A Reminder

Palestine is not over. Palestine is not dead. Gaza, the West Bank, the entire region between the river and the sea, and the various countries across the world where refugees have fled to, house a surviving people and surviving culture. Palestine is not dead, and WILL NOT die.

I'm seeing a lot of very valid despair online, but if you're someone like me, living a privileged life in a Western country NOT under active bombardment, and which is actually COMPLICIT to some degree in that bombardment: we don't get to give up. Not now, not ever.

You can still get involved in protests or direct actions (e.g. blocking supply), you can still donate eSims or fund UNRWA on your government's behalf, you can still hassle the crap out of your local MP. No, it won't roll back the harm that's already been committed, but all of those things are STILL WORTH DOING. PEOPLE ARE STILL ALIVE OVER THERE. PALESTINE IS STILL WORTH SAVING.

If you've bothered to read this far, you're probably already aware of what's going on over there right now. If not, check out Al Jazeera's fantastic coverage. But also remember that Palestine, and Palestinian culture, is more than just death and despair. Examples below:

Long live Palestine, from the river to the sea.

Hey y’all wanna see the worlds most appropriately unhinged phantom of the opera as it came up on my FYP?

ordered pizza from a small local place and they didnt actually cut it so i've chosen to revert to a wild animal and begin ripping it apart instead of just using a knife to portion slices

This is what @masriyah was saying,and it's so true. Like why are we clutching pearls over hypothetical people instead of very real suffering right now?

israel is massacring gaza!

How To Be Anti-Zionist WITHOUT Being Antisemitic

Yes! It's possible! But it's not automatic.

This post is by no means comprehensive, but bear in mind rule one of the Internet: You CANNOT tell the difference between a well-meaning yet uninformed leftist, and a neo-Nazi sockpuppet pretending to be a leftist to spread antisemitic rhetoric. Reading and absorbing the information in this post will help you avoid dipping into antisemitic modes of thinking.

Don't deny Jewish history in Palestine. There's been a continuous Jewish presence in Palestine ever since the Romans destroyed Judea - and not just the descendants of Jews who stuck around after that; Jews have been making aliyah to Palestine, and specifically the four holy cities (Hebron, Safed, Tiberias, and Jerusalem), for pretty much the entire history of the Jewish Diaspora. Every time Jews got expelled from somewhere, some Jews migrated to Palestine. There was even an attempt, in the middle of the war between the Byzantines and Sasanians in the 7th century, to regain political autonomy in Palestine and reconstitute Judea under the Sasanids (it, uh, obviously didn't succeed.) This is all historical fact, but that doesn't mean any of it justifies apartheid in the modern day. Denying the history doesn't help anyone, it just makes you antisemitic.

Don't whitewash the Jewish population in Israel. Ashkenazim only make up about 31% of Israel's Jewish population, less if you consider that the 2019 study would have counted Bulgarian and Greek Jews as Ashkenazim, when they're in fact Sephardic. The majority of Israeli Jews are Mizrahim who were expelled from other countries in the SWANA region who wrongly blamed their local Jewish populations for the Nakba. There is an internal racial dynamic within Israel where Ashkenazim hold hegemony, and that is worth critiquing in concert with Israeli oppression of Palestinians, but just saying "Jews are white Europeans" is antisemitic and flatly wrongheaded. Jews are an ethnoreligious group whose members come from all racial backgrounds.

Don't invoke classic antisemitic tropes like dual loyalty, or tell Jewish Israelis to "go back where they came from". Most Israelis do not have a second passport, are not eligible for a second passport, and cannot return to wherever they or their grandparents came to Palestine from. Litvak Israelis can't return to Lithuania, their communities were destroyed by the Nazis and then paved over and replaced by the Soviets. Moroccan Israelis can't return to Morocco, they were expelled. American Israelis only make up about 5% of the Israeli population. Jews have always lived on "other people's land", the difference in Palestine is that we're the oppressor, rather than the oppressed.

Understand why Israelis fear the Palestinian Right to Return, even if that fear is something you (rightly) oppose. It's true that settlers always become anxious about the people whose land they stole fighting back, but with Israelis this is even more potent due to two thousand years of antisemitism, and in particular, an event in living memory. In 1932, German and Austrian Jews were stripped of their citizenship, becoming stateless, and when the Evian Conference was held in 1938 to address what to do with the Jewish refugees, all 32 countries in attendance refused to take in more than at most 30,000 Jewish refugees, and that "most" was from the USA and the UK. (Except the Dominican Republic, but that was because Trujillo wanted to bring in a surge of Europeans to overwhelm the country's Black population, so...) When my country, Canada, itself a settler colony, was asked how many Jewish refugees would be allowed into Canada after the war, the infamous response was "None is too many." Golda Meir, then representing the British Mandate in Palestine, and later a Prime Minister of Israel who said and did some awful shit to Palestinians, was not permitted to speak or participate in the conference, she was only allowed to observe as country after country refused to accept Jewish refugees in any large number. (Though it should be noted that Chaim Weizmann and David Ben-Gurion, later the first President and Prime Minister of Israel respectively, actually supported this bullshit, because they thought having nowhere else to go would drive Jewish refugees to Palestine. They were right.) Israeli settlers are terrified of becoming a minority, because they do not trust the Palestinians to be any different from the rest of the world. And again, none of this justifies Israeli apartheid, but it elucidates where the Israelis are coming from, and should inform your anti-Zionist work.

Be specific and precise in where your principled anti-Zionism is coming from. To say that "the State of Israel is an openly settler-colonialist venture that has displaced millions of Palestinians and continues to engage in daily human rights abuses and ethnic cleansing" is specific and precise. To say that "Zionists use the Holocaust to play victim and get whatever they want"... do you understand the difference between those two statements? And why the second one might sound like when you say "Zionists", what you really mean is "Jews"?

Avoid double standards. Unless you genuinely believe that all white people should be kicked out of the Americas and return to Europe, don't apply that same belief to Israeli Jews. There is no post-Israeli future in Palestine that doesn't involve Jews living there. See points 1 and 4. And just to be clear, avoiding double standards cuts both ways. There is also no just future that involves the continued apartheid and ethnic cleansing of Palestine. It's evil, fascist, and genocidal for Israeli military officials to say that for all they care Gazans can go jump into the sea.

For fuck's sake stop putting the Neturei Karta on my dash. The Neturei Karta are a fringe group of Litvish Haredim who split off from other Haredim in Jerusalem. They're very publicly anti-Zionist while also being visibly ultra-Orthodox, so they get a lot of attention, but they're also Holocaust revisionists who attended and spoke at a 2006 Holocaust denial conference whose other speakers included David Duke of the KKK and several outright Holocaust deniers, and their leader defended Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, a president of Iran who claimed Jews made up the Holocaust. If you want anti-Zionist Jews, there are plenty of us. Check out Jewish Voice for Peace, Independent Jewish Voices, or even the Satmar if you really want Haredim. Don't give the fucking Neturei Karta any oxygen.

Finally: Zionism is not a euphemism. Zionism is not "when Jews do a thing I don't like," and a Zionist is not "a Jew I disagree with/don't like". Zionism is a nationalism, and like all nationalisms, it hasn't fully delivered on the liberation it was created to provide, and it's oppressed others in the process. Zionism will never go away until the material conditions that drive Jewish nationalism - that is, global antisemitism - are addressed, and yet the Palestinian right to liberation is not and must not be contingent on the end of antisemitism. This is the fundamental problem at the core of the issue: Zionists believe Jewish safety will only come from a Jewish ethnostate with a Jewish majority, and since everywhere on Earth is populated by someone, it may as well be in Palestine, given the Jewish historical roots there. And they're wrong. They're doing horrific, evil, genocidal things in the name of Jewish safety, and they're wrong to do so. But we can condemn Zionism from an informed perspective, rather than from an ignorant one, and in doing so avoid antisemitism and strengthen our anti-Zionist work. The last thing we want to do is spread Nazi rhetoric in the name of Palestinian liberation.

did i just log in to rb posts about gaza? yes. do not turn a blind eye to what's happening.

and let the history books name joe biden, rishi sunak, justin trudeau, emmanuel macron, ursula von der leyen and every other world leader who did not step in to prevent the genocide of palestine as cold-blooded murderers. may they face a shred of the immeasurable pain and suffering they allowed to be committed against 2.2. million innocent lives.

God they cut off all the internet and cellular networks in Gaza

it was never about hamas. not for a single second was any bit of this latest chapter of israels genocide over palestinians about hamas. never let anyone convince you of that. internet was cut off for everyone in gaza. we might only find out the horror of whats happening there right now once its way too late to prevent this already incomprehensible terror from growing into something none of us will ever get to walk away from while we're alive.

Happy unnecessary feelings day!

'what you need the most right now is hope.'

eva rebuild scenes redraw.

insta: @windsaor

thoughts that destroy your world

blend with inner self

Happy Valentines Day!