Are you being antisemetic?
Are you being antisemetic?
I've seen a lot of posts on this site that are leaning into anti semetic tropes while criticizing Israel. I want to point it out so that folks can recognize it.
First, because I have to say it:
Israel is a colonial outpost of the United States. It was created by Britain and inherited by the US. The US gives Israel ~3,000,000,000 USD in aid every year. As a colony, it should be the goal of every socialist to destroy it, just as we seek the destruction of the US, Northern Ireland, South Korea, Canada, the Phillipine state, etc.
But! Israel is also a safe haven for Jews. This is seperable from the colonial nature of the state. Israel could have been created in Germany or Siberia or frankly Florida for that matter (in fact, annexing Florida to create a new state of Israel is what I mean when i refer to "the one state solution"). In many ways, the US with its civil rights act serves the same purpose, and in fact, most Jews live in the US.
Many of us had ancestors in Germany or Poland during the holocaust who did not stick around after the war. They saw Israel as their best shot at safety in the wake of the holocaust. Many Israelis are liberals, hoping to vote out Likud, stop supporting settlements, and negotiate palestinian statehood. These people are advocating half measures, sure, but they are not our enemies.
So I wanted to point out some anti-semetic tropes I've seen on this website and call them out so you can recognize them.
Conflating Jews in Israel with Zionists.
This can be done through omission. If you aren't clear whether you're talking about jews or a specific institution (for example, the I"D"F or the settlements or Likud), many people will read your statement as being about Jews. Be careful with the word "they"
erasing the ambivalent position of jews within colonialism / conflating jewishness with whiteness
The zionist entity is not a Jewish colonial project, but an Anglo colonial project. It was created by the British and now is funded by the US Americans. Jews are an oppressed minority whose oppression is leveraged against other oppressed peoples. Similarly to how the US uses Kurds to Balkanize Iraq or The Hmong to wage counterinsurgency in Laos, it's uses Jews to destabilize the Levant.
Outside of the US, jews are largely understood as a racial group and oppressed on that basis. Especially in the Arab world where the Islamic hyper nationalism has gained ground in response to colonialism and been funded further by colonialists to their own ends (google "the safari club" or "Israel funds Hamas")
Blood Libel
This one is the assertion that Jews are uniquely bloodthirsty / murder non Jewish children. The classic example of this myth that people are familiar with is Runplestiltskin.
It is true that the IDF under the direction of Likud and the US state is murdering many Gazans, the majority of whom are children. but! be careful to specify. When people talk about "jews" or "israelis" generally as perpetuating the murder of children, they are engaging in the blood libel trope. Again, be careful with the word "they" and specify which entities you're talking about.
calling for ethnic cleansing
Okay, wtf ya'll. It's not jews as an ethnicity that are oppressing Palestinians, it is US imperial power. Jews have always lived in Palestine and the occupation only began in the 40s as part of a British initiative.
Jews will always be part of a palestinian state, and frankly need protections as ethnic and religious minorities. We do not seek the expulsion of Jews from Palestine, but their integration into it as citizens.
Jews are safe in the US not because its a colonial state but because of civil rights protections and generational wealth. If we can create civil rights protections in Palestine and a social safety net (ideally communism but I'll settle for social democracy), then jews will be safe in Palestine.
Jewish control of America / protocols of the elders of zion
America controls Israel and not vice versa. APEC is not a cabal brainwashing otherwise Nobel Christian politicians. US politicians support Israel because they're colonial politicians and Israel is our colony. APEC exists because lobbying is how power is exercised in the US, but if we had patronage instead, APEC' functions would be carried our by a governor or an ambassador or whatever.
conclusion
Recognize the role of the US empire in Palestinian oppression. Recognize that jews are in an ambivalent racial category and are an oppressed people. Be specific when criticizing Israeli colonialism. Name who you're criticizing, is it the settlements? The IDF? Likud? The US military Industrial Complex? Stop calling for ethnic cleansing of jews if you've been doing that. Don't equate jewishness with whiteness / the Nazis. White people are white people, the US is the Nazis.
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Just to preface, I do think that we can benefit from being more aware of anti-semetic tropes. Many fascist dogwhistles do disguise themselves in language and symbolism that appears harmless or even resembles valid critique, such that even well-meaning people can reference them by mistake. I think of Corbyn for instance, nobody ought to doubt his sincerity but clearly he made a few unforced errors here or there that helped feed Labour antisemitism hysteria.
So I'm all for, here's some common anti-Semitic tropes, now you know so you can avoid them. And in particular, I would say "Be specific... Name who you're criticizing" is pretty solid advice. With that said: I do think there's some here that's a little problematic, and nobody else has quite articulated what I'm feeling so let me put this out here:
First, many have mentioned the timing of this post at a moment of serious crisis as not feeling right. I want to emphasize the issue isn't so much that it's "tone-policing," but rather, that it plays into colonialist narratives. Personally I'm fine with having to tread carefully around sensitive topics, but I'm decidedly not fine with the pervasiveness of the right-wing narrative that the Palestine liberation movement and even the Left as a whole is somehow intrinsically antisemitic. And when you point vaguely to "a lot of posts ... leaning into anti-Semitic tropes" without contextualizing who or what posts or how they were received by the community, that does sound a bit like a repackaging of this "left/Palestine/BDS antisemitic" narrative, which has been used as a major political cudgel to resist change to the status quo.
Now, in another moment, some self-crit in how we approach dismantling this narrative might be warranted, even if outsiders were to take it as a tacit admission of a problem. But at the moment of truth where you've got 500 dead in a hospital airstrike and troops lining up for a ground invasion, the "Left antisemitism issue" is really not the discussion we want to be having. (It is worth noting, to OP's credit, discussions of issues internal to the Left are, regardless of situation, much, much more appropriate on a platform like Hexbear where those discussions will mostly remain internal to the Left, than they would be on a platform where we're engaging with a broader public to be swayed such as :reddit-logo: .)
That's really the main issue here, but as to a couple of the more specific gripes:
~"Conflating Jews in Israel..." - More or less agree with OP's points here, but I do think it is worth recognizing that this is, in a real sense, a religious sectarian conflict. I suppose you could say it's superstructural, but when Israel legally defines itself as a state for Jews and only Jews, that's where they (the Israeli state) are looking to draw the lines, and that's what we have to combat. In other words, no, this is not a problem with Jews or Judaism, but also: Israel cannot be a Jewish state.
~"calling for ethnic cleansing" - OP says "Jews have always lived [there]," but this is imho minimizing just how much of the population is part of or descended from the colonial project. Wikipedia is telling me the Israeli Jewish population went from <100k in 1915, to over a million by 1949, to nearly 5 million at the turn of the century, and over 6.5 million today. That's not organic population growth, that's a massive influx of people who came in and took land where there were already other people.
Now, I agree that full-out sending away all the Israeli Jews is not and should not be on the table. Not only do some have claims predating the settler influx, but I imagine even many of the settlers and their descendants don't have much place else they can go and still ought to be treated humanely. That said, I think we ought to be realistic and recognize that the Palestinians have been forced from their homes, in some cases quite recently, and in the case of Gaza forced into a tiny little area, very densely populated and lacking basic infrastructure. If we're going to have justice, it's not going to come without a lot of reparations and frankly probably some degree of land back and right to return. The more recent and more wealthy of the settlers probably should leave.
~"Jewish control of America" - OP says "America controls Israel and not vice-versa"... it's really more of a two-way street. Israel and AIPAC/Israel lobby just very much do have serious sway over American politicians and honestly Western politicians more generally. Israel is an independent state and functions as one, at times annoying people in Washington who want them to do their ethnic cleansing a little more quietly. That said, it also goes without saying that Israel's prosperity is dependent on some measure of servitude to American geopolitical interests, and that framing Israeli influence as "Jewish control" is very much :haram: .
That's all I got. Hadn't planned for this to be such an effortpost but :shrug-outta-hecks:
AHHHH I lost my comment just by scrolling down.
whatever, I was saying you and Maoo did a good job explaining the critiques of the post. More specifically I was saying the biggest problem is the apologia for Israeli liberals. Even a two state solution would mean removal of settlers from the '47 borders. Most significant though is that OP conflates Israelis with Jews even if they don't mean to. An Israeli in Israel being the target of anti-colonial violence is not the same as the Tree of Life Synagogue victims full stop.
One example is someone living as the ruling race in an ethnostate being targeted because they are the oppressor, the other are victims of antisemitism. Israelis, especially in Israel and involved in politics or settlements do not get to be "an ambivalent racial category and an oppressed people" they are oppressors and are literally in a country in which they are first class citizens. Once you move to Israel the game changes, you don't get to use the suffering of the diaspora as a shield. If you colonize another country with an openly racial supremacist and white supremacist/eurocentric goal, you ARE part of white supremacy and genocide.
You can find a moral difference in attacking Likud vs a liberal Israeli, but at the end of the day them being attacked by Palestinians is linked inexorably to them being zionists, literally settlers in an ethnostate with laws that make Palestinians lesser than them. I agree with the OP on a lot of what they are saying, but things like that are defenses of zionism and are equating Jewishness with Zionism intended or not. They conflate saying Israelis are killing Gazans with saying "Jews are killing Gazans" in the same breath as telling people to be careful about specifying who they mean. Implying, or arguably just stating that Israelis and Jews are equally incorrect ways to talk refer to those committing massacres. NO, saying "jews" are doing it is incorrect and antisemitic, saying Israelis are is literally just the truth. Same reason we say "Americans killed Iraqis" even if yeah every individual American is not killing an Iraqi personally.
It is true that the IDF under the direction of Likud and the US state is murdering many Gazans, the majority of whom are children. but! be careful to specify. When people talk about "jews" or "israelis" generally as perpetuating the murder of children, they are engaging in the blood libel trope. Again, be careful with the word "they" and specify which entities you're talking about.
This is just conflating Israeli and Jew and my problem with it is not tone-policing, but rather that it itself falls into an antisemitic conflation of the two, and importantly portrays the IDF as outside of Likud and the US. They are going at great lengths to distance Israelis and even the literal members of the Israeli death squads from the violence they represent and commit. That is actually offensive and gross.
This is just conflating Israeli and Jew and my problem with it is not tone-policing, but rather that it itself falls into an antisemitic conflation of the two, and importantly portrays the IDF as outside of Likud and the US. They are going at great lengths to distance Israelis and even the literal members of the Israeli death squads from the violence they represent and commit. That is actually offensive and gross.
GOOD post. OP makes some good points, but they could have been made without settler apologia, IDF apologia, and (ironically, and clearly unintentionally) antisemitism. Saying that it's blood libel to say "Israelis are murdering Palestinians" is absolutely ridiculous, and as you said implies that "Jews" = "Israelis" and criticisms of Israel are antisemitic.
As a note, even if you were to say "Jews", it wouldn't be blood libel. Absolutely antisemitic, but not blood libel. Blood libel is specifically about accusing Jews of using the blood of children in rituals. You can expand that definition reasonably to include a lot of accusations about using the blood of children, but it's clearly not applicable here. It's a specific antisemitic trope with a specific meaning and history, and it's probably counterproductive to stick the label on every antisemitic statement involving accusations of violence.
I'm rewatching BE's video on settler colonialism and this comment sums up the error in OP's post so well
this is not a problem of the israeli right, this is not a problem of benjamin netanyahu, this is not a problem of likud, this is not a problem of religious fanatics, this is a problem of the very nature of the israeli state from its very origins it has always been like this it is probably always going to be like this
And yeah people use blood libel as just "accusing a Jew of killing children" or "accusing Jews of killing children" when it is a far more pernicious and specific conspiracy theory rooted in European Christians.
Yeah, the more I think about it the more perplexing this post is. There are some factual and logical issues that I don't think were necessarily intended (as you said, error), but seem to be the product of unexamined ideology. I've seen OP's posts before, and I seriously doubt it's meant as wrecking, but I think this post is counterproductive both in terms of combating antisemitism (Jews = Israelis is easily one of the most common modern antisemitic tropes and the post implicitly supports it) and in terms of upholding Palestinian liberation (for the exact reason you just stated).
Thanks, I was worried my critiques would come off as overly harsh or self-contradictory