truly do not understand how people just slip into relationships and jobs and opportunities and friend groups and lifestyles. to me there are a million obstacles to navigate in a single basic conversation
Calling me a self-hating Jew for supporting Palestine is just funny. I’m I also self-hating for being an antifascist? Opposing Zionism is a Jewish tradition that’s just as old as Zionism is. Before the founding of the nation-state of Israel, the main opponents of Zionist ideology outside of Palestine were other Jews! Because those Jews were often anarchist, socialist or communist they were a major target of the Holocaust.
That tradition of Jewish antizionism faced a major setback because of how many of them would die in the camps. Only recently have we started to see a significant resurgence of this tradition, and it still is nowhere near the plurality or dominance it once held. Zionists considered the question settled in 1948 and because so many dissenting voices had died or were forced into diaspora across the world because of the Nazis, there was not enough people to resist these actions.
Still, the Zionist hijacking of the global Jewish community towards hegemonic, uncritical support for settler colonialism abroad was not complete until after 1967. There were still Jewish dissenters in the community, though efforts by right wing Jewish organizations following the aftermath of 1967 to marginalize and demonize criticism of Israel by Jews would set back the cause of Jewish antizionism and internal criticism of Israeli colonization for decades.
Israel and pro-Zionist organizations also spend a lot of money convincing diaspora Jews that this nation works in our interests. If this was a foregone conclusion, there would be no need to build an extensive pro-Israeli propaganda network through every mainstream Jewish organization. Despite the propaganda we’re fed since childhood and the popular marginalization and shaming of Jewish dissenters, large cracks are starting in appear in at least American Jewish support for Israel. More American Jews under 40 are willing to openly criticize Israel and even support the liberation of Palestine into a singular binational state with equality for all its citizens than in many decades. This is obviously not enough. These are rookie numbers and will need to be increased through active political education and engagement with the Jewish masses.
Israel is a kapo state. The earliest Zionists such as Theodore Herzl were willing to openly work with antisemites to achieve their goals. The infamous Belfour Declaration was of course authored by Arthur Belfour, an infamous British antisemite who agreed with the Zionists on the necessity of mass Jewish emigration from Europe. Then there’s the Transfer Agreement between Zionist settlement organizations and Adolf Hitler, which stipulated that if some Jews were allowed to settle in Palestine, the Nazi Party could seize their possessions and assets in exchange. What did these organizations have in common? Their desire for the Final Negation of the Diaspora. Before the Russian invasion of Ukraine when the mainstream media wouldn’t deny, obfuscate or dismiss the neo-Nazism of the Azov Battalion, Israel was providing aid including weapons to this openly neo-Nazi paramilitary. Israel also armed Rodrigo “like Hitler killed 3 million Jews [sic], I will kill 3 million drug users” Duterte’s anticommunist drug war.
The creation of the state of Israel has done nothing to improve the conditions of Jews in the diaspora who are constantly the targets of popular conspiracy theories, intimidation and violence by white supremacists. Zionism actively consorts with the enemies of the Jewish masses and is therefore also an enemy of the Jewish masses, an active threat to our continued existence on this planet.
A diasporic people who have been repeatedly forced to flee their homes through violence while their possessions and assets are seized over a 1000 year period cannot liberate itself through driving another people into diaspora through violence while they seize their possessions and assets. That is not liberation, that is a sick, perverted inversion of the oppression we’ve suffered and now inflict on another people.
There is no pragmatic, good, moral or just reason to support Zionism and Israel as a Jew.
Israel has been committing unspeakable war crimes, crimes against humanity, and illegal collective punishment against Palestinians in Gaza for 15 years. 15 years. Any comment or analysis that doesn’t take this fact into consideration today is hollow, immoral, and dehumanizing.
when someone asks you why you haven’t had any of the “normal stereotypical” experiences a young person should apparently have and you just go i don’t know what to tell you i just haven’t and for the most part you don’t care but then the atmosphere immediately shifts and you’re being pitied. and most people don’t really give a fuck right, they’re minding their business, but idk i’ve had interactions with people who do bring it up in subtle ways and treat you as if you’re some innocent little being, like oh cover your ears you poor little thing. so you leave and isolate yourself, but then it’s like how am i going to have those experiences if i isolate myself? but then when you do try people shame you for it. and this is the way people act when it comes to soooo many things in life. you’re like that and we want you to be like this, but we’re gonna laugh at your attempts if that’s okay?
