the church in the coptic monastery of the virgin mary in bethlehem, palestine. this unique church is built inside of a cave tunnel which connects it to the nearby church of the nativity. the holy family is said to have passed through it during their stay in bethlehem. saint helena, who established churches across palestine during her time, is said to have established this one as well. the coptic archbishop of jerusalem purchased this and four nearby homes in the 1950s, establishing the monastery and re-establishing the church. today, the site is maintained by two nuns.

as much as Zionism is a colonial project (though I tend to take the view as expressed in "Decolonizing Jewishness" re: Zionism as failed decolonization attempt) I think it's extremely reductive to claim that Ashkenormativity is to blame for the colonial nature of the Zionist reality. as more and more people from outside of Jewish spaces are introduced to the concept of Ashkenormativity, "Ashkenazi" is being used as a synonym for white and for colonizer.

this is not the whole picture. first and foremost, a large percentage of Ashkenazim are not white, though of course many of us are. conflating Ashkenazim with whiteness, both inside and outside of the Jewish community, contributes to the erasure of Jewish People of Color. additonally, the first Jews in the western hemisphere, arriving with conquistadors and colonizers, were, in fact, Sephardi. in the US, almost every Jewish person was Sephardi until the second half of the 19th century. Sephardi and Mizrahi Jews have also historically participated in and currently participate in Zionism, including in the settlements. furthermore, when we're talking about Israel's suppression of diasporic culture, a very real phenomenon, we need to discuss how many Ashkenazi cultural elements were also suppressed - including Yiddish and Ashkenazi Hebrew. in fact, Ashkenazim from Europe who wanted to hang onto their diasporic cultures were considered weak and effeminate. this reality should make sense to everyone who is aware of how Holocaust survivors are treated in Israel. in Israeli society, there is contempt for EVERY Jewish culture that is not Israeli, and of course that is compounded and exacerbated by racism for Mizrahi, Ethiopian, Indian, and other Jewish groups of color.

it's not the same dichotomy as the Black vs white dichotomy set up by US/UK/French/Spanish/etc colonization, and the term "Ashkenormativity" being taken out of Jewish contexts and applied to Zionism just makes Ashkenazim a convenient scapegoat for all the evils of Zionism. the main consequence I'm seeing is the idea that Ashkenazim are "fake European Jews" in contrast to the "real Middle Eastern Jews." this idea hurts us all. Jewish people are from every corner of the globe, and every Jewish person is a real Jewish person. I'm asking those of us who are pro-Palestine to tread very carefully when discussing this issue, and maybe retire the use of "Ashkenormativity" when it comes to discussing the racism of Zionism, which Jewish people from every diasporic background can and do participate in. Ashkenormativity refers to the centering of Ashkenazi history and customs when discussing Jewishness, and I'm really concerned that the way I'm seeing it used does not meet that definition and is not helpful (and maybe ends up centering Ashkenazi "evilness" or "Europeanness" while still not discussing Sephardi, Mizrahi, and other Jewish diasporic group's histories at all outside of their interactions with Ashkenazim in Israel). there's a lot of racism Jewish spaces, in Zionism, and in Israeli society, I just think we should call it racism and white supremacy.

I have really high hyperopia and couldn't afford glasses for years and was told for much of my life that I'm dumber and more credulous and more susceptible to propaganda than the average person and would believe "gullible" was written on the ceiling and as a result I got obsessed with history and rhetoric and visual semiotics and now I feel cuckoo crazy insane watching people I respected as critical thinkers trip and fall into the chasm of 2003 War on Terror derangement. Like. You should know better! I am the one who's supposed to be stupid and naive and possessed of poor abstract reasoning! Come on!!!

When I was young, I never really understood my parents insistence to only use olive oil imported from Palestine. It took a long time and a great distance in a process that was neither cheap nor convenient. The oil came in old beat-up containers that did not look appealing to me at all. In my head, if they wanted to support distant family back home, they could just send them money and save us and them a big hassle. We could just use the nice looking olive oil containers from the nearby store. Yet, this was never an option in our household. The only olive oil we used at home was from Palestine.

‎As I grew up and started a student part-time job, I worked with olive oil a little. I knew all about olive oil imported from Spain, Italy, and other countries. I knew which ones were better and more expensive. I also learned to tell, based on the pungent taste, which ones were extra virgin. I was tempted to use my employee discount to bring home one of the fancy bottles and use at our kitchen. I could not get myself to do it, and I did not exactly know why. I felt like it would be disrespectful to my parents even if it didn’t make sense to me. It did not feel right. It was not an option.

‎After living in Palestine for a year during the olive picking season, something changed. The olive picking season in Palestine is holy.

‎Palestinians relate to the weather based on how it would benefit or harm the olives. There is well-known unspoken rule about treating olive trees with respect. There is a day off from work just to pick olives. On public transportation, it is not unusual to hear someone on the phone telling their friend to stop by for their share of this year’s olive oil stored in what used to be a Coca-Cola or a liquor bottle. A driver will stop in the middle of the way to give his brother- in- law a jar of olives that are so close to one another that they start to crush showing their insides.

‎In Nablus, the owner of the Nabulsi soap factory takes pride in how picky he is about getting his olive oil. He insists on filling a cup to let me smell how authentic it is and smirks as he sees my diasporic facial expressions transform in appreciation of its strong smell running through all of my brain cells.

‎I started noticing how olive oil is an essential part of so many dishes. “Palestinians drink more olive oil than water” I would jokingly say and they would laugh in agreement. Olive oil is truly an everyday ritual.

‎They fantasize about its color when it’s fresh and remind me that it starts to change as it reacts with oxygen over time. They dip their bread into olive oil, just like that and without any additions, and enjoy it more than the sweetest of all foods. I can guarantee that every lunch invitation (عزومة) I received during the olive-picking season was a chance for my hosts to share their olive oil using Msakhan (a traditional Palestinian dish).

‎I now have a deeper understanding of the psychology behind the burning of olive trees by Israeli soldiers and why farmers moan at the scene as if they lost a loved one.

‎Wherever you are, if it’s accessible to you, make sure your olive oil is Palestinian. Your ancestors would want that.

- Dima Seelawi

I feel like people have such a limited view of the Shoah as something that killed religious Jews living in Eastern Europe. Certainly, that’s the majority of Jewish deaths from a raw numbers perspective. But that narrow view erases so much suffering.

Imperial Japan was allied to the Nazis, so Jews in East Asia and the Pacific forced to flee or die as Japan expanded their empire. Fascist Spain was sympathetic to the Nazi cause, and it’s not like the Sephardic Jews could easily flee into France after 1940. The Axis powers had colonized Algeria, Iraq, Libya, Morocco, and Tunisia at that point, so North African Mizrahi Jews weren’t spared the horrors. While the US government didn’t directly kill Jews, they denied us refugee status during the Shoah, and they did nothing to prevent the spread of multiple US American fascist parties and white suprematist groups. The Vatican, unofficially allied with Fascist Italy, handed over the names and locations of Jews they had converted to Catholicism decades or centuries prior. Families who didn’t even know they were ethnically Jewish were dragged out of Catholic Churches during Mass and sent to slaughterhouses hundreds of miles away. There were precious few diasporic communities throughout the world where Jews were safe in the 30s and 40s.

The Holocaust spanned entire continents. The Holocaust was global.

Edit 04/02/24: This post wasn’t written about Israel, and you shouldn’t make it about Israel. In either direction. The Shoah should not serve as a justification for the unnecessary abuses of the Palestinian people by the Likud government. Simultaneously, the Shoah was not a “lesson” to be learned by Jews, you cannot make a reasonable comparison between the Shoah and Gaza. This post is not about Israel and Palestine. Do not make it about Israel and Palestine. The deaths of our ancestors are not a tool with which you can make your argument.

The thing is, the Western superpowers NEED the people divided. Division leads war, displacement, economic collapse, forced assimilation— repercussions that generate income for the overarching hegemony. Division is their backbone. This is why any act of unity in history has been retroactively distorted to brainwash us into thinking there is no alternative to Capitalism. The United States attempted to physically divide Vietnam in the US attempted- intervention on Vietnam, and successfully divided Korea shortly after the nation’s liberation from brutal Japanese occupation.

You can read about the ongoing Korean War here, and see a timeline here.

North Korea has been systematically demonised for being one of the few successful modern Socialist states; for the crime of liberation. They are a demonstration of what anti-Capitalism looks like, and yet we are barred from witnessing that with our own eyes. The Western propaganda machine works at maximum capacity to ensure the masses are deluded into believing North Korea is an evil, oppressive regime, a corrupt government that abuses and oppresses its people— whilst homelessness is at an all time high in the United States and Western nations, with an extortionate cost of living, inaccessible health care and rampant medical negligence, Not to mention, police brutality, Neo-Nazism (like, Western-funded Ukraine’s historic complicity with Nazism) anti-Trans laws that lead to murders of Trans people, and the Western Israeli Regime’s support in multiple genocides across the globe (Mayan, Tamil, Rwanda and of course, Palestine). Not to mention, North Korea has had unwavering support for Palestine

The West has been lying to us for years about China, North Korea, Cuba, Vietnam, Palestine, Iran and so many more nations to mask their deadly Imperial ambitions, money-hungry forceful acquisition of oil and resources, and further imposition of globalised White Supremacy. We, the people, suffer at the hands of our very nations that copiously delude us into thinking there’s no way out, there’s no alternative, there’s no hope.

We implore you learn more about North Korea, and will be adding more resources to our Drive, linked in our link tree. Here’s some more resources on Korea:

Nodutdol 노둣돌 is an excellent pro-Palestinian organisation of diasporic Koreans organising for a world free of Imperialism, and for the reunification of Korea. Check out their page, and website, to keep up to date on their events, organising and get more information on what the West try to hide.

We also recommend this excellent documentary:

What I'm actually furious about, isn't just the anti-Semitism I've dealt with here.

What I'm furious at is the Israeli government and military. I am furious that they have the nerve to perpetrate war crimes while appropriating the memory of the 6 million. It makes me sick. It feels me with rage. It fills me with feelings of betrayal (those are complex and require deconstruction, discussed briefly below). How dare they massacre children, civilians, and fucking hospital patients; and how dare they do so while using the 6 million as a rhetorical shield?

The edgelord who left me a snide remark comparing the situation in Gaza to the Warsaw Ghetto wasn't the first person to make that comparison to me. It was actually the Palestinian woman who translated two major sources from Hebrew into English for me.

She was translating a biography of Tossia Altman when her three nephews and sister-in-law were murdered during the IDF action in Gaza. I asked her if she wanted to stop working on the project (with no impact on her fee for the project, of course; that's where about $4000 of the money y'all helped me raise went, fyi). The brand of Zionism practiced by Tossia and her comrades is very very different from the version embodied in Netanyahu, and it was those schools of Zionism which mostly died in the Holocaust (I said), but I would completely understand if the material was too triggering for her.

She said "I’m not sure about this triggering me, I think holocaust survivors and Gazans are on the same boat to tell you the truth. It could be an opportunity for me to actually fathom the full picture, in a way." And I haven't stopped thinking about it since.

I'm not going to post the rest of our conversation here, for what I hope are obvious reasons. And for concerned parties, this woman has been living away from Gaza for a very long time.

But this is why I'm so angry and emotional.

And I'm over here having these, frankly, very painful, personal feelings (if my posts over the last 4 months haven't made it clear, I spent my teen years in an extremely manipulative right wing Israel "education" program, and was raised surrounded by first and secondhand Holocaust trauma which inevitably impacted how my elders educated me about The Conflict none of which I was fully able to deconstruct until I became a Holocaust Historian in grad school). Especially with my knowledge of how SHITTILY Holocaust survivors were treated when they got to Palestine in the mid-1940s; of how fucking disgracefully Yad Vashem treated Rachel Auerbach and Yitzhak Zuckerman. Of the way the Jewish fighters actually died in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. I became a Holocaust historian because I am the great/granddaughter of survivors and I do this work because it's a fucking calling, not something that brings me joy. And the goddamn Israeli government, the government of a nation which likes to say it exists for all Jews (when it barely even represents the Jews who live there but that's a different conversation); the way that government manipulates and misuses that history to excuse their actions in Gaza make me fucking sick. And, as demonstrated by some of you actual fucking pieces of shit, puts Diasporic Jews in danger. (side thought: Does Netanyahu WANT to put Diasporic Jews in danger?? He knows how this fucking shit works, and I wouldn't be surprised if he WANTED Jews to feel deeply unsafe and respond to that by fleeing to Israel).

And WHILE I'm experiencing all of this and trying to keep it all together while writing the what may be the most important thing I've ever written in my career, you fucking [word I don't use out loud or in writing] come in here and to throw your anti-Semitic bullshit at me when I ask you to please not spew it at me via my (year old) fucking Holocaust Remembrance Day posts, and when I ask you to be fucking mindful of it in your political speech.

So let me make it fucking clear, as far as I am concerned there are 4 separate conversations at play rn.

1) October 7 was horrific, genocidal, and traumatizing for Jews on a global basis.

2) Israel is committing heinous war crimes in Gaza right now which, if its own military's statements are anything to go by, are actively genocidal.

3) You shouldn’t harass random Jewish people because you’re disgusted with Israeli governmental and military decisions and actions.

4) The Israeli government’s appropriation of Holocaust memory within its larger state building project doesn’t give you [collective: non-Jews] the right to abuse Jews for discussing and generally having feelings about the Holocaust.

And FRANKLY I think all those conversations are accurate and valid. I also don't think I'm obligated to tear my heart open give you all my intimate feelings because a bunch of pieces of shit on this site can't grasp points 3 and 4.

So fuck that right wing program I belonged to as a teen, fuck you fucking left wing anti-Semites who can's grasp that you're touting the ideologies of people who would have wanted you dead, and fuck the Israeli government for committing war crimes. fuck them for their ongoing abuse of palestinian civil and human rights, and fuck them for invoking the memory of the 6million while doing it.

I've fucking had it with that fucking State, I've had it with you goddamn Jew-haters, and I've had it with the Jewish ppl who might want to destroy my career upon seeing this post.

I am mad as HELL.

I'm not even saying my mental health break is over. I've just had a moment of clarity, my period is over, and I'm pissed as hell. i'm tired of policing myself to make the gentiles who hate me comfortable; and I'm tired of policing myself to make my coreligionists who'd destroy me for having these thoughts comfortable. and there are 122,000 if you, so i don't care if you're so fucking fragile that this post makes you hit the unfollow button.

tl;dr:

the cathedral of st. james in jerusalem, palestine. this is the principal church of the armenian patriarchate in jerusalem.

the armenian community in palestine is one of the oldest continuous diaspora communities in the world - dating back to the 1st century. though this church was founded in the 4th century, the current structure was built in the 12th.

"In “Memory Voids and Role Reversals,” Palestinian political science professor Dana El Kurd writes of her jarring experience, hearing of the October 7th massacres by Hamas while visiting the Holocaust Tower at the Jewish Museum in Berlin. She notes the historic irony of Holocaust survivors seeking security from future oppression by expelling another people from their homeland by the hundreds of thousands, ghettoizing them in enclaves enforced by military checkpoints, and controlling them with collective punishment.

The irony of a state formed as the “antithesis” to the ghetto using ghettoization as a strategy of control is not lost on Palestinians. This infrastructure of coercion went hand in hand, of course, with ever-present physical violence — imprisonment, home demolitions, air strikes and more.

She quotes Aristide Zolberg’s observation that “formation of a new state can be a ‘refugee-generating process.’”

This is not only true of Palestinians. The Westphalian nation-state, which has been the normative component of the international system since the Treaty of Westphalia, necessarily entails (especially since the post-1789 identification of nationalism with the nation-state) the suppression of ethnic identity to a far greater extent than the expression of any such identity. Every constructed national identity associated with a “State of the X People” has necessarily involved the suppression and homogenization of countless ethnicities present in the territory claimed by that state. At the time of the French Revolution, barely half the “French” population spoke any of the many langue d’oil dialects of northern France, let alone the dialect of the Ile de France (the basis for the official “French” language). The rest spoke Occitan dialects like Provençal, or non-Romance languages like Breton (whose closest living relative is Welsh). The same is true of Catalan, Aragonese, Basque, and Galician in Spain, the low-German languages and now-extinct Wendish in Germany, the non-Javanese ethnicities of Indonesia, and so on. Heads of state issue sonorous pronouncements concerning the “Nigerian People” or “Zimbabwean People,” in reference to multi-ethnic populations whose entire “identity” centers on lines drawn on a map at the Berlin Conference.

When I say official national languages were established through the suppression of their rivals, I mean things like the residential schools of the United States and Canada punishing Native children for using their own languages. Or schools around the world shaming students with signs reading “I Spoke Welsh (or Breton, or Provencal, or Catalan, or Basque, or Ainu, or an African vernacular instead of the English, French, etc., lingua franca). And so on.

And when we consider the range of artificial national identities that were constructed by suppressing other real ethnicities, we can’t forget the “Jewish People” of Israel. Its construction occurred part and parcel with the suppression of diasporic Jewish ethnic identities all over Europe and the Middle East. The “New Jewish” identity constructed by modern Zionism was associated with the artificial revival of Hebrew, which had been almost entirely a liturgical language for 2300 years, as an official national language. And this, in turn, was associated with the suppression — both official and unofficial — of the actually existing Jewish ethnicities associated with the Yiddish, Ladino, and Arabic languages.

The centuries-old languages and cultures of actual Jewish ethnicities throughout Europe were treated as shameful relics of the past, to be submerged and amalgamated into a new artificially constructed Jewish identity centered on the Hebrew language. 

Yiddish, the language spoken by the Ashkenazi Jews of Europe — derived from an archaic German dialect and written in the Hebrew alphabet — was stigmatized by Zionist leaders in Palestine and by the early Israeli government. According to Max Weinreich’s History of the Yiddish Language, the “very making of Hebrew into a spoken language derives from the will to separate from the Diaspora.” Diasporic Jewish identities, as viewed by Zionist settlers, were “a cultural morass to be purged.” The “New Jew” was an idealized superhuman construct, almost completely divorced from centuries worth of culture and traditions of actual Jews: “Yiddish began to represent diaspora and feebleness, said linguist Ghil’ad Zuckermann. ‘And Zionists wanted to be Dionysian: wild, strong, muscular and independent.’” 

This “contempt for the Diaspora” was “manifested . . .  in the fierce campaign against Yiddish in Palestine, which led not only to the banning of Yiddish newspapers and theaters but even to physical attacks against Yiddish speakers.” From the 1920s on, anyone in Palestine with the temerity to publish in Yiddish risked having their printing press destroyed by organizations with names like the “Battalion of the Defenders of the Hebrew Language,” “Organization for the Enforcement of Hebrew,” and “Central Council for the Enforcement of Hebrew.” The showing of the Yiddish-language film Mayn Yidishe Mame (“My Yiddish Mama”), in Tel Aviv in 1930, provoked a riot led by the above-mentioned Battalion. After the foundation of Israel, “every immigrant was required to study Hebrew and often to adopt a Hebrew surname.” In its early days Israel legally prohibited plays and periodicals in the Yiddish language. A recent defender of the early suppression of Yiddish, in the Jerusalem Post, argued that Diasporic languages threatened to “undermine the Zionist project”; in other words, an admission that actually existing ethnic identities threatened an identity manufactured by a nationalist ideology.

If this is true of Yiddish — the native language of the Ashkenazi Jews who dominated the Zionist settlement of Palestine — it’s even more so of the suppression of Jewish ethnic identities outside the dominant Sephardic minority. Golda Meir once dismissed Jews of non-Ashkenazi or non-Yiddish descent as “not Jews.” 

Consider the roughly half of the Israeli population comprised of Mizrahi Jews from Middle Eastern communities (including those living in Palestine itself before European settlement). Although the Mizrahim are trotted out as worthy victims when they are convenient for purposes of Israeli propaganda — the majority of them were expelled from Arab countries like Iraq after 1948, in what was an undeniable atrocity — they are treated the rest of the time as an embarrassment or a joke, and have been heavily discriminated against, by the descendants of Ashkenazi settlers. For example former Prime Minister David Ben Gurion described Mizrahim 

as lacking even “the most elementary knowledge” and “without a trace of Jewish or human education.” Ben Gurion repeatedly expressed contempt for the culture of the Oriental Jews: “We do not want Israelis to become Arabs. We are in duty bound to fight against the spirit of the Levant, which corrupts individuals and societies, and preserve the authentic Jewish values as they crystallized in the Diaspora.”

Current Prime Minister Netanyahu once joked about a “Mizrahi gene” as his excuse for tardiness. And an Israeli realtor ran a commercial appealing to “there goes the neighborhood” sentiments by depicting a light-skinned family having their Passover celebration disrupted by uncouth Mizrahi neighbors.

Nationalism and the nation-state are the enemies of true ethnicity and culture, and built on their graves. There’s no better illustration of this principle than the Zionist project itself."

-Kevin Carson, "Zionism and the Nation-State: Palestinians Are Not the Only Victims"

I found a post about Palestine and olive trees about a week ago, this reminded me of it so I'm gonna post the text below.

This was posted on Facebook by Dima Seelawi on the 29th of October 2018, it just happened to find its way to my newsfeed:

"When I was young, I never really understood my parents insistence to only use olive oil imported from Palestine. It took a long time and a great distance in a process that was neither cheap nor convenient. The oil came in old beat-up containers that did not look appealing to me at all. In my head, if they wanted to support distant family back home, they could just send them money and save us and them a big hassle. We could just use the nice looking olive oil containers from the nearby store. Yet, this was never an option in our household. The only olive oil we used at home was from Palestine.

As I grew up and started a student part-time job, I worked with olive oil a little. I knew all about olive oil imported from Spain, Italy, and other countries. I knew which ones were better and more expensive. I also learned to tell, based on the pungent taste, which ones were extra virgin. I was tempted to use my employee discount to bring home one of the fancy bottles and use at our kitchen. I could not get myself to do it, and I did not exactly know why. I felt like it would be disrespectful to my parents even if it didn’t make sense to me. It did not feel right. It was not an option.

After living in Palestine for a year during the olive picking season, something changed. The olive picking season in Palestine is holy.

Palestinians relate to the weather based on how it would benefit or harm the olives. There is well-known unspoken rule about treating olive trees with respect. There is a day off from work just to pick olives. On public transportation, it is not unusual to hear someone on the phone telling their friend to stop by for their share of this year’s olive oil stored in what used to be a Coca-Cola or a liquor bottle. A driver will stop in the middle of the way to give his brother- in- law a jar of olives that are so close to one another that they start to crush showing their insides.

In Nablus, the owner of the Nabulsi soap factory takes pride in how picky he is about getting his olive oil. He insists on filling a cup to let me smell how authentic it is and smirks as he sees my diasporic facial expressions transform in appreciation of its strong smell running through all of my brain cells.

I started noticing how olive oil is an essential part of so many dishes. “Palestinians drink more olive oil than water” I would jokingly say and they would laugh in agreement. Olive oil is truly an everyday ritual.

They fantasize about its color when it’s fresh and remind me that it starts to change as it reacts with oxygen over time. They dip their bread into olive oil, just like that and without any additions, and enjoy it more than the sweetest of all foods. I can guarantee that every lunch invitation (عزومة) I received during the olive-picking season was a chance for my hosts to share their olive oil using Msakhan (a traditional Palestinian dish).

I now have a deeper understanding of the psychology behind the burning of olive trees by Israeli settlers and why farmers moan at the scene as if they lost a loved one.

Wherever you are, if it’s accessible to you, make sure your olive oil is Palestinian. Your ancestors would want that."

And this picture was attached:

Link to the article in the header image:

It's so pathetic and despicable that the only posts about Israel's genocide of Palestine you've shared are the ones defending all you 'diasporic' Jews as though you're in no way complicit in Israel's actions. You just sit there, in your first-world comfy homes, whining about the holocaust and whatever else happened centuries ago while ignoring the cruelty of your own people *today*. You should be ashamed of yourself. I hope Hamas kills every single one of you.

k. so. it's been just over a week since I received this message and it's not until today I've been calm enough to formulate an answer, but here goes:

you do not know me.

you have no idea what I do offline. you don't know if I'm attending daily meetings with the Danish Zionist Federation or if I'm marching for a free Palestine or if I'm collecting signatures on Amnesty's petition for a ceasefire.

because you. don't. know me.

all you know is that I'm a Jew, and that is enough of an indictment in your eyes to make me shoulder the blame for Israel's actions.

it doesn't matter to you that most of my extended family were victims of the Holocaust and that I have no connection to Israel, that I am not and do not want to be Israeli, that I consider myself Danish, Scandinavia, European, Jewish, but not Israeli.

all that matters to you is that I'm a Jew and that I'm not reblogging the exact type of political, pro-Palestine posts that you want me to reblog.

so honestly, you can take your fucking antisemitism and shove it up your ass for all I care.

and the same goes for everyone else who's using the Palestinian people's pain to justify their own antisemitism.

May all you names and memories be erased.

By Amanda Gelender

As I write this, the wheels of genocide are turning. As I write this, I am preparing for Shabbat.

When I see Gaza, I see my own people languishing in concentration camps. I see a world that has turned its back on us, letting us be slaughtered en masse because we aren’t quite human enough.

...

You — who squat in stolen homes and kidnap children. You — who rape, murder, mutilate, humiliate, then take a photo. You — Israel. You are not me, you never were. My Judaism spans thousands of years. My Judaism is expansive, righteous, boundless, rooted. I am a miracle of Jewish diasporic vision that could never be contained by a military state. I have no love for you or your fascism, Israel. I don’t know you and I never did.

...

When I see Gaza, I am the Palestinians. I do not see myself in the face of an Israeli soldier — why should I? Because we are both Jewish? I see a colonizer, an occupier, a violent settler. I see someone willing to keep their boot on the neck of Palestine until she dies in the street.

from RNN (click) 19.10.23:

BREAKING: Palestine Action expands its activities to the US. The diasporic resistance movement announced today that it seeks to expose and disrupt Elbit Systems—the zionist entity's largest drone manufacturer—in the US, as well as other complicit actors and weapons manufacturers, for their role in the zionist genocide of Palestine. Elbit drones are used—and have been downed—in Gaza, the West Bank, Iraq, and elsewhere, to murder Palestinians and Arabs. Elbit sells its weapons of death and surveillance to Azerbaijan, Myanmar, Brazil, the Philippines, Honduras, and of course, the United States. Following recent direct actions, Elbit's share prices tanked by almost 10% this week, despite other weapons companies rising 5-17% in stock price. Palestine Action has already had a number of successes, permanently shutting down two Elbit facilities in Britain due to direct action. We cannot allow Elbit to continue to "innovate" their "battle-tested" weapons of surveillance and destruction. Elbit runs operations in Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, Virginia, Texas, Florida, Alabama, and South Carolina. They say, "Sustained direct action can make business inoperable for Elbit." "They are scared of the community’s power to resist their war profiteering." The time to act is now. #ShutElbitDown You may read more about the US campaign here. Share the Tweet announcing PalAction US' launch here.

a two state solution is racist. there is no way an occupying colonial force deserves the land of those it colonized ever, especially if the people whose land was stolen are still alive and want to go back to it. a one state multinational secular palestinian state is the ONLY solution.

About 50% of Israelis, accounting for about three and a half million Jews, are ethnically Mizrahi. I’ll save you the trouble of looking that word up because you’ve clearly never heard it before. They’re Jews that never left the Middle East. Plenty of them never left the land that became the Mandate of Palestine in the first place. The rest were forced to emigrate to Israel by neighboring Arab countries. Where do you want them to go? Hamas certainly won’t let them keep hanging out.

The rest of the Jews in the country are diasporic. Which means Jews who were violently uprooted from their homelands in 70 CE. And 132 CE. And 617. And 717. And 1066. And 1099. And 1465. And 1834. And 1929. Plenty of those dates refer to times when imperialist Muslim caliphates tried to destroy Jewish presence in their ancestral homelands to replace them with Arab Muslims. One of those dates refers to a time when Palestinians mass-murdered and ethnically cleansed indigenous Jews. Do you know which ones are which? Do a little research and find out, instead of just parroting propaganda.

You’re totally right. There’s no way an occupying force that’s killed and displaced native peoples deserves to rule over the land it’s colonized, especially if the people who’s land has been stolen are still alive and want to return to it. That was one of the foundational ideologies of early Zionism when the land was ruled by… Turkey. Not Palestinians. Not even Arabs. Turkey.

Colonial rule can be avoided when two indigenous groups with equally valid claims to the same land stop butchering each other for land grabs, nationalism, and dominance. So either a joint rule, or a two-state solution.

And where are you calling from, America? Next.