Isreal Palestine War - Tumblr Posts - Page 2
... Ukraine itself stands with Israel, so I guess it's time to taste a little bit of the zionist poison.
I stand with Palestine đ”đž
and once again: it drives me absolutely fucking insane that the posts with the most notes and the most engagement aka the voices being most listened to do not come from jewish people, or palestinian people, or israeli people, or anyone actually remotely personally affected by this, it's just by some fucking american tankie wasps getting high off the clout and popularity of telling people how to be a politics understander. where the fuck is your 'listen to marginalized voices' now, tumblr. fuck you.
i think a lot of people are clinging on to very antisemitic ideas about the global Jewish elite being behind the current us military policy in Israel because theyâre antisemitic
i also think a lot of them are doing it because it provides targets that are easier to deal with mentally and simpler to fight thanâŠ: the entire us military industrial complex. Like so many of these isssues are in fact *worse* than you think they are. The us doesnât give Israeli civilians or the Israeli economy direct cash. It hasnt been brainwashed into loving Israeli civilians through some secret (((hasbara))). The âaidâ is a blank check of money thatâs already been set aside for military purposes that is then used to buy weapons directly from American companies - think of it like a red lobster gift card from your uncle, who owns a red lobster. As such the money goes straight back to American arms dealers. Closed loop. They have so much reason for this continue forever and for war to continue forever. This isnât a justification for any of the horrific things being done right now but itâs likeâŠ: so much more complicated than American Jews learning to sing hatikvah and I think thereâs a massive misdirection on some of the interests involved, because those misdirects make an easier situation to swallow. After all Judaism as a whole, American Judaism, is so much less powerful than the collective interests of the military industrial complex - itâs an easier entity for people to call a war on
I'm going to try to turn my anger and frustration into action. I've abstained from making a post like this for a long time because I really don't enjoy this topic, but, we've reached a moment of such intense anti-Semitism that I think it's my duty, as a Holocaust historian, to say something. I'm going to use bullet points.
- Jewish people in leftist and pro-Palestine spaces who inform others that their speech has anti-Semitic undertones aren't trying to silence you; they're asking you to please not make the space actively unsafe for them because they WANT to stay and do this work. Anti-Semitism is part of the intellectual heritage of the West, and all the places the West has colonized. It is part of the language, the speech, the literature, in ways it's hard for non-Jews to grasp. When Jews hear it and see it, they're trying to educate you so these spaces can stay safe and accessibly to them; please listen.
- The "Zionists" aren't getting celebrities who speak out against the IDF's war crimes in Gaza fired from projects because "they" control Hollywood and the media. Those celebrities were spewing anti-Semitism veiled as criticism of Israel, and it's absolutely just that they face consequences. I wish all public figures faced consequences like these. Susan Sarandon, for example, said the following at a rally in New York: âThere are a lot of people afraid of being Jewish at this time, and are getting a taste of what it feels like to be a Muslim in this country, so often subjected to violence.â This isn't courageous pro-Palestinian speech. This is very very blatant anti-Semitic rhetoric, in which Jews are viewed as an internal enemy; a hive-mind inherently more loyal to each other than the state; and who must suffer collectively for any act perpetrated by any Jew. Hitler talked like this. Henry Ford talked like this. The White Russians talked like this. Just because Susan Sarandon is too willfully ignorant to understand why what she said was deeply violent and anti-Semitic, doesn't mean that it wasn't anti-Semitic. To the contrary, these words not simply condone violence against Jews, but incite it. That doesn't help Palestinians. To the contrary, it creates situations where Jews may feel that they have no other option but to....flee to Israel. As happened to much of Middle Eastern and North African (MENA) Jewry during the second half of the twentieth century.
- Jews talking about the Holocaust, their historical experiences, and their intergenerational trauma is not political speech. It is not about Palestine, or Israel, until someone else decides to make it about Palestine, or Israel. Further, the realness of that trauma does not exist in counter towards the trauma experience by Palestinians. It does not cancel out the traumatic experiences of Palestinians, and vice versa. Both traumatic experiences simply exist. The Jew who barely survived Auschwitz and the death marches and made their way--sobbing and broken, with no living family to turn to and no home to return to--to the Promised Land when they had nowhere else to go; and the Palestinian Arab, who spent centuries living on and cultivating that land, only to be violently expelled from their property and forced to live as a landless refugee within a State built on their ancestral land, but not created for them, who now exist in silently damning photographs of Palestinian elders holding keys to properties which no longer exist...they are both real. These experiences exist, and not in contradiction to each other. As educated, informed people, our place is not to fight over which trauma mattered more or was worse, or happened in the first place, G-d forbid, but simply to accept that both experiences happened and were real. Are real. Very few things in this Conflict are easy or simple, and the only option is to learn to hold those contradictions in your head.
- All Israelis are as much a Netanyahu-loving Arab-hating group of nationals, as all US Americans are a Trump-loving POC-hating group of nationals. A lot of Israelis are DEEPLY unhappy with the war, Netanyahu, and his handling of Palestinians, and have been for a VERY long time. Netanyahu has been engaging openly in criminal acts, and working to undermine Israel's democracy for YEARS now. Further, Israel has a HUGE number of active political parties; at least 13 active right now, for a country with the population of ~9,813,920. It is a Parliamentary system, meaning that the party in charge is not the party which wins the majority of votes, but which wins the largest PROPORTION of votes. A majority of Israelis don't need to have voted for Netanyahu's party (Likud) for his party to have won the majority of seats in the Knesset. Moreover, if all Israelis WERE just like that first line of this bullet point's first sentence, why should American Jews have to be punished for that? Why is this belief in Jews as a collective hive-mind still so prevalent?
- "None of this matters all Jews should know better based on their historical experiences and any Jew who supports Israel is basically a Nazi." Yeah. A lot to unpack. First of all, no one is born having been educated and and encouraged to engage in critical thought about their past(s). That's a choice. Jews are before anything else, people, and they, like all people, must choose to grow, learn, and change. They, like you, can choose to learn from the past, or just sprint forward without critical thought. Like you. Like anyone. Now, for the next part....non-Jews really like using Hitler/Third Reich/Holocaust comparisons in relation to Israel and Palestine. Let's break this down to what it actually is. Israel and Nazi Germany are both examples of the nation-state. They are also VERY FAR from the only examples of a nation-state. Indonesia in a nation-state. China is/wants to be a nation state. Poland, Norway, Croatia, Bhutan, Myanmar, Rwanda, Iran, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Turkey; Thailand, Mongolia; these are ALL nation-states. A nation-state--a type of polity which exists for a singular ethno-national group based on the understanding that that ethno-national group has long term historical roots in that particular geographic area--are an inherently exclusive type of political organization, and a product of modernity. Because they are inherently exclusive in their conception of statehood and citizenship, all nation-states will contain minority populations which exist as an existential threat to the State's ideological roots and agreed upon mythology. Under the best of circumstances, the majority will handle this minority with condescending interest and concern; under the worst, shit will go to ethnic cleaning and/or genocide places very fucking fast. This is not something exclusive to the Third Reich, or Myanmar, or Turkey, or Indonesia, or Bhutan, or China etc; this is a problem at the very heart of the construct of the nation-state. The fact that a certain portion of critics of Israel choose specifically Nazi Germany and the Holocaust as comparisons for Israeli policy towards Palestine again and again and again says, to me, that this is a person who is 1) sick of "whiny Jews;" 2) sick of having to pretend to care about the Holocaust; 3) is thrilled that "The Jews" (not Israel, the Jews) are "just as bad" as Hitler so now they can stop pretending to care about the Holocaust; and 4) knows that invoking that comparison will deeply disturb all Jews around, and will use their distress as "proof" that "all Jews" are Zionists who hate Palestine and use Holocaust memory as a tool of ideological violence. It's transparent, ignorant, and offensive.
If you are angry or defensive or wanting to unfollow me or respond with righteous indignation after reading this, it may be because you are an anti-Semite, and are suffering from cognitive dissonance based on the fact that you believe that you are a good person with no bigoted beliefs. The good news, is that you can use your negative emotions to learn, and grow a more complex understanding of all the truths and lies and parallel, contradictory truths at the heart of all this. This blog is a space I hope is open and welcome for everyone, Jewish, Palestinian, and otherwise, because deserves access to history, and an understanding of how history works. This is not a space, however, which will ever strive to make anti-Semites feel good about themselves.
Written by a Gazan author:
A post by @bambahalva on the subject of Oct 7 denials and demands for "proof" (that is already readily available) made me think of something related, but in the interest of not flooding her (very good) post I'll make a new one -
Does it make anyone else's skin crawl the way so many people outside of Israel and Palestine seem to face this war (and all the others before them, and the continued issues between wars) in a way that feels almost voyeuristic? The willingness of people outside Israel and Palestine to post graphic photos of dead children at the slightest provocation, the eagerness to breathlessly share the lurid details of real and alleged crimes, the insistence that it's somehow a moral duty to spend hours scrolling through photos of horrific scenes of pure human tragedy... It's. I mean. It's fucking grotesque.
I've complained on this blog before about true crime girlies (poorly) "analyzing" photos of the Oct. 7 aftermath and tbh, many of the reactions to the I/P conflict broadly remind me a lot of the worst aspects of true crime "fandom," where rather than being motivated by a real desire for justice or even a fascination with a complex real life mystery, people seek out and indeed demand the sordid details of the worst day of someone's life, treating a family's ongoing waking nightmare as entertainment to which they are entitled.
I don't know. I'm just thinking of how many times I've seen photos of horrific scenes of human suffering, bodies in Gaza and bodies from the kibbutzim, and dead Syrian children shared on Twitter by a self-proclaimed "activist" from Michigan in the name of Palestinian liberation, who doesn't know enough to know that these children died in a different country ten years ago, but by G-d, they're doing truly good work showing their corpses to strangers for...
What purpose, exactly?
I'm thinking of strangers with no influence and no power and no connection to this war save an emoji they just added to their username demanding to see graphic photos of rapes and mutilations, as if they're entitled to it, as if it's their right as an onlooker to gawk at human misery - And again I say, for what?
All of this is in response to this:
Ukraine voted to abstain from voting for protections of civilians and upholding legal and humanitarian obligations in Gaza. Iâm not here to tell you whether itâs right or wrong that Ukraine didnât vote, but what I will say is that if all sudden this vote by the Ukraine Government made you retract all support for Ukrainian civilians and believe that Putin should âblow Ukraine to piecesâ. Then you are a piece of shit whoâs entire ideology is performative and uncaring because you are unable to think more critically and use nuance in a situation, and would rather have innocent civilians just fucking die than understand the decisions the Ukrainian Government makes do not in any way determine the value of life each Ukrainian person has and does not mean that they all deserve to die.
@elenajones23 first of all, who are you, a non Jew to lecture me about what my religion does or doesnât allow? Who are you to tell me, as someone who doesn't practice the same religion, that I can or cannot do things?
The Torah isnât a simple set of guidelines and commands, itâs far more complex than that. It has different interpritations, so saying the torah doesn't allow it is blatantly false. The name "Zion" (Promised land) is mentioned 154 times.
âIt isnât your land and it never was your landâ bullshit.
We absolutely do have a land, if we don't, then why do we have holy sights in Jerusalem? Why are names like "Jaffa" and "Haifa" Hebrew?
The land of Israel is where my ancestors came from, it is where they lived, it is where they had a connection to, and it is where they suffered under the romans and were exiled.
We were never welcomed in Europe, we were never welcomed in the rest of the middle east.
These are ancient scrolls called the "Dead sea scrolls" which are a set of ancient Jewish writings dating from the 3rd century BCE.
This is all of what remains of our ancient temple, this is what it once was:
The first temple is Solomon's temple, the second one is Herod's temple, which was destroyed in 70CE by the romans. centuries later, the Muslim caliphates built the Al Aqsa mosque which was built on top of our temple mount. Today, the west wall is all we have left of this historic holy place.
The name "Palestine" was given to the land of Israel by roman colonisers who exiled most of us from the land of Israel, took many of us slaves, and scattered everyone else through western Europe (Some moved further east).
Now about the Nazis = Zionist argument. The Nazis originally made a deal with German Zionist Jews (The Haavara agreement) to bring about a mass migration from Germany to Israel, it should be mentioned that this was because Hitler and the Nazis wanted a Jew-Free Europe, not because the Nazis supported Zionism.
This deal was criticized by both Nazis and Zionists. Zionist criticised it because it made a deal with the devil, and the Nazis criticised it because it went against their philosophy.
The Nazis were extremely antizionist, the belief that they were Zionists is soviet cold war propaganda to demonise the state of Israel and the broader Jewish community. They believed that Jews were biologically incapable of running their own state and were too inferior. Hitler had a "Palestinian" friend (Amin al-Husseini) who campaigned in Berlin, fought for a Palestinian state, and even CONTRIBUTED TO THE HOLOCAUST. They also lead a boycott of Jewish businesses in "Palestine".
So, you're wrong. So very very wrong. You can try to lecture me about the history of my own people and religion all you want, but you're wrong.
Please, kindly fuck off and read a history book. Please attend a Synagogue service and learn more about our religion before you come spewing false bullshit about it.