so much antisemitism comes from pop culture insisting being jewish is JUST a religion and you can’t convince me otherwise.

hey! so basically, i can't tell whether what i think is a result of brainwashing or not. like i think that jews and palestinians both have a right to the land and that israel is committing human rights violations. i used to think that israel was the most perfect country on earth lmfao 12 years of dayschool education. but now i just think that jews and palestinians both have a "right" to the land?

same "am i brainwashed" anon as before, i also wanted to ask (completely seriously i want to know your answer) if jews are demonstrably (genetically, culturally etc.) from the middle east, how can they be colonisers?

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i mean i guess my question to you for the first part is what exactly you mean by having a “right” to the land. the ability to physically live there without threats to safety and wellbeing? actual governance over the state? because as far as i’m aware, palestinians aren’t aiming to expel all israelis/jews from the land the way israel is currently doing to palestinians; i would argue that having a “right” to the “disputed territory” means something vastly different to colonizers vs the colonized. 

as for the second part - there are a number of reasons i could give you for how it’s possible for jewish israelis to be colonizers despite jews being historically levantine (the most compelling of which would be goals and intentions of the original zionist movement, which had aimed to colonize some then-undecided nation to declare it a sovereign jewish state and only decided on israel because the british had already colonized palestine and they offered a bunch of it up to european jews fleeing the holocaust)

but again i’m going to argue semantics, because i think the subtleties of the language used when discussing these types of things (and esp with regard to i/p, imo) are extremely powerful, and the slightest change in wording might reveal an entirely new perspective

the thing is, despite what zionists and antisemites alike want you to believe, israel the settler-colonial project is not synonymous with the collective jewish people that is sometimes referred to as “the people/nation of israel” in religious contexts. this is confusing, and it’s a matter of semantics, and these groups are using that against you. 

if israel the state = the collective jewish people, then anything israel the state does is done for the benefit of the collective jewish people, who, yknow, have been treated pretty terribly by most of the rest of the world throughout most of history. since many (white) jews have become assimilated and now benefit from their whiteness, antisemitism has become purely a religious issue on the global stage, instead of an ethnoreligious or even racial issue (as it had once been, when jews were racialized and NONE of us were considered white—again, this is no longer the case). and the harder the (mostly xtian conservative) capitalist imperialist powers backing israel can lean on “judeo-christian values” and “freedom of religion” and “standing up against antisemitism” as a cover for pumping money and military power into a genocidal apartheid state.

the problem is that the dominant narrative of the establishment of israel is that after the holocaust, the beaten and run-down survivors fled to israel, where the mean selfish arabs who just happened to be there for some reason refused to make some room for their unthreatening new neighbors who just needed a place to go :( and after all it WAS the original jewish homeland with lots of important religious sites :( 

but that’s not what happened. the uk didn’t give a shit about the holocaust survivors who had nowhere to go, and the holocaust survivors who fled to israel didn’t suddenly become land-thirsty monsters the second they set foot in the holy land.

what happened was what continues to happen today—the existence of very real and very deadly global antisemitism was weaponized against palestinians in order for zionists to enact their dream of establishing a sovereign jewish nation.

in other words: palestine was not colonized by The Jews, it was colonized by israel, an illegal settler state that claims to represent collective global jewry while really representing capitalist imperialist allies like the usa. this wasn’t a case of jews “returning to their ancient home”, but that narrative sure sounds a lot better than saying “settlers illegally forced palestinians from their ACTUAL homes that they were CURRENTLY LIVING IN and have been routinely subjecting them to horrific human rights abuses daily ever since”  doesn’t it?