chat

It's so weird how we got to this moment. AIPAC and Gaza being an open air prison have both been a thing more in the background of the American zeitgeist but it's somehow become the fulcrum that every issue is balanced on. As leftists, we all know how all things are connected and politics are everywhere, but that's not how normies view the world.

Now everyone is a Monday morning quarterback about all things Israel and Gaza. But they aren't well informed. The nauseating heel turn that mainstream Dems are doing with "we have always been against the genocide" is especially hard for me to deal with. Just six months ago they were calling me an antisemite because I didn't want innocent people slaughtered, especially with my own tax dollars. I don't get a say in it, and they take a third of my income to go kill people around the world with it. Obviously not my main issue with it...

Kissy face, kissy face Sent to your phone, but I'm tryna kiss your lips for real (Uh-huh, uh-huh) Red hearts, red hearts That's what I'm on, yeah Come give me somethin' I can feel, oh-oh, oh

never believe that the ~~antisemite~~ zionist is unaware of the absurdity of their replies, etc

I've heard Finkelstein say that antisemitism will rise because of the actions of the Zionists. Israel does the most evil shit, from sterilizing Black African Jews to the mass slaughter of people at food distribution stations that they set up. Just pure movie villainy.

When an actual Israeli gets asked to leave a store:

"Is it because I'm JEWISH!"

They're not genuine; they're not trying to be honest here; if they were they would have asked 'is it because I'm Israeli/zionist?', to which the resounding answer would be YES.

They recognize that respectable society, that good people have publicly rejected antisemitism, and they're trying to get in on that. If I had a Christian or Muslim zionist customer (and yes, surprisingly there ARE muslim zionists), I'd tell them to get out too. I hate to push antisemitic conspiracy theories that people who happen to be Jewish (although to be clear, I'm talking about zionist Jewish people, not Jewish people as a whole) are behaving badly and then crying when consequences strike, but you literally had Maccabi fans (just for a refresher, Maccabi football fans are the ones who openly chant about murdering Arabs, and openly singing about dead Arab children; yes, they sing and mock dead Arab children) attacking people in (Amsterdam?) and being openly islamophobic, getting beaten because obviously they weren't going to outnumber an entire city, and then crying about it and calling it a pogrom, with the authorities apparently refusing to see footage of what actually transpired and repeating that it was a pogrom.

Israelis literally use 'leftist' as a pejorative; you had (a former head of the Mossad?) literally threatening the families of the Israeli prisoners with consequences if they made Israel look bad and said they were just 'leftists'. Again, 'leftist' is literally a pejorative in Israel, with people being teased as liberals if they don't literally want all Palestinians dead (not even an exaggeration; I've seen a famous lady (whose name always escapes me) who did interviews in Israel and you had people saying that they're called liberals for not literally wanting all Palestinians dead, only wanting them forced out; again, they want to ethnically cleanse Palestinians, just not via death, and that's what gets them called liberals). The overton window over there is literally half submerged into hell.

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?

Why do you care about what zionists and liberals call you? let them call you an anti-semite or a bigot, it doesn't matter, they're opinions don't matter they support a genocide, it's like a Nazi calling you a barbarian.

one of the many ways that zionism is antisemitic

I wish there were more anti-zionist Jewish communities. There used to be a ton, Jewish bunds in eastern Europe were anti Zionist and the vast majority. There were also a lot of Bolshevik Party Jews (which the Nazis used to smear the soviet's but I take as a point of pride that there were some cool ass Jews). Even in the US, most Jews were anti-zionist. But for the past 80 or so years, zionists with the empires backing have been able to take over most major jewish communities, synagogues etc. Since then growing up in the US as a Jew meant that doing anything with your religious/ethnic community meant Israel was going to be involved in some way.

It's like zionists go out of their way to embody negative stereotypes about Jewish people but you're the asshole for pointing that out. I really fuckin feel for my Jewish comrades

They're trying real hard, but it's becoming more and more obvious the harder they strain

Especially with the Mamdani victory