreds of thousands.
I see Zionism as more of an oppunistic imperialist offshoot
Herzl and his successors have gone door-knocking by the British, the Ottomans briefly, the British again, the communists briefly, former Nazi Germans, the Americans and now the far right in general. Usually these alliances have rested on using a Jewish state to inhibit enemies in the regions for the allied partners. If circumstances change and Zionist ambitions become an obstacle rather than an asset, support wanes.
statistically not that many, especially when your definition of anti-zionism is actually anti-israel rather than being a squishy two state, one israel equal rights situation. when it comes to orgs self-IDing as Jewish, the vast majority are explicitly zionist
There’s a long history of discourse within Judaic studies, history, sociology, and so on, on the multi-level way Jewishness manifests as a social role and identity. It can be a Religion, Ethnicity, A nation (Zionism broadly, as in the Jews need a homeland, or more narrowly—that homeland must be located in current Palestine), or some have even argued a race.
I’m not going to comment on the validity of all these things, simply remark that it is complicated to at least some degree. There is a long cultural tradition of secular jews wondering where they fit into the picture given the kinds of contradictions that arise from the above overlapping but non-synonymous senses of identity. A Jew may self-identify as culturally a Jew, but not be practicing the faith. They will attend holidays and engage in rituals as a cultural practice, not an explicitly religious one. By way of analogy, many Americans and Europeans celebrate Christmas as a cultural practice, not because they are devout christians. Alternatively, a person may not identify as a Jew themselves, but because of their ancestry or whatever they may be ascribed Jewishness—much like poc are when they have mixed parents—as a social identity imposed on them by outside society. Much like the socially constructed fact of race in general, this conception could be considered a race, but that is imposed from the outside rather than in. I’d argue if Jews start identifying as a race themselves that is a reactionary tendency, as any ‘race’ conception is a reactionary concept so far as I’m concerned.
Most orgs self-identifying as Jewish are RELIGIOUS orgs. They’re one of the few civil institutions that can survive and replicate themselves under the grinding erosion of capitalism. Only the most devout stay involved because they are willing to live, practice, and participate in the group despite the social and material costs of doing so. Go figure, zealots are willing to commit to the bit, and that bit tends to be reactionary. Jews who are culturally Jewish but not religious likely participate at the fringes in this sense; that is their community and family whether they like it or not. However, they almost definitionally won’t be rising to positions of power because they are themselves marginalized within their own community.
This is honestly a sad phenomenon where people who by all rights should be able to consider themselves culturally Jewish are denied their own identity by a hostile and reactionary in-group trying to impose conformity from within, but they are ALSO put upon by conflation like you seem to be doing in your comment. We are encouraged to simply not be Jews—which is not so simple—for guilt by association.
i’m really not sure what conflation you’re talking about nor how you took “all antizionist jews should renounce their judaism” from my comment
That’s the pressure created by the above set of facts. Internally, Non-zionist Jews are actively being frozen out as ‘bad jews’ from the Zionist and reactionary domination right now of Jewish faith-based organizations.
Now, those rightfully critical of that phenomenon, but who are non-jews themselves without the nuanced or lived experience necessary to understand these internal contradictions, are trying to say there’s some innate problem to Judaism that is creating the conditions. One can easily infer it would be undesirable to be Jewish if they were to genuinely believe that.
Those of us who have been, and continue to be, trying to meaningfully distinguish between the two and protect Judaism as a multi-domain concept that has room for more than Zionism, are catching the pressure from both sides.
trying to say there’s some innate problem to Judaism
thankfully i never claimed this, so no need for the inference
Your response to Dort_Owl was upholding a certain statistical interpretation, one that says ‘not that many’ are anti-zionist. I don’t think that kind of survey captures the broad and complicated way Judaism manifests as a social identity. Many of the anti-zionist Jews are, at this point, being called non-jews by the orgs you and I both critique. Whether they were secular or religious, they are going to be isolated and marginalized now more than ever. I’m friends with many anti-zionist Jews, and most of them are declining to identify as Jewish now not because they think they are not Jewish, but because it will cause them to be lumped in as guilt by association. Such a phenomenon will skew the figures from statistical surveys like this, as well as perception more generally.
I think we should be celebrating anti-zionist Jews and saying, “Yes, you CAN be Jewish and anti-zionist, actually,” rather than lending support to the narrative that to be Jewish is, heuristically speaking or otherwise, to be Zionist. I support a more expansive conception of the situation, not a reductive one—which I take you to be endorsing with its entailments.
If you are not endorsing this reduction then so be it, hopefully my writing on the disentanglement of the complicated concept is enlightening to others all the same.
Ok, but 10% is still a surprisingly small number
Zionist Jewish institutions are using the fear of rising far-right anti-semitism that they are essentially allied with for the greater
project against anti-zionists, including anti-zionist Jews.There’s basically a “blue wall of silence” protecting and perpetuating this process in the majority of influential Jewish and Zionist institutions. I agree it is dangerous and sloppy to equate Jewishness with Zionism full stop, but there is also a very real materialist relation between most mainstream Jewish institutions and Zionism in a very significant majority of cases, and it is often obfuscated in mainstream discourse to discredit any anti-zionist perspective that seeks to highlight this.
I think the resolution of the contradiction has to come from making the oppression of anti-zionists (Jewish and non-Jewish) by zionists (Jewish and non-Jewish) the axis of the discourse. I think highlighting that contradiction deflates the power of the zionists to wield anti-semitism as a cudgel and a shield. The entity works diligently alongside zionists to muddy this distinction. Any input on the discourse from a Jewish person likely needs to include a statement on their position on zionism/the entity. That very quickly can clear things up. Part of the muddying is often a pivot to “two state”, equivocating on “ethnostate”, etc. This needs to be strongly opposed.
That’s about as simply as I can state my understanding of these things.
@geneva_convenience@lemmy.ml Since you banned me from your comm I decided to make this post because I actually liked you until you kept doubling down on your reactionary nonsense.
You seem to have internalized the “unlimited genocide on the west” meme as your entire ideology completely devoid of any actually material analysis.
For the record I did read your articles and watch that video but I could not reply again because you just banned me for pointing out the facts above.
I cannot stand this guy. Always gives off CIA vibes.
Jewish supremacist saying other people give off CIA vibes, nice one.
You and the OP of this post both gave zero effort into evaluating what geneva_convenience said in any of his responses to you, and tried to make it seem like they were an antisemite because they pointed out the overwhelming majority of jewish support for genocide.
It’s not white supremacy, it’s jewish supremacy.
i’m positive she was one of the users that fought so hard against the creation of the
emoji so anti-semite jacketing is her whole thing (and seemingly a much more important thing to her than the genocide and Palestinian and Arab voices)this site never properly dealt with the zionism that struggle session exposed, and we see the result every day
Well, when the people who should be dealing with it are the zionists…
I’m not trying to reignite some long past struggle session nor do I think that Geneva is sincerely antisemitic, it was just very strange that the post they made was basically demanding people make no distinction between jews and the nazi state of Israel. When I asked for that clarification I was banned so what is the takeaway here and why is it so important to distinguish this one settler project from all the others?
You’re positively wrong, then. OP’s account is 9 months old. The thread in question occurred a year ago.
i don’t think it’s a stretch for nakoichi to have made a new account but i’d gladly be wrong
So nakoichi, having been on the site since the first handful of days of its existence, went to the trouble of posting this comment to hide their tracks? Ngl, I think this is an absurd claim.
I’d argue it’s more of class support rather than anything based on ethnic lines as most supporters seem to be closer to the petit//bourgeoisie class than anything poor people will be worrying about. Except for when it affects them in their day to day lives (which is currently is).
Conflating it with any religion is basically swallowing the propaganda from a beer bong. It’s easy for Zionists to gain support among the weaker minded church goers since they’ll basically believe anything some guy in a silly hat says.
Just stop with conflating simple minded religious people with genociders hijacking their beliefs, especially when large portions of these religious groups are actively apposed to such things.
Reactionaries of all kinds are most comfortable speaking of abstractions. Culture war is their preferred conflict because it’s untethered to reality and therefore useless for real liberation.
Simply resist the attempt to reframe the discussion around concepts. Insist on discussing specific events, specific people, specific martyrs. Don’t engage with
that tries to get you to defend or attack a concept. That includes specious debates over antisemitism.
