It's pretty bonkers when white Americans lecture Jewish Israelis about living on "stolen land". Ashkenazi Jews have a far more reasonable claim of indigenousness to Israel than white Americans do to America.
Hating Jews for living on their ancient homeland allows Jews to server the same function as scapegoats, absorbing their own sins and thus providing absolution.
@emmaaum@benkap That "the Holocaust happened in Europe" is also a very gross misconception. Axis forces also took much of North Africa, and Jews there weren't spared either. And Iraq was ruled by a pro-Nazi ruler during WWII. We talk about the Farhud as being mostly post-founding of Israel, but those pogroms were happening for years. It was only after Israel was founded that there was a place to escape them.
The entire time Jews lived in Europe they were considered foreigners native to the Middle East and not true Europeans. It was taken for granted that they were part of the same people as Mizrachi Jews. Now that their descendants live in Israel, people are like: "No, don't live there, you're Europeans, come back to Europe, we won't genocide you this time, we promise."
Basically, wherever Jews live, we are told we don't belong. This even happens on a micro scale in the U.S. where Jews were historically accused of invading classically white, Christian neighborhoods and today when Jews are accused of "gentrifying" neighborhoods inhabited by other minority groups, even when the Jews moving into these neighborhoods are often quite poor themselves.
@emmaaum It is very ironic that many of the same people who say Jews don't belong in Israel are also the ones who are making diasporic Jews feel so unsafe in the countries that they are living in.
"Criticism of Israel is not anti-Semitic: Jews are now required to recite this humiliatingly obvious sentence, over and over, as the price of admission to public discourse about their own demonization, in “debates” with people who are often unable to name the relevant river or sea."
A friendly reminder that just because criticism of Israel isn't necessarily antisemitic, that doesn't mean you magically get a free pass when you use antisemitism to criticize Israel.
The right-wing antisemite generally embraces the antisemitism of past generations, seeing themselves as a continuation of a grand tradition of truthseekers who have successfully identified "the Jew" as the pernicious force seeking to underhandedly oppose their chosen values (nowadays, generally the values of white nationalism). (1/X)
The left-wing antisemite meanwhile, eschews the antisemitism of past generations. They instead believe that while the Jew hatred of the past was based on lies, their hatred of Jews, excuse me, of Zionists, is entirely justified and based on truth and fact. The antisemites of the past were ignorant and based their beliefs on superstition and hatred. But their anti-Zionism is based on objective truths they know because they have seen their ideological allies post them on social media. (2/X)
Of course the way the Jews were treated in generations past as minorities in Western countries was wrong, they say. Luckily, Western civilization has since enlightened, and Jews will encounter no such persecution today (globalize the intifada, by the way) so the motivation for a Jewish state is as baffling as it is wrong. The irony it seems, is lost on them. (3/X)
One of Hamas' greatest propoganda victories is that they refuse to differentiate between combatants and civilians when they release the number of Gazan casualties. I've seen multiple respected publications list the figure as a civilian death toll, despite the fact that it includes Hamas terrorists. Meanwhile, I've seen Israeli estimates range between 1/3 and 1/2 of those dead being combatants. Of course, Hamas provides no counter-figure to these because that would give away the game.
Most of the Jews I see on Fedi are extremely critical of the Israeli government and military, advocate for the rights of Palestinian civilians, and express a desire for a peaceful end to the war. Yet, whenever they call out antisemitism in the form of "criticism" of Israel, they are immediately accused of being hasbara bots and Netanyahu shills. The charitable interpretation is that the accusers are blissfully unaware of their own antisemitism. The Fediverse can do better.
If people really cared about the plight of Palestinians, they would likely realize that the people they are falsely accusing of supporting genocide could be some of their staunchest allies in seeking a peaceful end to the conflict. Instead, they're berated and ostracized because they're not willing to nod along with every antisemitic trope used to attack Israel.
Sometimes I think that the idea that you can just replace the word "Jew" with "Zionist" in the context of any classic antisemitic trope and get away with it is a strawman. Then I browse @endantisemitism and realize that it actually happens on the Fediverse every day and mods of major instances wring their hands rather than doing anything about it because they're afraid they'll be accused of silencing criticism of Israel.
@benkap I don't know what to say. The only criticism of Israel (as a state) that I have heard and was absolutely not antisemitic, came only from anti-nationalist and (classical) anarchist circles, and it was not different to the criticism of the existence of the own state, Israel was not singled out.
The rest, it was totally antisemitic. It was not really a criticism to concrete policies (which are not different or worse than in other countries) but to the very existence of the state, but without to put into question the existence of the other states of the planet.
One of the most common and infuriating antisemitic takes on the internet is that Israel proves that Jews did not learn the "lesson" of the Holocaust. As if the largest massacre of Jews in history was meant to teach Jews a moral lesson that the American or European dude posting about it online already knows because they're such a good person (TM).
One thing we did "learn" from the Holocaust is that when people say they want to kill the Jews, we should take them seriously. They'll do it if they have the means to do so.
If people don't want criticism of Israel to be viewed as antisemitic, it would help a lot if the loudest critics of Israel stopped using antisemitic tropes when criticizing Israel