in anticipation of all the regular bullshit about israel as they made it to the eurovision final this year i'd advise giving this article a read first:

(Just pop it into 12ft.io to get rid of the paywall!)

Anyway, the Israel-Palestine conflict is complicated, and cannot be reduced to a simple good vs evil narrative. Attempts to do so usually originate from people trying to use this simplification to aid their own agendas.

Since zionists are so quick to decide who is and isnt antisemite lets talk about the fella who came up with zionism.

Now who was he? Theodor Herzl. A dude who was (what it seems) against Judaism.

"What, though, does the average Israeli citizen know about Herzl? Not a lot, I suspect. Do they know he was reprimanded by his rabbi in Vienna for celebrating Christmas with a Christmas tree? Do they know he refused to have his son, Hans, circumcised? That his first solution to ‘the Jewish problem’ was a mass conversion of Austrian Jews to Catholicism? ‘It should be done on a Sunday, in St. Stephen’s Cathedral, in the middle of the day, with music and pride, publicly,’ he wrote."

"There’s an amusing youtube video in which a journalist presents a number of Israeli students with a quote from Herzl and asks who they thought wrote it. Every one of them says Hitler. They are shocked to discover the truth; the Herzl they’d learned about in school could not have written such an antisemitic statement. This is the quote: AN EXCELLENT IDEA ENTERS MY MIND — TO ATTRACT OUTRIGHT ANTI-SEMITES AND MAKE THEM DESTROYERS OF JEWISH WEALTH."

""Some thirty or forty ugly little Jews and Jewesses. No consoling sight.” Clearly Herzl didn’t like Jews much."

So either all zionists got trolled HARD by him OR yall are aware of this shit and are actually antisemites yourselves but only use Judaism as a shield.

something non jews need to understand is that zionism IS antisemitism. Someone can tell me that i have to support a place none of my family is from because it's my "homeland" and if i dont support it i'm not a real jew. If i dont want a genocide done in my name i'm not a true jew and i hate my kind. And also 90 percent of the time said person whos telling me this isnt even jewish. Zionism is anti semitic, and chances are if youre zionist, youre also anti semitic.

so there was this blog i tried to report. They had rebblogged and posted some zionism posts and tried convincing people that 'anti-zionism' is just the same as 'anti-semitism'. They said that the genocide in gaza isnt a genocide but its just a war, they used the 'hammas uses palestinians as human shields' excuse. Stuff like that, i tried to report them a couple times but tumblr wont let me?? it either keeps saying 'oops, there was an error' or 'you need to provide a url' despite there being a url?? I really hope its just a glich on my part but what the fuck tumblr???

the "wow people celebrating violence is awful" argument is bullshit because this isnt a case of one nation invading another or even necessarily akin to the ukranin conflict or a modern example of colonization (i take issue with the response even if that interpretation too but). the residents of israel are people just like you or me who decided to move into the evacuated home of a palestinian family decades if not longer old, over a bulldozed mass grave. People who would sit and watch the bombings of Palestine as entertainment. People from the United States and other homes away from israel, some I've met, probably you've met, in addition to the western powers providing the weaponry and funding too and championing this genocide. This is a unique situation. If escapees from concentration camps terrorized and attacked a german town in the 1940s i wouldnt celebrate the violence. but i know who i would fucking side with.

and im fully aware of the implications of this comparison. let me also say just to be %100 clear within this post too that i do not tolerate any anti semitism whatsoever (if u don't see why im clarifying this that's fine but there are people who treat jewish people as like a hive mind monolith which is stupid) Conflating anti zionism and antisemitism is ridiculous and insulting truly to all involved except for the oppressors

Someone saying “solely focusing on antisemitism right now in response to the renewed pro-Palestine movement is an issue” is literally in no way saying antisemitism doesn’t deserve attention too or isn’t an issue. It’s saying that there’s a long history of using the idea that anti-Zionism = antisemitism to shut down any criticism of Israel or any conversation about the human rights abuses against palesntine and so utilizing that now is in fact inappropriate and questionable at best. You rly missed the word “solely” there huh

yeah ok i’m sick of you idiots going “unga bunga long history of crying antisemitism as a political ploy” every time we claim that something is anti-semitic, as if “jews use claims of antisemitism to get what they want” isnt another fucking antisemitic trope. i’m not “utilizing” shit, i know jewish people who are scared to go out in public in fear of getting the shit beaten out of them and frankly the only reason i feel safe to leave my house is that i look goyish.

if antizionism isn’t antisemitism then there should be no problem with me pointing out antisemitism, right? like are you helping palestinians by yelling at some random jewish-american chick with less than 2k followers or are you just really excited to say how you really feel about those scheming jews

Put that way, the harm, as well as the denial of Jewish rights and history that are part of their agenda, is clear. But when you state your case, no matter how awful its goal, in the language of progressives, you are on the same wavelength of a Jewish community that prioritizes the universalist element of Jewish identity over its parochial elements. Speaking up for a Jewish state can sound vaguely racist to young progressive ears, especially when they are—as is the case with so many American Jews—ignorant about the conflict and most of Jewish history except for basic knowledge about the Holocaust. In a largely assimilated community, the sense of Jewish peoplehood that previous generations took for granted is now very much up for grabs.

Equally important is the need for us not to underestimate the way academia can influence other sectors of society. Not long ago, the sort of “cancel culture” in which those who questioned critical race theory and radical notions about history were silenced was only something that happened on college campuses. But as we’ve learned this year, the leap from such outrages being solely a way to protect hypersensitive and intolerant college students from hearing opposing views has gone mainstream.

Similarly, hatred for Israel and anti-Zionism used to be a marginal phenomenon that was rarely heard in mainstream media. But Beinart now preaches Israel’s elimination on the opinion pages of the Times and on CNN. He’s far from alone in that respect. And people like Tlaib and her colleague Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), who might have been canceled and shunned by respectable media outlets for their trafficking in anti-Semitic tropes about the dual loyalty of American Jews and buying American legislators in Congress to lobby for Israel, as well as support for BDS, are welcomed everywhere and treated as their party’s rock stars rather than the hatemongers they are.

isn’t zionism the want for a jewish state, not necessarily israel? and if so, isnt it anti semitic to call yourself anti zionist? i’m jewish and i’m just trying to figure out where i stand

Correct.  Zionism is the belief that Jewish people deserve liberation, self-determination, and self-defense in a land of their own, as all other peoples are understood to deserve.  In practice, that has turned out to be the state of Israel.  

Hypothetically someone could still be Zionist if they wanted the state of Israel to be dissolved but replaced with a different Jewish state elsewhere; in practice, no one really holds that opinion.  

Anti-Zionism pretty much always comes down to non-Jews deciding what rights Jews may have and where Jews may live, which is inherently and always antisemitic.  There are exactly TWO groups of people in the world who can be anti-Zionist without automatic suspicion of racism:  Palestinians, who really did suffer direct personal loss due to Zionism, and ultra-Orthodox Jews who say there can never be any Jewish state established by man, only by Moshiach.  Everybody else needs to get over it.  

By Bret Stephens via NYT Opinion https://ift.tt/3yBjsZu

By BY BRET STEPHENS from NYT Opinion https://ift.tt/3yBjsZu

By BY BRET STEPHENS from NYT Opinion https://ift.tt/3yBjsZu

By BY BRET STEPHENS via NYT Opinion https://ift.tt/3yBjsZu