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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 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."
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.
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.
I consider Ashkenazi and Sephardic Jews white. But there are a few hundred thousand Ethiopian Jews in Israel, and more Mizrahi Jews than Ashkenazi. I doubt most pro-Palestine people could reliably tell the difference between a Palestinian Arab and a Mizrahi Israeli just from a photo.
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