I was at a pro-Palestine campus protest and there were times where I was instinctively uncomfortable because they were really hammering in the whole bit about reported ‘antisemitic action on campus’ being a non-issue and I had to remind myself that they aren’t talking about people acting against Jews, they’re talking about people acting against Israel.
It’s my most personal and privileged grievance against Israel. I no longer know if a supposed threat to my safety is a bullshit bludgeon to silence pro-Palestine voices or if the yank reich is actually in town and I need to commute for the rest of the week.
I’ll never forgive them for it. I’ll never forgive them for a lot of things, but this is the most personal grievance I have, and since I’m born and raised a cracker suburbanite, it’s the only one I truly, directly feel in my personal life.
I don’t want this to override, you know, the actually important grievances that are at stake for Palestine here, and I don’t want to make myself the center of this issue when I’m very much not at all, but I guess I’ve just been stewing in this for a bit, and I want to uncap it before it somehow causes me to become a weird crank through lack of addressing the root of the issue and it festering into my belief system 
I think my least favorite aspect of this is being told it is in fact I, the anti-zionist jew, who is the antisemite and self-hating jew because I don’t want to support zionist genocide. just makes me see red. I don’t know how they justify it to themselves.
I feel the same way
It’s the same projection as when they accuse Hamas of war crimes, every one of their accusations is a confession
From an idealist liberal perspective: We are all familiar with the concept of the separation of church and state, but I think the common conception of this is a fear of the church corrupting the state. I think a lot less consideration is put into the countless ways the state corrupts the church.
I met a Palestinian in college in my freshman year who told me all about how badly they had been treated growing up, and it forever changed my outlook about the conflict.
College campuses are the only place in America where there’s a chance to break through the propaganda
I get it. I’ve seen a lot of dismissal of antisemitism as a serious issue since the conflict started, which has led to some actual very concerning antisemitic garbage making its way into the discourse; thankfully not here of course.
Stop making it about individual people, make it about an entire nation. Best way to do it, IMO.
Israel has excellent propaganda.
Pro tip, when someone is actually being antisemitic everyone just says ‘wow, that nazi is a real piece of shit’
I’ve yet to encounter accusations of antisemitism in the wild that wasn’t coming from someone thar was also incoherently, unspeakably furious that every country in the middle east with edible hummus hadn’t been bathed in nuclear fire yet, or that enough children hadn’t been orphaned. A deeply sick culture
There is something very sick about an ethnostate crying antisemitism. These people have more in common with the Nazis that did genocide against the Jews than the actual Jews. Yet they’ll use their suffering as a shield. It’s messed up.
This anti-German rhetoric is getting out of hand!
-Adolf Hitler
He literally did say that. Nazis were going on about reverse racism generations before any CHUD.
Frankly I think everyone should be much more racist against germans
One thing I’ve been thinking of recently is the parallel between how much both Israel and Nazi Germany have and had a mythos of being victims as a major part of their identity. I will need to investigate other fascist societies to see if this is a common trend among them or if this is just coincidence
Fascists are always self-victimizing, it’s always the Jews or the British capitalists (for Italy) or the immigrants and/or Muslims (modern western fascists) that are supposedly attacking the homeland and giving a basis for revanchism.
It’s a silly reference, but I remember Jacob Geller’s video on the ideology of Call of Duty, where he does a decent job of demonstrating how it so centers on a politics of aggrievement by foreign enemies necessitating a response of brutal violence by the US, where all the atrocities committed by the latter are the “hard choices” and “dirty work” needed to protect the country.
It’s the kind of thing that if Israel didn’t exist and you read this in a book you would think the writer is being heavy handed and unrealistic
Reactionaries using the language of the oppressed to claim they’re the real victims is very common. :(
It’s entirely intentional on Israel’s part that Jewish diaspora are made to feel unsafe and should thus “return home” to fill in all the curiously vacant land they have just waiting to be claimed. So it’s two birds being knocked out with one stone.
“muh anti-isreal = antisemetism!!111!!1”
Funny because the way isntreal has treated the indigenous arab semetic minority ethnic groups which were living on the Palestinian land they stole would make the nazis and americans nod in approval. The conflation of Israel with Judaism and the normalization of the genocide which was intentionally carried out to bring it into existence, has been one of the most successful western liberal psyops as of late.
Just had this exact discussion in the bulletin thread.
Anti semetism means nothing any more. It’s a been used as a weapon for decades now and i think we are at the point where it just doesn’t hold weight.
nah, it still has its old (real) meaning. and i think europe’s gonna remind the world what real antisemitism looks like soonish. when the collapse really starts to hurt their fascists, they’ll rediscover their roots.
the Ukrainians for example are real anti-semites
also we’ve had anti semitism in Europe ever since the romans decided that anyone who won’t worship the roman gods is also unfilial and plotting against roman society it’s not going away easy
yep. as i like to say, antisemitism is an older “pillar” of european culture than christianity.
I have spent my whole fucking life punching Nazis, sometimes literally (do you know how hard nazis are on your nail polish? It’s a real sacrifice.) And every time, there’s some dumbass undergrad in the org who conflates support of Palestine with anti-semitism and has to be gently given a visit from cadre.
Israel’s continuing fall into mask off Fascism is amazing.
Even 15 years ago you could find many leftists who were, despite many reservations, willing to support a two-state solution with a right of return, and who acknowledged that Israel at least started with some utopian socialist ideals mixed in with the horrifying settler colonialism and ethnic cleansing of local inhabitants. Like, they had the fucking holocaust as a line of moral credit and successive Israeli governments have done everything they possibly can to burn through that goodwill.
I remember when BDS happened I was against it, not because I thought it was anti-semitic but because I thought it was counter-productive (it wasn’t, I was wrong). And the sheer volume of rhetoric against anyone who so much as didn’t immediately change their entire diet to Max Brenner hot chocolates was horrific. And it just keeps escalating as support for Israel crumbles among ordinary people.
(not going to debate-bro you, genuinely curious)
What was your reasoning at the time that made you think BDS is counterproductive?
It’s a bit hard to remember at such a remove, but there was more hope of pressuring leftist organisations inside Israel to support at least a right of return.
Also i was significantly more Council-com at the time and knew a lot of Syndicalists and Chomsky was against it, not because he thought it was bad but that support for right of return and other demands of BDS could backfire due to lack of public understanding of the conflict. His reasoning was that Israel was not an apartheid state, it was a genocidal state. South Africa needed the Bantustans to provide cheap labour, and was thus open to international censure on their existance. Israel would very much like Gaza and the West Bank to stop existing and increased international pressure might result in “May as well send in the tanks now and wait out the backlash” rather than a forced negotiation.
Also, the general opinion was that localised boycotts of vocally pro-setter businesses were appropriate, but that more robust boycotts would be tarred as a prelude to Kristallnacht by right-wing and pro-israel press (as, indeed, they were). In any case, the public education for a boycott wasn’t there.
So instead, efforts should be made to increase diplomatic censure and engage in anti imperialist action to reduce weapons shipments. The argument here being that Israel needed those shipments to maintain existence and were thus a single point of failure.
These were all dumb, because it turned out all Israeli political factions were pro genocide. The US will never stop weapons shipments to anyone, and BDS has in fact accomplished the public education effort Chomsky said was a precondition, despite a substantial propaganda effort against it.
anti-apartheid rap idea:
yo yo yo Zionists be the real antisemites
(but actually though, the idea that Jews have some homeland that’s far, far away from Europe while Christians are home wherever they find themselves is blantant antisemitism)
The jewish community in Graz uninvited the communist party from their holocaust memorial day, because they where against the raising of the israeli flag on the city hall. So many jewish anti zionist communist (bundisten) where killed in the holocaust and also a lot of communists (in germany about 20% of the communist party members ~70,000) where killed in the concentration camps and even before. What disgrace these zionists are.
It’s a serious problem and a criticism that doesn’t get levied at Israel enough. Antisemitism is a serious and rife problem still in the world, but so long as it keeps getting leveraged by a nation (that claims to speak both for an entire ethnicity and religion) that deliberately muddies the language to justify war crimes, the very real issue of antisemitic racism becomes ten-fold harder to address for the sole reason that it’s impossible to talk about in widely understood terms.
Reading the comments here are mindblowing. A thread like this would have have never survived on reddit. It would have been a sea of “removed by moderator” And the worthy discussion would not have been had.
