For all of my adult life I have been strongly opposed to #aipac and similar organizations equating criticism of #israel with #antisemitism not only because it’s disingenuous but because it’s dangerous. It has the effect of “crying wolf” so that real acts of #antisemitic harassment and violence aren’t taken seriously. It’s also a funhouse mirror version of the “dual loyalty” trope that makes it harder to distinguish between the position of Israel’s government and the #Jewish diaspora.
So thanks a fuckin’ bunch to these #zionist organizations and lobbyists telling me, a #jewish person who lives in America, that I should swear allegiance to the right-wing government of #Israel for the past 15-20 years.
Thanks for abusing the term #antisemitism until it meant nothing.
Thanks for doing the whole abuser “only I can keep you safe” routine, but geopolitically, to the whole Diaspora.
The era of #Israel#gaslighting the world is over🙏🏽. While straggling ultra #zionist#nationalists still berate anyone for failing to have a PhD in Middle-Eastern Studies to have the right to express views on Israel’s behaviour against #Palestinian civilians, Israel is badly losing broad public opinion. Just TODAY, singers #Björk#Aurora and #surfer Easkey Britton used their #socialmedia platform to express solidarity with #Palestine & #Gaza. Never have I witnessed such widespread popular support
The members of #Hamas are #Palestinians. They have suffered like any other #Palestinian under #Israel occupation. An Hamas spokeperson has said that 85% of their combattants are orphans whose parents have been killed by the constant shelling by the #Zionist forces. they grew up as refugees, under siege, under occupation. Whatever you think about their #politics, if you consider them an external force controlling #Gaza and not as Palestinians themselves I really don't care to listen to what you have to say.
'The Misgav Institute for National Security & #Zionist Strategy, an #Israeli think tank, published a paper last week stating that thanks to the vicious #Hamas attacks of October 7, “There is currently a unique and rare opportunity to evacuate the entire #Gaza Strip.”'
“if you see a #jewish ‘person’ on campus, follow them home and slit their throats. rats need to be elimination from cornell” [SIC] one message on the forum read."
Another post said “the genocidal fascist #zionist regime will be destroyed. rape and kill all the #jew women, before they birth more jewish hitlers. #jews are excrement on the face of the earth. no jew civilian is innocent of genocide” [SIC]."
While I agree that #antizionism does not equal #antisemitism necessarily... I think we're rapidly approaching the point of no return on their unity.
For the last three weeks I've heard every manner of religious argument as to who has the right to #Palestine.
I'm an #Atheist so I stand with no side. I remove the equation of religion from my thinking & replace it with human rights.
Palestinian Christians, Muslims & Jews lived in relative peace in this region for 700 years before the #Zionist movement formulated a plan to create a Jewish state & supplant Arabs.
@mondoweiss It seems #Mastodon is not free from #Zionist#Censorship. Unsurprising but still disappointed to see such actions by so called supporters of Free Platforms. Hope the account is reinstated on mastodon.social and the #journalism can be continued for the broader masses. #Mondoweiss has been an excellent source of information for me. #FreePalestine
WASHINGTON, Oct 21 (Reuters) - When Joe Biden met with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his war cabinet during his visit to Israel, the U.S. president assured them: "I don't believe you have to be a Jew to be a Zionist, and I am a Zionist."
Israel’s recent attacks against Palestinians in Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza demonstrated, once again, the brutal colonial, racist, and apartheid nature of the Zionist state. The replacement of Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu’s government by a new coalition led by ultranationalist Naftali Bennett will change nothing for Palestinians.
Hundreds of Jewish activists protested peacefully inside the Capitol on Wednesday, demanding a ceasefire in Gaza. And just as quickly, Capitol Police began arresting them.
The Jewish-led protest involved thousands more protesting outside the Capitol, as well as about two dozen rabbis leading a prayer inside the halls of Congress.
@Free_Press The far right ultra #Zionist#Netanyahu regime does not want cease fire. It has been waiting so long for an excuse to wipe out all the #Palestinian babies, children, and women in #Gaza so that it can officially take over their land and water. This is a textbook case of #Genocide and #EthnicCleansing. Shame on all the Jews who support imperialistic ultra #Zionism aka #Jewish#Nazism.
"It is this context—the already-political grief at the core of the #Zionist adventure—that makes so many on the left so reticent to perform a public shedding of tears over Hamas’s victims. They are, we might darkly say, “pre-grieved”: that is, an apparatus is already in place to take their deaths and give them not just any meaning, but specifically the meaning that they find in the bombs falling on #Gaza. The appetite for the most grotesque images of violence against Israelis is so ravenous—leading to the repetition of dubious claims of mass beheading and rape that have the appearance of blood libels—because the apparatus of state grief runs so hot. It demands raw material. Its power, in turn, is such that the most ringing dissents calling instead for peace and humane mourning for all—like Eric Levitz’s and Joshua Leifer’s—nevertheless resonate only as whimpers of sentiment. Whatever the noble and admirable content of such humane efforts, their form is already molded. They are participating, presumably without intent, in a new Red Scare being prepared not against stray callous advocates of Hamas, but against all who defend the right of Palestinians to live, and to live as equals.
There is an unmistakable effort to push the pro #Palestinian left, including the #Jewish pro-Palestinian left, beyond the pale by weaponizing grief, yielding such darkly comical scenes as #German politicians refusing to speak to Bernie Sanders, whose family died in the Shoah, to mark sufficient deference to Jewish death. Such is the power of the Israeli grief machine: it authorizes Germans to tell Jews that they are mourning wrong. I joked, on the news about Sanders, that I could imagine a German stuffing me into a cattle car, weeping about the special German responsibility to ensure that the #Holocaust never reoccur. Across Europe, governments are attempting to crack down on any demonstrations against the occupation, while U.S. politicians libel #Muslims en masse and call to #censor of any vocal ally of Palestine. The significance of this fact is that, in the several days that we spent arguing about whether the left was sufficiently decent about #Hamas’s victims, Israel geared up its genocide machine—which it now is releasing."
@ia42@appassionato@palestine well some points are sort of interesting. But firstly Israel is directly responsible for ~750,000 Palestinian refugees as result of the fighting in 1948. In 1967 additional ~300,000 but half were displaced Palestinians from 1948.
About the religious conflict, its challenging. #Zionism is a secular movement. People like Herzl were completely ignorant of their origins.
The #Zionist movement was later taken over by Eastern Jews, mostly Russians, mostly socialist and very much secular if not atheist.
Religious Zionism, which is very dominant in Israel today (mostly #Ashkenazi Jews), used to be a fringe phenomenon. Today they’re the most dominant and most involved in the violence against the Palestinians in the occupied West Bank.
I’m mentioning that because Palestinian Jews, who were deeply religious and lived in the religious centers in the holy land since forever, before Eastern Jews started first attempts to colonize parts of Palestine, never thought of #Israel as a nation which needs to have its own sovereignty.
Some Anti-Zionist Jews thought Palestine should remain a religious Jewish center of learning etc., and not an independent state. I.e Yehuda Magnes, president of the Hebrew university then.
#Palestine was not an empty land. It was part of a rich and fertile eastern Mediterranean #world that in the nineteenth century underwent processes of modernization and nationalization. It was not a desert waiting to come into bloom; it was a pastoral #country on the verge of entering the twentieth century as a modern #society, with all the benefits and ills of such a transformation. Its colonization by the #Zionist movement turned this process into a disaster for the majority of the native #people living there.
#tv “Aljazeera World” is a very impressive documentaries series, with lots of original content exploring #MENA. Edward Said’s documentary “Out of Place” (2006) aired couple of days ago. It comes across somewhat hagiographical… with many of his colleagues singing his praise, including Noam Chomsky, Rashid Khalidi, Ilan Pappe and more.
What caught my eye was the archive material, especially audio/visual from his family home in upscale Talbiya (الطالبية, one of the most expensive neighborhoods in #Jerusalem still today) which make the phrase “A land without a people for a people without a land” (which was allegedly coined by a Christian #Zionist) sound VERY cruel.
“Netanyahu Shows Map of 'New Middle East'—Without Palestine—to UN General Assembly”
via @commondreams
"Netanyahu made clear with his little map today what normalization really seeks: eliminating Palestine... from the region and legitimizing greater Israel, all with the blessing of Arab regimes," one critic said.”
Anyone who spent some time editing the Zionist Wikipedia (aka Hebrew Wikipedia) knows the accounts who were exposed in the article attached, are just the tip of the iceberg. There are literally tens of accounts behaving in a very similar manner: twisting articles one sentence at a time, removing content or distorting it, making the Hebrew Wikipedia a the single biggest source of #disinformation on anything from The #Zionist-Palestinian conflict, to #LGBTQI, #ClimateChange, #antisemitism, and more.
Here's an excerpt from an investigation into #Kohelet Policy Forum, the #USA funded conservative #Israeli "Think Tank" behind the judicial hostile takeover attempt.
This style of slowly shifting the narrative (via hundreds of little edits) is typical of many entries I've been involved with. It's endemic. The Israeli @wikimediafoundation is aware of what's happening, the bureaucrats are aware as well... and yet nothing was ever done.
In the Hebrew Wikipedia article about the Israel Democracy Institute, a pro-democracy think tank that is critical of Kohelet, one of the fake users added that it was a “left-wing organization” and deleted a sentence stating that one of the institute’s goals is to act “to strengthen Israel’s still-emerging democratic institutions.”
"Life for #Jews in #Iraq became increasingly dangerous. An illustrative example is that in 1948, Iraq had one national radio station, and multiple times a day it would broadcast the chant: "Tel Aviv, Tel Aviv will be roasted by flames and the Jews, the Jews will be the fuel."
Newspapers also published vicious #antisemitic stories accusing Iraq's Jews of being a fifth column for the "#Zionist entity..."
Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas: #Ashkenazi Jews 'are NOT Semites'
Zionist leader Arthur Ruppin: German #Jews are NOT Semites but Aryan.
Yet Abbas in an antisemite, even though this idea is not really new (research: https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms3543), while Israel is naming buildings after the #Zionist leader Ruppin, who personally met with Himmler's mentor, Hans F. K. Günther.
Arthur Ruppin's Concept of Race
In: Amos Morris-Reich, Israel Studies , Fall, 2006, Vol. 11, No. 3 (Fall, 2006), pp. 1-3.
TIL that the term "Mizrahi" is a reclaimed term, originally a racist term and slurrish, it's since been reclaimed by those Jews as a way to self-identify, especially for those Jews who live in Israel.
I've only heard it in the context of its reclaimed use, but knowing the history is important.
@josephramoney well we have those as well… Baruch ashem … 🙏 the #Ashkenazi eugenicist Arthur Ruppin, for example, a prominent #Zionist leader who met with Himmler's mentor, Hans F. K. Günther. Ruppin was also Ben Gurion’s mentor, so I guess the ethnic cleansing of #Palestine was not an accident.
More information here:
Arthur Ruppin's Concept of Race
In: Amos Morris-Reich, Israel Studies , Fall, 2006, Vol. 11, No. 3 (Fall, 2006), pp. 1-3.
The preamble to the Program called for establishment of a "home in #Palestine for the #Jewish people, secured under public law," thus leaving open the question of statehood but affirming that the result required international support
To wrap up this mini🧵 on the First #Zionist Congress in Basel (29-31 August 19897)
The subsequent Congresses (annual, then biennial, up to 1948, with wartime interruptions) issued postcards and sometimes secured special local postmarks.
1-2) The 1897 #postcard, which, like the souvenir folder in the previous post, served as a Rosh Hashanah greeting
'I am a Zionist': How Joe Biden's lifelong bond with Israel shapes war policy (www.reuters.com)
WASHINGTON, Oct 21 (Reuters) - When Joe Biden met with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his war cabinet during his visit to Israel, the U.S. president assured them: "I don't believe you have to be a Jew to be a Zionist, and I am a Zionist."