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What is the Zionist model of antisemitism*?
Matt Yglesias posted what turned out to be a surprisingly hot take that the downturn in public opinion of Israel is a result of Israeli actions, and that the best way for Israel to fix its public relations problem is to change its actions vis-a-vis the Palestinian issue and foreign policy.
I was surprised at the pushback. This seems straightforwardly true. There was a great chart I saw a few days ago, which I am unfortunately unable to find, which showed that public opinion of Israel has been approximately this low before. It was in 1982 with the invasion of Lebanon and the notoriously brutal siege of Beirut.
Most of the alternative theories fell into two camps.
It’s hard to tell how religious the people in 2. are, but my general impression is, “quite a bit”. Many of them seem to speak of antisemitism as if it were a spiritual fault, another manifestation of the platonic ideal of pure evil. Seen as a spiritual problem, the correct response is to become even more aggressively Jewish. This has the rather large problem of being counterproductive when, e.g. smashing idols goes wrong.
*By “antisemitism” in this post I almost exclusively mean “antizionism”. I use the term to maintain consistency with the pro-Israel literature I am engaging with, not as an endorsement that antizionism = antisemitism.
Why not both?
There has clearly been mass disinformation in Western nations in recent decades. Journalists will go on air and lie broadly about infectious diseases, government actions, wars, crimes, war crimes, weapons of mass destructions, who pays them etc. Many Jews would be found in prominent positions within their ranks, such as Barri Weiss. Lack of truth will generate skepticism.
Then comes the second part, there is a biological, natural component among many humans referred to as pattern recognition. People will naturally associate stimuli with concepts upon sufficient exposure. This is where the antisemitism will get generated.
There is a very simple solution to the Israeli problem that nobody ever seems to suggest, conversion. Many Jews have historically benefited from simply integrating to the majority population of the country they lived in. Unfortunately, the Jews that are currently remaining are the ones that have generations of experience of earnestly refusing to integrate to the local majority population, and to take in the commands of their respective prophets.
This stubbornness explains why the Israelis seem to be stuck between a rock and a hard place, too weak to single-handedly eradicate their enemies, too strong to play dirty like their enemies without losing their more-compassionate allies. So what if they get hated? Should we have Russians on American TV airing their grievances against anti-Russian sentiment on college campuses? Why this desperate need to be liked anyway?
If you're willing to corrupt supply chains and plant bombs in your enemies' pockets in foreign countries, why are you surprised that your enemies will send lone gunners to target your allies in foreign countries?
Why trouble yourself with pro-Palestinian protests on American college campuses instead of building ammo factories in Israel? Why are AIPAC representatives training American congressmen instead of training IDF recruits?
This whole antisemitism thing is quite funny in the years when some other international crisis overshadows what the Israelis do routinely, and the demand for antisemitism by politically-motivated people is greater than the supply.
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Looking at the situation from Mars – isn't it a bit bizarre how so much attention is paid to antisemitism, how it's studied, dissected, treatments sought? Jews are a tiny global minority, they're a tiny minority even in their region. Zionists are a small minority. Generally speaking, such a thing as non-Jewish Zionism shouldn't even exist – we don't have a lot of, I don't know, Magyarists among non-Hungarians, constantly working to ensure that Hungary survives and cannot face any strategic threat from their neighbors. If Jews reliably evoke "Antisemitism" among people with completely different belief systems, from Communists to the far right, from Arabs to Scandinavians, from boomer Democrats to zoomer Republicans, from Beijing to Madrid – isn't the behavior of Jews deserving of much more scrutiny? Isn't the onus on them to prove that they should not be hated? Any other nation so widely hated is usually known to be doing some transparently objectionable bullshit. Yes, Jews have some sort of internal discourse about antisemitism, about Amalek, online radicalization and whatever. But – why does anyone else need to care? Everyone has justifications.
Of course the masses can be wrong and often are when they oppose some select group or thing. But why would we assume that the masses of Jews are less wrong? En masse, Israeli Jews don't even have high IQ, nor do they belong to a Western culture. These are nth generation European transplants, locals, various peoples like Yemenites (eg the notorious Ben-Gvir), the Haredi who exist outside of any civilization…
I don't see the argument for even considering this as a real question. Zionists don't operate on a theory anyway.
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I think that both Yglesias but also Peter Savodnik are correct: the current wave of antizionism/antisemitism or however you call it is at the same time caused by behaviour of Israel but also independent of it.
I actually saw this argument from Nick Fuentes couple of months ago, when I watched couple of interviews with him around the time he was on Piers Morgan, just to see what he is about. He described himself as being such pro-American nationalist, as Zionists (including US Zionists) are pro Israel. Israel defines itself as literal Jewish state in its declaration of independence, where you have automatic citizenship as soon as prove your Jewish origin - so an ethnostate if you consider Jews as an ethnicity. It also has explicitly religious underpinnings observing sabbath in public places or outsourcings significant parts of the public life to religious sphere such as marriages (e.g. it is impossible to be gay married inside Israel, you have to travel abroad). It is also unapologetically colonial state in nature, although they use the word "pioneer" tasked by reclamation of land lost thousands of years ago in their form of Manifest Destiny - the reclamation of the Promised Land. It is a state where you have public discussions around immigration, national security, threat of fertility of non-Jewish population toward the primary function of the state as safe haven for Jews to prevent potentiality of another Holocaust and all that.
I think there was an inevitable clash between Israel and current predominant leftist culture. Any other western adjacent nation with similar policies is immediately labeled as ultranationalist or fascist state. Was it also caused by Israel through their behavior since basically 19th century? Of course - but only tangentially. The same critique would be leveled against Israel no matter what. Heck even countries like Ireland or Finland can be blamed for colonialism or be target of such a rhetoric, so there is no defense against that.
I think Fuentes is onto something when he says that the power of Holocaust as a story is weakening, it no longer serves as a shield for a free pass. Israel is viewed as a western democracy, Jews are white colonizers and they are oppressors and not oppressed. I can use hilarious example of Whoopi Goldberg who usually claims that everybody is racist - of course except Hitler, who only engaged in white-on-white conflict of Germans against Jews. And she said it whole year before October 7 and Gaza War. This was at least unspoken ethos and pathos inside significant part of the left, it only strengthened after Gaza war.
When I was a kid, the Holocaust was still in living memory enough that tattooed survivors were showing up to school classrooms to tell their personal stories. At the time, the last WWII vets were retiring and still alive to tell their stories. The entire era there is passing out of living memory and I suppose it isn't surprising that the emotional and political valence of those events is changing as the torch is passed.
I don't think it was ever possible to maintain that story forever: it's hard to sell multigenerational grievances generally, and worse when the aggrieved party seems to be doing "mostly fine, actually" (opinions may vary) in the present.
But I do look at these changing attitudes and wonder what will happen in the next decades as other traumas fade in the collective memory. We're already seeing politicians first elected during the civil rights movement dying in office in their 80s, for example, and Vietnam veterans aren't as able to get out and protest as numerously as they used to.
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People are pissed off because they are having seriously doubt about whether their elites (even the "American first" ones) are more beholden to a small minority group and a different country their own population. Both democrats and republicans (and their counterparts in Europe) are willing to throw away every value they claim to uphold, and humiliate themselves to an extreme degree in defence of this one country.
Which other group than zionist will have republicans talking about safe spaces on campus? Which other group than zionist will make democrats eager to collaborate with Donald Trumps ICE to have students homes raided on campus? Which other country than Israel will have such undying loyalty that the US ambassador (and their european labdogs) pull out of a Nagasaki peace ceremony to commemoratate the nuclear bombs on Japan, because said country was disinvited?
These are not normal behaviors. And I think its undercommunicated how much this servility towards Israel from both sides of the political spectrum is pushing people towards both antizionism and antisemittism.
Oh yes, this is the Fuentes critique I was talking about. It is unironically impressive how successful "Israel First" policy is. Their politicians were able to wrap foreign dignitaries around their fingers and train them like dogs to implement their policies. The point being that people like Fuentes admire this chutzpah, they want USA to become the same. Everybody will bow to US supremacy under cross or some such. People in UN should be in awe and they should persecute antiamericanism and christophobia with the same if not greater zeal as antisemitism even as Americans bomb their adversaries to stone age. All media from NYT and WSJ and Fox or whatever will be united in this righteous messaging, EU diplomats and their regional media will parrot it in the same way they lap the current propaganda. It will be amazing.
I was commenting on leftists. For them Israel is yet another white supremacist western colonizer, they do not admire Israel at all. In a sense Gaza war does not matter, the moral standard is "historical oppression" and history is unchanged - Palestinians were and always will be historically colonized and oppressed even if they clear Palestine from the river to the sea. This is what Yglesias vs Savodnik discussion is about.
This is imo a strawman version of the leftist position that seems entirely derived from zionist interpretation (not saying you are a zionist, but most of your sources for this probably are). Yglesias used to openly advocate for the full ethnic cleansing of palestinians from Gaza. He is by all accounts a jewish supremacist, and frequently strawmans both the left and right anti-Israel position. But he is seeing the writings on the wall and trying to stake a position on Israel that is less repugnant for the average non jewish supremacists.
I am active in my local pro-Palestinian community. There are all walks of life here (including quite a few formerly zionist christians), but leftist dominate. The wider leftist position is quickly becoming the normie position because it is actually very defensible: "dont send money and weapons to a country full of religious nuts who believe they are justified in getting revenge on a defenceless population full of children". You honestly dont need to have any positive ideas about Palestine to reach this conclusion at all.
Most people are just horrified by Israels relentless violence towards the women and children of Palestine, and even more horrified by all the supposedly good people who are defending it. I dont think I have heard the word "historical oppression" once, and no one pretends that Palestinians are saints who can do no wrong. Nearly all advocacy is aimed at the innocent children in Gaza and excludes anyone who could possibly be a militant. Leftist have many terrible positions, but this is not one of them.
I don’t believe it’s a strawman. Yes you want to say it’s a strawman because it improves your arguments and makes it more prestigious.
But Jews are just “rich white people” is the only thing that connects all the issues the left has promoted recently. Third Worlders versus successful white people. DEI, BLM, etc common thread is that they attack richer, better, smarter white people who win. Brown people without a white enemy to attack never matter to the left.
When you only promote issues where they hurt white men then it seems apparent you just want to hurt white men.
Now I will admit there are always some with pure intentions. Some black people in blm. In this issue you have some pure Islamists who want to do river to the sea Jews will be gone because they rightfully view Israel as historically Muslim land and want to reconquista which is their right. And are using American leftists white man haters for their Muslim goals.
Support for Israel has taken a nose dive in every group except republicans over 50. If you think this is all due to Third Worlders I dont know what to tell you. People are increasingly seing the behavior of Israel and being put off by it.
The right doesn’t have pro-Palestinians. The left does. The right just wants Israel out of American politics or as allies.
People like Theo Von and Marjorie Taylor Greene absolutely come off as sympathetic to Palestinians, definitively more than most democrat politicians. Even Tucker seems supportive of the pro-Palestinian struggle.
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Sure, I could get under policy of not sending billions of dollars to Israel. Except it is probably more complicated given that Israel is an ally let's say in current conflict with Iran, they literally bombed the country. Whatever you think about this war, if it was caused by Israel or what, the fact is that it is a military ally and thus some support is necessary. US always sent weapons to movements and countries that committed violence. While your stance seems okay to me, it also seems naive.
By the way I am also for instance pissed that there is any help also sent to Gaza. I do not want to have anything to do with that awful place, it is not my responsibility. Let Egyptians and Saudis and other neighbors do that part.
There are people now defending carpet bombing of Nazi Germany or Japan including dropping of nuclear bomb. If this is something that seems unbelievable to you then you probably are not so engaged in this discourse. The problem is that I am horrified by too many things, such as genocide in Darfur, and the overall region of Sahel and other things. I think that there are many conflicts where the moral situation is much clearer.
I am not particularly energized by Palestinians in this sense, I do not see a reason why they should jump as a front issue for me. For instance I am focusing on Ukraine, which has much more direct impact on me. If there would be any other conflict, it would probably be genocidal persecution of ethnicities linked to Christianity in Sahel region especially in Darfur and Nigeria. Everything else is distant.
I am curious. None of your leftie pro-Palestine friends ever used the term colonizer, colonized or colonialism in relation to this shit?
this is something people dont want and its not just leftist, but its increasingly common to believe the US relationship with Israel is more beneficial to Israel than vice versa. The US is such a loyal and unconditional ally to Israel due to the influence of the Israel lobby and zionists.
[https://www.dataforprogress.org/blog/2026/4/20/voters-in-multiple-states-say-iran-war-benefits-israel-and-that-us-military-aid-to-the-country-should-be-halted](This is just one recent poll)
The republicans might be going through a generational loss in the Midterms due to how unpopular the war in Iran and subsequent cost of living crises will be. Everything they fought for might be evaporated, and there might be a generational rift in the party that might upend all power constellations. Democrats arent much better, but are probably likely to benefit from not being the ones who
Besides many European countries stood up to their American ally during the Iraq war and dont think anyone looks back at that and thinks that was a bad thing?
Interesting, do you want to increase aid to Darfur? Would you vote for a politician who took money from a pro-Janjaweed group and defended their actions?
The term colonization is absolutely used about the West Bank and I dont see a problem with that. But again you overestimating the degree to which discourse is about ideology. Most people are just upset about Israels behavior and the suffering of innocents in Palestine.
I said that if anything, the things happening in Darfur or Nigeria are more important to me than fucking Gaza. Not that it essential or that it makes me single issue Darfur voter. I would analyze a politician holistically in line with principle of subsidiarity.
And I think that you are underestimating the degree to which this discourse is captured by ideology. The level of emotion on the left is unhinged, it is just another operation with its own viral energy. I do not believe that it was all just some random thing when from all the conflicts and all the suffering of women and children in the world right now, this one was just randomly taken up by the left and hammered for years. I am not denying that the emotions are genuine, it is just strategically selected to garner sympathy. It is the same for all the leftist causes, like their most successful op so far of killing of George Floyd. Of course there were people genuinely horrified by what happened. But at the same time it was also a cynical operation to ram through policies that the left was preparing for decades. The same shit with Gaza here.
I have a feeling youre not american, because there is no way the pro-Palestinian side is the most unhinged. We literally have a congressman who tweetet: "Nuke Gaza", and a more than one senator who has said they main motivation for doing their job is helping Israel. The pro-Israel side started a multi-months harassment campaign and send death threats to a christian childrens youtuber because she mentioned Gaza in a fundraiser for Save the Children. Ackman tried to get a fellow finance guy fired because his daughter had protested Israel.
This is nothing like George Floyd, where I totally agree than republicans came out much better. The only way you would think this is if youre opinion is entirely filtered through zionist sources.
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That doesn't necessarily mean that accusations of anti-Semitism are wrong. When people apply double standards to Israel; when people who don't usually care about third-world people suddenly care a great deal about Palestinian Arabs; when those same people don't care about the way Lebanon treats Palestinian Arabs; etc., it's difficult to reach any other conclusion that their views are substantially informed by anti-Semitism.
I heard a counterargument from Daryl Cooper of Martyr made podcast that it is okay to have double standard and expect more from Israel - because they are western democracy. It is the same logic where US military has to behave perfectly despite fighting literal genocidal maniacs and other lunatic cults. Everybody expects that Putin or Xijinping will do gangster shit. Nobody is surprised that some muslim radicals are right this second genociding Christians in Darfur or Nigeria or that there are literal slave markets in Libya selling black slaves - not even BLM gives a shit. But that all pales in comparison with war crimes of western countries.
In a sense it is cynically logical - you will criticize somebody you can actually influence. There is no need to criticize Kim Jong Un, he does not care. Not even new pope Leo criticized him yet, in fact he is supposedly building diplomatic bridge with North Korea. Of course pope had a lot to say about US immigration policy or conduct of Iran war or about tyrants waging war - while dining with literal murderer Cameroon leader who is in power since 1982.
I don't know Daryl Cooper, but my question is this: Is he also willing to grant Israel more leeway; more support from the West; etc. because Israel is a "western democracy"?
For example:
Of course Israel having nuclear weapons is not a big concern -- Israel is a western democracy.
Of course we should be comfortable with US arms sales to Israel -- Israel is a western democracy.
No, the International Criminal Court should not go after Israeli leadership. Israel is a western democracy and if Netanyahu had actually committed any war crimes, his own government would have prosecuted him.
No, Israel is not an apartheid state. Rather, it is a western democracy.
Of course people should side with Israel over Hamas. Israel is a western democracy and Hamas is a terrorist organization.
The UN's extreme bias against Israel is show by its condemnation of Israel -- a western democracy -- far more than the most brutal and ruthless dictatorships.
Or how about this:
Yes, I am criticizing Israel at the moment, but while doing so I must emphasize that Israel, as a western democracy, is far superior to its enemies in terms of respect for human rights.
If he is willing to do these things, or least some of them, then his position is defensible. Otherwise, it sounds like a rationalization to me.
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Not far from where I live in Toronto, there were spontaneous demonstrations in celebration of Oct. 7 when it happened, before any retaliation. I can't say conclusively whether that was mostly 1, 2 or something else, but what it wasn't was a reaction to mean ol' Netanyahu.
People began criticising Israel's "genocide" in Gaza before Israel had even militarily responded to the Hamas attack.
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You're being overly systematic, here- 'antisemitism' in Zionist parlance is a snarl word. There are uses of the term which have a definition, sure, but not the Zionist one. They're not worried about the cause. They're worried about using it as a cudgel against critics. And as long as this lines up with somebody else's interests in the west, it will.
I would challenge you to find 2 situations from the last 25 years where (1) a prominent Zionist made an accusation of anti-Semitism; and (2) the accusation was baseless.
I assume members of the Israeli government count as prominent zionists? Bibi himself have accused Anthony Albanese and Macron (both die hard zionists) of antisemittism.
Not to mention the whole witch hunt against Ms Rachel that started because she mentioned Gaza (along with Congo and Sudan) in a fundraiser for save the children.
For the most part, I would agree. I'll certainly give you Bibi.
Can you please give me links and cites for this so I know what you are talking about?
Did Bibi accuse her of anti-Semitism? Or was it someone else? Who else?
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It seems manifestly true to me that they're is a substantial portion of the world's population who believe that Israel as a nation should not exist and who will cheer enthusiastically upon seeing Israeli sons killed and daughters raped.
To dismiss the acknowledgement of this fact as a mere "snarl word" strikes me as either extremely naive or purposefully uncharitable.
These people are real and are indeed antisemites, but the definition of antisemitism in use by prominent zionists is sufficiently self serving as to provide no particular evidence in favor of this- you know that various Iranian front groups are antisemites because of their words, not the labels of the Israeli government.
I feel like you are privileging labels over substance. If the Israeli government is able to identify the people who who wish to see Israeli citizens raped and murdered how much does it really matter which specific word they use to describe them? It seems to me that "zionist" (prominent or otherwise) is just as much a "snarl word" as "antisemite" is in this context.
Furthermore it's not about words, it's about actions. If the Democrats or Labour decide that they want to align themselves with radical Islam or the Islamic Republic of Iran decides that they want nukes that is their choice, but choices have consequences.
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This is a real phenomenon, anti-Semitism is a real phenomenon, and obviously a lot of anti-Semites are also anti-Israel, but you can want Israel destroyed without hating Jews qua Jews. Using "anti-Semitism" for - even vicious - hatred of Eretz Yisrael alone frankly is mostly a cudgel - it's trying to discredit all anti-Zionists by equating them to Hitler. (Of course, the NSDAP, while of course horrifically anti-Semitic, wasn't actually notably anti-Zionist - in some cases they supported Zionism in order to get Jews to emigrate.)
To give a similar non-Jew example: I'm very leery of Mainland Chinese expats and exports. This problem does not apply to (South) Korean, Japanese or Taiwanese expats and exports. I have no problem with the Han Chinese as an ethnic group (and remember, most present Taiwanese are Han; the refugees from the Chinese Civil War outnumbered the native population), nor with the nearly-racially-indistinguishable Koreans and Japanese. My problem is with the totalitarian state of the People's Republic of China, which brainwashes its youth and may in the near future enact full-scale cyberwarfare against the West; enemy agents and hardware with enemy backdoors are dangerous.
There are legitimate reasons to dislike Israel and Western support of Israel that have nothing to do with the fact that most of its citizen population is Jewish. I don't happen to think that those reasons justify massacre, but some do. To insistently consider such people "anti-Semitic" is to buy into the Zionists' (and, to some degree, the neo-Nazis') preferred frame that Israel speaks for and is supported by all Jews, which it doesn't and isn't.
Are there true anti-Semites, including in the West? Yes, obviously. But your proffered litmus test for them is inaccurate. And while I'm not attributing malice to you personally, the conflation of anti-Zionists and anti-Semites is to a large degree enemy action - and it's difficult to blame people for refusing to concede to that.
Just to be absolutely clear. You are saying that...
"Do you celebrate when hear about (or see footage of) Israeli citizens getting raped or murdered?"
...is an "inaccurate" litmus test?
For hating Jews qua Jews? Yes. It's not zero correlation, but one does not have to hate all Jews to hate Israelis.
(For hating Israelis, it is of course sufficient.)
If that is sincerely your position, then I am going to once again echo our Vice President by saying I don't really care, I don't want these people in my country.
From my perspective you are attempting to draw a distinction without a difference. It is my opinion that if your reaction to 10/7 was celebratory, you are not just an enemy of Jews or of Israel, but of Civilization, and as such I have a moral responsibility to oppose you.
I despise Israel-the-political-entity and I cheerfully agree with you on this point. 10/7 was an act of barbarism, and the best model for Hamas' behaviour since then has been "identify the most evil thing an insane evil person could come up with, and watch them do it".
If you are going to us methods of barbarism in a somewhat-justified war, you should do so in pursuit of a somewhat-justified military objective and with a somewhat-justified hope of military success. 10/7 was some evil cunts getting off on Jewish pain from the safety of their Qatar hotel rooms with no visible path to military victory, or even a draw.
To be clear, in my post below I was expressing reservations about the idea of trying to deport everyone who cheers atrocities, not about trying to deport (or kill) people who commit atrocities. Thankfully, most of the fuckwits who cheered October 7 do not go out and try it at home, which means we do actually have options in how to deal with them beyond "to defeat the spree killer, shoot at it until it dies".
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I think that whether someone hates all Jews or merely Israeli Jews is somewhat significant to risk assessment by countries which are not Israel and contain Jews.
I will also note that, while bloodthirst is certainly distasteful, there are really quite a lot of people with bloodthirst regarding some group, even in the West. I suspect that trying to outright expel all of them would, ironically, end in rivers of blood.
and again I don't really care about risk assessments or what others might find distasteful. The enemies of civilization must be opposed, and as such I don't want them in my country.
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In theory this is possible, but typically the surrounding circumstances strongly suggest that the anti-Israel sentiment is motivated in large part by anti-Semitism. For example, if the anti-Israel person applies double-standards to Israel. Or if the anti-Israel person professes to care a great deal about Palestinian Arabs but doesn't seem to particularly care about other third-world groups. And doesn't particularly care about the way Palestinian Arabs are treated, for example, by Lebanon. Or by Hamas.
There's sort of a parallelism here: If someone uses Palestinian Arabs strictly as a cudgel to attack Israel, it's reasonable to respond with the "cudgel" of an anti-Semitism accusation.
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You don’t think they use the term “antisemitism” amongst themselves to describe (what they think is) a real concept?
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> Pass an anti-terrorism law that de facto applies only to one ethnicity, which you're already being accused of apartheid-ing, which calls for "death by hanging, carried out in no more than 90 days" as the default sentence.
> "there is literally nothing we can do, the fake news is just going to twist our ethnic death penalty laws to make us seem like monsters"
> "this is why we need to control tiktok"
Damn, can't help but notice this seems absolutely bananas
I'll defend them on this one. Swift execution is the only way to prevent murderers from being released in the inevitable next hostage exchange.
Exactly. Part of the ridiculousness here is that Israelis act in ways that any sensible Western regime should be acting, but get absolutely pilloried for it due to norms of conduct that Jewish thinkers have done their best to encourage off the back of the Holocaust and their outsized influence. If the average Zionist didn't have a sole carveout in their politics for Israel to act belligerently I'd be a lot more supportive of their views.
Can you give two specific examples of this so I know what you are talking about?
So in your view, the "average Zionist" is responsible and accountable for the norms encouraged by "Jewish thinkers"? This sounds rather suspicious to me, but I'll hold off judgment until you've had an opportunity to provide a couple examples.
Ethnostate for me, infinity zogs for thee. If it was ethnostate for all, they'd be fine and I find Israel far less objectionable than their enemies.
To any lurkers who are reading this, it serves as an example of how anti-Semitism is a result of conflict theory, not mistake theory. Note that the response was NOT along the lines of "Oh, wait a second, I can't think of any specific examples of what I am talking about, perhaps I am mistaken."
Note also how for the anti-Semite, each and every Jew is responsible for whatever is said by every other Jew. If one Jew believes X and another Jew believes NOT X, then all Jews are hypocrites.
Note also that this collective responsibility applies only to Jews. Rules for thee and not for me, indeed.
A general statement about a group does not imply even it's dissenting members are held accountable for the majority opinion.
Agreed. However if the dissenting members (or some other subgroup) are accused of hypocrisy based on the stated views of some other subgroup, that's the sort of group responsibility I am talking about.
In this case, the Jew hater identified (1) "Jewish thinkers" who are allegedly responsible for pushing various norms of conduct on the world; and (2) "Zionists" who allegedly carve out an exception to violate these norms.
Of course there are a number of problems with this claim.
For starters, Israel actually is NOT violating any modern norms of war. For example, it's perfectly legitimate to blow up a hospital which is being used as a terrorist base of operations.
Second, modern norms of war are not the result of Jewish thinkers any more than any other aspect of modern thought. To be sure, since the 19th century, Jewish people have a tendency to contribute more to any kind of modern thought. But for the Jew-hater, the Jewish contribution depends on whether the end result is, in his view, positive or negative. If it's something he thinks is negative, and only then, then Jewish over-representation means Jews are responsible. (Will the Jew-hater give Jews credit for modern physics in the same way? Doubtful.)
Third, even if there were a contradiction between these "Jewish thinkers" and "Zionists," it's only hypocrisy if either (1) there is significant overlap between these groups; or (2) Jews are collectively responsible for the positions of all other Jews.
Anyway, that's about as much I can do with Gish Gallop which has been presented by @Bingbong
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Israel has attacked 5 countries in the past few years and has caused what is likely to be the biggest economic crises in decades. That is absolutely not how any sensible regime, let alone Western should behave.
Are you able to name even one of these "5 countries" Israel has attacked, where the country hadn't already either attacked Israel or been used as a staging ground for attacks against Israel?
I take it that you blame Israel for Iran's attempts to block the strait of Hormuz?
Yeah I blame Israel for attacking Iran and starting this war. The Hormuz blockade was an entirely foreseeable consequence of that.
Only if you think the Iranians have no agency.
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I take it that you are unable to name even a single country Israel has attacked in the last 5 years, where the country hadn't already either attacked Israel or been used as a staging ground for attacks against Israel?
Well do you agree that Israel's attack against Iran was an entirely foreseeable consequence of Iran's aggressive and relentless proxy attacks against Israel over the years?
If youre land is already being illegally occupied by Israel I dont think you can in any way be accused of attacking first.
Blockading a strait that you control is very different from bombing another country in an attempt at regime change.
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If it was after the US Civil War and they passed a law which says you go to the gallows if you're still keeping a slave, that would only apply to one ethnicity, but it seems like it would be an appropriate measure anyway. It would be silly to object to that on the grounds that it wouldn't convict any black people so it's ethnically based.
That's a fair point, to counter though, this law isn't "terrorists get the death penalty" it's "people who intentionally cause the death of a person with the aim of denying the existence of the State of Israel" as judged by a military tribunal, with absolutely 0 appeals allowed after sentencing.
So in your situation it's more like a law that only applies to slave owners who also don't like Abraham Lincoln/the union, i.e. any northern slave owner caught with slaves wouldn't get the death penalty.
Also the law absolutely violates their due process and other legal rights.
Appeals inherently dull the intended effects of deterrence and the lack of ability for a prisoner exchange.
If due process is what the objection is, well, maybe thats true. Or maybe modern due process is actually an affront to victims rights.
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Sort of related: I recently read an article called "On Collective Jewish Guilt".
I understand that anti-Zionism is not intrinsically reducible to antisemitism, and that, in theory, one could oppose the existence of Israel while harbouring no ill will towards Jews and wanting them to be safe. But it's hard to avoid the conclusion that, in many cases, anti-Zionism is the motte and antisemitism is the bailey. This article argues that you can tell a lot of anti-Zionists don't really mean what they say based on how they react to antisemitic terror attacks and hate crimes that take place outside of Israel (e.g. the recent Hanukkah mass shooting on Bondi Beach). After all, if anti-Zionists were really only opposed to the state of Israel, you would logically expect them to be the first to condemn attacks on the Jewish diaspora, and in the loudest possible terms: after all, if they believe that a dedicated Jewish state is not necessary to ensure the safety of Jews, they should be the ones most opposed to attacks on Jews outside of Israel. That is, to put it charitably, not what we see. Every time there has been an antisemitic terror attack or hate crime in the last two and a half years, I have seen one or more of the following:
I am sure there is someone out there who is opposed to the existence of Israel on philosophical grounds but legitimately harbours no animosity towards Jews on an interpersonal level and sincerely wishes them no harm. (This is the person Freddie deBoer claims to be; I don't believe him.) But in my experience, nine times out of ten a Gentile who calls himself anti-Zionist will eventually be revealed to be antisemitic, and I'm sick of trying to pretend otherwise.
"So I know the group our people are targeting for harassment and abuse now is the same group our people have been targeting for harassment and abuse for centuries. And I know that our justifications for harassing and abusing them (they murder children, they control the banks, they control the media, they're sexual degenerates) are literally word-for-word the same as the justifications we used for centuries before now. But our harassment and abuse is totally justified now because of anti-colonialism, guys."
It is interesting that a Palestinian whose family was ethnically cleansed by Israel in order for them to have a jewish majority, is not allowed to just be against that, but have to also assure zionists that they: "harbour no ill will against jews"
Are you able to provide a specific example of this having happened? Because I'm rather skeptical.
Current pravda is that the Jews ethnically cleansed the area of the modern Israeli state in 1948.
I'm very pro-Israel, and I concede that there was limited ethnic cleansing which went on.
The question is this: If a descendant of an Arab who was ethnically cleansed in this way were to criticize Israel, would any prominent Zionists insist that the person provide assurances that they weren't an anti-Semite?
I tend to doubt it. Of course part of the problem is that the vast vast majority of anti-Israel criticism comes from people who have no personal stake in the conflict. For those people, if they hold Israel to double-standards (and most do), it's reasonable -- at a minimum -- to strongly suspect them of anti-Semitism.
Among Palestinian Arabs, of course, they are often pretty open about the fact that they hate Jews. In this day and age, if someone is openly a fan of Hitler; or votes for a political party whose political platform promises to kill all Jews everywhere, well, at that point the burden is more or less on them.
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It's even more interesting that you seem to be essentially arguing that antisemitism is defensible or even justifiable.
Antisemitic thoughts and speech among Palestinians whose family members have been mistreated by Jews in living memory is just as defensible as any other justified ethnic hatred. Were one being eristic, one might compare it to the routine anti-German sentiment that kept popping up in the cultural output of Jewish and philosemitic Americans well into the 1980s.
Sure. And what about antisemitic violence? And specifically antisemitic violence targeting Jews who've never set foot in Israel and who have no say in Israeli policy or IDF military tactics?
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Another example of how the word antisemitism has lost all meaning.
Palestinians have every right to not give a shit about the feelings of jews when they critisize the founding of Israel.
It's one thing to be indifferent towards the feelings of Jews. When Israelis criticise Palestinian militants, they are not complaining that Palestinians don't care about their feelings. They are complaining that Palestinian militants are trying to kill them, because they are Jews.
This is an entirely bad faith reply. We have been discussing ideology, not militancy.
Okay, well one example of the kind of "ideology" to which I refer is Hamas apologism, which I believe is not reducible to simple anti-Zionism. Supposing a non-Palestinian person who has never been personally victimised by Jews expresses support for Hamas and thinks that their actions on October 7th were justified. Is it reasonable for me to conclude that such a person simply hates Jews as a group, or could such a stance be compatible with anti-Zionism i.e. opposition to the existence of Israel on philosophical grounds, without any concomitant antipathy towards Jews as a group?
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This feels like we are just erecting an impossible standard for being described as a neurotypical person that also dislikes Israel. I.e, we want to label everyone who does not like Israel with a verbal guillotine called 'antisemitism'. Which is conveniently defined by us as an ever evolving collection of psychosocial irrational delusions. Sucks to be one of those, I guess.
The article’s most grating implicit premise is that dissent is only permitted if one first secures a survival plan for Israeli ethnocentrism. This is irksome not just because Israel is not holding itself to such a standard with its own actions against the Palestinians, but also because it relies on the lack of such a standard existing in the western world. Where Israel holds seemingly no reservations about sending any and all refugees their continued ethnocentric existence might cause. It's a catch 22 for the argument.
If the author thinks they are hoisting leftists by their own petard by employing this rhetoric, let me introduce you to the rich history of jewish intellectuals that spent their lives dismantling even the notion that ingroup bias, nations, or biology itself should exist in any relevant way in the western mind when we think of ourselves or our identities!
To the articles assertions more directly: Diaspora jews are probably the most self aware and protected group in the world. They are funded by tax payers like no other. Their representation in media is rivaled by none and the attention they receive from world leaders borders on absurdity. The notion that the multiculti death worlds that diaspora intellectual jews have helped create in the west are not safe for jews because of the imported muslims that Zionist policies necessitated and many diaspora jews aided in the import of is, on top of the audacious hypocrisy, not rational.
Jews are not going more extinct in the west than any other western group. On that simple fact the debate is over. Jews are not put upon, jews are not oppressed. They are just... suffering from a collection of irrational psychosocial delusions. Call it 'authoritarian-ingroup-hysteria'. They are afflicted with the odd and outdated notion of ingroup bias towards their own kind. That ones ingroups continued existence as a coherent sovereign entity is somehow valuable or relevant. Or that attacks against the ingroup are personally relevant. The western world has long dissolved any notion pertaining to such ideation. Nowhere is the continued existence of Europeans demanded. Least of all by leftists or jews! We deserved 9/11! Diversity is our strength! Our genes will survive no matter our phenotypic expression! Beige Power!
...I could go on and on. Thank you for linking the article, it was traumatizing.
It's close, but the continued existence of French Canadians is certainly demanded.
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To push back on this point: depending on how you define it, there are two orders of magnitude more white Europeans in the world then there are Jews, and the global population of white Europeans has not declined at any point in the last century. Jews are not mistaken to perceive themselves as a vulnerable population in a way that white Europeans are not.
It doesn't matter how much more there is of one group than the other, when their core mechanism of cohesion has been, and is still being eroded.
In practical terms it kind of does matter.
I think you'll need to elaborate on that.
Just within the last generation you could see a massive cultural and demographic shift in Europe, even in it's most populated countries, and any pushback against the trend will only get harder with each passing day. Is the fact that technically it will take more for us to die off, than it would for a smaller population, supposed to console me somehow?
It's not meant to console you in particular. I'm just trying to illustrate that, for reasons of demography, the outright extermination of Jews in a couple of generations is a live possibility in a way it simply isn't for white Europeans.
Not really. We should still care about Lithuanians, Latvians, Estonians, Swedes, Finns, Norwegians, Danes, the Irish, Icelanders... etc., etc., etc., far before we care about the Jews. If we shouldn't care about these nations because they are all "white" and "whiteness" will live on without them, we also shouldn't care about the Jews. Unless you want to tell me that Jews aren't white.
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I think the perpetrator in that case….just read the article….did in fact have proper cause to shoot up a synagogue. He’s still my enemy. Most Jews do support Israel, many go on their free trip to Israel, vote for US guns to go to Israel, and the key point ISRAEL did kill a bunch of his family in Lebanon. Human groups do have conflict. He doesn’t have the state capacity to go win a war and remove Israel. This isn’t mistake theory….he is/was properly at war with Israel. Same thing Bin Laden the US did arm a regime that was against his interests. He had a proper cause to hit the US and the US being mightier after being hit had cause to torture and kill his supporters. It’s war. Civilizations are clashing and they kill each other.
My personal vote is we should have never let a Lebanese Muslim into the country. There’s no crying in war. If your tribe kills a guys family then yes he’s allowed to try and kill your tribe.
That’s not a defense he has to get off for murder but it is a moral justification for revenge. And I support the US cops killing him.
But this is that exact absurd collective guilt framing the article was decrying!
A few years ago, Liam Neeson told an anecdote about how, when he was younger, a close friend of his was raped by a black man, which drove him into such a rage that he stalked the streets of London carrying a cosh, looking for a black man to beat up in retribution (thankfully he didn't go through with it in the end). He told this anecdote essentially as a cautionary tale about how ugly, prejudiced attitudes can sneak up even on well-meaning people, and how one must actively resist the urge to submit to one's darkest base impulses – and even with this context he was still excoriated as a racist.
Meanwhile, a Lebanese man shoots up a synagogue in Canada, and people say "well, several of his family members were killed by people who share ethnic heritage with the people in that synagogue, so he was justified in trying to kill them".
Would an American who lost family on 9/11 be justified in shooting up a mosque? Would an Englishman who lost family in an IRA bombing be justified in shooting up a Catholic church in Clapham?
Being Jewish and at a Synagogue isn’t quite the same thing as being black. I understand people’s desire to keep the culture of their parents buts it’s still a CHOICE to be Jewish and at a Synagogue. American Jewish money and votes are a big reason why Israel wins wars. Maybe just being at a Synagogue doesn’t make you complicit with Israel but at what point would you be part of their war effort? A person donating to AIPAC or more?
Now I am not saying any random person gets to take action here. But at some point you end up being a Nazi and a Frenchmen living in NYC in 1942 and you become 2 people who are actually in war living in a third country.
So I will asks you a question what actions by the Jewish Synagogue would make it not “Collective Guilt” for a man with family killed by Israel to shoot them?
To answer your final question would an American be justified shooting up a mosque who had losts a family member in 9/11? Potentially yes.
"You can be as Jewish as you like, just as long as you don't engage in any of the cultural practices associated with Judaism, not even in private."
What is the word "potentially" doing there? Would an American who lost a family member in 9/11 be morally justified in shooting up a mosque, yes or no?
Potentially I believe I was referring to is it a Mosque that passes around a hat funding X,Y,Z I’m a terrorist cell. So then yes. Same as if someone who lost a person to an IRA bomb shooting up an Irish pub in Boston that took donations. So yes there would need to be an added connection in these cases.
So what you're really saying is "Alice is entitled to seek revenge on people who actively conspired to murder Alice's family members". That's really not what I'm asking. I'm asking, is an American who lost a family member on 9/11 entitled to shoot up a mosque even if he has no reason to suspect that any of the worshippers in said mosque had even the most tangential role to play in 9/11? Is he entitled to shoot up a mosque purely on the basis that the worshippers in that mosque are part of the same "tribe" (broadly defined) as the people who killed his family?
Just shooting for tribe affiliation would be wrong. This was with regards to Israel. So what I was proposing at what point does a Synagogue have actual ties to Israel and it’s not just affiliation?
It’s a good bet that a lot of the young adults visit Israel and probably did birth right tours. Highly likely many have dual citizenship. A reasonable bet their is backing of AIPAC which has been Israel’s hammer to keep significant military aid flowing to Israel.
I think we could agree for a Muslim who had relatives killed by IDF that Sheldon Adelson would be an appropriate revenge target. The US obvious does drone strikes on people who raised funding and organization capital for terrorists.
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I don’t recall anyone online saying a positive thing about that terror attack. I do remember, however, the posts about how the Rabbi who died had a habit of spamming X with calls of “Amalek”. (Amalek being the enemy of the Jewish people whom the Jews are mandated to blot out from existence, including the women and children). So, for instance, he often called the Hague Amalek, because the Hague was shown videos of IDF soldiers cheering the slogan “there are no uninvolved civilians [in Gaza]”, and I suppose he didn’t want the goyim to know that, so that made the Hague Amalek. Then he called them Amalek a couple other times, and in response to a video of a starving Palestinian woman who hadn’t eaten for five days, he simply called that AI. I think this sort of merciless disregard for the good of others does not engender the sort of sympathy normally allocated to victims of horrible tragedies, even though it was a tragedy all the same.
Funny you bring that up, given I never claimed they did.
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Such a sly rephrasing.
What @FtttG said was:
This is accurate.
We could perhaps add:
You're right, almost no one is going to go mask-off and say "I support shooting Jews because I just really fucking hate Jews."
Even the most vehement Jew-haters are more sly than that.
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I feel this describes most of the Jewish Americans that I knew in college and highschool. Especially the ethnically and culturally Jewish that did little of the actual religion part. I didn't get to poll many of them after the October 7th attack, but the few I did poll seemed to have shifted a bit after that. More pro Zionist obviously.
There is something to be said about the people harping on the Jewish state online the loudest are just generally not happy with Jewish people.
I sort of feel that the best solution would be for Jews to just all live in America. The middle east seems like a shit hole. The fact that they really want to stay there and make it work seems strange to me. I feel no animosity towards Jewish people, and I certainly tend to enjoy their comedy (ari schafir) and writing (scott Alexander). I'd be happy to have more of them as neighbors.
It just seems like a doomed project to have an ethnostate and religious minority in a third world area, and neighbors with one of the most war happy religions out there. I am confused how the Israel project seemed like a good idea ever. Unless it was a naked attempt to just kick the remaining Jews out of Europe and let the Muslims finish the ethnic cleansing that Hitler started.
Hmm. While very far from feasible, it looks to me like the best course of action would be to move all the Israelis to Japan.
There's actual historical precedent here, one that's charming/alarming depending on how you feel about inheriting a plan whose original architects cited The Protocols of the Elders of Zion as a strategy primer.
In the 1930s, Imperial Japan seriously proposed resettling up to a million European Jewish refugees in Japanese-controlled Manchuria. Officials in the Japanese military and foreign ministry had read the Protocols, naively took it as genuine, and concluded that people with such allegedly vast economic power would be excellent to have on the team.
They called it the Fugu Plan, after the pufferfish: dangerous if mishandled, a delicacy if prepared right. The plan kinda sputtered out when Japan allied with Nazi Germany, but Chiune Sugihara's visas and the Shanghai ghetto made their mark on history, and they saved thousands of lives.
There's a real philosemitic strand: Den Fujita, the Japanese founder of McDonald's Japan, wrote The Jewish Way of Doing Business and exhorted readers to imitate Jewish commercial methods. Shichihei Yamamoto's The Japanese and the Jews sold over a million copies as the bestseller of 1970.* But the "Jewish corners" of Japanese bookstores also stock overtly antisemitic works, including The Secret of Jewish Power to Control the World, authored by a sitting member of the Japanese Diet. Then again, there are scholarly claims that Japanese philosemitism and antisemitism sit on the same underlying belief structure: that Jews are a uniquely powerful, unified, globally influential people. Which is... true? How you feel about it is your problem.
And Japan has its own demographic crisis, so it's not like the influx of people would be bad for them. Scraping off a few feet of top-soil from the Holy Land shouldn't be beyond the ability of modern Israel, and that's what they care about, right? Move the magic dirt and we're good. Plus given the popularity of anime and Japanese culture, it's not like there aren't going to be hundreds of thousands of weebs in Israel who'd consider Japan to be their new holy land anyway.
(The AMAI run Animatsuri at the Jerusalem Convention Center, the Israeli embassy making anime shorts(!), manga tributes to the IDF)
I wouldn't go so far as to say this is a good idea, but it's also far from the worst idea, and it's also very, very funny. If I was the ruler of the world, you bet we'd put a premium on funny. And this would put me in the good graces of the future Judeo-Hapa master race, so I'm covering all my bases.
*published under the pseudonym "Isaiah Ben-Dasan," a fictional Jewish observer who supposedly explained Japan to itself. A Japanese man writing as an imaginary Jew to tell Japanese people what they're like is almost too on-the-nose for the thesis.
Oh dear, am I allowed to say "on the nose" without accusations of either/both antisemitism or anti-Asian discrimination? I don't know.
Definitely a funny option. Though if they had somehow ended up in Taiwan as a result of this, and been right on top of computer chip production. Oy vey, imagine those rumors of Jewish control.
Clearly the only logical solution is to just swap the populations of Taiwan and Israel.
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Freddie deBoer argued that, if the purpose of Israel is to be a country where Jews will be safe forever, the US already fits the bill. If I recall correctly, he posted this article before that couple were shot dead in DC and that Egyptian guy threw Molotovs at a group of Jews, one of whom died from her injuries. I'm curious if he's revised his position any.
I think DC would need a few hundred more incidents like that in a year to rival an israeli citizen's terrorism danger. I think I'd revise my position if these sorts of incidents became neighborhood awareness of threats rather than national news. Which would maybe be around a few dozen happening each year in most or all cities, and many more happening in Jewish centers like New York.
The perpetrators are also as far as I'm aware still treated like full criminals, with no chance of them being handed off to a neighboring nation in a hostage exchange.
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I think there's plenty of places that they could have stuck the Israel project and it'd be a pure unalloyed good. Northern Australia, for instance, where there's fuck all people right now and I'd expect the Jewish diaspora to be far more productive than what's currently there. I do also feel that a lot of the Israel in the Middle East situation was impacted by the sheer amount of Oil reserves in the region, as otherwise the neighboring states would have very little scope to productively oppose the country of Israel since they are not good at creating organized affluent societies.
There's lots of places Israel would have been better off for practical purposes. But it's where it is now, and the particular land IS significant. And in practice, there was no free land; drop them in Northern Australia and aborigine advocates would hate them today (even if there were insignificant numbers of aborigines in the area).
Yeah but the Aborigines complain about the current people of the Northern Territory and have way less military and cultural clout with which to complain with.
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A real life example of this is Rhodesia. The highlands where most of the whites settled were sparsely populated because the native Africans were using wooden tools and the soil in the highlands was largely unworkable for them. After Mugabe took power he seized tons of white farmland on land where the natives had never lived.
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Yeah I also had the thought of something akin to the Indian reservation system that US has for old tribes. They get their land, they are a semi sovereign entity within US territory. And their people can choose integration or separation. The Amish and Mennonites also are able to maintain extreme religious beliefs and a separate society within America. Orthodox Judaism seems to also have thriving communities in New York city.
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I think "opposed to the existence of Israel" spans a spectrum. There are people who think Israel in its present form is an oppressive ethnostate and it needs to be reformed ("reform" meaning anything from a one-state solution to a two-state solution to various other proposals that have been floated and failed over the years), and there are people who think Israel should literally cease to exist and if that means Israelis literally ceasing to exist, oh well.
Jews and other progressives who oppose Israel on moral grounds but don't actually hate Jews tend to be more of the former; they don't like Israel, but they also tend to not like the United States, or indeed the West. But they don't want to see a bloodbath, however unrealistic the alternatives they suggest.
The actual anti-Semites, of course, tend to be in the latter category, with their answer to "What about the Israelis who live there now?" ranging from "They can all move elsewhere" to "They should die."
In all seriousness, read a few books on the topic. (I recommend reading both pro- and anti-Israel historians.) It might not convince you the Israel project was a good idea, but there are definitely reasons that made sense at the time, both ethno-religious and otherwise. Of course there were many alternative plans besides Israel itself; Uganda, Madagascar, Venezuela, and Alaska were among the proposals. It was both practical and historical reasons that lead to Israel proper being the location chosen. It may well be that it was doomed from the beginning, but for example, "Let all the Jews who want their own state move to America" was definitely not an option when the Zionist movement began in the 19th century, and it wasn't even an option for all the Jews to flee to the US after WWII.
I believe you. I'm not gonna read books on the topic. My level of interest in foreign affairs tends to drop precipitously off of a cliff somewhere at the edge of my neighborhood. Its a benefit of living in the US that I dont have to understand foreign peoples and conflicts.
Im curious if you know if any of the architects of the Israel project ever expressed regret or a moment of 'whoopsie, that was the wrong place'?
I don't know that any of the founders of Israel ever regretted it (though I am not that knowledgeable about all the personalities). Certainly they knew from the beginning that it was a fraught project that might fail. They were definitely aware the Arabs didn't want them there, though the more optimistic ones thought they'd eventually reach an accommodation and normalized relations.
The thing is, they really didn't have a lot of other choices.
Despite the fact that I am usually in the role of "Israel defender" here because the Jew-haters are so tediously disingenuous and ahistorical, I actually am not particularly invested in Israel. I wish them well but I also wish the Palestinians well - my preference would be for an impossible peace. I blame the impossibility mostly on the Palestinians, but not entirely. I also don't think the US should be so heavily invested in Israel. What do they do for us, really?
But I do like to understand where both sides are coming from. For example, I completely dismiss the "This is our ancient homeland" argument because that only plays if you are religious. Otherwise, no one has a right to land just because your ancestors lived there 2000 years ago.
That said, there are a lot of lies about Israel being a "settler-colonialist" project as well.
If you don't want to read books, my favorite current media figure speaking from the Israeli POV is Havig Rettig Gur. He has a YouTube channel and he is a Free Press columnist now. He's unabashedly Zionist, but he's very articulate and a clear explainer, without any of the anti-Arab vitriol you get from some Israel-explainers.
I wish there was an equivalent on the anti-Zionist side, but aside from people like Norman Finkelstein, there aren't many who aren't just antisemites with a coat of paint.
Isn't "this is our (somewhat less than) ancient homeland" also the entire argument for why the Palestinians should have primacy in the region over the Israelites?
Yeah, if you read mutual accounts of Israel/Palestine they both make a combination of plausible and risible claims about who was there first and who's been there longer.
There are Arab revisionists who claim that ancient Israel is a myth and the Jews literally never lived there at all (they focus on denying the Israel of the Old Testament and kind of ignore extensive Roman history- the Romans would have been surprised to learn there were no Jews in Palestine and Israel didn't exist). Zionist revisionists, for their part, will point out that small populations of Jews have existed in the region since antiquity, but try to link that to some unbroken lineage going back to King David.
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Its this sort of statement I responded to above and what kind of bothers me. There are definitely moderates on this issue. I just get the sense that you don't get to be both a moderate and get any air time in the debate. Its a toxoplasma issue and both sides spend a lot of effort amplifying the crazies on the other side, and there is plenty of crazy to go around.
This seems pretty close to the same position as all the moderate secular Jews i know. And pretty close to my position, with the added caveat that I blame more than just Israel's immediate neighbor. The Arab states in general seem like bad neighbors. Like maybe only above "african warlord" and "USSR" as a category of bad neighbor.
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It describes me, that's for sure. Israel doesn't have a right to exist actually, it has a right to try to exist; and I don't think my country should be there permanent backstop. Israel can lay in the bed it's made.
That said I would happily welcome all the jews living there not just to my country but into my state and neighborhood; the ones I disagree with politically seem like problem gamblers. Maybe if they weren't in the middle east they'd stop doing things that look so bad.
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It's not conclusive -- absent mind-reading capacity, I don’t want to convict anyone, even in my mind, of anti-Semitism. But one guideline I like to use when evaluating a vocally anti-Israel person is "have I ever heard them voice concern about human rights in Sudan, or Iran, or Belarus, or indeed Gaza? Or is it only the failings of one government that they object to?" There are people who pass this test. Not many, I would say.
You probably havent heard someone criticizing human rights in those countries because its not controversiel and no one tries to make you lose your job or blacklist you.
Zionists first came for Ms Rachel after she mentioned Gaza in a fundraiser for save the children (where she also mentioned Sudan and Congo). She has since increased her focus on Gaza (but she also posts regularly about Sudan) because that is what people do when they are being silenced for doing something than any decent person should find entirely uncontroversial.
This doesn't make any sense. If there is little or nothing in the way of negative consequences for criticizing the human rights situation in countries X, Y, and Z, one would expect -- all things being equal -- to hear MORE criticism of those countries.
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The dead giveaway is that the people ostensibly most concerned about Palestinian welfare (most of whom tend to present themselves as opposed to Hamas) tend to be the quietest when Palestinians are oppressed or victimised by anyone who isn't an Israeli, including Hamas themselves. "No Jews, no news", as the saying goes.
That being said, epistemic bubbles are absolutely a thing:
To the extent that I think Israel's military goals in Gaza were defensible, this is probably a criticism which applies to me.
My friend once said, "I get more liberal the farther away you are". Everyone's concerned about the Palestinians, but no one wants to save the Palestinians. Even less charitably, a good chunk of them are just circlejerking around the "current thing". Antisemitism may be losing its meaning, but so is Zionism. You have to believe that Epstein was Mossad's blackmail kingpin holding US elite by their predaphile balls and that Israel offed Charlie Kirk for... reasons, or you're a philosemitic goycuck. No matter your reservations with Israel's warmongering government and support for West Bank settlers.
The people who claim to be agains this but spend 10x the amount of time complaining about antisemitism are not credible.
I supposed it comes down to where you care to expend your attention, but we can just as easily invert the litmus test at the people who uncritically circulate the hare brained conspiracies I mentioned. Are they more credible?
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The point of being vocal is to change something that you can affect in the world. Americans can’t affect humans rights abuses in Iran, Belarus, or Sudan. But we could have influenced the food embargo in Gaza and stopped a few hundreds of thousands of children from starving. That would have been cool.
This seems like the opposite of correct. You could almost certainly stop human rights abuses in Belarus and Sudan with decent sized cash payments (totally not bribes). There is a plausible military path to regime change in Iran wherein a non-human rights violating government comes to power.
The only plausible path to ending human rights abuses in Palestine is by doing one big, quick, human rights abuse and shoving them all into boats and dropping them off somewhere they are not near lots of Jews. Madagascar has been floated elsewhere in this thread in other contexts. Works well for this plan.
It’s at best highly speculative that you could bribe Sudan to stop their civil war, whereas it’s obviously correct that we could have withheld our alliance to Israel (and threatened sanctions) and thus stopped the mass starvation of children. Also, America allocated 300mil to famine relief in Sudan
Withholding support from Israel doesn't mitigate the problem that they have a bunch of hostiles in land adjacent to them that use children as human shields, both literally and nutritionally.
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They absolutely can, they generally choose not to. It's not like it would even be surprising if progressives took up Sudan as a major cause du jour and demanded change! And yet.
Do you mean by being the world police? I don’t think the progressives upset about world events want American soldiers to police these places, they just don’t want America to throw their support and money behind them.
Also that we clearly have affected Iran, quite recently. Not in a way that progressives want this time, but we "can" if we choose to.
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I would still love to see evidence for these hundreds of thousands of Gazan children who starved. Most pro-Palestine people seemed to quietly drop that specific claim after the UN were forced to walk back the most explosive framing of it.
https://www.rescue.org/press-release/children-gaza-need-protection-hunger-and-injuries-surge-irc-data-shows
Polling indicated that 1 in 3 children in Gaza during the height of the blockade went full days without eating. There are 600,000 Gazans under 10 years old, meaning that 200,000 children were consciously starved by the Jewish State during the food blockaid.
No, it says that one in three children under 3 went a full day without eating in the past 24 hours (kind of an oddly phrased question, but whatever).
We can make reasonable extrapolations from this poll:
A family with limited food is not going to single out their youngest child to go without eating; the human instinct is to feed the youngest and most vulnerable. If children under 3 are going a full day without eating, then this is at minimum how long every child is going without eating. The youngest is who needs to eat the most frequently.
This poll wasn’t conducted on a day with a particularly limited amount of food, but sampled on a random day. This means they are continually going full days without eating.
Doctors who worked in Gaza have confirmed this: Mark Brauner, Tom Adamkiewicz, Nick Maynard, Joanne Perry. (These are the non-Muslim names).
Do you deny that this is starvation?
I don't deny that it's starvation, but I'm unconvinced that Israel is solely to blame for this state of affairs. I read several articles independently claiming that Hamas were seen stealing aid packages and selling them to fund their war effort.
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Well, if you can claim 6 million dead, historically that's enough for European powers to feel obligated enough to you to give you a piece of the Near East after the fact as repentance.
Clearly, the pro-Palestinian people are simply asking the EU to do that again, but this time it's the Great Satan (the US) getting in the way of the historic, millennium-old European Peoples' tradition of dictating who controls Judea.
Do what again? Award a group a piece of the Near East after 6 million of their people were killed? Which group has seen 6 million of their people killed recently?
Well, there was that time the most powerful EU member nation killed a bunch of the people currently occupying the Holy Land back in the early 1940s.
The survivors of that purge had taken that land, formerly administered by Britain (the second-biggest loser of WW2) by 1948.
You're referring to the Holocaust, I get that. When you said "the pro-Palestinian people are simply asking the EU to do that again" I interpreted that to mean "the pro-Palestine people are asking the EU to award them a piece of the Near East after 6 million of their people have been killed". But 6 million of their people haven't been killed. Or did I misinterpret you?
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This strikes me as very likely in some cases
I don't see how any of this is logical at all actually.
I have no problem with Jews, I admire their culture. Frankly, any culture that prizes educational attainment and hard work is desperately needed given how hard the West is abandoning these values.
I think the state of Israel, while in a very shitty neighborhood, is going absolutely ham to a degree that is impossible to support ethically. There are many examples of the various attrocities they have recently inflicted on Palestinians (rape, violence, blah blah blah). Also fun stuff like death penalty laws that only apply to Palestinians. Or the entire concept of West Bank settlements and the Swiss cheesing of that area. Or how gaza is levelled and the ~2mil ppl there are now pressed into less than 50% of the pre 2023 land area. It goes on...
Of course, the Palestinians, and the Arab Muslim world at large, are terrible neighbors and have inflicted lots of attrocities back on Isreal. I dislike them as well.
So in sum, I dislike everyone in that area, and I hope they resolve their problems (they never will). If I meet a Jew in real life, I'll shake their hand and hope I can get invited to Shabbat because I'm a slut for Challah.
But I also think the state of Israel is being run by essentially cartoon villains and I absolutely do not support them.
I don't understand why I have to yell loudly about not liking violence against Jews forever to demonstrate that I'm "one of the good ones". I don't like violence against Jews, people shouldn't be violent ahainst them. I dislike violence against most people.
Apart and beyond the usual level of such atrocities in any military?
What would be a more effective way to clear out Hamas bases and tunnels that are deeply embedded within civilian infrastructure, without putting your own soldiers at risk? I'm genuinely curious -- I have not been able to get a single good answer to this that isn't simply "Well, don't."
Good faith Marshall plan Gaza or actually genocide it fr.
You can't "Marshall plan Gaza" when the aid money is just going to get funneled into Hamas.
As for "actually genocide it fr",
You would start ethically supporting Israel if they went even further than doing things that you find impossible to ethically support?
I don't support them genociding Gaza, I just think it's basically one of ~two "effective" (as in, actually stops the two groups from doing everything they can to fuck with each other) options for actually ending this conflict.
Ok, so then what realistic and fair option do you actually support for ending this conflict?
I provided the two viable options I see before us.
To be clear, I do not think it is possible to achieve a "realistic and fair" solution that both parties will agree to. There's so much hostility and bad blood and history that I genuinely do not think this will ever end.
The Palestinians will suffer and occasionally lash out, the Israelis will crush them and keep them contained/mow the grass.
I anticipate, barring some black swan event, that when I die the status quo will be similar to now
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My point (made more eloquently in the linked article; I'm drunkenly paraphrasing) is that there are a lot of people who would never dream of suggesting that a hate crime targeting e.g. black people might be justified because of how a group of black people behaved in a different country. But when a hate crime targets Jews minding their own business in a country other than Israel, these same people will outright state that such violence is "only to be expected" in light of the actions of Israel (even if the targeted Jews don't hold Israeli citizenship, have never set foot in the country and have personally expressed discomfort with IDF military tactics).
A person who is opposed to the existence of Israel on philosophical grounds but who harbours no ill will towards Jews would presumably condemn anti-Semitic violence outside of Israel just as loudly as they condemn anti-black hate crimes, gay bashing etc. The fact that they tend not to do this, but rather will excuse or justify the violence in question, rather suggests that their motivating impulse is something other than a philosophical opposition to the existence of the Jewish state.
Not only would a lot of people never dream of suggesting that, the US even has a government agency that supposedly coerces people into making explicit statements regarding the denial of race as a factor in crimes committed against their families.
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Ohhhh I understand, thank you
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Modern leftist anti-semitism is not historical antisemitism. It’s an offshoot of DEI, blacklivesmatter, woke, anti white beliefs that have grown on the left. Jews are compared to normal whites even richer and more successful. And of course they mostly have white skin. Same with anti-Zionism on the left it’s fundamentally the same as anti-colonialism leftism. Unfortunately the Jews largely backed those beliefs for decades while not realizing that eventually Ashkenazi Jews have extremely high IQ on average and win more than anyone else is modern neoliberalism and this anti-whitism logic would eventually turn on them.
And yes Israel was colonialism or probably even closer to apartheid than colonialism in N America. Except they did it historically in the 20th century. N America for the most part displaced few people as it was sparsely populated similar to Argentina. Modern Ashkenazis are as much Italians as they are genetically related to the historical people of Israel. Their richer, smarter, and better at military than the people who lived in Palestine and conquered Israel in the 20th century.
I’ve got no problem with Israel except when they act against my interests. The ADL was one of the biggest promoters of anti-whitism which has now turned on their own people.
Sometimes it amazes me that the BLM crowd is so content to throw their weight behind the Palestine crowd, elements of which are also funding actual genocides of Black people in Sudan and Nigeria. But the self-centered-ness of the political activist class isn't that surprising, I guess.
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I agree with the larger point, but keep in mind "leftist anti-semitism" includes Muslim antisemitism too (meeting historical antisemitism criteria), which is given a more anodyne, anti-colonialist twist to be palatable to their white liberal peers.
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I tend to lean towards model 1, except I don't really think it was a coordinated campaign, just social incentives. Due to geopolitics of the cold war, Israel became a symbol of the west. And if there is anything the left truly loves, it's destroying symbols and hating on the west. And if you want to try and unite the working class globally, you better pick an international issue that everyone is familiar with.
The irony is that Israel is less and less representative of western culture as time goes on, given that their religious lunatics are growing rapidly as a percentage of the population. Once they pass 50%, things are gonna get very hairy over there. You think Netanyahu is bad, wait until the all ministerial positions are occupied by the Haredim.
In the meantime, we all get to deal with the absurdity of listening to "leftists" go on and on about Israel despite the fact is has nothing to do with envisioned proletariat uprisings, and that far worse atrocities are being committed in almost all non-western corners of the globe as we speak.
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I mean, I suppose I fall into this camp.
When I look at Israel's actions during the relevant time periods where support for the state has gone down, I simply think they couldn't have done anything different, or at least substantially different. Because of the way Hamas and Hezbollah operate, every square foot of an area they occupy ends up being a legitimate military target. This is, of course, famously schools, hospitals, mosques, etc. If you want to disable Hamas soldier and rockets, you basically have no choice but to bomb targets in those categories. This will then create the "wall of dead children" as you put it. IMO responsible reporting would ignore said dead children, or, if they did report, emphasize strenuously that the children were killed by Hamas's actions.
That said this isn't unique to Israel. The same tactics are deployed by American press against America all the time. The press, as a rule, does not like competency and patriotism, and the mix of competency with patriotism is particularly offensive to them. Well, Israel is both so they will be hated by the press.
Does antisemitism help drop Israel below the floor that the press can drive America to? Yes. But the press's vitriol for a winner is even more important.
How about not occupying more and more territory. How about not sponsoring jihadists in neighbouring countries. How about not turning millions of people into refugees.
Compare Northern Ireland with Israel and the difference is massive. Northern Ireland is safe while Israel is still at war.
Antisemitism has one cause, jewish behviour. Jewish behaviour is caused by an exceptionally ethnocentric religion with a mindset that makes it difficult to co-exist with any other group. Jews stick together by being in constant conflict with the rest of the world.
I don't think you're comparing apples with apples.
I also question the way you're laying 100% of the blame for the sad state of affairs at Israel's fault. I mean, when you include bangers like
Like, even if I concede that this description applies to the Jews in Israel – surely you must concede that, at the minimum, it also applies to the Palestinian Arabs? If nothing else, Jews in Israel can peacefully co-exist with each other (Israel is a significant outlier in the middle East for having experienced zero civil wars since 1948). Palestinian Arabs are such basket cases that they don't even get along with other Arabs, and inevitably end up starting civil wars whenever they're admitted into neighbouring Arab countries. If you want to say that peace in Israel and Palestine is impossible because there are two competing ethnic groups who both follow "an exceptionally ethnocentric religion with a mindset that makes it difficult to co-exist with any other group", I could understand where you were coming from. But the idea that this description only applies to the Jews and not to the Muslim Palestinians is just laughable on its face.
This is a little unfair; as you note, Jordan's civil war was with the Palestinians, and labeling that "civil" while Israeli/Palestinian conflicts are not is defensible but a bit arbitrary.
Anyway, if it's so difficult for Jews to co-exist, it would be great if they could just... have their own country which other people could avoid, right? They could even build a wall to separate them from the other groups so there's no trouble. Of course, we know how that turned out. (and it ignores the Israeli Arabs, who don't seem to be particularly worse off than minorities in many other nations)
Well sure but the Israelis also control the other side of that wall. They control the borders of the West Bank and have a whole hodgepodge of fully integrated settlements on the other side of that wall. and they've had fifty years to enunciate some sort of borders.
Other wall.
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This is a reasonable objection, but even leaving aside these marginal examples there have been a lot of civil wars, revolutions etc. just in the past eight decades.
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Funny how this one always gets trotted out, and yet all the occasions Israel offered territory back to their Arab neighbours are overlooked.
They just want 77% of Palestine with settlements in the remaining 23% while occupying the Golan heights. That is pretty much the opposite of the deal the Irish got.
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Really. What Jewish behaviors made the Holocaust necessary or justified?
I can't help but notice that he didn't say "the Holocaust was necessary or justified".
It's implied, no? He's blaming any and all hate of the Jews on their own behavior. With no antisemitism there's no Holocaust. If Jewish behavior is the only cause of antisemitism, then the Holocaust was their own fault, absolving the Nazis.
You never seen someone sperg out, and do something unjustified in retaliation to a transgression?
Are you trolling? Genocide, with decades of increasing hostility being built before it was carried out, is not a sperg out.
Come up with a better name for it, if you want, the dynamic seems the same, and the point was to show that saying a reaction was caused by something, does not actually justify the reaction, unlike what you were claiming.
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If you are going to have a specific model of antisemitism, then ideally you should have a model that explains historic instances of it rather than just a single contemporary instance. That it's a result of a downturn in public opinion of Israel as a result of Israel's actions fails to explain pre-1948 antisemitism for reasons I hope are obvious.
I can't speak for the US, but in the UK, neither Yglesias or the proposed alternative theories are a good model. the current wave of antisemitism is basically a coalition between the far-left and Islamists. The older part of the far-left have been playing at this for years, they are not new, and thus there is no rise to explain. The growth of Islamists tracks demographic changes, these types always hated Jews, there's only recently enough of them to be a relevant voting bloc. And the third group of young far-left people (somewhat disproportionately female) can't be explained without explaining why they are both going far-left and anti-Israel. From what I can tell there is nothing so uniquely capitalist about Israel that hatred of Israel is enough to make you go communist too, so the connection is better explained going the other way, perhaps by path dependency regarding still being led by the old far-left... So probably the cold, dead hand of the Soviet Union's reaction to Israel crushing a bunch of Soviet-armed Arabs in 1967 continuing to ripple through history.
I agree. Before the existence of Israel, Jews were collectively accused of spreading communism; spreading capitalism; spreading the bubonic plague; killing Christian babies to make matzo; oppressing people on behalf of the Czar; undermining support for the Czar; and probably a whole bunch of other things.
The basic rule is that whenever something is considered bad, it won't be long before the Jews are accused of it.
What unfortunately lends so much credence to the accusations of the anti-Semites is what when the claims start getting thrown around, almost 'nobody' takes to combatting them to show them why they're factually false. The implied default assumption seems to be that anti-Semites don't actually believe there's a causal arrow between the activities Jews participate in and the negative downstream consequences it stirs up in the societies they inhabit.
I 100% disagree completely with the prescription people like Sam Harris have to anti-Semitism, saying it's just a ridiculous notion to be an anti-Semite (it is) and "we need to tell these people to go fuck themselves." It completely ignores the fact that people actually believe there's a factual foundation to this and the fact that it's never counter-argued or address is often what adds continued fuel to the conspiratorial notions people have.
I think there's value in debunking false accusations, but I doubt it's going to help much. People start with their Jew hatred and then look for reasons to justify it. There are countries out there actually doing the bad stuff of which Israel is falsely accused. Are those countries hated the way Israel is?
No other country on Earth has the pedigree that they do and that's why they've attracted so much attention throughout history, beginning all the way back with the accusation of deicide in the 2nd century A.D. Most people who treat them suspiciously are not rabid anti-Semites but get roped into thinking there's "something to it," because it going unanswered as left conspiracies to fester in their minds.
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They were just thrown out of 109 countries over a span of 3000 years with similar complaints each time for no reason. If you have been thrown out of 109 bars do bouncers have a collective delusion or is your behaviour lacking?
Jews need external enemies to unite their own group. Jews are extremely ethnocentric and are loyal to their group instead of their host societies. Jews have a religion which morality is shockingly antagonistic to goyim.
I hate to pull the "akchually" card but yes I know someone who gets kicked out of bars with uncanny regularity, with no real provocation every single time. It's odd, but sometimes your luck is just consistently fucking rotten.
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Jews have disproportionate influence. They are nepotistic and work as a team for their special interest. A small dedicated lobby working for a specific issue can push the mainstream. That is what lobbying is about. It doesn't mean they are superior. There are plenty of cases in European history of one ethnic group having the upper hand in an empire over another. That doesn't require others to be inferior.
The issues with jews is that their interests are not our interests. Open borders migration and diversity makes sense for an ethnic minority protecting its interest. It doesn't benefit wider society. Promoting their ethnic subinterest over the majority's causes conflict. This is why throughout history they have been kicked out by the host population.
Christians and Muslims want to convert the non believers. The jews see the goyim as cattle with no soul.
Between this post and this one, the mods are now discussing whether you have earned the permaban you were promised last time you crashed out about Jews.
For now I am inclined to just tell you to chill out, despite the fact that I warned you no leniency would be granted last time. The reason for this is not because I think there is any chance you will moderate your behavior and stop being absolutely unhinged every time you post about Jews, but because threads about Israel and Jews always wind up here, and it's hard to say you are significantly worse than several other posters, who are more verbose and circumlocutious when they argue that Jews are monstrous and evil, but are expressing essentially the same sentiments.
The next post I see from you in the mod queue is probably going to be the trigger, though.
So just to review one more time for all our Joo-posters: you are allowed to hate Jews. You are allowed to say you hate Jews. You are allowed to advance theories about Jewish "behavior" and why they deserve hatred. But you cannot just "boo" your outgroup (e.g., Jews do this, Jews do that, Jews are blah blah blah) without pinning these accusations to specific groups. "Jews" are not a "specific group." You cannot realistically argue that there is something inherent to every single person of Jewish heritage that causes them to act a particular way. (I mean, if you want to, go ahead and present your biological/genetic evidence for this claim.) You cannot realistically argue that every single person in the "Jewish community" thinks a certain way or that everyone practicing the Jewish religion believes a certain thing. Because that is very obviously not true. So if you want go off on "Jews," you are almost certainly on thin ice, not because "Jews" are a protected class but because we mod people for doing exactly the same thing wrt every other group.
As always, you must proactively provide evidence in proportion to the inflammatory nature of your claims, and since claiming that an entire ethnic group is inherently treacherous, malevolent, and hostile to "our" interests is clearly inflammatory, you need to very diligently dot your i's and cross your t's every single time. And you don't.
Just as an example:
Really? "The Jews"? All Jews? All religious Jews? All Jews who are culturally Jewish regardless of their religious inclinations? You can argue (as some people do) from selected Talmudic excerpts that there is a strain of Judaism that considers "goyim as cattle with no soul." I think this is pretty clearly bad-faith cherry picking and you still need to, you know, point at the actual scriptures that say this (even @coffee_enjoyer only manages to produce some distorted and disputable texts to argue that that's what the nefarious Jews actually mean), but there are at least words you can point to as evidence that some Jews think things like this. There are rabbis who shitpost on Twitter and you can say "See, some Jews talk shit about goys."
But that's not sufficient evidence to claim "An ancient text says this, therefore all Jews believe this." Or "A prominent rabbi said this, so this is representative of what Jews think and we can indict them all on the basis of his words." It should go without saying that such standards would indict essentially every religious or ethnic group. But we've been over this before. Jew-haters gonna hate, but we're still going to apply the rules. Evenly.
You continue to post on very thin sufferance.
Funny how we have other people openly post about genociding Palestinians and that doesn't seem to get anyone banned.
Searching for the exact term "muslims believe" leads to 314 search results on the motte. Many of these comments are negative. There are over a thousand comments with the phrase "Russians are". Do they need specification as well?
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Yes. And so “Jews” are like any other group in such regard. Whether you or I think it’s legitimate for them to do so is beside the point. You’re describing basic behavior.
Do I dislike particular Jews because they advocate politics antithetical to my own? Yep. Do I dislike them because they follow the religion of Judaism? No. Unless you’re telling me what you’re really against are Zionists, in which case I’m with you there.
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And even worse: things which were once considered bad when Jews did them may later come to be considered good, but new infractions will be discovered or invented to pin on Jews so that their perceived moral status among gentiles never improves.
For many centuries, Christians were forbidden to lend money, so if a Christian wanted to borrow money, he had to borrow from a Jewish moneylender (cue centuries of stereotypes about greedy Jews). Over time, Christian countries liberalised and secularised, and now there are just as many gentile moneylenders as Jewish ones, if not more so. But has this resulted in a rehabilitation of Jews in the gentile imagination, or an acknowledgement that it was wrong to stereotype Jews as greedy when in many cases they were completely shut out of many lines of work other than finance? Has it fuck. Gentiles are allowed to engage in the behaviours that resulted in the "greedy Jew" stereotype without incurring any of the associated negative status.
It's such transparently rigged, unfair bullshit.
What you're leaving out of the story is that Jews were also forbidden from lending money at interest (all Abrahamic faiths were, though the only ones trying to stick to it nowadays are the Muslims) they just weren't forbidden from lending money at interest to the goyim. This dynamic is at the root of a lot of the antipathy between the groups.
Right. But we're now at the point where Gentiles feel no qualms about lending money at interest either to each other or to people of differing faiths. Probably there are thousands if not millions of people who've chanted "from the river to the sea" who support themselves by lending money at interest.
Group A despises Group B. When asked to explain the reason behind their antipathy, Group A explains they hate Group B because Group B does Activity X to Group A. Subsequently, Group A decides that Activity X isn't such a bad activity after all, and starts doing it to Group B (among other groups) e.g. a Jewish family who takes out a mortgage with a Gentile-owned bank. However, Group A's antipathy towards Group B doesn't budge an inch.
Doesn't this strongly suggest that Group A's antipathy towards Group B really has nothing to do with Activity X, and it's just a convenient pretext to ostracise a group they wanted to harass for unrelated reasons?
You could say that activity X has nothing to do with it, but not in the way you wish to imply. The actual issue was the dynamic where an activity is seen as corrosive to society by both groups, so one of them bans it universally, and the other bans it only within the ingroup. I don't know how you can claim it's a "convenient pretext", one group is clearly defecting, and has no right to whine about their defection being recognized as such.
The activity being no longer recognized as harmful due to changing socio-economic circumstances does not change the fact that one of the groups was defecting. And even though that particular activity is no longer controversial, the defection dynamic causing the conflict is still observable today.
How are the Jews defecting now?
By majority-supporting progressive policies for other nations, while opposing them for their own communities.
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?? The greedy jew stereotype is the butt of jokes, not something people seriously hold. Serious antisemites are much more likely to rant about dual loyalty or jews r pedos conspiracy theories.
In the last three years I have seen plenty of people discussing in complete seriousness how all of the banks and financial institutions are controlled by Jews and that this is bad.
American Jews are more than 10x over-represented in wholesale financial services, and there are substantial parts of the industry (though not close to a majority) where access to senior positions is gated by Jewish social networks.
This is a long way from Jews controlling finance, but when you can't safely tell the truth except on a pseudonymous online forum or in left-wing spaces dominated by machine politicians elected by unassimilated immigrants from Goatfuckistan, it isn't surprising that people postulate a more powerful conspiracy than the one that actually exists.
The same applies to Hollywood and probably the US MSM more broadly.
Hollywood has been kicking out Jews because of diversity initiatives. Just about all Jews are white in this context.
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Forgetting that Marx was jewish and that the Russian revolution was at least as jewish as it was Russian. Jews are an ethnocentric outsider group that is loyal to itself. It isn't odd that they are accused of not being loyal to the society as a whole.
Yes, it is.
Apply that standard to literally any other group. Marx was dead for decades before the Russians got to him. Might as well say the U.S. is a white supremacist state.
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I'm going to ask that you kindly capitalize the word "Jewish," consistent with normal English usage for the last 100 years. I am well aware that you are one of the Jew haters we are talking about, but to me this is just insulting "boo-outgroup" nonsense.
In any event, although I am skeptical that the Communist movement in Russia was majority Jewish, I would certainly not dispute that it was disproportionately Jewish. Although you claim to want to forget it (which I don't believe), I think it is worth thinking about. "Spreading communism" is one of those excuses to hate Jews but not the real reason. If it were the real reason, then why did the Soviet Union persecute its Jewish population? They should have been ecstatic that it had a subgroup that was so gung-ho.
This is another justification which is not the real reason for anti-Semitism. For starters, it does not explain the ferocious hatred towards Israel. Nor does it explain anti-Semitism in societies where Jews make great efforts to assimilate. Nor does it explain the various blood libels against Jews over the years.
Of course, I am also well aware that you no doubt have other rationalizations for your hatred of Israel. For example, they bomb hospitals (which just so happen to be bases of operations for anti-Israel terrorists). They "steal land" (which mainly consists of Jews going back to live in areas from which they had been ethnically cleansed within living memory). All of these ridiculous false accusations against Israel, combined with silence over behavior from other countries which actually do horrible things but are completely ignored shows that these are but rationalizations.
The inescapable conclusion is that anti-Semites such as yourself start with your hatred of Jews and then look for ways to justify it. That there is literally nothing the Jews can do (short of disappearing) which would change your mind.
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Both can be true. That people will deem Israel guilty no matter the facts and that Israel is doing its best to not win the hearts and minds of the western populace.
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Like any other form of bias, it both affects how people interpret events and is affected by events themselves. Compare to political partisanship: the public's interpretation of political scandals (of varying levels of real or fake) is obviously enormously affected by both their personal political views and the political views of the media sources and social circles they trust. You can probably think of plenty of cases where very similar actions have been interpreted differently by partisans and biased organizations depending on which party they're associated with. At the same time it's not completely detached from reality, not everyone is maximally partisan so there really are actions you can take to make your political party more or less popular.
That doesn't mean being generically "likable" is the best strategy either, you can also do things like decrease the influence of your political enemies or do things that have a real-world impact that people like even if they don't like the policy in abstract. If Trump successfully changed the political leanings of mainstream media institutions, or Israel successfully helped the Iranian protestors take over the government, then that would help their popularity more than it pissed people off so long as it didn't require doing anything really unpopular like mass-arresting journalists or using nuclear weapons. Conversely if Israel made all palestinians citizens that would make the population of Israel a lot more anti-jewish despite it being "likable". Anti-white bias has had a recent surge in influence via the growth of the social-justice movement despite sustaining itself on stuff like "police are allowed to defend themselves and sometimes make mistakes" and "the 1955 lynching of Emmett Till", sometimes an influential ideology really does hate you enough that you'll make more progress by trying to fight that ideology than by playing nice. Anti-Israel bias isn't as detached from their recent actions, at least not in the west, but it's a reminder that determining the net impact of an action long-term is more complicated than checking popularity polls.
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The inevitable fate of basically every term is to be distorted both as an attack and distorted as a defense. The strategy of both Israel and the actual antisemites has been the same here, to link Israel and the general Jewish population as inherently linked.
Israel links them as a defense to criticism of their actions. The antisemites link them as a way to smear general Jews. But they both do agree, the two are linked.
The Israel strategy actually worked for a short time, just like the woke strategy did. The general US population was generally supportive of Israel! Just like they were generally supportive of some DEI policies. But now views have effectively reversed in the US and antisemitism is growing. The "your criticisms are bigoted" defense only seems to work for a short period, eventually they start speaking up again and some even turn more bigoted in response, especially since the defense is also "the two are linked". Israel after all has told people who have problems with their behavior, that they must also have problems with Jews in general.
Let's go over the two theories you put as well
Then one must ask why is this anti Israel misinformation so much more potent now? It's not as if antisemitic propaganda is a new phenomenon, what has changed to make it more effective? I've shared one of my theories above.
You also gotta appreciate the irony here of "we need more control over information" given the common antisemitic trope of Jews wanting control over information.
So again, why is antisemitism apparently increasing then? It's the same exact question that leftists fail to answer when companies raise their prices due to "greed". If it's such an intrinsic thing, what is the difference between now and then?.
Meanwhile "Israeli actions actually do impact how people view Israel" is a pretty strong explanation for why people change their views. Maybe stuff like letting soldiers who sexually assaulted and abused a prisoner on video get off scot free might actually make people dislike you. Maybe some people who would otherwise support you don't like it when there's video of your soldiers shooting a young boy, standing around not rendering aid, and seemingly framing him by placing a rock near to say he was throwing it.
Another hypothesis I want to consider is the switch from text-based news and commentary to audiovisual news and commentary. It's easy enough to defend Israel over text. Jews needed a place to go after the holocaust. Mandatory Palestine had a thriving Jewish community thanks to the British and early Zionists. The PLO did a lot of extraterritorial terrorist attacks you can rattle off. They bombed a damn pizza place. It's not until you've seen the bombed-out remains of Gaza or Lebanon, talked to the guy in the West Bank who used to have an olive grove on the other side of that hill but can never get to it ever since the settlers moved in, and seen the literal walls that separate the Jewish part of Hebron from the Arab part of Hebron that you realize what a mess the whole thing turned into.
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Woke.
That could explain anti-Israel/antisemitism sentiment growing among the left but those views are not exclusive to the left. But weirdly enough among some groups, there is a negative correlation from embracing anti-Israel and embracing the antisemitic views.
So seemingly the woker you are, the more anti Israel you are but less antisemitic. Or at least less explicit in it.
You basically answered your own question.
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Yes, and people conflating this with historical antisemitism are pretty clearly off the mark. You can't explain it with reference to, idk, shylock or the dreyfus affair (do 5% of Americans know who alfred dreyfus was?)
To the antiracist left/liberal, Jews are white colonialists and Arabs are brown natives. There is very little that the oppressed can do against their oppressors that deserves full-throated condemnation.
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You've got two classes here: Anti-semites and Israelis, and you note that both of them want to link Israel to the general jewish population.
The general jewish population is also a class, no? What do they want with regard to the connection of Israel and themselves?
Do you, personally, believe that Israel has a right to exist as "a Jewish and Democratic state"?
Do you, personally, believe that a state can in practical terms be both "Jewish" and "Democratic" in the commonly-understood definitions of those terms? That is, assuming the general positive-valence progressive understanding of "Democracy" as a social system, do you think "Democracy" is broadly compatible with an explicit ethno-state?
What are the bounds of discourse? It's pretty clear how much criticism of Israel is acceptable to Israel (little to none) and how much is acceptable to antisemites (almost all to all). I think it's pretty clear that the general jewish population likewise has something like coherent bounds on the amount of criticism of Israel they consider acceptable; are those bounds closer to the Israeli limits or the antisemite limits?
You appear to want to limit this discussion to Israel and the Antisemites, since both of these are your outgroup. But the general jewish population is a cohesive social cluster, and one that is not, to put it delicately, a complete stranger to the organization and exercise of political power. My observation is that the general jewish population is strongly supportive of Israel as a state, as they have been for decades. Criticism of specific actions of Israel or its agents does not change this fact.
I used to be very strongly pro-Israel. I went very strongly anti-Israel when I went blue. Now I am committed to, as best as I am able, no longer having an opinion on the matter either way. If your strategy is otherwise, I wish you the best with dodging the antisemite label yourself, but do not expect your dodging to work. I do not think you or your coalition generally will be able to carve out a stable middle-ground where "antisemite" retains its negative valence and yet effective, consequential criticism builds toward an effective social consensus. I think a major reason this will not happen is because the general Jewish population does not want it to happen, and will organize against you to keep it from happening. When they start calling you a Nazi, know that to at least a minor extent, you have my sympathies, and my hope that the experience is educational for you.
Rights are irrelevant. It is impossible to have a Jewish, democratic state in the territory currently controlled by Israel because that territory contains more Palestinians than non-Haredi Jews, and without a genocide (real or technical) is likely to continue to do so. (And even if a multiethnic democracy with Jewish character was possible, neither Israeli Jews nor Palestinians have any interest in attempting it).
Both the current governing coalition in Israel (led by Netanyahu) and the most popular opposition party (led by Naftali Bennett) claim to be committed to a Jewish state including the vast majority of the West Bank, which implies either permanent apartheid (with the Palestinians continuing to be treated worse than any minority group in any country which expects credit for being a "democracy") or a Final Solution to the Palestinian problem. I don't think either Bennett or Netanyahu or most of their supporters are actually thinking in terms of Final Solutions, but Netanyahu's coalition includes Kahanists who definitely are and Bennett ran on a joint list with them before he adopted big-tent anti-Netanyahu politics.
None of this implies that that the current Israeli government is as evil as Hamas, but when Germany play Argentina in the World Cup you don't have to hold your nose and root for the lesser evil, if you are a good person you can go touch grass, and if you are a bad person you can buy popcorn and root for injuries.
Absolutely, and inside-the-Green-Line Israel was (and still is, in so far as it can be conceived of separately from the West Bank settlements). A democracy whose character reflects the shared culture of the voting majority while acknowledging the rights as individual humans and citizens of members of ethnic minorities is a solved problem. But building that Jewish democracy was only possibly with a supermajority-Jewish population.
This is the sort of answer I would expect, yes.
How did that particular chunk of land get to be supermajority Jewish? If we handwave how it was established, what policies are acceptable in keeping it supermajority Jewish? If they build a wall and refuse all non-jewish immigrants, is that an acceptable policy just for them, or should other states be permitted to act in a similar way?
My point is obvious, I think; progressive values and principles are flatly incompatible with the function and form of Israel as a state, this incompatibility is severe enough that it probably cannot be maintained in the long term, and that this fact presents a serious dilemma to western Jewish people who have heretofore been closely aligned with progressive politics.
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It's never, ever, coming home, mate.
In the spirit of this bet, I wonder whether peace will come to the Middle East before England wins a World Cup. But sports fandom isn't supposed to be rational, and I don't bet on England games for that reason. A hundred years of hurt isn't going to stop me dreaming...
For whatever it's worth, I had basically lost all hope by 2022 and "we" then proceeded to win the world cup and then elect a libertarian.
Gotta keep dreaming.
From your n=1 sample, how has that changed, for better or worse, your daily life?
In the very short term, my relative salary went down, since there was a "price rearrangement" (lots of inflation without currency devaluation) and I was working for a foreign company. Later on, said adjustment meant professional salaries became competitive enough to the point of being able to get a job here, which is convenient for a variety of reasons. Most of my peer group's (of those that hadn't already emigrated) income was significantly boosted. Also, wokeness stopped being institutionally mandated and electorally viable, which is nice.
Overall my purchasing power has diminished (eating out is more expensive, as is meat), but it's compensated with a variety of psychological benefits.
This is, of course, how it affected me personally, and I am fairly isolated from the negative effects of most governments, if you want my opinion of the overall impact: as with all Trumpian Bargains, it has been a mixed bag, but I think it was overall very positive, and I'm optimistic. That being said, it has been a very painful process for a lot of people, and I'm kind of proud (of the people) that the midterms were as good as they were despite this.
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The world cup or the government change?
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I wouldn't say the general Jewish population is as easy of a class to read here. Lots of individual Jews will have different opinions with different nuances. It might statistically skew one way or the other, but there will be important variance from one to another.
Israel is easy because it's specifically the actions and rhetoric of the current Israeli government. Antisemites is an easy class simply due to the category itself (when properly applied) inherently being people who would want the Jews to look bad and be hated.
I think it can be democratic and made up primarily of Jews, but I agree that explicit ethno-state and democracy struggle to be compatible with one another. Especially one based at least somewhat around religion. It's unlikely, but what if a significant portion of the citizens turned Buddhist or something? Seems to me they still should have a voice.
I disagree, even with the people who "support Israel as a state" lies a ton of different nuance. Supporting the concept of Israel as a safe space for the Jewish people doesn't necessarily mean they support all of the expansionism or genocidal policies of the current Israeli government. Heck, one of the most rabidly anti Israeli left wingers I know is an ethnic Jew himself. That's not very common, but this is the sort of thing I mean by not wanting to treat Jews as a "cohesive class". There's lots of different parts to the topic and different people will have various nuanced views on each. And people can change their minds too so I'm not gonna write everyone off from their ethnicity. Hell even within Israel, some of the literal soldiers committing abuses have come to regret it. Now there comes a point where forgiveness isn't enough, and abusing/murdering innocents is far past that line but it is a display of how people do change their views.
Lots of individuals having different opinions with different nuances is irrelevant, when the sum of those nuances skews heavily one way or the other. I'm reliably informed that ten Jewish people will hold eleven different positions on a topic, and yet our government consistently provides large-scale economic and military aid to Israel, provides Israel with powerful diplomatic cover, and even, in your assessment, fights wars on Israel's behalf, and it does not appear to me that the general jewish population is interested in seeing these policies change. It is evident to me that one of the strongest bulwarks against these policies changing has been accusations of antisemitism against those advocating such changes.
From my perspective, the question is whether the category is properly applied, and what you intend to do if you find it is being misapplied. If you or your coalition could meaningfully police the application of the term to only those areas where it was appropriate, the problem could easily be solved. But the problem is that Antisemitism is, at its core, a term that the general jewish population owns, and to the extent that they in general disagree with you over where and when it should be applied, the sum of their opinions will be dispositive.
In your view, what does the phrase "general [x] population" mean, and why do you use it if you believe that it can be overridden by anecdotal examples?
I often find that my ingroup contains infinite, fractal complexity when criticisms of its collective behavior are presented, so it seems we are as brothers in this matter. And yet, I also find that large-scale populations are capable of coordinated action in the pursuit of long-term goals. If I can engage productively with criticisms of Christians or Muslims, men or women, Blues or Reds, Boomers or "the kids today", it is not obvious to me why "the general jewish population" alone should be an amorphous enigma of which no concrete critique can be made, other than the observation that when such critiques are made, the person making them is inevitably labeled an antisemite.
I don't doubt that some of them have. I do doubt that the general jewish population is interested in bolstering that regret through actual policy consequences. I think many Israelis regretted their involvement in the Sabra and Shatila massacres; I saw a movie they made about it once. And yet, I note that such regret did not result in legible justice toward those involved, and the commander who coordinated their involvement still got to be Prime Minister, and most of those who thought this was a bad thing did not, for example, think it was a bad enough thing to really do much about it.
It does not seem to me that these observations amount to "writing off people for their ethnicity"; no society is perfectly just, but some societies are trying for something I recognize as justice, and other societies are not. If you consider Israel an unjust society, what do you think should happen as a consequence? What do you think will happen as a consequence? What role do you expect the general Jewish population to play in the transition from ought to is?
This is true, but it does not mean that those accusations have been false.
And certainly there are a lot of American Jews who don't like Netanyahu or don't like various actions Israel has taken. There are very few who want Israel to cease to exist as a Jewish state.
When considering the culture war as a whole, would you say that accusations of racism or sexism have generally been false?
Yes. This is my point. There are significant differences between "I don't like this" and "I think something should be done about this" and "I am willing to fight to see something done about this". With regard to the general Jewish population, negative attitudes toward Israel cluster around the first of these, and the last of these are very, very rare.
There certainly have been more false claims than true ones. Though not evenly distributed. For anti-semitism as applied to those opposing support for Israel, I believe the claims are mostly true in the US -- the bulk of the people actively opposing supporting Israel (as a whole; many will argue over details) are anti-semitic, and most of the rest are useful idiots who don't know which river or what sea.
I don't recall whether you've laid out your political history in the past. Were you a blue, once upon a time? Did you have the experience of getting in a fight with other blues, and reaching for common ground and solidarity, only to have those appeals rejected out of hand because your refusal to get in line was considered proof that you were an ist or a phobe of some description? If you did, how did it incline you toward the people who treated you so?
Back in the day, before I made the decision to no longer have opinions on the subject, I lost count of the times I was called a nazi and an antisemite for arguing in favor of what appeared to me to be basic, foundational moral and legal values when it came to Israel's policies and the behavior of its agents. I stopped having those arguments, and indeed stopped consuming news about Israel or its various conflicts, because I realized I was becoming legitimately antisemitic through frustration and disgust with the behavior of my opposites and their coalition. And for what it's worth, with some years of remove, I can recognize that I bought into extremely foolish underdog narratives of the other side, and gave them a pass for their own crimes and atrocities because they were committed against the side I saw as more in the wrong. This was stupid, but it didn't spring from congenital hatred of Jews, it came from the observation of entrenched and fattened callousness and injustice. You might say I believed I was judging them by the content of their character.
Now, I no longer have an opinion on the subject. This statement is not a pose or a linguistic strategy; I do not want and will not allow myself to have an opinion, to root for a side. I have done my best to cauterize the portion of my brain previously dedicated to such concerns, and this is a policy I intend to maintain for the rest of my life. My conclusion is that the land is cursed, and people generally would be well-advised to live elsewhere.
That being said, as someone who has been through this from the opposite side and is watching the shifting sands of ideology, I think the sort of reflexive dismissal you and many others have deployed on this topic doesn't seem like it's working well long-term.
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I don't understand these questions and you seem reasonable and have good takes.
What if my answers are:
yes, kind of. I don't really think any state has a "right" to exist all that much. However I think states that are able to enforce their existence on planet earth should probably exist, and I'm generally against people trying to make other states not exist, even if they perhaps could pull it off.
absolutely. I think Isreal can be run by Jews and have leaders elected by popular vote. You could also absolutely have an ethnostate that has a democracy. I don't think "universal suffrage" is required for democracy, although it is preferable.
These questions seem so basic I feel like I'm missing something.
I'm not FCfromSSC, but a common belief, I'd argue a defining belief, of modern progressivism, and even most of the center left, is that democracy is invalid when people either vote for specific positions or vote for leaders who espouse specific positions.* Witness how, and this it not just in the US, the terms 'democratic' and 'populist' are very much separate terms with 'populism' being argued to be anti-democratic since its policy go against what is considered valid in a democracy by the mainstream progressive left. You can even see this outside of the US: if you read El País (rough Spanish equivalent to the NYT) they describe pretty much every figure on the right as an 'Ultra' and talk about how they are all dangerous to democracy.
Almost all left wingers, especially those described as 'woke', consider ethno-nationalism to be illiberal enough that it's just not a valid/democratic platform to have. This is both openly stated by most left wingers, and it is even the law in many European countries that explicit arguments for an ethnostate are hate speech. If you apply woke standards to Israel, the entire project is considered illegitimate because the nation is literally founded on the "undemocratic" principle of ethnonationalism. Some center left figures ideologically argue that Israel deserves a carveout or the above viewpoint shouldn't be applied everywhere, but the straightforward application of 'wokism', or even the center left viewpoint on ethnonationalism, is that the political system of Israel is founded on undemocratic principles and is thus illegitimate.
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And those “left center” or whatever you want to call them group of bloggers have been posting for days that Dems need to drop Israel because Israel is not doing enough for Democrats. Some reason this reminds me of the quote “fairness feels like oppression when your use to privilege”. Jews and Israel have been in voting and dollars backing Dems at about an 85% rate for decades. They still found support on the right because of Evangelicals end time stuff and I think a general feeling on the right that Jews in the ME are better friends than Muslims.
I think we are at a point where Jews/Israel are going to have to decide which party they back and won’t be able to play both sides anymore. I am tired of Jews running an ethnostate and opposing the West from shutting down immigration. At this point I think the Jews have no choice but to go hard right. The current forces on the left in the west love brown and unsuccessful people. The Jews are too rich and white to have a seat with the Dems.
I am disappointed Trump hasn’t struck a harder bargain with Israel. I can love the Jews if their money and political power goes all in on white nationalism. Anyway Yglesias an Noah Smith etc are saying the Jews need to do more for Dems if the want backing for Israel and I’ve been saying the opposite that we need more support from them if they want support from MAGA.
I think Yglesias just realizes Israel/Jews are unpopular with the left and pushing them out of the Democrats has political benefits but he’s acting it’s like the Jews left the Dems instead of the Dems turning against Jews first.
If we went back in time the only way Israel could fix their political problems would be backing tough border enforcement in Europe and the rest of the west. The US and Europe being filled with third worlders always meant the left would eventually become anti-Israel. And then the right wouldn’t despise Israel for backing immigration.
Why would you frame it as "playing both sides" when whites, hispanics, and Asians also voted for both parties last election?
Dems are demanding it for one (Yglesias)[https://x.com/mattyglesias/status/2045619973586837717?s=46]
And second interests groups do tend to only support one party. Catholics only vote GOP. Evangelicals GOP. Blacks Dem. Historically Jews Dem. Sure you can say this isn’t 100% support but these group have been 85% voting and donating to one party.
Why should the GOP back Israel when Dems won’t yet 85% of Jews vote Dem and donate to Dems. Politics is transactional.
To what extent are American Jews in support of Israel? Seems like a very sizable contingent of them think there is a genocide in Gaza, which sounds like they belong right in the D camp. Why should GOP (or Dem) treatment of Israel be influenced by Jewish American voters any more than, say, their treatment of China is influenced by Chinese American voters?
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Whites, Hispanics, and Asians are not single-issue voters. "Jews/Israel" really means Ethnocentric-Israel-Single-Issue-Voters. Up until recently, their single issue hasn't been an issue -- being impartial to either party.
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Matt is just saying a tone-policed version of "Do better." to Israel. Of course Israel wouldn't want to hear that! And alternative theory 1 is just "How can Israel get what it wants?"
Mentioning such obvious facts like "actions are related to public opinion" does you no good. Saying "Actions determine public opinion" is a normative statement ("Do better.") disguised as a factual one.
Zionist model of antisemitism is the same as the basic model of all -isms: due to various antisemitic biases, people hold Israel to high and unfair standards.
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What Yglesias stated -- that "that global perceptions of Israel are totally unrelated to Israeli conduct" is false -- is almost vacuously true. The implication -- as you said "the best way for Israel to fix its public relations problem is to change its actions vis-a-vis the Palestinian issue and foreign policy" is false. We're in a situation where Israel is blamed everything it does regardless of reason or justification and many things it hasn't done (in particular, "genocide"). It's opponents are not held responsible for anything they do. Israel changing their actions -- aside from taking actions which would result in them ceasing to exist -- would not fix its public relations problem.
I'm in camp 1.
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