chat

I have always thought that Jewish things are, generally speaking, kinda cool and neat. I have at times "stepped in the salad" in the same way as I might for any other group I'm not part of, but nevertheless I was still the type of person who'd regularly listen to a song about how the singer's "proud to be a Mountain Jew" — so I think I can comfortably say that I've never really been "an antisemite" so much as the opposite, someone who's by all means fond of Jewish culture. Ever since October 7, though, I've had to confront just how much "casual" Zionism was in the Jewish stuff that I had enjoyed up to that point: that Mountain Jewish song, for instance, midway through randomly shouts out the Mountain Jews living in "Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, Haifa, Netanya, Akko, Sderot", so now I can't easily listen to that song anymore; and the Jewish Museum in Oslo, which I had wanted to visit at some point, apparently has its staff posting Zionist bullshit on social media, too, so I guess I'm not visiting that museum any time soon, either.

The success of Zionism among Jews is a calamity in itself, really. Zionism is a force which is ultimately alien to working-class Jews, but imposed upon them by bourgeoisie both Jewish and gentile, with the aim of transforming Jews into servants of empire. To dehumanize others means to dehumanize yourself first: for Jews to destroy Palestinian, Lebanese, Syrian etc culture, requires firstly that Jews destroy their own culture. Herzl's Mauschel. Grün (or "Ben-Gurion") calling Yiddish a "grating, foreign language", and banning much of its usage in the colony's media. Et cetera. It's no different from any other colonial project.

So how or to what extent Jews support Zionism, doesn't really matter to me. It doesn't matter to me in the same way as the number of Yankees who support the colonization of Turtle Island doesn't matter to me. Colonialism is everywhere doomed, as a Soviet poster once said, and likewise any subscription to a colonial ideology is also everywhere just as doomed: Every single Jew in the world could be a Zionist, and anti-Zionism still wouldn't be antisemitic, because Zionism would still inevitably collapse under its own weight, and the day after, Jews would still exist, and the day after that, no more Jews would be Zionists, and nature would finally heal. I simply have no reason to question whether I'm truly "not antisemitic", no reason to mind any bad-faith accusation of bigotry, because I have built up what I consider to be a pretty solid theoretical understanding of what Zionism is and why it's bad.

Until Zionism finally collapses, though... Sheesh, basically the only Jewish content I can enjoy without feeling uncomfortable nowadays is like WWII-era Yiddish partisan music, and the odd podcast like Proles of the Minyan. It certainly makes me feel for any anti-Zionist Jews, how it must feel like Huey Freeman wearing a coat in a February heatwave to be able to see past this class collaborationist colonial ideology supposedly "in their people's name", how lonely it must be to have so little culture to call your own that hasn't been appropriated by colonizers, right?