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Notes -
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.
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 would 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'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.
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.
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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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