#I see way too often an anti((zionist)) being called out for antisemitism

[jewishspite]

I wish antizionists would, just for once, actually listen to jews about how antisemitic they're being.

No, dear antizionist, I don't mean your token "antizionist jew" who agrees with you. I mean the 100 other jews who felt attacked by your anti(((zionism))). You know, the ones you called "zionists" when they tried talking to you about it

[pencopanko]

Antisemitism and Islamophobia are very similar (if not the same), actually

So I was scrolling down the #palestine tag for any updates and important information, and I came across this:

And I think we need to sit down and talk about this.

I am a Muslim. I live in Indonesia, a country that is predominantly Muslim and a lot of Muslims here also support the Palestinian cause. Hell, even our government supports it by not only allowing Palestinian goods enter the country without fee, but also by taking in Palestinian refugees and even acknowledging the status of Palestine as a state while not having any political ties with Israel. The topic of the Palestinian tragedy has been spoon-fed to us at schools, sermons, media, etc., so your average Indonesian Muslim would at the very least be aware of the conflict while non-Muslims would hear about it from their Muslim friends or through media.

However, there is a glaring problem. One that I keep seeing way too often for my liking.

A lot of them are antisemitic as hell. The sermons I would hear sometimes demonize Jewish people. Antisemitic statements are openly said out loud on social media. Some are even Nazi supporters who would literally go to anime cons and COSPLAY as members of the Nazi party. This is not just an Indonesian Muslim problem, no, but this is a glaring issue within the global Islamic community as a whole. Today, this sense of antisemitism is usually rooted in general hatred towards the Israeli government and its actions against the people of Palestine, but antisemitism amongst Muslims are also rooted in certain interpretations of verses from the Qur'an and Hadith mentioning Jewish people and Judaism (particularly the Bani Israil), but in a way that is more ridiculing instead of life-threatening when compared to how antisemitism looks like in the Western world.

As someone who prefers to become a "bridge" between two sides in most cases, I find this situation to be concerning, to say the least. While, yes, it is important for us Muslims to support Palestine and fight against injustice, we must not forget that not every Jewish people support the Israeli government. A lot of them are even anti-Zionists who actively condemn Israel and even disagree with the existence of Israel as a state as it goes against their teachings. A lot of them are also Holocaust survivors or their descendants, so it is harmful to think for one second that Hitler's actions and policies were justified. It's just like saying that Netanyahu is right for his decision to destroy Palestine and commit war crime after war crime towards the Palestinians.

As Muslims, we also need to remember that Jewish people (the Yahudi) are considered ahli kitab, i.e. People Of The Book along with Christians (the Nasrani). The Islam I have come to know and love has no mentions of Allah allowing us to persecute them or anyone collectively for the actions of a few. While, yes, there are disagreements with our respective teachings I do not see that as an excuse to even use antisemitic slurs against Jewish people during a pro-Palestine rally, let alone support a man who was known for his acts of cruelty toward the Jewish community in WW2. They are still our siblings/cousins in faith, after all. Unless they have done active harm like stealing homes from civilians or celebrating the destruction of Palestine or supporting the Israeli government and the IOF or are members of the IOF, no Jewish people (and Christians, for that matter) must be harmed in our fight against Zionism.

Contemporary antisemitism is similar to (if not straight up being the exact same thing as) contemporary Islamophobia, if you think about it; due to the actions of a select few that has caused severe harm towards innocent people, an entire community has been a target of hate. Even when you have tried to call out the ones supporting such cruelties, you are still getting bombarded by hate speech. It's doubly worse if you're also simultaneously part of a marginalized group like BIPOC, LGBTQ+, etc. as you also get attacked on multiple sides. This is where we all need to self-reflect, practice empathy, and unlearn all of the antisemitism and unjustified hatred that we were exposed to.

So, do call out Zionism and Nazism when you see it. Call out the US government for funding this atrocity and others before it that had ALSO triggered the rise of Islamophobia. Call your reps. Go to the streets. Punch a fascist if you feel so inclined. Support your local businesses instead of pro-Israel companies.

But not at the cost of our Jewish siblings. Not at the cost of innocent Jewish people who may also be your allies. If you do that, you are no different from a MAGA cap-wearing, gun-tooting, slur-yelling Islamophobe.

That is all for now, may your watermelons taste fresh and sweet.

🍉

Salam Semangka, Penco

[naradreamscape]

At this point, the DNC's true colours, and that of the US empire as a whole, are on full display. In the DNC's case, it's the essence of neoliberalism, which is that everyone has a valid place in government and representation...so long as they are supportive of the rest of the upper crust's pursuit of monetary gains and power. It's a Girl Power sticker on an oil fracking apparatus, or Raytheon bragging about how many LGBT+ employees it has.

People have been lied to that the Palestinian genocide is valid in any way - the population has been lied about to seem "uncivilized", "selfish" for not wanting to hand over their natural resources to the West, or as a culture of antisemites - in reality, they are defending themselves from self-entitled, often broken Jews enacting Manifest Destiny, who are backed by an imperialist empire that smelled oil.

Meanwhile, regular Jews such as myself are terrified that the establishment of a "home" state will mean we will one day be deported there against our wills. We are also sickened by how Palestinian people are being treated, and see it as a revolting mirror of the way our people have been treated throughout history. If this were a genuine Judaic settlement, the Arabs would be our neighbors; there would be no walls between us, and we would have bought our houses and land fairly from the ones who tended the land before us. If there were no aggressive, invasive occupation, there would be no native retaliation.

And yet, I am constantly told I, a White Ashken whose ancestors have lived in Europe and North America for centuries, am more entitled to occupied Palestinian land because the homes already there are "just Arabs". The gruesome deaths of children are supposed to be excused because "they were just going to grow up into terrorists anyway". I cannot believe the things I have seen self-identifying Jews say over the past 10 months...to meet them halfway in their arguments would be to land in blatant xenophobia.

The occupation of Palestine is not being done for "Jewish safety". It is being done to satiate the imperial industries of the USA, using a shield of profoundly Islamophobic religious extremists. At this point, everyone needs to call out the occupation. I, an actual Jew, am begging you all to feel comfortable criticizing the occupation. No one is benefiting from this, aside from bigots of many shades. The USA is committing a genocide for natural resources. Way too many of my people are trying to find personal benefit from this mass exodus.

To mi haverim: Please read more about Palestine that does not come from state propaganda or far-right publications. We should not see ourselves as being entitled to "civilize" the Middle East, because given everything we've seen the IDF filming themselves doing, does any of that seem civilized? And if you are scared to speak out, please know there are so many fellow anti-zionist Jews out there who would love to hear from you.

Goyim of America: speak out against your government. Do not fall prey to antisemitic stereotypes, but know the colony only represents a small percentage of our culture, one that is equivocal to nationalist Evangelical Christians. Criticize the colony as you would criticize any other foreign state's actions. Criticize American politicians for wasting money on genocide instead of your state and municipal systems. This won't stop until we are all united.

[canichangemyblogname]

I’ve been telling people that Israel— and the Zionist movement as a whole— is actually a security threat to the whole of Southwest Asia *and* to Jewish People globally.

The moderate conservatives and fascists who control the US government keep saying that Israel is vital to western geopolitical interests in the region. But those interests are *not* “security” interests. The interest isn’t preventing war in Southwest Asia or North Africa, especially not when historically colonial leaders (US, UK, and France) are involved. Like… Israel has often been a roadblock in diplomatic deescalation with Iran and counterterrorism in the region (see: Bibi funding terrorists, for one).

I’ve been saying that Israel’s violence is going to spill over to the region. I’ve been warning that Zionist expansion and aggression is going to meet fierce resistance. I’ve been trying to explain that Zionist aggression and expansion is dangerous not just to the Arab people of Southwest Asia, but also Jewish people in Israel and the SWANA region. At some point, Israel will meet too much resistance. At some point, there will be too many fronts and not enough resources.

This violence going to continue to widen in the region and diplomacy will continue to deteriorate. Hezbollah and Houthi activity are only the beginning. Jordan withdrawing their ambassador, the deterioration of normalization with Saudi Arabia, the complete cessation of relations with Brazil, etc… are only the beginning.

But America’s support is likely to remain unwavering, and as long as America has the international power it does, that means little is likely to change. As long as Israel has American support, there will be violence in Southwest Asia.

What a lot of the “I stand with Israel” promoters don’t understand is that the only way to secure the long-term safety and wellbeing of Israeli Jews, and the only way to achieve security and longevity for whatever state they live in, is to provide full and equal rights to Palestinians. That includes their full participation and representation in political systems, full land rights and protections, full economic freedoms, full citizenship, and the right of return.

Zionism has led to nothing but Jewish and Arab death. And the thing is? When the concept was first created in the early 1800s, long before it became a term Israelis attached to Jewish Nationalism, that was its point. People supported this concept as a solution to their country’s “Jewish Question.” They saw it as an opportunity to get Jewish people out of their country. And many Christian groups have come to support the concept believing that all Jews must return to the holy land to be massacred so Jesus can return. They want death. Death is the literal point of Zionist support and movements in countries like the US, UK and France. Christian Zionists want war while Secular Zionists just want to get rid of Jewish people, and don’t give a shit if they die.

There are more Christian Zionists in the US than there are Jewish people in the US. There are more non-Jewish Zionists in the US than there are Jewish people in the whole world. Jewish people make up a fraction of Zionists, and that is because many Jewish people recognize the antisemitic origins of the concept and the danger of ethnic and religious nationalism.

Anti-Zionists recognize that Jewish Nationalism is being used for US and UK colonial interests. Zionism justifies putting Jewish people in harm’s way and the line of fire for US economic interests in Southwest Asia, and calls it “necessary” for Jewish freedom and security. Zionism as well as terrorism is the reason over 1400 Israelis died on Oct. 7th.

Israel ignoring Egypt's warnings, Israel's chaotic "recovery" (a.k.a. their explicit non-recovery and bombing of hostages), and the IOF's chaotic engagement with Hamas fighters on Oct. 7th and 8th that caught hostages and civilians in crossfire should be proof enough that Israel cannot and will consistently fail to provide for the security and welfare of Jewish people. It should also be proof enough that Netanyahu's government doesn't give a shit about Israeli lives unless they can be weaponized to serve his political and regional goals.

From “Zionism encourages and spreads antisemitism around the globe.”

[daloy-politsey]

[Images ID: An 18 part Twitter thread by Michael W. Twitty (@KosherSoul) that reads the following:

1) How does someone like me experience #Antisemitism? Anti-Jewish sentiments and behavior can reflect the different variants of people expressing their displeasure with Jews as a people, sub-ethnicities and as a sect of religious practices of cultural or social stances.

2) Wearing a kippa, having a beard or wearing tzitzit...or fringes intended to remind me to observe the commandments often signify my Jewishness but that's not the only way people might identify me as a Jew and treat me differently in a negative way.

3) I was slapped in a grocery store by a man who grinned as he said "oh sorry didn't see you there..." and my kippa fell off. I was so shocked I didn't know what to do.

4) A white woman called me a "kike" in a parking lot dispute and when I called her out on it, the cops threatened me with arrest for "escalating," for calling her anti-Semitic. They were Black and no help to a fellow brotha.

5) A former landlord demanded I let workers in and around on Saturday and demanded that I be there to let them in even though I reminded her it was Shabbat. The city gvt of Rockville. Md didn't care.

6) I was attacked on the metro by a large group of fundamentalist Christians and their children mocked me and attempted to spit on me and my prayerbook. They preached about how awful Jews were...over they figured out I wasn't Muslim. Nobody intervened.

7) People might think I am Muslim if I wear an African or Asian style kippa which might resemble the kuffi. I desperately needed to charge my phone at Union Station & a very rude older white man who worked there demanded to know what I was doing & he told me to get me "fuckn terrorist ass" out

8) Getting my ID for research at the library of congress...the woman taking care of me demanded to know why I was Jewish. She then said, "I bet you're a damn Republicans too..." and shook her head with pursed lips.

9) The first and last time I prayed at a station with my tefillin I had more than one person with a walkie talkie come up to me and ask what I "thought" I was doing and why I had strange things on me and if they were dangerous.

like you would you even bother to ask...

10) I mentioned during a presentation for the Folklike festival that the folks in my synagogue made the same dish but with different ingredients and context & the curator for food ripped the mic out of my hands & told the crowd they were misinformed & that it had nothing to do with the Jews

11) Antisemitic and Anti-Jewish in my world is having a cop pull us over on Tisha B'Av & hold a gun to my head, its being told not to "bring up that Jewish angle" or having an editor turn down The Cooking Gene because I mentioned I was Jewish & them telling me "America wasn't ready"

12) Its being harassed and questioned on the train about why I am not a Christian or people hoping that I'm really "Messianic." Or ppl thinking they are funny at work calling em "Little Amish boy."

13) Its having another landlord threaten you over building a Sukkah. Its having a kippa off and being perceived as just Black while some white dude talks about the "the fnn Jews..." are the problem behind everything...

14) Its being asked "Do you have to wear that here?" (Kippa)

Its people seeing this beard and a headcovering and experiencing intersectinal isht at an airport...

Its people questioning my Jewish identity because they only frame Jewish identity as one identifiable type.

15) Its saying "I'm Jewish," and having people burst out laughing.

That one...

They can't hide the fact that bc I'm not a caricature that they think I am ridiculous in my current incarnation as a complex and nuanced American.

It hurts really bad.

16) Its people coming into my social media saying "I heard you were a Zionist. Are you a Zionist? Explain yourself." I never said a word about the matsav but I say Jewish and they say that.

17) Its people assuming that Jewishness takes me out of my consciousness as a person of color. Its people assuming real Black ppl can be Christian or Muslim but not Jews. Its people trying to tell me what Jewishness is about to justify de-centering me as a Jew.

18) I 'm going to close it here. Shver tzu tzayn a Yid.

/end ID]

[hazel2468]

Oh, and here’s one that got me;

“A memo given out by the British Ministry of Information in 1940, an instruction to its own propagandists, suggested that the idea of atrocity- what it calls “horror”- “must be used very sparingly, and must deal with the treatment of indisputably innocent people: not with violent criminals, and not with Jews.” This instruction came from a number of beliefs. Primarily, it came from a sense, prevalent in the government at that time, that the British public should not feel they were fighting a war on behalf of the Jews. But underneath that is something deeper. Underneath that is the profound belief that Jews do not belong in the category of the indisputably innocent: that, just by the virtue of being Jewish, they have sinned.”  

This line snagged me. It snagged because, though this book does go into amazing detail about the association between Jews and Capitalists, the making of the image of the Jew into the image of The Man, into how antisemitism is so very often framed as “punching up” and “rebelling” against the “whites in power” (this book also wholesale refutes the idea that Jews are white, and brilliantly so), I think that THIS line digs down into the heart of it.

The idea that Jews are guilty, that we are “sinning” (though I know most progressives would be loath to admit they think of us that way), is something I feel is at the heart of the refusal of progressives to offer the same allyship and concern to Jews the way to do to almost every other minority. The willingness to connect Jews to evil capitalists, to demand that we bend over backwards to prove that we are “innocent”- in many progressive spaces this means anti-Zionist, despite this being about America and American Jews who have about as much say in Israeli politics as we do in any other Middle Eastern nation...

If I had to pick something that all of this shit stems from. I think it would be this. There is an idea that Jews are inherently not innocent, that we are always “up to something”.

And I wish more progressives would look at the antisemitism in their exclusion of Jews, in their outright condemnation of Jews and the banning of Jews and Jewish symbols from their spaces, in the way they so easily fall into antisemitic stereotypes because they so easily accept them because they, too, buy into this notion that Jews are just inherently guilty- I wish more progressives would look at that and be willing to see the racism in it, just as they are seemingly open to seeing the racism elsewhere.

[sylvielauffeydottir]

Hi I just saw your post about Israel and Palestinian. I don't know if you're the person to ask or if this is a dumb question but I was wondering if anyone has considered starting a second Jewish state? I was wondering because there's a bunch of Christian countries so why not multiple Jewish ones.

Sorry if I'm bothering you and Thanks for your time.

That’s actually a pretty interesting question. I am going to apologize right now, because I essentially can’t give a short answer to save my life.

I’m not a ‘Jewish Scholar,’ so while I can speak with some authority about the history of Zionism, I definitely couldn’t speak about it with as much authority as others. I mentioned in at least one of the posts I have written about the history of plans for a ‘Jewish state’ when Zionism was originally being proposed, and I can kinda of track the history of Zionist thinking for you if you are interested, though essentially it’s just about arguing where to go. But there are better scholars for this than me, so I would recommend Rebecca Kobrin, Deborah Lipstadt, Walter Laqueur … idk. Maybe just read some Theodor Herzl, honestly. With all of that said, I can speak with some authority about the post-war history of this in the Middle East. So let’s go.

In post-war times, there has really only been one serious discussion of an alternative Jewish state, as far as I know. And actually, this is part of why I find it so ironic that people are campaigning so hard to be “anti-Zionist” and to express views like “anti-Zionism” in their activism, because the Jews in Israel who are most anti-Zionist are actually the settlers of Palestinian territories, who want to secede and form a “Gaza-State” called Judeah. There's a great book about this called The Deadly Embrace by Ilana Kass And Bard O'Neill, if anyone is interested. Anyway, most of those people, who are largely Haredim (the Ultra-Orthodox Jews, though some of those settlers are semi Orthodox), have essentially been waging a “culture war” about what it means to have a Jewish state and what the identity of that Jewish state should look like basically since the 1980s.

There is a really good article about this that you can find right here written by Peter Lintl, who is a researcher at the Institution of Political Science for the Friedrich-Alexander Universitat. I’ll summarize it for the lazy people, though, because it’s like 40 pages. Just know that this paragraph won’t be super source heavy, because it is basically the same source. Essentially, the Haredim community has tripled in size from 4% to 12% of the total Israeli population since 1980, and it is probably going to be about 20% by 2040. They only accept the Torah and religious laws as the basis for Jewish life and Jewish identity and they are critical of democratic principles. To them, a societal structure should be hierarchical, patriarchal, and have rabbis at the apex, and they basically believe that Israel isn’t a legitimate state. This is primarily because Israel is (at least technically, so no one come at me in the comments about Palestinian citizens of Israel, so I’ll make a little ** and address this there) a ‘liberal’ democracy. Rights of Israeli citizens include, according to Freedom House, free and fair elections (they rank higher on that criteria here than the United States, by the way), political choice, political rights and electoral opportunities for women, a free and independent media, and academic freedom. It is also, I should add (as a lesbian), the only country in the Middle East that has anything close to LGBT+ rights.

[**to the point about Palestinians and Palestinian citizens of Israel: I have a few things to say. First, I have recommended this book twice now and it is Michael Oren’s Six Days of War, which absolutely fantastically talks about the ways in which the entire structure of the Palestinian ‘citizenship’ movement, Palestinian rights, and who was responsible for governing Palestinians changed after the Six Days War. If you are at all interested in the modern Middle East or modern Middle East politics, I highly recommend you read this, because a huge tenant of this book is that it was 1967, not 1947, that caused huge parts of our current situation (and that, surprisingly, a huge issue that quote-on-quote “started it” was actually water, but that’s sort of the primary secondary issue, not the Actual Issue at play here). Anyway, I’ve talked about the fact that Israel hugely abuses its authority in the West Bank and Gaza and that there are going to be current members of the Israeli Government who face action at the ICC, so please don’t litigate this again with me. I also should add that the 2018 law which said it was only Jews who had the natural-born right to “self-determine” in Israel was passed by the Lekkud Government, and I really hate them anyway. I know they’re bad. It’s not the point I’m making. I’m making a broader point about the Constitution vis-a-vis what the Haredim are proposing, which is way worse].

To get back to the Haredim, basically there is this entire movement of actual settlers in territories that have been determined to belong to the Palestinian people as of, you know, the modern founding of Israel (and not the pre-Israel ‘colonial settler’ narrative you’ll see on instagram in direct conflict with the history of centuries of aliyah) who want to secede and form a separate Jewish state. They aren’t like, the only settlers, but I point this out because they are basically ‘anti-Zionist’ in the sense that they think that modern Zionism isn’t adhering to the laws of Judaism — that the state of Israel is too free, too radical, too open. And scarily enough, these are the sort of the people from whom Netanyahu draws a huge part of his political support. Which is true of the right wing in general. Netanyahu can’t actually govern without a coalition government. Like I have said, the Knesset is huge, often with 11-13 political parties at once, and so to ‘govern’ Netanyahu often needs to recruit increasingly right wing, conservative, basically insane political parties to maintain his coalition. It’s why he has been so supportive of the settlements, particularly in the last five years (since he is, as I have also said, facing corruption charges, and he really can’t leave office). It would really suck for him if a huge chunk of his voters seceded, wouldn’t it?

Anyway, that is the only ‘second Jewish State’ I know about, and I don’t think that is necessarily much of a solution. I really don’t have the solutions to the Middle East crisis. I am just a girl with some history degrees and some time on her hands to devote to tumblr, and I want people to learn more so they can form their own opinions. With that said, I think there are two more things worth saying and then I will close out for the night.

First, Judaism is an ethno-religion. Our ethnicities have become mixed with the places that we have inhabited over the years in diaspora, which is how you have gotten Sephardi, Mizrahi, Ashkenazi, and even Ethiopian Jews. But if you do actual DNA testing on almost all of the Jews in diaspora, the testing shows that we come from the same place: the Levant. No matter how pale or dark, Jews are still fundamentally one people, something we should never forget (and anyone who tries to put racial hierarchy into paleness of Jews: legit, screw you. One people). Anyway, unlike other religious communities, we have an indigenous homeland because we have an ethnic homeland. It’s small, and there are many Jews in diaspora who choose not to return to it, like myself. But that homeland is ours (just as much as it is rightfully Palestinians, because we are both indigenous to the region. For everyone who hasn’t read my other posts on the issue, I’m not explaining this again. Just see: one, two, and three, the post that prompted this ask). This is different from Christians, for example, who basically just conquered all of Europe and whose religion is not dependent on your race or background. You can be a lapsed Christian and you are still white, latinx, black, etc right? I am a lapsed Jew, religiously speaking, and will still never escape that I am ethnically Ashkenazi Jewish.

Second, I think you raise a really good point about other religious states. There are many other religious majority states in the world (all of these countries have an official state religion), and a lot of them are committing a lot of atrocities right now (don't even get me started on Saudi Arabia). I have seen other posts and other authors write about this better than I ever could, but I am going to do my best to articulate why, because of this, criticism of Israel as a state, versus criticism of the Israeli Government, is about ... 9 times out of 10 inherently antisemitic.

We should all be able to criticize governments. That is a healthy part of the democratic process and it is a healthy part of being part of the world community. But there are 140 dictatorships in the world, and the UN Human Rights Council has condemned Israel 45 times since 2013. Since the creation of the UN Human Rights Council, it has has received more resolutions concerning Israel than on the rest of the world combined. This is compared to like … 1 for Myanmar, 1 for South Sudan, and 1 for North Korea.

Israel is the world’s only Jewish majority state. You want to talk about “ethnic cleansing” and “repressive governments”? I can give you about five other governments and world situations right now, off the top of my head, that are very stark, very brutal, very (in some cases) simple examples of either or both. If a person is ‘using their platform’ to Israel-bash, but they are not currently speaking about the atrocities in Myanmar, Kashmir, Azerbaijan, South Sudan, or even, dare I say, the ethnonationalism of the Hindu Nationalist Party in India, then, at the very least, their activism is a little bit performative. They are chasing the most recent ‘hot button’ issue they saw in an instagraphic, and they probably want to be woke and maybe want to do the right thing. And no one come at me and say it is because you don’t “know anything about Myanmar.” Most people know next to nothing about the Middle East crisis as well. At best, people are inconsistent, they may be a hypocrite, and, whether they want to admit it to themselves or not, they are either unintentionally or intentionally buying into antisemitic narratives. They might even be an antisemite.

I like to think (hope, maybe) that most people don’t hate Jews. If anything, they just follow what they’ve been told, and they tend to digest what everyone is taking about. But there is a reason this is the global narrative that has gained traction, and I guarantee it has at least something to do with the star on the Israeli flag.

I know that was a very long answer to your question, but I hope that gave you some insight.

As a sidenote: I keep recommending books, so I am going to just put a master list of every book I have ever recommended at the bottom of anything I do now, because the list keeps growing. So, let’s go in author alphabetical order from now on.

One Country by Ali Abunimah Rise and Kill First: The Secret History of Israel's Targeted Assassinations by Ronen Bergman Kingdom of Olives and Ash: Writers Confront the Occupation, edited by Michael Chabon and Ayelet Waldman The Girl Who Stole My Holocaust: A Memoir by Noam Chayut If a Place Can Make You Cry: Dispatches from an Anxious State by Daniel Gordis Israel: A Concise History of a Nation Reborn by Daniel Gordis The Deadly Embrace by Ilana Kass And Bard O'Neill Like Dreamers: The Story of the Israeli Paratroopers Who Reunited Jerusalem and Divided a Nation by Yossi Klein Halevi Antisemitism by Deborah Lipstadt Six Days of War: June 1967 and the Making of the Modern Middle East by Michael Oren The Yom Kippur War: The Epic Encounter That Transformed the Middle East by Abraham Rabinovich One Palestine, Complete: Jews and Arabs Under the British Mandate by Tom Segev Hollow Land: Israel's Architecture of Occupation by Eyal Weizman

[schraubd]

Explicit Mizrahi Zionism and the California Ethnic Studies Curriculum

In Jewish Currents, Gabi Kirk has a long piece on the antisemitism controversy over the California Ethnic Studies curriculum (last year I wrote on the matter here). It's a wide-ranging issue and a wide-ranging essay, but (in keeping with my prior contribution) I want to focus on the specific issue of Sephardic/Mizrahi inclusion.* Here is what Kirk says when she reaches that angle of the story:

Complaints about the [proposed Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum] aren’t coming solely from white Ashkenazi Jews; Sephardic and Mizrahi Jewish groups have also claimed the curriculum leaves out their experiences. Jews Indigenous to the Middle East and North Africa (JIMENA)—which is also an explicitly Zionist group—claimed in multiple letters to the CDE that the draft ESMC “portray[s] Arabs as a homogenous, Muslim group,” and “excludes and erases the experiences, perspectives, and voices of diverse Middle Eastern communities.” (JIMENA did not respond to requests for comment for this piece.) California is home to a large Mizrahi Jewish population; Los Angeles is home to the largest Iranian-Jewish population in the US. 

Have you fixated on one word in a passage, and just felt it inexorably press layers of meaning onto you? That's me with "explicitly" (as in JIMENA is "also an explicitly Zionist group"). Throughout Kirk's essay, the Jewish organizations criticizing the draft ethnic studies curriculum were pretty much always referred to as "Jewish Zionist". Nobody was ever referred to as "anti-Zionist" -- only the Zionists needed the perpetual modifier attached to them. It's the Zionists versus the unmarked neutrals. But of all the groups mentioned -- from the AJC to the ADL to AMCHA -- only JIMENA was "explicitly Zionist".** And I started wondering -- why explicitly? What was that word doing? How was JIMENA explicitly Zionist in a way its peers were not? To be sure, JIMENA is Zionist in the same way that most Jewish organizations are, in the same way that most Jews are. I'm quite familiar with them, and I know what role Zionism plays in their organizational orientation. JIMENA is an organization that was formed to represent the interests and the stories of Sephardic/Mizrahi Jewish refugees whose communities in the Arab and Muslim world were decimated in the decades surrounding the establishment of Israel. It is Zionist because (a) most of the community it represents is Zionist and (b) in its estimation, its mission and values are furthered through some iteration of Zionism. But Zionism is not its raison d'etre. It does not even appear in JIMENA's "About" section. One would be hard pressed to explain how JIMENA is notably "explicit" in its Zionism in a way that, say, the AJC is not. And what would "non-explicit" Zionism look like? If it's not "explicit", is it "covert"? "Hidden"? It starts to look pretty lose-lose, pretty quickly. The almost assured truth is that the word "explicitly", here, is redundant in terms of cognitive content. It is not actually meant to distinguish JIMENA from the AJC; it does not add information. Its purpose is more affective -- meant to convey a mood of danger, or of shamelessness. It reads like an "explicit lyrics" stamp slapped on an album: these Jews need a warning label. It's similar to how one sometimes sees groups or speakers called "openly" or "avowedly" Zionist. Taken literally, one might ask "as opposed to?" But the purpose of the modifier isn't really to add new content as it is to tut at the brazenness of it all. How very dare they. These are not respectable Jews. They flaunt. If there is a reason why "explicitly" got attached to JIMENA in particular, it was as a red flag for the unwary reader who might otherwise be inclined to credit the worries of the Mizrahi community. There is something that I think is worth saying about the manner in which the Zionism of Mizrahi Jews is often cast and denigrated in these tones -- as brazen, audacious, flamboyant, even obscene. It's late, and I'm tired, and others can pick this ball up if they want to. But it is something I've noticed before, and I was not surprised to see it here. * There's a separate issue burbling up regarding a column on this issue written by a certain disgraced Jewish journalist in the Jewish Journal. I have no desire to give this writer any more attention, so I'll just say that the disgraced journalist is disgraced for a reason and that it's a further disgrace that they are still being published in respectable outlets. ** Though the letter was hosted on JIMENA's website, it actually had ten other co-signatories, all California-based Sephardic/Mizrahi Jewish organizations including five synagogues. They go unmentioned in Kirk's essay (are they "explicitly" Zionist too -- whatever that means?). By comparison, in the next paragraph Kirk contrasts JIMENA's letter with "others [who] trace the difficulty of imparting Mizrahi history to Zionism itself." The link goes to an essay hosted by Jewish Voice for Peace (a far more "explicitly" anti-Zionist organization than JIMENA is "explicitly" Zionist) and was signed by two people, one of whom lives in Indiana. Nonetheless, Kirk spends roughly twice as much time on (and extends much more sympathy to) the analysis of this duo. That later in the essay she quotes a proponent of the draft ethnic studies curriculum complaining about "tokenizing" is more than a little rich. via The Debate Link https://ift.tt/3crCyWj

[rook-seidhr]

I'm at the point where I can't see how focus on the Israel Palestine question re: Chicago Dyke March is anything other than derailment. I'd also like to say that perception that pro-Palestine sentiment here is being silenced *as a general trend* very much does not sit well with me because I believe the silencing to be happening the other way around, and think this is in fact a longstanding destructive feature of discourse surrounding the Palestinian cause. Also, I believe most of those engaging in defense of a pro-Palestinian liberation stance right now mean well but do not understand how much its framing decenters actual Palestinian welfare. I will elaborate on both counts. I'm agitated from all sides about this and I can't do brevity so bear with me I guess. First, the derailment. It's of particularly troubling sort because it falls into a larger pattern of whataboutism where what *should be* a case of clearcut antisemitism cannot ever be identified and unilaterally condemned by the left without also being hashed and rehashed in exculpatory ways "because Israel." This is ESPECIALLY troubling when: - There is a persistent phenomenon that's almost like a lefty inversion of the concept Israeli exceptionalism. Like a reverse- exceptionalism, whereby discussion of Israel's transgressions are held to singular standards of scrutiny to the exception of other nations/populations with comparable and/or far more deplorable histories and actions and crises. And in that I am including all the unspeakable injustice and destruction the larger MENA region has wrought to Palestinians, and how accountability seems no concern there, in part *because* of eternal return to obsessive, unilateral focus on Israel as the central Palestinian issue. - Cases of anti Muslim bigotry aren't held to the same scrutiny. The fact that people will demur about antisemitism but not anti-Muslim bigotry betrays a terrible lack of self awareness re: double standards. I mean, if you want to go 'head and make weak arguments about how religious symbols are politically wielded, I'm going to have to start wondering why you aren't referencing the much more appalling and deadly scope of human rights abuses committed under Muslim banners whenever the question of banning Muslim symbols comes up. Which would be a clearly terrible argument, but maybe it's worth reflecting why the same argument suddenly makes sense when it comes to Jewish symbols. - Casual antisemitism often manifests as (among other things) conflations between Jewish symbols or beliefs / various Zionist ones / various Israeli nationalist ones. We ALREADY know the Dyke March incident to be an iteration of this problem. Now think about how fucked up what happened next is: the ban of a Jewish symbol at a public event based on a bigoted conflation is called out as anti-Semitic. Then, as a kind of precondition for defense against or acknowledgement of such anti-Semitism, people on the left apparently see fit to hold Jewish people accountable, individually and as a group, for *the same bigoted conflations targeting them*, basically needing Jewish people to declare their politics and/or unilaterally renounce Zionism -- essentially acting as gatekeepers despite being outsiders operating from apparently rather reductive and narrow presumptions of Zionist politics, since they somehow have the arrogance of assuming they understand and can judge what any given Jewish person's Zionist adherence entails and means based on the label alone??? Who the fuck else does this? Who the fuck else has to go through this? Do we have to establish and approve of the political and ideological leanings of Muslims in order to defend them against anti-Muslim bigotry, or do we engage in whataboutism re: the scourge of political Islamism in the Middle East to determine if Muslims have the right to display their religious symbols in the west? Now the Palestine thing. And necessary conversations. And silencing and whatnot. Even points that are so reasonable and evident they may well be tautologies by now, like 'Palestinians are entitled to basic human rights', bear a different weight when made in these contexts. They don't exist in vacuum, but carry the shadow of a discourse that already has huge issues with privileging particularly anti-Zionist or anti-Israel Palestinian advocacy no matter how tangential to the conversation, and never mind what else is minimized and derailed in the process. I am not doubting the sincerity and concern of my friends who are struggling to express pro-Palestine sentiment while being confused by hostility right now, but I would urge a more thorough consideration of the relative space taken up by the respective conversations thus far, and to not confuse long overdue push-back from folks who have every reason to be frustrated and sick of derailment and semantic squabbles over definitions of Zionism every time anti-semitism comes up. If it seems like there is rejection from the left when you want to assert a pro-Palestinian stance here, it is less likely to be because people have a problem with pro-Palestinian politics as such, and more likely to be because there is a salient point regarding how cavalier antisemitism already is today and how these patterns of derailment every damn time end up gatekeeping attempts to counter an insidious kind of racism that can and must be discussed without forcing marginalized people to jump through the Israel Blame Game hoops to defend their humanity. The Israel Palestine thing needs to stop hijacking conversations about antisemitism. Palestinian welfare does not suffer if people refuse to derail conversations about anti-semitism, but conversations about anti-semitism certainly suffer when what-about-Palestine pops up. And that's all besides the fact that no matter how well-meaning, this Palestine-specific whataboutism does not contribute anything appreciable to Palestinian welfare and is so oblivious in some ways it's kind of heartbreaking to try to navigate through. I firmly believe that the kneejerk way the Palestinian Cause is held up like a trump card whenever convenient and the infuriating reverse exceptionalism with which the conflict is treated has been a firm factor in prolonging the crisis and exacerbating Palestinian suffering. I'm struggling to find the words for why it troubles me so much to see all these conversations stuck on questions of whether anti Zionism is anti Semitism because don't forget Israel and what about accountability for Palestine. Please. Please. Please try to understand that an anti-Zionist pro-Palestine liberation stance is not one that needs championing in the left, that nobody fucking lets us forget Israel when we try to talk about Palestine, and nobody stops talking about Palestine when anyone mentions Israel, and it hasn't done shit for diaspora or territory Palestinians except turn us into a handy slogan. Establishing a stance of basic advocacy for the rights and welfare of the Palestinian people is not what the discourse lacks, it is what the discourse needs to *move past* already. Everybody is well-versed and comfortable with the Israel Blame Game-- it drowns out and supersedes everything else, and it's everything else that Palestinian advocacy desperately needs. This is something that frustrates me to no end because it's not reducible to something like Israeli conduct being dealt with disproportionate scrutiny in the left *as such*, but as a function of urgency and relative space. When Israel overshadows discourse about Palestinian welfare even though it is Arabs who are responsible for the most staggering and horrific ongoing Palestinian abuses, we have a problem. And it can never be talked about or addressed because only Israel's actions are viewed with agency and significance, and attributing Palestinian suffering to anything else is instantly condemned as insidious detraction. So you can see how it is frustrating to go through the whole 'is pro-palestinian anti-zionism anti-semitic' rigmarole when it is so often a distraction from more functional questions of Palestinian welfare. Fact: There are kinds of anti-Zionism that are pro-Palestinian rights and that are also anti-Semitic. Fact: There are kinds of anti-Zionism that are pro-Palestinian rights and that are not anti-Semitic. Fact: There are kinds of Zionism that are consistent with upholding the rights and freedoms of Palestinian Arabs, and, fact: there are kinds that are categorically not. Educated opinion: Not only is anti-Zionism the established and normative stance across most of the Middle East, but, if we're being honest, probably the most prevalent and established type of anti-Zionism in the discourse is that which engages in solid pro-Palestinian advocacy while also falling into both gross and casual anti-Semitism. This is definitely the case in the broader discourse on the issue in the Middle East, and what's more, there is next to no self-awareness of the anti-Semitic assumptions, myths, and bigotries, not to mention the historical revisionism, threading popular and political anti-Zionism in the MENA region and popular Palestinian and Lebanese culture as well. This is a problem, and one that will never be addressed as long as pro-Palestinianism and anti-Semitism are presumed to be wholly non-overlapping binaries by well-meaning leftists. It is both possible and necessary to acknowledge and mount critique of anti-semitic elements in pro-Palestine discourse while maintaining Palestinian advocacy. Acknowledging anti-Semitism in the discourse is not going to undermine the Palestinian cause. Again, people don't need to be perfect moral agents to justify a defense of their humanity. Educated opinion: Leftist discourse centering the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is overall entrenched in rigid, binary thinking and overwhelmingly leans pro-Palestine but in unfortunately too-basic, reductive ways. It already has an ideological rigidity problem. The discourse is such that to be pro-Palestine is to be above all transcendentally righteous: the lines of oppression and blame are clear and brook no further complexity; it is the cause no reasonable person can deny or fail to center in any conversation, and Palestinian advocacy is almost synonymous with condemnation for the Israeli crimes against the Palestinian people and aught else. It is troubled with issues of allegiance and abstraction-- maintaining certain principled stances re: the Cause is treated as an almost inviolable tenet for anybody who can claim to care about Palestine, despite the fact that the central narrative of the Cause pits the immediate welfare and prosperity of generations of living, breathing Palestinians against the memory of a Palestine that has not existed for decades and an abstract future promise of a right to return to a place that never again will be. The narrative may have once been in service of the people, but it has not been so in a long time. And it is only the narrative that is treated with sanctity by the most vocal champions of Palestine, and if it comes at the expense of Palestinian lives like in Yarmouk, so be it. Palestinian advocacy is more about condemning Israel than it is about supporting Palestine, and that is the problem. It's beginning to feel like despair, seeing how pro-Palestinian discourse is framed in terms of the questions of Zionism and anti-Zionism over and again, constantly centering and recentering the question of Palestinian welfare as a foil to Israeli aggression in broad nationalistic and/or existentialist terms, assuming unilateral causes, ascribing agency very selectively to regional actors, brooking no interrogation of Palestinian, Arab, or Muslim agency in the conflict, and obsessively resistant to moving past the past. It's been decades and Palestinians continue to suffer large-scale crises in basic resources, public health, trauma, and disenfranchisement, and they have largely been allowed to persist in the name *of* Palestine, at the hands of Arab regimes that shrug off all accountability in Israel's direction, though for fifty years diaspora Palestinians in the larger Levant have been purely at the mercy of the Arab states housing them. We do not need to hear tired pro-liberation stances when it is those very stances that are used to justify keeping us holed up in Lebanese and Syrian refugee camps, stateless, in suspended animation, without civil rights or wealth or upwards mobility, dying slowly of poverty and deplorable living conditions and isolation if we're lucky, and if we're unlucky, until a guy like Assad comes along and murders, maims, starves, and makes refugees out of a whole city of us-- and yet it is in the name of liberating Palestine that Assadist discourse proliferates, being anti-Israel, and Palestine's catastrophe is only and ever subsumed into the crimes of Israel and not of those of Syria or Lebanon or Assad or Hamas or the PA or Fatah or the GCC states or anybody else. When I want to talk about Palestinian advocacy, I want to talk about Assad and the nearly 200,000 Palestinians in Yarmouk camp that are now dead or gone or starving under siege and I want to talk about how the Lebanese state has made pariahs and a lost people out of *generations* of diaspora Palestinians practically quarantined in refugee camps because of petty sectarian concerns and I want to talk about the Palestinian political elite grievously frittering away resources and opportunities that could have prevented significant Palestinian suffering and death because of political feuds and a reckless privileging of a jihadi cause over popular welfare-- but I cannot, because the justifications, distractions, conspiracy theories loop incessantly back to Israel. Which cements *my* concern that these conversations are not really *about* Palestinian welfare at all.

Hiba Bint Zeinab, a Palestinian-Lebanese woman living in the US (reposted by permission)

[leftpress]

Al-Jazeera: recycling antisemitic conspiracy theories

David Collier | January 14, 2017

Today was the fourth and final instalment of the Al Jazeera ‘documentary’ called ‘The Lobby’. The “undercover report exposing how the Israel lobby influences British politics”.

For those that haven’t seen it. The show came in four, 25 minute videos (1, 2, 3, 4). Highly repetitive, extremely drawn out, with about 5-8 minutes of content in each one. The sinister music and hidden footage feel, create the atmosphere you are watching something illicit. After a while you realise that despite the eerie music, the accusation itself is empty.

Viewing figures tend to agree with me. Whilst the firstshow on YouTube has already reached nearly 100,000 views. The Second sits at 24,000, the third 16,000 and currently the last show has only been viewed 3,000 times. Everyone soon realised there was no meat on this bone.

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The antisemitic premise

Far too often, as I watched, I simply couldn’t understand what was wrong with what I was seeing. This difference, between my recognition of everyday political actions, and the attempt to suggest that we were witnessing the inside actions of a powerful conspiratorial story, highlights exactly what was wrong with the show itself.

The idea, the premise could only have been formulated within an antisemitic mind-set. The ‘undercover reporter’, Robin Harrow, spent six months looking for evidence of something that quite simply does not exist. His findings are disjointed pieces of a picture of a UK Jewish community that is deeply connected to Israel, put together haphazardly by the mind of an antisemitic conspiracy theorist.

In a excellent take down of the ‘expose’, Marcus Dysch, Political Editor at the Jewish Chronicle, called it “harassment of Jews dressed up as entertainment”. Jonathan Hoffman, in a piece on Harry’s Place, broke his analysis into three central complaints, brilliantly summing up the show as ‘voyeurism For antisemites’.

In essence, the entire show hangs on a single sentence. Six months of undercover work, numerous events, scores of meetings, untold hours of networking, and they caught one ‘take-down’ comment on camera. Even then, it was spoken by a junior member of the Israeli Embassy staff with an over-inflated opinion of himself and a dubious command of English.

Trust me, undercover work is what I do. If I had six months, professional assistance and proper funding, I know that what I would put together would do major damage to the anti-Zionist camp in the UK.  They had six months and found nothing. I have real material to work with. They don’t.

Andrew Billen in The Times said this:

“For the life of me I could not see what Israel was doing wrong here. The Lobby sensationally exposed the existence of, well, a lobby.”

Al Jazeera attacks British Jews

So, what was this all about? Yes, the focus was on one embassy employee, but that was not the point. He was just the eventual conduit and you cannot write history backwards. An important point to remember is this: when they started, they could not have known which way this was going to go. The intention was to damage the grassroots, the strategy to weaken the fight against antisemitism, and the goal was to suggest British Zionists, one way or another, are all paid puppets of the Israeli State.

The anti-Israel (pro-Palestinian) movements in the UK have been damaged over the last 18 months, due to their inability to separate themselves from rabid antisemites. If they did not want to operate from a drastically weakened platform, they needed the tools to protect the antisemites. The ability to deflect the accusations, to continue to work unhindered by such ‘petty’ issues such as racist abuse against Jews.

Therefore, this was a deliberate attack on British Jews by a state funded, state owned, news outlet from Qatar. And in return, those who have found themselves politically weakened by antisemitic accusations, such as Jeremy Corbyn, are clamouring for the government to investigate Al Jazeera’s baseless conspiracy theory. The first opportunity Corbyn had to sell out the Jews to regain some political power, he has taken with both arms raised. Dancing with him on the table are people like Jenny Tonge, Ben White and Jackie Walker. I hope he enjoys the company.

This type of antisemitic suggestion, that Jews conspire and rule the world, is still common in the Middle East. Yet, Al Jazeera was operating inside the UK, attacking British Jews with a highly antisemitic brush. If I had one major accusation outside of the Al Jazeera team, it would be that the Mail on Sunday promoted the Al Jazeera ‘expose’ with front page cover just four day before broadcasting.  What on earth possessed the Mail on Sunday to jump into bed with Qatar, antisemitism, Electronic Intifada and Jenny Tonge against what is just a group of people who all share similar western values together?

There’s no antisemitism here guv

The two details worthy of note came in the second and third installments.  The first was a confrontation between Labour MP Joan Ryan, and Jean Fitzpatrick an anti-Israel activist. The entire confrontation in my opinion, was a set-up. Fitzpatrick is a hard-core activist. If she was politely asking questions about settlements, it was because she was on a mission. In any event, we also only see part of the footage.

What we do know is that Fitzpatrick, who was investigated and cleared, was not the only incident. We hear that “”one nutter came up and basically said that the coup was run by Jews, and Jewish MPs and Jewish millionaires.”  we know also that “others suggested the creation of the antisemitism scandal was merely part of a plot”. Even if the comments from Fitzpatrick are arguable, the atmosphere surrounding the stall may have already been toxic.

In any event, consider this, we have two non-Jews arguing over what they consider is antisemitic, and a state funded Arabic TV station showing some of the footage of the exchange to suggest a conspiracy in which antisemitism in Labour does not even exist. I am sure that Jackie Walker would be horrified, if someone tried to use the inability of two white people to ably identify the boundaries of racism, to discard all claims about the existence of all racist abuse.

Bullying the victims

The second incident left me feeling physically sick, and was the conversation between the reporter and Jewish Labour Movement Director Ella Rose after the antisemitism meeting at the Labour Conference. As David Hirsh put it “Al Jazeera’s spy pretends to comfort a Jewish woman who is in tears after experiencing antisemitism, secretly videos her exasperation, then runs off to his pals to help them edit his footage into an antisemitic documentary.”

Ella Rose “formerly worked” at the Israeli embassy. Apparently, if you work at any time for the Israeli embassy, you are forever tainted. According to Al Jazeera, Jackie Walker and co, this is proof positive you are of evil intent.  Once this ‘horrifying’ detail about her past life was uncovered by Asa Winstanley, Ella suggests Jackie Walker  ‘slammed her all week’ on social media. This is the life of those that choose to work within the Jewish community in this way. They become stalked, investigated, the prey of the antisemite.

Then much was made of her post abuse comments. When I saw this footage, it seemed to be that of a victim, trying to rebuild, to retake ownership of her pride. So I asked an expert. This from psychotherapist Amanda Perl:

“This fantasy or rehearsal that she talked about is simply a way of overcompensating for feeling dis-empowered, scared, humiliated, inferior and ashamed – it’s as if she has been left looking like a coward, not dealing appropriately or how she wanted to in a situation – she is simply with such words trying to overcompensate for being seen as ‘weak’. This overcompensation its a coping mechanism”

So, not only do Al Jazeera take hidden footage of a victim of antisemitism. They then use a natural response of a victim, a response nurtured in clinics for abuse victims around the country as a way of overcoming abuse, and they turn her into the abuser as part of an antisemitic documentary. Currently, because of Al Jazeera, some antisemites are further fueling the abuse against Ella. Everyone involved in this, including those who commented on it, or sent vicious messages via social media, are assisting in further abusing a victim. This Al Jazeera action needs to be thoroughly investigated.

Thoughts

This was a heavily funded, antisemitic attack on British Jews by a Qatari funded state news agency. As at times, we saw footage from different angles in the restaurant, we know there was more than one cameraman involved.  We know that Shay Masot was probably drunk on at least one of the occasions he was on camera. After six months of investigating, it is safe to say they found nothing.

We know that sending MPs to Israel is a lot better for ‘fact finding’ than sending them to ‘Palestine’. We know that MPs that go to Israel are at least given a grounding in the truth of the conflict. Why don’t Al Jazeera investigate themselves? Or better still Caabu:

“In 2013 Caabu took three delegations to the West Bank including former Foreign Secretary, Jack Straw; Shadow Business Secretary, Chuka Umunna; Jake Berry MP; Karen Buck MP; Cathy Jamieson MP; and Mark Pawsey MP.”

At many events I go to, I hear of MP’s having been taken by anti-Israel groups to Palestine. I hear of groups taking them. It never crossed my mind to take the footage, edit it, and turn it into a conspiracy. Others have written the bottom line already about this antisemitic show.  It is a disgrace. It is also disgusting that some politicians are using the product for their own political gain. We know these people bully Jews and they further smear them, by pretending the victims are the abusers.

We are a community at war. In an environment that is deteriorating. There is nothing imagined about it. We are now entering an atmosphere in Europe where torching a Synagogue is no longer seen as an attack on Jews, but rather an expression of frustration against Israel. We are no longer at the top of this slippery slope, but have begun a descent. Be alert.

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Who is Captain Marvel an allegory for? Is she a “Zionist Superhero,” as The Forward asks, emphasizing her final-act effort to find a home for a dispossessed people? Are the Skrulls a metaphor for the Jews, their ability to “sim” a metaphor for anti-semitic fears of Jewish assimilation (as the Times of Israel wonders)? Or maybe the Kree are Israel, publicly declaring the Palestinian Skrulls to be “terrorists,” always firing missiles at geography, and mounting commando raids against refugee camps (all to protect their borders from the families they call “infiltrators”)? Then again, perhaps the Kree Empire is the United States, or the EU: the Skrulls are misunderstood (and wrongfully maligned) refugees that — though portrayed by the empire as a threat to the body politic — turn out to be nothing more than families, so the Kree could as easily be Trump’s America (or Fortress Europe) as Nazi Germany. But since the movie also doubles as a commercial for the Air Force, it may also be that our heroine is simply The United States — as it sees itself — her superpowers being “The Superpower”’s use of military force to protect the weak from the predatory strong (which is why America has a military, right?).

And yet, despite some loosely organized chatter here and there, it’s been interesting to see how little discussion there’s actually been of the movie’s political subtext. Perhaps no one wants to touch it, or it’s gotten lost amidst other issues, like the misogynist boycott (and, secondarily, the movie’s obvious imbrication in the military industrial cultural complex). Maybe the MCU juggernaut has just gotten too exhaustingly vast to be interesting. And the parallels aren’t that exact: the Skrulls can’t be Zionists, per se, because they are not trying to return to their ancestral home (their planet was destroyed by the Kree); they aren’t persecuted Jews trying to make their way in an antisemitic world, because they literally only infiltrate, and only want to escape, not assimilate; and the Skrulls are not exactly the Palestinians, since — again — their home world was destroyed in retribution, not settled; what the Kree want is Skrull submission, not their land.

As for American allegories, well, if the Kree are comparable to the American empire in general respects — in that they are both empires — then the Skrulls are also comparable to refugees in that broadly general sense, and what we end up with are very general generalities. You can make this a Zionist movie or a pro-Palestinian movie if you cherry pick the points of comparison; you can make it pro-American or anti-American in the same way. What you can’t do is make this a pro-empire movie, or avoid the way it portrays refugees as the oppressed protagonists of history; if it’s Zionist, it’s because the Skrulls are refugees (like the Jewish diaspora) who need a home, and if it’s anti-Israel, it’s because the Zionist state denies a home to others (like Palestinians and African migrants). If it’s pro-American, it’s because you believed Donald Rumsfeld’s “we don’t do empire,” and if it’s anti-American, it’s because you know how full of shit he was.  

In other words, the movie’s politics are actually constant; the variable is what reality we inhabit. Do you live in a world where the US is an empire and Israel is an oppressive, expansionist ethnostate? Or do you live in a world where the US is a helpful non-Empire that protects the weak (and Israel is a refuge for a people who have long been oppressed by empires, and now only survive with the aid of a super-power)? Reality — as mediated by very different ideological lenses — can provide you with either backdrop for this movie’s politics.

¤

Who is Carol Danvers? For me, the basic problem with Captain Marvel is that its protagonist doesn’t have a real arc, that her superpowers drain away her character. She ably inhabits a reflexive set of knee-jerk postures — she is cocky and confident as a Kree super soldier, briefly hesitant and reflective as she learns she isn’t a Kree super soldier, and then, finally, she becomes cocky and confident again as a kind of super-powered rogue Air Force pilot. But how satisfying is this arc? I think the movie itself is too easily satisfied with “fighter pilot” as a personality and with a photo album of cliches and a falling-down-and-getting-up montage (while doing “boy” things) as a substitute for backstory. The amnesia plot could have been more interesting; in The Long Kiss Good Night or The Bourne Identity, obvious points of reference, amnesia is a device to alienate a person from themselves, to place the person she was and the person she has become into conflict. But Vers’s recovered past only confirms who she is, only negates her six years as a faux-Kree. And so, instead of of working out the dilemma of a past the character no longer wants, the memory she has lost could be summed up in an Air Force recruiting commercial — apparently has been — and she simply returns to being the person she had been before; her conflict is external, but because she is endowed with so much power, she solves it with ease.

She was a soldier before; then she became a soldier; now she is, again, a soldier.

Whether this is a problem depends on what you want from Captain Marvel. In one sense, the story of how a Kree super-soldier learns that she is really a human being and that the Kree are, to quote Mitchell and Webb, the baddies, is basic MCU stuff. As she she comes to realize that she and Jude Law are the baddies, the movie becomes the story of how she learns to be the good kind of super-soldier — the US Air Force kind, instead of the Nazi kind — and how she unlocks her powers to save refugee families instead of killing them all; in this sense, it is an MCU story, which are so often plots about how a super-soldier realizes that there is something off about American Empire and has to fight to purify it, reform it, or save it (and does). Thor’s Asgard is a little like this — with two different movies just about learning Asgard’s original sins — but the best examples are Captain America signing up to punch Nazis and discovering, in Winter Soldier, that S.H.I.E.L.D. has been infiltrated by Hydra, and Iron Man building weapons for the government only to realize that war begets war begets war. If this is what you want from Captain Marvel — if what you want is an MCU story — then this is what you’ll get: she learns that being human sometimes means breaking the rules, and when threatened by the army that claims to have made her — that will take away her powers and leave her “only human” — it turns out that she has even more power, alone.

In the MCU, the answer is always to privatize your power and do it yourself, and this, in Captain Marvel, is also the answer. In MCU movies, the good guys always turn out to be the baddies because there are two different realities which define American politics: in one, the US are the good guys, punching Nazis and protecting democracy and human rights, the world’s policeman that keeps the peace; in the other, we are the settler state whose reservations were a model for Hitler’s genocide, a cop who spends his day being ready to shoot non-white people and evicting the homeless.

In Captain Marvel, then, the Kree become a scapegoat, an oppressive empire that oppresses the oppressed. And while the Air Force could easily be shown to be the same kind of genocidal imperial force as the Kree, they are not; when we see Carol Danvers longing to be a fighter pilot, it’s the first Gulf War that she would have — had not events interceded — wanted to take part in, the good gulf war where bombing Iraqi cities only resulted in hundreds of thousands of dead civilians and only set the stage for the decades of suffering that have followed. If the long gulf war against Iraq isn’t considered a holocaust, after all — three decades of warfare that began, in 1991, when those bombing campaigns that Carol Danvers longed to take part in produced “near apocalyptic” conditions — it’s because Iraqi lives and deaths have never been part of the reality where the US Air Force is good.

The Kree give us an excuse to stay in that reality. Carol Danvers doesn’t become a US Air Force pilot, and doesn’t fire missiles at populations of civilians; instead, we see the Kree do those things, at the beginning and end of this movie, absorbing all of villainy that might otherwise have accrued to the movie’s other imperial slaughter machine. Carol misses the first gulf war and avoids being indoctrinated into an Islamophobic slaughter-machine because instead of being the soldier she had wanted to be, she gets kidnapped and brainwashed and enlisted into the Kree army, against her will; after the reptilian shapeshifters turn out to be families, she has an occasion to save them, flying away from Earth and the United States and never has to choose whether to take part in our never-ending forever war against Iraq and the Middle East. Because it’s the Kree Starforce she repudiates, she never has to take a position on whether the US Air Force are the baddies or not.

The space where she would have had to make a choice — were it not for those interceding events — is the space where her character’s internal conflict and growth might otherwise have been. But because this movie cannot allow us to ask or answer whether the Kree are the Nazis or whether the Skrulls are the Palestinians — can gesture towards empire being good and refugees being bad — it can’t quite allow her to have a character arc defined by that internal conflict; she remains a collection of Top Gun clichés, updated for the era when women can play those roles too, but essentially consistent in its vision of cowboy pilots fighting for the good.

What we’re left with is an “origin story.” Even the Air Force commercial before the movie — “What Will Your Origin Story Be?” — knows that what we’re really doing here is establishing the prequel to the character who will, in Avengers: Endgame, show up to save the day. But this is why this movie isn’t really about Carol Danvers, why the first female-driven MCU movie doesn’t get anything like the space and time to build a growth arc to match all the boys. Iron Man and Thor had multiple movies before the characters started to really achieve depth and complexity — which only totally pays off in the Avengers movies — while the first two Guardians of the Galaxy and Captain America movies are essentially two-parters. Captain Marvel gets one movie; unlike Captain America, she doesn’t get multiple movies to learn how not to be the soldier she had always wanted to be, and unlike Thor, she doesn’t get four films to learn how to earn the inheritance she was given. Each of the boys struggles with the inadequacy of what they initially wanted, and learn to want more, but Captain Marvel is mainly a movie about the origins of S.H.I.E.L.D., filling in random details that no one really needed to have filled in — like the origin of Nick Fury’s eye patch — and answering one big character question: how did Nick Fury come to decide that Earth needed help against aliens? What made one person — and only one person — decide that a super-secret organization was needed to develop a super-powered human to defend against an armada of alien spaceships that attack, out of nowhere, for no reason? This movie explains why Nick Fury did all that, by showing him experiencing it for the first time. These questions it answers, repeating the events of The Avengers (2012) by placing that repetition in the past. But the story of Carol Danvers gets left on the cutting floor, source text for an empowerment montage, not otherwise shown.

As a result, the movie poses questions it can’t answer. When we see her show up in the present — played by the same actor who is the same age — do we ask what Captain Marvel has been doing for the last twenty-four years? What she has done and learned? How she has grown and changed? If she approves of Nick Fury’s “Avengers Initiative,” and of S.H.I.E.L.D.? Did she watch Captain America: The Winter Soldier where an American super-soldier with the name “Captain” discovered that the good guys had been secretly infiltrated by the bad guys since the beginning? There are obvious and inescapable political allegories here, but what is her position on the two-state solution, the right of return, and does she have any thoughts on Ilhan Omar? Who, precisely, are the Skrulls and the Kree meant to be?

If these are ridiculous questions, it’s because this is a Marvel movie, whose episodes always gesture at resolutions that the big team-up movies will cannibalize. Thor: Ragnarak ended with the population of Asgard become a rootless diaspora searching for a new home — an extremely resonant image — but when Avengers: Infinity War began, five minutes later, Thanos had already killed half of them, offscreen, and the MCU seemed to have completely lost interest in that story, as comprehensively as it does when Black Panther’s triumphantly concluding Afrocentrism becomes Infinity War’s “sure, we’ll sacrifice Wakanda, why not.” The ending of Captain Marvel gives us the same feeling of closure — she has stopped being a soldier who kills civilians and become the kind of soldier who saves them — but the MCU’s narrative engine will never sustain this transition; the real amnesia of this franchise is how single-character episodes discover things about their protagonists that have to be forgotten.

In a month, Carol Danvers will show up on earth again, to help the Avengers fight Thanos; as the post-credits scene indicates, she will not have aged in the interim, a nicely symbolic figure for her general character stasis. Growth is not what she’s for. She is, as a throwaway line in the movie briefly acknowledges, a weapon.

¤

And yet, there is one thing that does seem worth saying, that this movie does clearly says: the thing Carol Danvers learns from Nick Fury is that “being human” means disobeying orders and following your conscience, specifically, in this case, disobeying the orders given by the army and command structure that claims to have made you who you are, to have given you your powers, and to have been your origin story. This is too implicit to be in open rebellion with the Air Force commercial, but it’s there: that isn’t, the movie whispers, your origin story. And so, when Jude Law tells her that without what the Kree have given her, she’d be “only human,” this is the point: to be human is to be without what they have given her. To be human is to quit the military, we might conclude; to be human is to know — and not to have to ask whose side you’re on — when you see a flesh-and-blood human being attacked by her natural enemy, the military.

After all, what makes Carol Danvers who she is, what makes her human? It’s not the Air Force, or if it is, it’s not the part of the montage where the men jeer and laugh; it’s the part of the Air Force where she and Maria Rambeau are kept out of the Air Force, and the sisterhood they form from that experience. It’s her re-connection with her friend, through two stunning monologues — about loss and pain and love — delivered by the character who grounds her as a character (and without which she wouldn’t be one).

What do we want from this movie? Carol and Maria are never going to be given an explicit love story, any more than Marvel Studios could do without the money the US Armed Forces gives them to make these movies; Captain Marvel is not explicitly queer and Captain Marvel is, explicitly, extremely pro-Military. But that’s how movies work; the good stuff lives in the little moments, the gestures, and the things that aren’t explicit enough to be nailed down. And there’s one detail that does seem important to me: Carol Danvers never gets the chance to, but it seems clear that Maria Rambeau quit the Air Force, a long time ago.

The post Who’s the Baddie? Captain Marvel in the Age of American Empire appeared first on Los Angeles Review of Books.

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[maghrebim]

On your post about reblogging to punch Terfs and Nazis you talk about how you rarely see people stand up for the groups that they affect. What are some ways to better do this? What are things people can do that would be more helpful?

ok so i really like this ask and im sorry that it took me a bit to answer it but i wanted to do it somewhat right even though im like......an 18 y/o dumbass with a blog please keep that in mind

different groups have different needs, of course, and geographically what one can actively DO can vary a ton, but in online activism and generally in leftist/sj spaces there’s a lot that could use improvement. getting rid of microaggressions is a big one, and its something probably everyone is guilty of. analyzing your own conceptions about marginalized groups that you dont belong to and your language when talking about these groups and how you treat members of a group. battening down on cissexist and transphobic language and ideas is a good start, wrt the trans community at least. this isnt new at all but basically dont unnecessarily gender language to exclude trans folk, dont gender body parts, be cool about peoples pronouns, do your own research, TALK TO PEOPLE (!! this is an important one! members of a marginalized group tend 2 be the best experts after all), be careful of & learn to recognize insidious radfem rhetoric like ppl talking about “male socialization” re: trans women (an incorrect and fucked up concept) or “biological sex” or those kinds of things, and, if youre financially able, support people with their transition! that shit is expensive! there are tons of donation posts there for people who need hrt or surgery, and even just reblogging helps a little bit. boost voices coming from the community, be critical of the media you consume and if youre cis use your privilege to protect and help trans people in the ways youre able to. GET INVOLVED IN YOUR LOCAL ELECTIONS! do a bit of research about the politics and elections in your area, and use your vote to shut down horrible politicians who want to use their power to punch down on marginalized groups by passing laws and bills that discriminate against them, overtly or not. theres probably a lot more than this and its pretty basic, but its something at least!

also i think some of the above could be said for groups affected and targeted by nazis and white supremacy too, although antisemitism in particular can be incredibly covert and IS really widespread in leftist spaces, which someone else could probably talk more about than me since im dumb as fuck. but yknow, shut down alt-right assholes who spout that garbage (using reductive terms like “the jews”, “blacks”, “transgenders”, etc. is a BIG red flag), make an effort to educate yourself on the history behind nazism (and understand that antisemitism didnt begin or end with nazis), shut down holocaust denial AND attempted “justification” of the holocaust (but also: if youre not jewish or rromani then dont overstep your bounds wrt this topic in particular because whatever you have to say about it is probably gonna be extremely lacking), be careful of stereotypes and hate speech (”jews are greedy, barbaric, [any comparison to an animal], colonizers, white supremacists, controls the government” etc.) AS WELL AS goyim making criticisms of jewish people and/or zionism. be wary of (goyishe) people who generalize or use being anti-zionist as a shield against accusations of antisemitism, and who calls anyone who calls them out on their antisemitism a zionist. take jewish people seriously on our accusations of antisemitism (suggesting jewish folks are overly paranoid is, you guessed it, antisemitic), BOOST OUR VOICES (a lot of posts we make about things regarding us & antisemitism usually just circulate among other jewish people). for the love of g-d, do not ask a jewish person on their stance on palestine and israel if its unsolicited and not something they tend to talk about. learn more about our culture! knowledge is fun and learning whats appropriation and whats appreciation is pretty important i think. be wary of nazi imagery!!! its not always as obvious as actual literal swastikas, neo-nazis are known for using imagery and, like, certain phrases to be more lowkey about their nazism. learn to recognize these.

this is super long already so im gonna (try to) wrap it up and also put another disclaimer here that i can be really fucking stupid so if i messed up please tell me and also realize that i could probably be more constructive or specific about this and that i probably left out a shitton of things people can do. you can always improve in your activism!! theres always stuff to learn or unlearn, theres always something to do, theres always gonna be times when you fuck up but letting people educate you so you can better = very good start!

like, going into the point of my original post (here, for reference), SAYING you want to shut down terfs/nazis/any other hateful group is all well and good, spreading that and making sure they have no platform and dont feel comfortable expressing their disgusting views is great! but saying is one thing, actually doing it is another. like idk hopefully i managed to shed some light on how to do that and how to support marginalized people (specifically trans people and jewish people in this case i guess) at least a little bit. like....people can say they hate terfs and nazis all they want but unless they ACTUALLY do something to demonstrate that then its worthless. performative activism is completely useless and selfish and allowing yourself to become lackluster and not even try to do anything about the problems you claim to oppose or even think about why it needs opposition (beyond “its bad to oppress people”) has no place within activist spaces imo

its a constant struggle probably, and theres always gonna be things you could theoretically Do More of, or ways to be More Helpful, but yknow. begin with the little things and try to grow and extend compassion where you can. ask questions too, if you want to learn how to help specific people. oppression is often systemic and hard to untangle and hard to fight, and like.....not to be sappy but theres a saying from the talmud that goes “you are not obligated to complete the work, but nor are you free to abandon it” and idk. i think thats good to think about. doing just a little bit is better than doing nothing.

anyway im done

[schraubd]

When The Mask Comes Off ... What's Beneath Doesn't Look All That Different

The Prime Minister of Malaysia, Mahathir Mohamad, explains why he is "glad" to be called an antisemite.

“There is one race that cannot be criticized. If you are anti-Semitic, it seems almost as if you are a criminal,” Mohamad said in an interview with the Associated Press on Monday, denying that he disliked Jews, as such. “Anti-Semitic is a term that is invented to prevent people from criticizing the Jews for doing wrong things.”

“When somebody does wrong, I don’t care how big they are. They may be powerful countries but if they do something wrong, I exercise my right of free speech. They criticize me, why can’t I criticize them?”

Mohamad, an avowed anti-Semite, was sworn in as prime minister in May, nearly two decades after he last held office. He is well known for his anti-Semitic rhetoric, writing on his personal blog in 2012 that “Jews rule this world by proxy.”

He has also said, “I am glad to be labeled anti-Semitic […] How can I be otherwise, when the Jews who so often talk of the horrors they suffered during the Holocaust show the same Nazi cruelty and hard-heartedness towards not just their enemies but even towards their allies should any try to stop the senseless killing of their Palestinian enemies.”

This, of course, is rather naked. It speaks of Jews (although the de rigueur conflation with Israel is present), and it does not shy away from (indeed it actively embraces) the idea of antisemitism. In that sense, it is almost too easy of a case. And this is not remotely out of character for Mohamad either. But where these passages may be of some use is in highlighting how certain antisemitic tropes work in a context where they are freely and openly attached to an antisemitic ideology, the better to spot them when they appear without such an overt gloss. Basically everything Mohamad is saying is something that, dressed up (a little) more nicely, is a common feature of discourse about Jews in global society today. First, there is the claim that the real victims of antisemitism are those accused of it -- antisemitism is not (or is not primarily) a genuine form of oppression for Jews, but rather is a perk Jews enjoy to shield ourselves from critical review. Compare here Bruce Robbins "The real issue here is anti-Semitism; that is, accusing people of it" or Naomi Klein suggesting that some Jews "think we get one get-away-with-genocide-free-card." Second, there is the argument that in taking on the Jews, he is taking on someone or something "big". Here he really dips between referring to "Jews" generally and "Israel" specifically (For the record, Malaysia has four times the population of Israel across a territory almost sixteen times its size). Of course, the perception of Jews as inherently "big" -- domineering, cabalistic, pulling the strings -- has deep pride of place in antisemitic rhetoric. Mohamad is appealing to a notion whereby antisemitism always is a form of "punching up", "a movement of the little people against an intangible, global form of domination".  This perspective has come to occupy a critical role in the narrative Corbyn supporters tell of Jewish outrage -- both in the view that Corbyn, in antagonizing the Jews, is tackling the powerful, and in the view that the Jewish backlash is itself attributable to some nefarious conspiracy Next, there is the invocation of "free speech". Of course, this particular ploy should by now be familiar to anyone forced to endure alt-right trolling of college campuses -- when they choose to be racist, it's just free speech! And if you call it racist, you're suppressing their free speech! But this device makes its appearance regarding antisemitism too, and has done so for a very long time. Jewish Voice for Peace's old blog was titled "MuzzleWatch", and one of the major fringe groups backing the Corbynistas and opposing Jewish efforts to raise awareness of antisemitism in the UK is named "Free Speech on Israel". Glenn Greenwald has likewise dismissed the widespread adoption of the IHRA antisemitism definition as part of a "global campaign to outlaw criticisms of Israel as bigotry". Then there's the comparison of "Jews" (represented through Israel) to Nazis -- we're all familiar with that play, and I'm glad to see it here if only for completion's sake. But we'll conclude with the most striking bit, and the one that perhaps seems least applicable to more workaday antisemitic cases: where Mohamad says he is "glad" to be called antisemitic. Here one might say I'm actually being a touch unfair to Mohamad, for what I suspect he means is something more like "while antisemitism -- appropriately (and narrowly) defined -- is terrible; what is called antisemitic in public discourse are actually good, noble, and virtuous positions that one should be proud to hold." This is buttressed by the caveat Mohamad gave at the beginning, where he denies that he "dislikes Jews, as such." Once again, this has parallels. Steve Bannon notoriously said that being called racist is a "badge of honor"; Steven Salaita's contention that antisemitism has become "honorable" thanks to Zionism plays on the same turf. In all cases, the claim actually isn't "it is good to hate outgroups"; it's something more like "what outgroups claim is hateful, actually is good". Now, to be clear -- that's still a BS response, partially because it is too clever by half, partially because it depends on an epistemic injustice directed against the outgroups whereby their assessments of their own experience of inequality is so unreliable that one should be "honored" if they feel threatened by you. But at least formally, it reduces down to a claim that "one can and should dislike X group insofar as they act in A B C bad ways, or support D E F bad policies." Which actually circles back, strangely enough, to my Tablet Magazine article on Open Hillel's intervention in the SFSU antisemitism debate. In that article, I cited Bernard Williams for the proposition that virtually no form of racism holds itself out as being a product of raw, unadorned antipathy. It always comes attached to claims that are at least on-face about something that qualifies as a candidate for a reasonable position. Wrote Williams:

Few can be found who will explain their practice merely by saying, 'But they're black: and it is my moral principle to treat black men differently from others'. If any reasons are given at all, they will be reasons that seek to correlate the fact of blackness with certain other considerations which are at least candidates for relevance to the question of how a man should be treated: such as insensitivity, brute stupidity, ineducable irresponsibility, etc. Now these reasons are very often rationalizations, and the correlations claimed are either not really believed, or quite irrationally believed, by those who claim them. But this is a different point; the argument concerns what counts as a moral reason, and the rationalizer broadly agrees with others about what counts as such -- the trouble with him is that his reasons are dictated by his politics, and not conversely. The Nazis' 'anthropologists' who tried to construct theories of Aryanism were paying, in very poor coin, the homage of irrationality to reason.

So too here. I quoted Mohamad's words extensively because to my mind they represent an unquestionable case of antisemitism. But his caveat that he does not dislike Jews "as such" is one that Open Hillel's standard of antisemitism has great trouble grappling with. If Mohamad's point is that he doesn't dislike Jews-qua-Jews, only the bloodthirsty ones, the Zionist ones, the Nazi-like ones, the ones who are "big" and the ones who censor his free speech -- is that antisemitism? Cast in that light, Mohamad isn't actually all that different from the peers I've been comparing him to; perhaps just a little rougher around the edges. And that, ultimately, is the real point here. One might think that Mahathir Mohamad represents what happens when the screen of respectability comes down and an antisemite simply says what he thinks. But it turns out that, when that happens, what one sees doesn't look all that different from what one sees when the mask stays on. Mohamad uses tropes and claims and devices that are common in discourse about Jews by people who have far more claim to respectability than Mohamad does. One would like to think that's an indictment of the respectable. But it just as easily can become a defense of what we otherwise would think of as undeniable antisemitism. via The Debate Link https://ift.tt/2L1o6Gj

[schraubd]

Thinking About the Structure of Antisemitism

A Lebanese-Canadian writer, Mila Ghorayeb, has written a wonderful post on the interaction of leftist politics and antisemitism. It is a tremendous example -- albeit (by design) a first step -- of how to take seriously antisemitism as an important feature in thinking about Israel and the Israeli/Arab and Israeli/Palestinian conflict while still maintaining a significant critical perspective on Israeli governmental policy. It is particularly timely given McGill is currently being roiled by at least two germane antisemitism controversies -- a student officer who tweeted "punch a Zionist" (and has resisted calls to resign) and a policy by the McGill student paper to no longer publish columns with a "Zionist" perspective (one wonders whether Mila's piece would qualify). One way I would parse Mila's excellent meditation -- and this is something I've sought to develop in pieces like Criticizing Israel without it Seeming Anti-Semitic is Hard (and That's a Good Thing) and Anti-Semitism as Structural and the Iran Deal Debate -- is that we need to break out of the binary mode of thinking which treats "is this [criticism of Israel] antisemitic?" as the sole operative question. Certainly, that's sometimes a relevant question, and one that we should ponder seriously. But it is a subset of a larger point, which is that antisemitism is part of the set of social conditions which significantly and materially effect Jewish life and institutional practices. Hence, if you're talking about a Jewish institution or practice (e.g., Israel or Zionism), then one of the things you should be thinking about is antisemitism because antisemitism is part of the overall set of social circumstances which create the environment and atmosphere in which those institutions/practices exist. And so I wrote:

Anti-Semitism is an extremely important facet of any discussion regarding Israel. Any discussion of Israel is a discussion, in part, about what Jews are at liberty to do, how the political institutions that govern them can justly be structured, the sort of self-determination they are entitled to, and the epistemic status of Jewish versus non-Jewish perceptions of Jewish behavior and moral claims, among other things. In all of these discussions, matters of anti-Semitism should affect our analysis considerably. These are not the only things that matter, of course, but they do matter, and if one talks about Israel without having these considerations foregrounded in your mind, you're talking about Israel poorly.

Note that this paragraph does not say that "all criticism of Israel is antisemitic." What it says is simultaneously much narrower and much broader: it says "antisemitism is substantially relevant to all discourse about Israel." Not the only thing that is relevant, but an important relevancy, such that if we excise it from the conversation or table it save in cases where it is indisputable (when is it ever?), what will result is a considerably stilted and malformed conversation. This was the point of the analogy I drew to discourse about affirmative action:

Consider as a parallel discussions about affirmative action, which also suffer from the oft-heard claim that "one should be able to oppose affirmative action without being 'racist.'" Now, I'm a strong supporter of affirmative action. Nonetheless, I recognize that there are important debates to be had about the propriety and legitimacy of affirmative action programs, and critical positions can be held by persons who have perfectly egalitarian views towards racial minorities. It is important to have these debates, and we should have these debates. But it would something else entirely to say that we could even have an intelligible, let alone productive, discussion about affirmative action without the issue of racism entering into the picture at all. Yet as with anti-Semitism, people seem to feel they have an entitlement to talk about affirmative action without having their particular position's compatibility with racial equality called into question. The "debate" they want to have about affirmative action -- one where one is not permitted to consider the impact and continuing salience of racism or assess the validity of particular positions against the metric of racial justice -- is no debate at all; it would be incomprehensible gibberish. Keeping "racism" at the forefront of affirmative action debates ensures that an important element of the conversation which people very much would rather ignore stays at the center of the analysis. That's a very good thing.

Note here, too, that the main question isn't and shouldn't be "is this criticism of affirmative action racist or not?" It is entirely coherent -- and I'd argue necessary -- to say both that a particular criticism might not be racist in of itself but that to be legitimate it nonetheless must grapple seriously with the fact of racism. A criticism of affirmative action that refuses to even address racism would just be nonsense (yet how often do we see attempts to do just that?). Likewise, it is conceptually possible for one to issue a criticism -- even a cutting criticism -- of affirmative action that is attentive to and responsive towards the reality of racism, and which accepts that racism is an essential part of the social milieu which sets the parameters of the debate (and, to a large extent, explains why we have it). So to with Israel. Some criticisms of Israel are antisemitic and some aren't, and we figure out which is which by careful analysis to separate the wheat from the chaff. But even a non-antisemitic criticism of Israel might still be ill-formed to the extent that it fails to adequately account for and grapple with antisemitism as a relevant feature of the social world which should condition our views on Jewish institutions and practices. A good critic pays attention to such germane elements of conversation, and it is reasonable to demand that critics be good at their jobs (and, by extension, when critics are unreasonably resistant to incorporating this particular dimension into their analysis we might fairly wonder whether that refusal is fairly characterized as a form of antisemitism). via The Debate Link http://ift.tt/2kOe1iC