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Another day, another controversy about what is antisemitism and what is legitimate criticism of Israel.
This time, a German architecture prize was rescinded over the recipient signing a letter condemning Israel.
Of course, the Guardian is not quite sure how the founder of the prize is called, oscillating between Schelling and Schilling:
The letter in question is here. Key passages:
We still have 3/4 of that century to go, but good job being optimistic!
This would at least be debatable.
Fair enough.
That would be the the general right self-determination of peoples, as mentioned in the UN charter? Does this also apply to the Uighur, the Kurds, the Basques, the Catalans and so on?
Or is the relevant law the limited recognition of Palestine, or the Oslo Accords?
Was the Hamas rule before the Oct 7 a shining example of self-determination?
Personally, I am somewhat sympathetic to calls to stop the IDF from bombing the hell out of Gaza. I am also fine with demanding that Israel should stick to the Oslo accords in the West Bank and dismantle their illegal settlements.
But to demand political autonomy in the context of Gaza is where I get off the train. The force of political autonomy in Gaza is called Hamas. Their primary objective is to sabotage any peace process by murdering random residents of Israel. Asking for political autonomy for Gaza is like asking for political autonomy for Germany in 1946.
Overall, I don't think that the letter is plainly antisemitic. If the author had signed a similar pledge against Chinese institutions for the Uighur genocide, and also demanded self-determination for the Kurds, I would tend to call them a general advocate for oppressed people. If their only political topic is Israel, then that would be a bit dubious.
In my view, someone boycotting Israel could, theoretically not be anti-Semitic, but I don't know of any organised movement that qualifies.
For such a movement to demonstrate not being anti-Semites, they would need to state conditions XYZ, such that:
However, doing this would lose the support of those who oppose Israel not out of sympathy for Palestinian children but anger that the Jews have somewhere where they can exist without the permission of the Nations.
That is a very uncharitable way to say "The rules of war that you say we have to follow, you have to follow them too." How many people who were complaining about the "kids in cages" at the southern border are ardent Zionists and don't see any inconsistency in their beliefs about the morality of border enforcement? Chuck Schumer is one of these types of people, in 2007 he went to a fundraising gala for Efrat, an Israeli anti-abortion lobby group while being 100% pro choice when it comes to American fetuses.
How many Zionists would tolerate what's happening to Gaza if Gaza were located in South Africa?
Interesting how such "isolated demands for rigor" regarding how America is run never seem to apply to Israel.
Hamas does not follow the rules of war. Furthermore, the rules of war do not say half the things Israel's opponents claim they say.
Does it matter? Anyway, how many Mexicans were launching rockets at El Paso and San Diego? Was there some operation where an organized group directed by the Mexican government (or whatever group controlled the territory) came in and killed and kidnapped a bunch of random Americans? The situations aren't all that similar.
Depends on who was doing it and who was getting it done to, naturally.
Alright, tell you what, when AIPAC gets disbanded and we get a formal apology for the Epstein-Island blackmail operation, I'll stop bringing up Israel's ongoing genocide every chance I get. Nobody American under 65 cares about Israel, the umbilical cord is getting cut sooner or later, and if they want someone to fight Iran, they need to do it themselves.
PS: Israel having free college and free healthcare while we don't is also a sore spot to your average Democrat voter, Israel should align their social spending to be more like ours if they don't want us to resent sending them money.
PS2: I could write a book pointing out specific hypocritical political arguments pushed by dual-citizenship types and you'll just say "That's not the Israeli government, you can't hold the actions of the diaspora against the state Israel, that's collective punishment and immoral." That would be a great argument if Israel hadn't been using indiscriminate bombing and food/water/electricity/medical aid denial as collective punishment this entire time.
As an aside, do you remember what happened to the activist Rachel Corrie back in 2003? The IDF crushed her with a bulldozer quite intentionally as dozens of people watched, and nothing ever came of it. I was pretty young when that happened and it made a lasting impact in how I view the Israeli government. Don't the US and Israel supposedly have a "special relationship" like we have with the UK? I don't think the British would discourage Americans activists from protesting in the UK by turning one into a soggy pizza using heavy machinery. Not very friendly at all.
So are half the people here, including the person you’re replying to of course, and including me. That Jews would advocate against their own identity is unsurprising, gentile whites do it all the time. The question is what you hope to gain from it.
I'm not one of them, but there are a lot of young jews with left wing political views, and those views have a very clear and definite position on what's taking place in Gaza right now. The left wing generally views ethnic cleansing in defence of a blood-and-soil ethnostate to be one of the greatest possible crimes you can commit, the sort that would stain the history of a people forever (just look at Germany). You don't actually need to "gain" anything material from opposing something you consider deeply immoral(though I suppose this means that what they 'gain' is satisfaction of emotional needs), and the footage being posted to the internet by both Palestinians and Israelis is really impossible to ignore if you're young and on social media. If I knew that my country was taken over by ethnonationalists and was about to start burning jewish people alive in their hospital beds, I'd protest against it even if I wasn't gaining anything from it (especially so if my only relation to "my" country was that they have the same ethnicity as me and I lived somewhere completely different) and I don't think that's a particularly extreme or hard to understand position.
I suspect the majority of these people are only Jewish by parentage and don't actually live their lives in any way that's discernably Jewish (happy to be proven wrong on this), and therefore their being Jewish doesn't lend any particular credibility to their position on the issue. It's much the same as me saying "as a gay person I disagree with the democrats position on LGBT rights" when I've never actually had sex with men myself, but I happen to have a close relative who's gay.
That doesn't explain the pre-occupation with Israel. If what they're doing is ethnic cleansing, then it's the most ineffectual example I've ever heard of.
This is an old argument that we've seen a lot of times before. "I suspect the majority of these people are only Scottish by parentage, and don't actually live their lives in any way that's discernibly and truly Scottish". But either way there's a decently sized population of orthodox jews who reject Israel for scriptural reasons as well.
Your second point is being litigated in another post so I won't respond to it here.
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Gaza is already ethnically spotless.
What @hydroacetylene said. Claiming Israel is ethnically cleansing Gaza is nonsense. The term seems to be used as some sort of odd compromise between "genocide" and "war", but it's not.
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I have no idea what you are trying to say - are you joking about the fact that the Israelis have already murdered huge swathes of the population?
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