#Arab-Jewish relations
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Former Miss Iraq pays sympathy visit to site of Hamas slaughter
Sarah Idan (left), former Miss Iraq, on a visit to the site of Kfar Aza, one of the sites ravaged by Hamas terrorists on 7 October
“I visited Kfar Aza, a place where the heart-wrenching horror of Hamas’s infiltration led to a massacre of innocent Israeli families right in their homes,” tweeted Idan, a Democrat running to represent California’s 30th congressional district in place of Adam Schiff, who is vying to enter the U.S. Senate in 2024.
“Located just a mile from Gaza, we stood witness as the Iron Dome intercepted rockets launched by Hamas. I brought my old uniform from Iraq to be mentally prepared, but I was still shocked and at a loss for words. Never in my life, not even amidst the terror of ISIS, have I seen such barbarity. What was once a vibrant community now echoes with a haunting silence of tragedy,” she continued.
By “uniform,” Idan means the camouflage pants, T-shirt reading “Fight Back” and combat boots that she wore as a translator for U.S.-led coalition forces in Iraq.
“I don’t care what’s your religion if your God permits you to do this in his name then your God is wrong. My mind is still traumatized by the scene, the smell of the dead bodies. Shame on those pretending the massacre didn’t happen,” she tweeted.
More than a hundred civilians were murdered and others were kidnapped from Kfar Aza when 3,000 heavily armed Hamas terrorists forced their way across the border and rampaged across the northwestern Negev, murdering around 1,200 persons in total, mostly civilians, wounding thousands more and taking some 240 hostages back to Gaza.
Idan and her family were forced to flee Iraq after she posed for a selfie with Miss Israel Adar Gandelsman at the Miss Universe pageant in Las Vegas in 2017 and wearing a bikini in a swimsuit competition.
Her Iraqi citizenship revoked, Idan immigrated to the United States in 2017.
On May 19, she filed her candidacy for the California seat, which includes the cities of Burbank and West Hollywood, and parts of Glendale and Pasadena.
Read article in full
Iraq beauty queen:’people in Israel looked like my people’
Miss Iraq rebuilding relations between Arabs and Jews
Brave Iraqis get awards for advocating normalisation
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having jewish family from n iraq general area is very strange. n iraq area is a bit of an outlier from its neighbors people group-wise because it’s often kurd = muslim; arab = muslim also; assyrian = christian (or at least an overwhelming amount of christians are assyrian); yazidi = yazidi; but jews are called ‘kurdish jews’? they probably just got that label because they were in the area (some have ‘tribal’ last names if they were from the literal towns the tribes got their names from), but for example syrian jews who lived in aleppo/damascus and spoke arabic are called syrian jews, some people use “arab jew” but afaik most don’t
in that context “kurdish jew” seems a little...misleading? “assyrian jew” is too, they were both religious minorities and spoke aramaic but jews have a separate history (and due to current politics it feels insensitive but idk.) and both of those can be used by israeli govt stuff for propaganda purposes, so looking into sources for this is nigh impossible. tbh i prefer ‘mesopotamian jew’
#strange situation overall that i don't think can be solved anytimne soon#*srael pretty much fucked up jewish history research that isnt european#ultimately small potatoes compared to what palestinians are going through#weird pan-’mizrahi’ ethno-anthropology ultimately relates back to it. colonialism & all that#both 'kurdish jew' and 'assyrian jew' sources i managed to find were zionist propaganda. sobs#not to mention it was a very small community and there aren't a ton of descendants in the world in comparison to like. moroccan jews#ironically the most reputable + objective historical account w/ interviews from people who lived it#was compiled by someone currently head of netanyahu's 'ministry of arab affairs'#such is the state of mizrahi jewish history research#there’s also historical records referring to them both as ‘kurdish jews’ and ‘assyrian jews’#but 'kurdish jews' could've been location-based and probably wasn't in the modern context of 'a people'#('kurdish christians' was often used to refer to assyrians for example)#and 'assyrian jews' was also used to refer to s. iraq general area jews and syrian jews#i’d complain about how it’s annoying that jews are ‘their own thing’ unless they’re bene israel/’kurdish’/yemenite etc but#ill uh. explain this in a reblog
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Just unfollwed someone for reblogging an video saying this: Jews are direct descendants of Abraham, who was Arabic, and Abraham was there first, so Arabs were there first, so Jews are White Colonizers. DO YOU KNOW HOW ANCESTRY WORKS???? 'Oh yeah this Arab guy's great-grandkids? They have no claim to being Arabic. But his OTHER great-grandkids? Those are Arabs because he's their ancestor.' It could be argued if you follow Abrahamic geaneology that Ishmael's Arab descendants get their claim to that ethnicity through his mother Hagar, who was Egyptian (although at that time that could have been what we modern people would consider like three different ethnicities but whatever). However, if you are going to say (and he did) that Abraham was Arabic because he was born in the region that is now modern-day Iraq (not set in stone but a viable argument), then that makes ALL of his sons and their grandchildren Arabic! If you want to claim that Arabs were 'there first' because Abraham was Arabic, you then have to admit that all of his descendants are HIS DESCENDANTS
#does antisemitism make you stupid or is it the other way around#Arabic people are indigenous to Palestine#sure that's true#that DOESN'T MAKE JEWS WHITE#That DOESN'T MAKE BEING ARABIC AND BEING JEWISH MUTUALLY EXCLUSIVE#like the specific term Arab Jew is not favoured by some for various reasons#I am not the person to explain that#but Turkish Iraqi Syrian Iranian ETC Jews are all people that exist!#because ethnicity is fucking complicated!#how the fuck does it work in this guy's head#that one group of this guy's great-grandkids get to claim the heritage of being of his bloodline#but the OTHER group of his great-grandkids don't#even though they're the exact same degree of relation#as I said before ethnicity is complicated but this is the VERY BASICS OF ANCESTRY#this guy's smug presentation of an absolute logical clusterfuck has made my head explode a little#if you have corrections for my facts I'm open to hearing them because I am not an expert in the family tree of Abraham#but if you're just going to be gross about either Jews or Muslims you can fuck off forever
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starting a new era of 2013 tumblr grungecore based on this straycatj post
#also that person deactivated lol#i wonder if someone told them being jewish doesnt mean they werent being annoying and racist#also im willing to bet they still looked white#i can only relate from the perspective of when white arabs call themselves poc. like shut up please
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zionists stop lying challenge. palestinians were arabised, they’re still indigenous as shown over & over by genetic studies.
In a principle component analysis (PCA), the ancient Levantines clustered predominantly with modern-day Palestinians and Bedouins and marginally overlapped with Arabian Jews, whereas AJs clustered away from Levantine individuals and adjacent to Neolithic Anatolians and Late Neolithic and Bronze Age Europeans.
Palestinians, among other Levantine groups, were modeled as deriving 81–87% of their ancestry from Bronze age Levantines, relating to Canaanites as well as Kura–Araxes culture impact from before 2400 BCE (4400 years before present); 8–12% from an East African source and 5–10% from Bronze age Europeans. Results show that a significant European component was added to the region since the Bronze Age (on average ~8.7%), seemingly related to the Sea Peoples, excluding Ashkenazi and Moroccan Jews who harbour ~31–42% European-related ancestry, both populations having a history in Europe.
🤡
#a population converting after colonisation doesn’t erase their ties to the land#if u argue palestinians r coloniser arabs bc they have minimal#relation to outside populations then ashkenazi jewish ppl showing strong relatedness to european populations are what?#discounting palestinian indigeneity when they have stronger links to their land than many populations inhabiting israel is stupidity#zionism
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Hi, this is very ignorant. I'm trying to read as much as I can on Palestine and Zionism but there is one point I cannot find an answer for. Given that Zionism is not Judaism, given that at the beginning most Jewish people did not share this view and was actually supported by christians with antisemitic views, given that it was conceptualized as a colonial project that could only be actualized by ethnically cleanse Palestine, one thing I don't know how to disagree with Zionists is the idea that Jewish people do come from that land. Even if European jews are probably not genetically related to the Jewish people from there, I think Jewishness is something that can be constructed as related to that land. This of course does not mean that Palestinians are not natives too and they have every right to their land. However I don't really know how to answer when Jewish (Zionists) tell me that Jewish people fled that land during the diaspora. Other than "yeah but the people that stayed are native that underwent christianization before, arabization later, grew a sense of nationhood in the 19th century and are Palestinians now"
It's a fundamental misunderstanding of what "indigeneity" is to believe that it means "whoever has the oldest claim to the land." Rather, to describe a people as "indigenous" is a reference to their current relationship to the government and to the land—namely that they have been or are being dispossessed from that land in favour of other private owners (settlers); they have a separate, inferior status to settlers according to the law, explicitly; they are shut out of institutions created by the settler state, explicitly; they are targeted implicitly by the laws of the settler state (e.g. Israeli prohibitions against harvesting wild thyme or using donkeys or horses for transportation); the settler state does not punish violence against them; &c. &c.
It is a settler-colonialist state that creates indigeneity; without one, it is perfectly possible for immigrants to move to and live in a new location without becoming settlers, with the superior cultural and legal status and suppression of a legally inferior population that that entails.
If all that were going on were some Jewish people feeling a personal or religious connexion to this land and wanting to move there, accepting the existing people and culture and living with them, not expelling and killing local populations and creating a settler-colonialist state that privileges them at the expense of extant populations, that would be a completely different situation. But any assertion of the land's fundamental Jewish-ness (really they mean white or European Jewishness—the Jewish Arabs who were already in Palestine never seem to figure in these arguments) is a canard that distracts from the fundamental issue, which is a people's right to resist dispossession, ethnic cleansing, and genocide.
Decolonize Palestine lays out some of the ethnic and cultural history of the region, but follows it up with:
So, what does this all mean for Palestine? Absolutely nothing. Although the argument has many ahistorical assumptions and claims, it is not these which form its greatest weakness. The whole argument is a trap. The basic implication of this line of argumentation is as follows: If the Jewish people were in Palestine before the Arabs, then the land belongs to them. Therefore, the creation of Israel would be justified. From my experience, whenever this argument is used, the automatic response of Palestinians is to say that their ancestors were there first. These ancestors being the Canaanites. The idea that Palestinians are the descendants of only one particular group in a region with mass migrations and dozens of different empires and peoples is not only ahistorical, but this line of thought indirectly legitimizes the original argument they are fighting against. This is because it implies that the only reason Israel’s creation is unjustified is because their Palestinian ancestors were there first. It implies that the problem with the argument lies in the details, not that the argument as a whole is absolute nonsense and shouldn’t even be entertained. The ethnic cleansing, massacres and colonialism needed to establish Israel can never be justified, regardless of who was there first. It’s a moot point. Even if we follow the argument that Palestinians have only been there for 1300 years, does this suddenly legitimize the expulsion of hundreds of thousands? Of course not. There is no possible scenario where it is excusable to ethnically cleanse a people and colonize their lands. Human rights apply to people universally, regardless of whether they have lived in an area for a year or ten thousand years. If we reject the “we were there first” argument, and not treat it as a legitimizing factor for Israel’s creation, then we can focus on the real history, without any ideological agendas. We could trace how our pasts intersected throughout the centuries. After all, there is indeed Jewish history in Palestine. This history forms a part of the Palestinian past and heritage, just like every other group, kingdom or empire that settled there does. We must stop viewing Palestinian and Jewish histories as competing, mutually exclusive entities, because for most of history they have not been. These positions can be maintained while simultaneously rejecting Zionism and its colonialism. After all, this ideologically driven impulse to imagine our ancestors as some closed, well defined, unchanging homogenous group having exclusive ownership over lands corresponding to modern day borders has nothing to do with the actual history of the area, and everything to do with modern notions of ethnic nationalism and colonialism.
I would also be careful about mentioning a sense of "nationhood" or "national identity" in this context, as it could seem to imply that people need a "national" identity (a very specific and very new idea) in order not to deserve genocide. Actually the idea that Palestinians lacked a national identity (of the kind that developed in 19th-century Europe) is commonly used to justify Zionism. Again from Decolonize Palestine:
This slogan ["A land without a people for a people without a land"] persists to this day because it was never meant to be literal, but colonial and ideological. This phrase is yet another formulation of the concept of Terra Nullius meaning “nobody’s land”. In one form or the other, this concept played a significant role in legitimizing the erasure of the native population in virtually every settler colony, and laying down the ‘legal’ and ‘moral’ basis for seizing native land. According to this principle, any lands not managed in a ‘modern’ fashion were considered empty by the colonists, and therefore up for grabs. Essentially, yes there are people there but no people that mattered or were worth considering. There is no doubt that Zionism is a settler colonial movement intent on replacing the natives. As a matter of fact, this was a point of pride for the early Zionists, as they saw the inhabitants of the land as backwards and barbaric, and that a positive aspect of Zionism would be the establishment of a modern nation state there to act as a bulwark against these ‘regressive’ forces in the east [You can read more about this here]. A characteristic feature of early Zionist political discourse is pretending that Palestinians exist only as individuals or sometimes communities, but never as constituting a people or a nation. This was accompanied by the typical arrogance and condescension towards the natives seen in virtually every settler colonial movement. That the early settlers interacted with the natives while simultaneously claiming the land was empty was not seen as contradictory to them. According to these colonists, even if some scattered, disorganized people did exist, they were not worthy of the land they inhabited. They were unable to transform the land into a modern functioning nation state, extract resources efficiently and contribute to ‘civilization’ through the free market, unlike the settlers. Patrick Wolfe’s scholarship on Australia illustrates this dynamic and how it was exploited to establish the settler colony.
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The thing that's never made sense to me is the "Holocaust inversion" talking point and the idea that we are "moralizing" the Holocaust as something you're supposed to learn from which like aside from the fact that israel's entire pr is that it needs to exist because of the Holocaust, I really don't understand how feeling empathy based on past experiences is like... a moralizing action?
Even those who don't feel empathy, they still like... have the universal idea that you shouldn't do bad things onto other people. When you consider that yeah, when you live in the world, you experience terrible things and you relate those terrible things to other terrible things happening in the world. That's just what everyone does. Whenever I hear things happening to indigenous Turtle Islanders I always relate it back to Palestine. When I hear about violence happening to Black people, I think "Ah it must be terrifying" and I think back to my own family members and friends who were killed by Israel. When i think of antiBlackness in arab spaces, i relate it back to the occupation and compare myself to the occupation on whether or not im inflicting the same pain i and my family endure onto others. It's just how you experience the world. No one is asking you to "learn" from the Holocaust, people are just asking you to apply empathy.
A universal example is that you don't really understand the grief of losing a loved one until you yourself lose a loved one. And when you encounter a person who lost a loved one as well, you relate to them in a unique way that you wouldn't have without having that experience of grief before. It's not a moralizing experience, it's just... an experience. An awful one but you don't *learn* anything from it.
So it always confounds me that there's such vehement pushback against the idea that what Palestinians are going through is similar to the Holocaust because it's not like we're making light of the Holocaust? It's that we are asking you, a zionist (in this case one who is Jewish specifically), to acknowledge that there are similarities between the way Palestinians are treated and the ways Jews, Roma, and multiple other people were treated during the Holocaust. It's that we're relegated to second class status, we are considered lesser, we are confined to ghettos, we have our livelihoods stolen from us, we have weapons tested on us, we're survielled like we are dangerous monsters and we experience systematic segregation. And now we are experiencing mass slaughter campaigns within our concentration camps. But what's the issue? Are you offended that Palestinians can even remotely understand the terrible violence that Jews experienced in the Holocaust? Or are you denying that Palestinians are experiencing those things??
People always bring up like "Oh you don't understand what exactly happened during the Holocaust, you're just using it as a stand in for "a very bad thing"" and that's like... never made sense either because what does that mean? I'm not... using the Holocaust out of nowhere, I'm using it because Israel tells US, PALESTINIANS, that we need to be kicked out and raped and tortured *because* of the Holocaust. When us, Palestinians, ask you to feel empathy for us based on what you experienced during the Holocaust, we aren't just pulling it out of thin air, we are using a zionist talking point and pointing out the flaws. "Does experiencing a Holocaust allow you to conduct massacres and unbelievable violence onto other people?" and "Why are we paying for the terrible crimes of Europeans? Why is this our fault that we must suffer for it, as you, a zionist, insist we must?"
It's just so confusing how people would take offense at feeling empathy for Palestinians. We aren't denying the awful, awful genocide of the Holocaust, nor are we "making light of it..." but if you believe that comparing what Palestinians go through is making light of the Holocaust, then you must think that what we are going through is not bad at all.
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Nearly 60 percent of Israelis believe social media posts showing sympathy for civilians in the Gaza Strip should be restricted, according to a poll published by Haaretz newspaper on 5 September. The poll was conducted in March by the Pew Research Center.
Fifty-nine percent of Israelis “think posts expressing sympathy for civilians in Gaza should be restricted, while 41 percent think posts criticizing the government should be censored,” according to the poll.
The poll also shows that 92 percent of Israelis believe posts inciting violence should be restricted, 87 percent say posts expressing support for Hamas must be censored, and 72 percent want graphic footage from the war removed.
The poll makes clear a significant rift between Jewish and Arab Israelis. Seventy percent of Jewish Israelis support censoring content that shows sympathy for civilians in Gaza, while only 18 percent of Arab Israelis agree.
Additionally, fifty percent of Jewish Israelis support censorship of posts critical of the Israeli government, compared to 31 percent of Arab Israelis.
“Despite widespread social media use in Israel and political polarization, fewer than a quarter of Israelis (22 percent) regularly share or post about political or social issues,” the poll reveals.
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the correct criticism would be observing that if irish-americans did have a right of return and, having exercised it, a pattern of bombing Northern Ireland
(which is not implausible; the IRA got loads of its funding from individuals in the US)
and driving random Protestants on both sides of the border out of their homes and casually committing sectarian murder to 'reclaim the stolen counties,' then if the Republic supported this activity and dedicated military forces to protecting and promoting this reconquista activity:
that would be a very obvious problem with Irish national policy, which other countries would probably take issue with, and which would make Ireland a horrible place to live for everybody.
which is why, to step back into reality, in the 80s and 90s the Republic of Ireland did not support the oppressed catholic minority in Northern Ireland in its anti-colonial terrorist activities. because it would have embroiled them in civil war until god knew when, and made them a pariah.
obviously the nuances of the situation are very different but like, if you're going to draw these kinds of parallels, get it right.
I just want to talk about how non-Jewish leftists are weirdly obsessed with Israel’s right of return. The way they talk about Israel in general is really messed up, but the right of return seems to really bother them. Like, you don’t have to know or care about the history of Israel and why it was founded to understand that a sovereign nation can make its own citizenship and immigration laws.
I’ve seen so many anti-Israel posts and comments where someone will say something to the effect of “I’m of Irish descent and I can’t return to Ireland and claim citizenship” and then turn that into an argument about why Israel is the most evil country to ever exist. And it’s like, yes and? Ireland and Israel are two separate counties with separate laws. Like, why does an American living in Ohio think they have the right to question how another nation chooses to define its own citizenship?
they think it shouldn’t happen because “jews are european colonizers and therefore have no right to return”, since they believe jews aren’t originally from judea. its not about a country deciding citizenship, it’s colonizers dictating how many white people get to live in the colony. they’re getting deranged about it, but that’s the reasoning I’ve seen from them. it’s disgustingly antisemitic but what else could we expect from rape apologist terrorist sympathizers.
#of course the palestinians do not have the British Empire in their corner#the other arab states in the region may be anti-israel but the palestinians in the west bank getting hatecrimed constantly#don't have a powerful imperial patron#and israel (unlike ireland) does#making all the anglo-irish hop back across the channel is in some ways more and in some ways less practical#than trying to restrict jewish immigration to israel on any basis#but not nearly as heinous or disruptive as the last few generations of purges of the palestinians#(who unlike the english have been there a lot more than a few hundred years and weren't the ones who drove the diaspora)#the difference was: israel thought it was worth the cost#and still does#and i'm sympathetic to how you get into that mindset given the context#but there's no context no matter how bleak that makes classifying people as vermin okay#and i have now seen *so* many pro-israel arguments that hinge on the assumption that palestinian lives are worthless/forfeit#and not worth counting#that 'rape apologist terrorist sympathizers' used to refer to people making dumb not-even-directly-related critiques of Israel#now reads as *blatant* dogwhistling for 'genocide good when the Good Guys do it'#which is gross#so if that's *not* what you meant be aware that's who you're aligning yourself with using that language yk?
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Moments from Palestine across generations and communities
(1) A Bedouin woman smiles in Jerusalem (1898-1914)
(2) Asma Aranki Holding a Child from Her Family at Their House, Birzeit (1948)
(3) Bedouin girls in Jericho (1918)
(4) An extended Palestinian family gathers in front of their house in the village of Beit Sahur, near Bethlehem (1918–35)
(5) From the Mount of Olives, a young woman looks out over eastern Jerusalem (1929)
(6) Ruth Raad, daughter of photographer Khalil Raad, in the traditional costume of Ramallah (1939)
(7) Standing in his neatly ironed shirt and shorts, George Sawabin poses for a studio photo (1942)
(8) Katingo Hanania Deeb, prepares to demonstrate in the 1936-1939 Arab Revolt -- which was a nationalist uprising by Palestinian Arabs against British colonial rule in relation to Palestinian independence and the land acquisition and pushout as a result of the mass Jewish immigration (1936)
(9) Young children walking home from school Beit Deqqo Village, the Occupied Palestinian West Bank, 1987
(10) Four young girls decorating vases in a ceramic workshop in Nablus (1920)
(11) A young Palestinian girl squints and smiles as she holds a jar on her head (1920-1950)
(12) The ancient craft of a Palestinian potter (1918-35)
(13) The mothers of Palestinian detainees' protest in Jerusalem (1987)
Source(s): The British Mandate Jerusalemites (BMJ) Photo Library, Palestinian Museum Digital Archives, The Jerusalem Story + Khalil Raad
Please support, share, cite, and (if financially able) fund these organizations and public storytellers for their rebellious histories and community work!
#decolonization#our world#our history is your history#people#free palestine#palestine#indigenous rights#art of making#and manifesting#history is not neutral#futurepast
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Jews in Moroccan tourist industry are rattled by anti-Jewish hostility
This is not the Morocco we knew,” says Kobi Ifrah, co-founder of Kulna, a nonprofit organization that aims to preserve and promote Jewish Moroccan heritage. Ifrah moved from Dimona to Marrakesh 10 years ago. But he is rattled by the fierce anti-Jewish hatred that has come to the surface after the Hamas massacre of 7 October, JNS reports:
The Ibn Dahan synagogue in Fez
Hundreds of thousands of Jews have explored Morocco over the past year, said Ifrah, but they stopped coming in the wake of Hamas’s Oct. 7 massacre in Israel.
“A lot of Israelis with Jewish roots considered Morocco to be their second home. Since the war broke out, we see at the protests here the expression of hatred for the Jews, for Israelis and support for Hamas. We expected basic levels of solidarity and we did not get it,” said Ifrah.
“Morocco used to be a place where everyone could feel at home no matter who they are, where they come from and what they believe in. It made Morocco unique. If Jews and Israelis are no longer welcome, it won’t be safe for anyone,” he added.
Tens of thousands of Moroccans took the streets post-Oct. 7, with many chanting antisemitic slogans and holding placards reading phrases such as “Down with Zionism ” and “Palestine is Hamas.”
Read article in full
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I want to take a few minutes to talk about my connection to Israel, as a Jew. I want to do that because some people desperately need to understand this, and also I'm procrastinating on uni homework.
Some years ago there were calls to return artifacts from the British Museum to the countries they're from. I know Britain pretty much went anywhere and took anything they wanted, but it got me thinking about cultural identities and their connection over time.
The middle east was home to some of the world's most ancient civilizations, and I'm sure most people living there could trace their lineage back to those civilizations (theoretically of course, we don't have data going that far). But how are they related to them? Do modern day Iraqis have any connection to Babylonians? They don't have a common language, religion, holidays, costumes… there is no cultural connection there. Babylonians happened to live in the same place, but other than that…
But this is not the case for Jews. Wherever Jewish people ended up throughout time, we kept a direct connection to ancient Israelites. I speak the same language they did thousands of years ago, I celebrate the holidays they celebrated. Our holy book is localized to Israel. We have holidays where we use local flora as decorations. We remembered our home, wherever we were, and waited to return.
The city I grew up in has flooding every winter. The whole area does (the Sharon region). It's because it used to be a swamp. There are 3 limestone ridges blocking the rivers from getting to the ocean, and when the early Zionist pioneers bought lands in this area (which were uninhabited swampland at the time) they had to open up tunnels through the limestone and drain the swamps before people could live here.
Why am I telling you this? Because we already did it before. Ancient Israelites already dug tunnels and drained swamps and lived here. There was a prayer during Yom Kippur specifically for the safety of people living here. All of the towns in the Sharon were razed by the Mamluks in the 13th century, and it became a swamp again. Until we returned.
To anyone who call us "colonizers": These "ancient" Israelites don't just share a religion with us, they ARE us. We were expelled from our homeland, but we kept our identity, we refused to let go, we kept wishing to come back home. We were always indigenous to Israel. We don't belong anywhere but here.
And now they're are trying to tell us that some people with a name invented by Rome to erase Judea and Israel, with a religion and language from Arabia, who didn't have a distinct cultural identity other than "Arab" until a few decades ago, belong here more than we do? I don't think so.
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"jewish protagonists in world war 2 movies will likely be more relatable to an american viewer than roma people, straight up, because most mainstream holocaust films with jewish main characters are about middle class ashkenazi jews who lives are much like middle class americans. even though most of the jewish victims of nazism were poor religious eastern european jews. its the fear that it could happen to you, and thats less apparent if the story is about victims you cant relate to. also, theres a lot of jewish directors in america and not a lot of roma directors".
Hollywood has made a lot of movies about the Holocaust, but not a single one has shown a romani perspective, even though half of Europe's roma population was exterminated by the nazis. I can't really think of anything coherent to say about this, do you?
because it is not of interest to western audiences and doesnt fit the pre-established popular narrative structures of mass culture relating to ww2. whats going to be a popular movie has nothing to do with the real magnitude or importance of something. the big space that ww2 and nazi movies occupy in mass culture also has little to do with the real history of the holocaust for any of its victims. in fact the holocaust was pretty absent from american consciousness post war, it wasnt seen as part of why the us was fighting ww2, survivors didnt talk about it, and it first started to enter popular american consciousness in a big way because of a nbc tv series in 1978 called holocaust about a fictional jewish family. and although this series was the first time many americans had even seen or heard of many aspects of the holocaust, it was still criticized for sanitizing the true extent of nazi war crimes and how horrific conditions were. all this is to say that very few of these popular culture representations really have to do with showing the full reality of something, there are calculations in terms of everything relating to the mass market for film and tv. theres on one hand a western fascination with the third reich (just go to any book store and see how many books there are about hitler) that i think motivates a lot of these representations and on the other hand the transformation of memory of the shoah into a political tool for us interests and the rise of the israel lobby in the us, thus american films are more likely to feature jewish narratives. jewish protagonists in world war 2 movies will likely be more relatable to an american viewer than roma people, straight up, because most mainstream holocaust films with jewish main characters are about middle class ashkenazi jews who lives are much like middle class americans. even though most of the jewish victims of nazism were poor religious eastern european jews. its the fear that it could happen to you, and thats less apparent if the story is about victims you cant relate to. also, theres a lot of jewish directors in america and not a lot of roma directors 🤷🏻
further reading:
The Culture Industry
#holocaust#hollywood#it's crazy how well this applies to the way arabs are constantly dehumanized in movies#the way american cinema portrays arabs in any context actually be it period dramas or '''''documentaries''''' or war dramas or whatever#arabs are constantly portrayed as caricatures#and in media and in politics in general#their voice their experiences are constantly dismissed and silenced#but nobody is pointing this out#because usamericans and a good bunch of europeans do not consider arabs as people#they do not see them as human beings#their lives do not have the same value#because their particular brand of victimhood is not relatable enough#they are debased dehumanized and otherized systematically#because the victim label is reserved for specific ethnic/religious categories#this has nothing to do with reality#it is just a brand at this point#and yes#marketing#it is a strategic choice: we choose our victims meaning who can be a victim and who can't#and it is always always AFTER the fact because it's convenient of course#palestine#this is especially relevant for france#french people consider jewish people as ''''their people'''' = their own#and arabs are ''''the others'''''#despite the fact that there are MILLIONS of arabs here#and despite the colonisation#so it's much much easier for the average french person to make connections between french jewish people and israel#and as a result defend israel
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Hi there! I am reaching out because someone sent me a question about how to help Gazan civilians without accidentally helping Hamas or spreading more hate against Israelis. I honestly feel lost on this myself, but as far as I can tell you are someone who has done real activism in Israel. Do you have suggestions for diaspora Jews who want to help fight for peace?
So a small disclaimer to the Gaza problem. We have 2 main problems with getting aid into Gaza, the first is the limited amount of aid that is allowed in, sending more money cannot make it go in faster. Problem number 2 is that much of the physical aid ends in Hamas's hands or in the black market and there is nothing we can do with that. I have heard recommendations to wait and see who opens a field hospital on the Rafah border crossing, and donate to them. Despite that, here are some charities to help Palestinians both in and out of Gaza.
I will admit, most of my activism is focused on deradicalization on the Israeli side and solidarity work, so I had to ask around for some of those charities. Some of the groups I know of do not currently have an international donation link, so if I get more good ones, I'll make another post.
Gaza:
Medical aid for Palestinians-
Anera-
Doctors without borders-
Palestinians outside of Gaza and Peace movements:
Palestinian red Crescent- they also work in Gaza, but as the main source for Palestinian ambulances in the WB, I put them here.
mistaclim (Looking the occupation the the eye)- this group is helping to protect Palestinians from the illegal settlers
Keshet- this is a big one. they support Bedouin communities in normal times, and now they are working on getting bomb shelters to the unrecognized villages, and providing a mental health first aid line.
standing together- totally biased, as I am a member of this organization.
Women wage peace- a feminist based solidarity group
Haqel- they represents Palestinians in cases related to land ownership and access. there work is still ongoing even during the war
Center for Jewish non Violence - a diaspora org that also does a lot of work in the South Hebron Hills.
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Did the majority of Jewish people and institutions support Zionism pre-1948?
no, very far from it. i dont have time to give an in depth response, theres a lot of history here but ill give some bullet points
some interpretations of judaism have always opposed a jewish state in any form and many jews were religiously against zionism from when it first started becoming a political movement
(there are still a lot of religious jews who are anti zionist on religious grounds. the satmar hasidic dynasty is an example. this is separate from political groups like neturei karta)
religious opposition to a jewish state was so strong that without zionism constituting itself as a specifically nationalist movement drawing on other 19th century nationalist movements it probably would not have become successful
assimilated jews in europe, which herzl himself was, were divided on zionism. many assimilated middle class jews were liberal nationalists of their own countries and rejected zionism. many other european jews were socialists and rejected zionism as a form of nationalism and imperialism.
among european jews who were generally poorer and more religious, zionism became more popular in response to the active extermination of jews in eastern europe. still, it was not the dominant belief in eastern europe. eastern european jews were very involved in socialist and radical movements, many specifically saw socialism as the only answer to european antisemitism. the jewish labor bund in particular espoused a type of anti zionist diaspora politics.
most anti zionist and socialist jews, especially eastern european ones, especially the working class, were murdered. thats part of why its not so common anymore
post-war and in the context of the red scare, american jewish institutions basically threw left wing anti zionist jews under the bus, let people lose their jobs and get blackmailed, and started focusing on relations with israel
there has always been jewish opposition to zionism both on religious and political grounds and it was a hotly debated topic and not something people agreed on. you can read more here
i have reading guides under my tag resources
edit: this is just pertaining to european jewish history and american jewish history, and mostly of ashkenazi jews. the history of arab jews is different but to be very brief, there was not widespread support among arab jews for zionism before the nakba and founding of the state of israel, and the israeli govt and zionist organizations were very active in trying to create conditions for arab jews that would encourage them to immigrate to israel
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I like naming conventions. In some Chinese traditions, its considered bad luck / disrespectful/ inappropriate to name a child after someone older than them. In some Jewish traditions, one is named after a person who has recently passed away, and thinking about how it relates to "may your memory be a blessing." Meanwhile, in tagalog, men often change their names to reflect their children's name, like Amansinaya is "Ama ni Sinaya" / "Sinaya's Father." In Arabic, I've heard people name someone they love after themselves! Really cute how naming is a form of love ouob
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