Hi Riki! This Is A Bizarre Question Ngl, But Im Wondering If You Could Please Tell Me About Why You Are

hi riki! this is a bizarre question ngl, but im wondering if you could please tell me about why you are anti-Zionist? Since i have FRESHLY (last month!! Woohoo!!) become bat mitzvah, and I’m not going to beit Sefer every week now, I’m starting to realize that what I was told about Israel and zionism miiiight be innacurate. Please feel free not to, but I would personally feel more comfortable hearing about Antizionism from somebody who is for sure not hiding any antisemitic biases. Thanks and I hope it’s not a bother!

Mazal tov!

I was debating if I should reply to this and how. You're only one year older than my son and I never considered talking about this with a kid other than my own children. But if you're online reading and looking up information about this, I'll just answer the way I would for anyone. Like I said, I don't mind explaining. But I don't have the energy to collect sources for you. I'll do that later if you'd like. For now it'll be a bit of a rant.

Basically, if you ask different people what zionism is, you'll get different answers. Some people say that zionism is just the acknowledgement of our connection to this land. That's not what I'm going against. I'm not denying that this is our ancestral homeland. I've never known a different home, I grew up near Hebron. Our history means everything to me. So maybe you could create some definition of zionism that I wouldn't be against. But then I'll be against the use of the word because in practice, politically, the movement has been colonialist. And that reality is more important to me. So when I say I'm antizionist, I'm not talking about whatever pretty idea someone might have, I'm talking about things that to me are very concrete.

Zionism uses whatever political terminology is useful to it at the time. Currently, it tries to paint itself as a sort of landback movement, placing us as the indigenous population of this land. This is a distraction. If you mean "indigenous" as "this is where we originated" - both us and Palestinians are indigenous, which makes this term pointless to this situation. If you mean "indigenous" as "a local population facing colonization" - they're indigenous and we're the colonizers. That's the more politically useful distinction.

And the thing is, zionists knew they were colonizers. Ben Gurion was welcomed by the local population and expressed hope that they're nomadic and could be persuaded to leave. Ze'ev Jabotinsky argued that no land has been colonized with the consent of its natives, so we should just take what we want like other occupying forces did. They knew what they were doing. At the time, there wasn't the broad political pushback against colonialism that you see today, so they didn't really hide it. They saw themselves as the colonizing force and the Palestinians as the natives and this distinction had them placing themselves above the Palestinians.

When I was in school, I was made to believe that Palestine was never truly a country and the population here was never a cohesive nation. You might see questions like "Who were the Palestinian prime ministers and presidents? What was the Palestinian coin? What Palestinian wars were there before the creation of Israel?"

These questions tell you nothing other than the fact that Palestine has been under foreign occupation for a very long time. They try to lead you to believe that Palestine and the Palestinian identity are fictional constructs designed to deny us our place in this land.

But Palestinians have their own dialect of Arabic. They have their own varieties of Middle Eastern foods. They have their own clothing, their own embroidery patterns, their own dances. They have a very rich culture that wasn't just made up from nothing within the last century. I still have to battle against cognitive dissonance every time I find something of the sort, because Palestinian culture goes against everything I was taught.

The truth is, the British had no right to occupy Palestine, and they had no right to offer it to us. If we pretend there was no population that was wronged when we took Israel, we can be "the good guys" with Palestinians being a sinister plot to ruin us. This turns normal families, normal people, into a conspiracy made to hurt us. We're not fighting a military force - every Palestinian person is a threat to our legitimacy. Israelis don't even really use the term "Palestinians" - they're just Arabs, their individual identity is stripped from them. We pretend that they belong to other countries around us.

Israeli propaganda will tell you that we only ever act in self defense. It's in the name of our military, it's called a defense force. Israel boasts that it has the only ethical military in the world. The only defensive one. But like I said, we define threats very broadly. And we whitewash a lot of history. I was taught in school all our fighting was defensive - and then I spoke to an elderly man and he said "of course we killed whole villages, it was war, that's what you do." Only as an adult I found out about things like the Sabra and Shatila massacre and our involvement in it.

For the existence of Israel as an ethnostate, every Palestinian is a threat. A lot of people are all in favor of Israel, but against the government actions of ethnic cleansing. The truth is, the ethnostate is not sustainable without the ethnic cleansing. You can't accept one and expect it not to lead to the other. An ethnostate is never a justified goal, and that's always been the goal of zionism as a practical movement.

And I know why this exists. We've had two millennia of persecution. Antisemitism is one of the oldest forms of bigotry. And we just experienced an attempt to industrially exterminate us, we lost millions, including from my own family. We want shelter and safety and the ability to defend ourselves. I just can't see that as justification for what we did and continue to do.

You can look up our human rights abuses, but personally, there were moments that hit me. When I saw a whole warehouse of mail intended to reach Gaza, mail that's been kept from them for years, including items like wheelchairs, in such bad conditions that some envelopes got moldy. I still think of the people who spent all that money to get a wheelchair and were prevented mobility because we decided to hold their mail.

I watched the biggest apartment building in Gaza collapse under our bombs and I cried thinking about the people inside, and about the potential survivors and everything they lost.

I watched our people beat up the pallbearers at the funeral of Shireen Abu-Akleh, a Palestinian reporter. They almost dropped the casket from all those beatings. They were no threat. They just carried her. There was no reason to hurt them.

On the news, after Shireen Abu-Akleh died, the description of the Palestinian response to her death was that they're "חוגגים על המוות." The literal translation is that they're celebrating over the death, but that's not what it means. The meaning is that they're exaggerating their pain and their grief. They're acting, pretending, milking the injustice of it for show. And that's a common Israeli narrative, that Palestinians make a big deal out of things and pretend to suffer more just to make us look bad. We've dehumanized them to the point where we don't believe their grief.

And before all of this, growing up, I saw what the "us vs them" mentality caused in children. I grew up in Kiryat Arba and the population there is very strongly zionist. It's a settlement. It's largely Dati Leumi (national religious? I'm not sure how to translate, dati means religious and leumi means national). Over there I saw children as young as six cheerfully talk about joining the military and killing Arabs. I saw a kid throwing chocolate past the electric fence separating us from them, and laughing when a small Palestinian child went looking for that chocolate, calling her a pig. I saw my high school classmates questioning if they should help the family of a six-months-old baby, first demanding to know if the sick infant is Arab.

The Israeli left has a bit of a slogan. הכיבוש משחית. The occupation corrupts. It means that being an oppressive force changes what we are. It ruins us. And I truly believe that. It taints so much about us and our culture, about our compassion and our ability to have solidarity with other humans. Many principles that kept us safe in diaspora are used now to harm gentiles living under our control, and Palestinians suffer most of all.

So these are the reasons I'm antizionist. I hate what we do to Palestinians. I hate what it does to us. And more fundamentally, I'm against colonialism.

Daily update (28)

Our homes enrage them and terrify them. They are afraid of this great, lofty, lofty edifice. They think they have been able to destroy it!

They do not know that this house will emerge from the rubble, and they will rise!

The oud inevitably intensifies, then tells us the story of sacred revenge, survival, the stable house that will not be demolished!

" my friends, I urge you to donate to me and get me to the next goal of $30000 CAD by the end of the next week. I suffer a lot, I am in constant danger, please help me rebuild my home."

gofundme.com

Donate to Support Siraj's Family in Rebuilding Their Home, organized by Ahmad Abudayeh

hi, my name is ahmad and I'm raising a fund for my cousin Siraj and thi… Ahmad Abudayeh needs your support for Support Siraj's Family in Reb

HAPPY BIRTHDAY HIRO YOU CAUGHT ME AT A REALLY BAD TIME #FUCKFINALS

“Sitting in this room playing Russian Roulette. Finger on the trigger to my dear Juliet.”

You'll never know how strong you are until strength is your only option."

From the heart of Gaza, these words become more true than ever. I am Bilal Abed Rabou, and I stand before you as a survivor of five wars, an academic student at Al-Azhar University and a software developer from the besieged Gaza Strip. I witnessed the devastating effects of these conditions firsthand

.

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Donate to Help me to complete my education In Gaza, organized by Mohammed Asfour

"You'll never know how strong you are until strength is your only option." … Mohammed Asfour needs your support for Help me to complete my

We were a family, living in peace, love and warmth. But everything changed when conflict and despair swept through our lives. Living in Gaza means confronting ongoing conflict, struggling against poverty and the lack of basic necessities to live. Life is very difficult, and even the simplest tasks seem impossible. Yet, despite all the chaos and pain, we remained grounded by the warmth of our love and the strength of our spirits.

Even six months ago, everything changed. Our once home turned into a mess and everything we cherished. Since then, we have been lost, clinging to a world of uncertainty and despair. We left our badly damaged home with only a few things. Since then, our lives have been threatened

with every passing minute.

But now, there is no longer a reason to stay in this place full of suffering, where we are deprived of even the most basic and important rights, education, security and peace.

Our hearts hurt because of all this injustice. We were willing to endure anything to keep our family together and provide comfort and care for our father in his time of need.

With each passing day, our despair grows and our burdens grow heavier. We need your help to break the cycle of suffering, rebuild our shattered dreams, pave the way to a better future, and reunite with our family. Your support is not just a lifeline; Rather, it is a beacon of hope in our darkest moments.

Here you will find our whole story

And here is the direct donation's link

gofundme.com

Donate to Help me to complete my education In Gaza, organized by Mohammed Asfour

"You'll never know how strong you are until strength is your only option." … Mohammed Asfour needs your support for Help me to complete my

only 46 CAD donated in the last hour! Siraj new goal is 30k and he is at 21,178 as of now. Please donate if you have these means to, or reblog since it only takes a second!

Daily update(27)

When my house was bombed, I felt cold, and I am the one who loves the idea of ​​a home, safety, walls, curtains, and warmth!

I have never felt that our homes in Palestine are just stones. I have always seen them as an olive tree with a solid trunk that groans if it is cut!

I actually heard the groaning of my house. Half of me is here, half of me, and the other half is there with the rubble of the house and the memories!

Despite all of this, I still have hope, as I am moving towards the third goal of 30k in order to rebuild the house that was bombed by the occupation in November 2023.

This requires your support and participation

gofundme.com

Donate to Support Siraj's Family in Rebuilding Their Home, organized by Ahmad Abudayeh

hi, my name is ahmad and I'm raising a fund for my cousin Siraj and thi… Ahmad Abudayeh needs your support for Support Siraj's Family in Reb