#Jewish emigration

[bixiebeet]

The embroidered textiles are called suzanis. They are found in Central Asian and particularly associated with Uzbekistan, which is where Bukhara is located. Suzanis are gorgeous, and Uzbekistan overall is known for its incredible textile production and arts! Ikat print—via fabric dying and weaving and painting—is another staple of Uzbekistan’s design style.

Bukhara has Persian roots and was a prominent center of trade, scholarship, and culture along the historic Silk Road. Even today, Tajik (a language related to Persian) remains a dominant local language, rather than Uzbek (a Turkic language).

Bukharan Jews were part of a larger group of Persian-speaking Jewish communities that also lived in modern day Iran and Afghanistan, as well as other parts of Central Asia. This was distinct from other Soviet Jewish groups in Eastern Europe, who primarily spoke Yiddish in the late 1800s and shifted to Russian in the 1900s.

Bukharan Jews are one of the oldest ethnic-religious groups in Central Asia, and their roots go back hundreds of years. Sadly, they also faced many periods of persecution.

In the 20th Century, the Soviet Union’s policies stressed assimilation and the removal of religious practice. Soviet propaganda painted all the ethnicities within the USSR as living in harmony and being equal, but this was never really the case. Central Asians—who are predominantly non-white, secular Muslims—continue to face discrimination and stereotyping even today. Antisemitism was also ever present during Soviet times, especially during the 1950s-80s.

Despite their rich history and deep roots, Bukharan Jews became more and more isolated. Many emigrated out of Central Asia to find more welcoming spaces. (Overall, Jewish out migration accelerated approaching and after the USSR collapsed in 1991.) A particularly notable community of Bukharan Jews settled in Queens in New York City. If you’re in the area, you should try to find some Uzbek food—like the textiles and art, the food is also incredible.

This was a super brief take! Here are some resources to read more:

In the former house of a wealthy Jewish merchant, Bukhara, Uzbekistan, 19th century.

[shalom-iamcominghome]

It seems, sometimes, like people sometimes almost expect converts/converting people to hate where we come from, and if I'm honest... I think connecting with judaism has made me want to connect with my roots even more.

I'm thinking about starting to learn the languages (some of) my family would have spoken before emigrating to where I live now (german and italian), and, hell, I've learned a lot about xtianity since officially embracing judaism and diving head-long into it.

In my experience, judaism doesn't inherently demand that you forsake everything you were or are. What is asked of you is to embrace judaism. To recognize g-d, to worship g-d, to willingly join the jewish people. That is not the same as demanding you to spit on what led you where you are now. Nothing will change my past, my heritage, and judaism has actually helped me appreciate where I come from. I want to connect with myself, my family, because I embrace judaism.

I don't want to speak to other people's experiences, so just a reminder that this is only my story as a student, as someone who adores judaism and appreciates the experiences that were a one-way ticket right to where I am now.

[murderballadeer]

idk about ukraine specifically but among eastern european jews in general it was quite common for the sons to get distinctly jewish names and for the daughters to get "secular" names. in the arab world + north africa you will also frequently see families where the boys have arabic or distinctly religious names and the girls have international names

oh this is very interesting i didn't know this!! both of my jewish great-grandmothers had very jewish names (sima and esther) so i wasn't aware that it was common to give girls secular names, thanks for the info :)

[meyerlansky]

it does make me laugh seeing film bros (gn) get their feathers ruffled over literally any part of goncharov because like

for all that people are complaining that it doesn't make sense as a scorsese work, as a product of the given time frame, as a cohesive piece of [fake] media, no one involved in any of this understands how organized crime itself works, MUCH LESS the specific flavors involved in cross-ethnic organized crime a la a russian gangster in naples would work in the first place

but you don't see me with my masters degree in inter-ethnic cooperation in organized crime tearing that shit apart, because i know how to have fun

[chicago-geniza]

SCREAMING CRYING THROWING UP remember my tag about how this whole ~affair was just. So palpably Jewish to me even if it was not necessarily legible as such by means of any marked or notable signifiers, it was just this overwhelming Vibe? Well the cookies Agnes baked for her class when her grad student was like "I'm in love with you" during office hours and she reciprocated? RUGELACH, BABY

[fmet]

Am of the opinion that any nation formed from violence and expulsion that has had the foolishness to let their victims live and their crimes known is bound to end by violence and expulsion 🙏

[jewish-sideblog]

Russia, 1881: We’re gonna kill any Jew that doesn’t flee Russia. We’re restricting Jewish emigration to Europe, but permitting emigration to the Middle East.

Germany, Austria, Italy, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Finland, Slovakia, Croatia, France, and others, 1933-1945: We’re gonna kill every Jew in Europe. Flee to the US or Palestine, or die trying.

The US, 1927-1952: Yeah sorry we’re restricting Jewish immigrants to like. 300 people per country. So good luck getting in. We recommend that Jews go to Palestine instead. Btw we are looking to take in Nazi scientists if you know any

Egypt, 1947-1950: We’re rounding up all our Jews and deporting them to Israel

Iraq, 1951-1952: We’re rounding up all our Jews and deporting them to Israel

Algeria, 1962-1965: We’re pressuring and intimidating Jews in the hopes that they’ll all leave the country and go to Israel

Egypt, 1956: We’re rounding up all our Jews and deporting them to Israel (again)

Egypt and Libya, 1967: We’re rounding up, torturing, and killing all our Jews. The ones that survive can flee to Israel

Poland, 1968: The Jews in our country are already loyal to Israel. They will face dire consequences if they don’t leave our country and go to Israel

Ethiopia, 1974-1985: We’re going to marginalize and eventually try to kill all our Jews, and the only way they can escape is by being airlifted out of the country by Israeli helicopters

The US, 2023: Why can’t the Israeli Jews just go back to where they came from? Don’t they all have dual citizenship or whatever?

[halalchampagnesocialist]

There's a good reason why we, as Palestinians, are so reluctant to engage with the "Jews are Indigenous to Israel" argument as some historical fact. Regardless whether it is factual or not, it is certainly not a neutral statement.

This phrase or argument has always been used in tandem with the argument of "Palestinians are just Arabs originating from the peninsula." In practice, it's been used to drive us off our land and displace us in order to make way for Jewish settlers, whether it be in the West Bank or in '48 territories. It is also used as a rebuttal whenever we describe Israel's relationship to Palestinians or Palestinian land as one of settler-colonialism, it is used to deny and dismiss that argument entirely.

Obviously I don't think it is helpful to deny Jewish connection to Palestine or cultural roots there nor do I think it's helpful to pretend that Jews only just started showing up once Zionism took hold. I just don't think we should accept this argument wholesale while Jews can emigrate from anywhere in the world to Israel and become automatic citizens with full rights while Palestinians are actively fighting our displacement still to this very day. Indigenous also does not mean 'native' but describes a specific position with regard to coloniality, and you can't be a settler and Indigenous simultaneously. Saying that also does not mean that all Jews living in Palestine are inherently settlers or non-Indigenous. Words mean things.

[fdelopera]

Yo Goyim! Looks like I'm going to need to give some of you a crash course on what antisemitic language looks like, because I've been seeing entirely too much of it from some of you here on Tumblr.

Now, I think it's time for a Jewish history lesson, because I've been seeing way too many Nazi-related conspiracy theories going around. If you hear contradictions to the basic information that I am about to share (i.e., if you hear someone saying that the Jewish people are "a race that originated in Europe"), it is likely that you are hearing a white supremacist, anti-Jewish conspiracy theory.

So, here's the basics of Jewish history. Jews are indigenous to the Levant have been there for thousands of years. The Levantine people that Jews descended from have been in that area of the Levant since the Bronze Age. Jews as a distinct people have been there since the Late Bronze Age. Before it was Palestine it was the Kingdom of Judah, then Judea, and then Judaea, and that is literally where we are from. The word Jew means "a person from the Kingdom of Judah." The Romans renamed the area Syria-Palaestina (which they borrowed from the Greek name Palestina) in the 2nd century CE after destroying the Second Temple in Jerusalem and leading another campaign to try to eradicate the Jewish people (guess what, we're still here, motherfuckers).

And even after the Romans tried to annihilate us, even after they scattered many of us into European diaspora, many Jews came back, again and again over the ages, and there have nearly always been Jewish communities in the region throughout history.

And if you come for me or try to dispute any of this history with white supremacist bullshit, I am a Jew who has studied way more Jewish history than you. And as politely as possible, you can take your white supremacist conspiracy theories and fuck off into the sun.

Okay, with all that out of the way, let's get into it!

Gloves are coming off, because this is just a sampling of the Nazi dogwhistles I've been seeing here on Tumblr about the Jewish civilians who were tortured, murdered, and worse:

- If you say shit like, "The Jews got what they deserved"...

GUESS WHAT? You're talking like a white supremacist, and you need to fucking check yourself.

- And if, on the other hand, you say shit like, "The reports were probably overblown. I think those were paid actors. I don't think those Jews were murdered. No Jewish children were killed. No Jewish bodies were desecrated" blahblahblah...

GUESS WHAT? You get to sit with the Nazis at their table for lunch.

- If you tell Jews "go back to Europe where you came from"...

GUESS WHAT? Not only are you telling the descendants of Jewish refugees to go back to the Spanish Inquisition, the Russian pogroms, and the Nazi gas chambers, as I explained in this post, but you are also repeating a white supremacist conspiracy theory about the origins of European Jews.

Jews are a Levantine people from the area of the Middle East currently called Israel (formerly called the Kingdom of Judah, and then Judea). While there was some emigration to Europe during the late Roman Republic and the early days of the Roman Empire, the first mass migration of Jews to Europe was a forced migration. Gentiles from the Roman Empire dragged us there as captives after 70 CE, the year Rome destroyed the Second Temple.

- And if you're telling yourself that there are "good Jews" and "bad Jews," and those Jewish civilians were "bad Jews," so they deserved to be tortured and killed...

GUESS WHAT? You're spouting white supremacist ideology.

Antisemitism takes a long time to deprogram.

A lot of gentiles grow up with anti-Jewish ideology that they have never questioned.

And a lot of Christians are kept ignorant about Jewish history because preachers and priests fear it would make Christians question the many inaccuracies in the Bible.

But the first step in noticing antisemitic beliefs is to notice when you start singling people out *because* they are Jewish.

And I have been seeing some of you gleefully celebrating the murder of Jewish civilians *because* they are Jewish.

And that is antisemitism.

That is one step closer to the next generation of Jews getting shoved into the gas chambers. And there are only 16 million of us left in the entire world. We're 0.2% of the world's population. And we cannot afford another Holocaust.

And if your response to me saying that is, "Well, those Jews deserve it."

Guess what. You are making it easier for Nazis and white supremacists to spread hatred and commit acts of violence against Jewish people. And you will have to live with that blood on your conscience.

So...

If you are a gentile, and you see other gentiles repeating these kinds of white supremacist dogwhistles about Jewish people, here's how you can help:

1. MOST IMPORTANTLY: Help them direct their focus away from attacking random Jewish people online and towards helping Palestinians.

Actions that people can take right now are contributing to verified charities and relief organizations that help the people of Gaza. Only donate to organizations that are verified by CharityNavigator.org and CharityWatch.org.

2. Call that shit out. Tell people that they're being antisemitic, and explain that Jew-hatred is dangerous to Jewish people. Antisemitism gets Jews attacked and it gets Jews killed. In the US, many synagogues require round the clock security to protect against white supremacists who want to murder Jews. In Pittsburgh, my old home town, a group of Nazis from north of the city planned the murder of Jewish congregants at Tree of Life Synagogue, and so far only one of them (the gunman) has been arrested and convicted of the murders. The others are still at large.

3. Explain to them that it is antisemitic to celebrate someone's death *because* they're Jewish. ALSO, it is antisemitic to blame a random Jewish person for the actions of ANY government, whether that be the Israeli Government or the US Government.

4. Explain to people that they're not going to solve this conflict by posting antisemitic statements and memes online. All they will do is alienate the Jewish people in their lives and make those Jews feel scared and unsafe. And they will contribute to this current wave of antisemitism.

Antisemitic hatred doesn't help Palestinians. All it does is put Jewish people around the world in danger.

[metamatar]

In 2005, the tellingly named studio After Stone wall Productions released a film titled Dangerous Living: Coming Out in the Developing World. Featuring interviews with various LGBT activists from different countries outside the West, spliced up and lumped together haphazardly, the film delivers the following overarching messages: that it is not safe to be queer in the "developing world," that what queer spaces do exist in the "developing world" are to be found in certain metropolises: Cairo, Kuala Lumpur, Calcutta, Rio de Janeiro—and that these sites trace their genealogy to the Stonewall riots. Furthermore, according to the film, queerness/gayness and sometimes transness (when it is acknowledged) were invented in the West. Epistemic breaking points such as the Stone wall riots and canonized locales such as San Francisco and Greenwich Village are the originating points of this innovation against the backdrop of a timeless, pervasive heterosexism. This cosmopolitan gayness/queerness then "spreads" from the metropole to the periphery, forming a web from city to city This coincides with Jack Halberstam's (excruciatingly white) analysis in his book In a Queer Time and Place: the idea of "metronorma tivity" that "the rural is made to function as a closet for urban sexualities in most accounts of rural queer migration" and that "the metronormative narrative maps a story of migration onto the coming-out narrative" (2005, 36-37). We can extend Halberstam's analysis further and see the ways that the closet/rural/(post)colony as well as out/urban/metropole get col lapsed onto each other—the queer is always pulled closer to the heart of capital.

The overarching savior narrative occurs towards the end of the film, when each interviewee, in clips spliced together, tells his or her story of emigrating to the West. After a particularly heart-wrenching story of Ashraf Zanati's departure from Egypt, the narrator comments that "Ashraf Zanati left Egypt. Ashraf had become part of a planetary minority." Although the film purports to care about the status of queers in the "developing world," it actually forms a wounded attachment that fetishizes displacement and bifurcates the queer from his or her society. This narration of non-Western countries as inherently unsafe for queer subjects produces the very displacement it describes, in a manner similar to the ways nine teenthcentury colonial archaeology laid the foundations for Zionism and the dispossession of Arab Jews. Writing about the European "discovery" and destruction of the Cairo Geniza—a building that had housed pieces of paper documenting centuries of jewish Egyptian history—Shohat (2006) shows us that the discursive/ archival dislocation of Egyptian Jews by the forces of European/Ashkenazi colonialism anticipated the later dislocation of Egyptian Jews. This dislocation would form part of the backbone of Zionist historiography's production of a "morbidly selective 'tracing the dots' from pogrom to pogrom." The fetishization of queer displacement, as projected by Dangerous Living, performs a similar historical flip to the one Shohat documents: "If at the time of the 'Geniza discovery' Egyptian Jews were still seen as part of the colonized Arab world, with the partition of Palestine, Arab-Jews, in a historical shift, suddenly became simply 'Jews'" (Shohat 2006, 205). Through various colonial practices, there was a discursive bifurcation between the "Arab" and the "Jew"; in the case of case of Dangerous Living there is a similar bifurcation between the "Egyptian" and the "Queer."

Papantonopoulou, Saffo. “‘Even a Freak Like You Would Be Safe in Tel Aviv’: Transgender Subjects, Wounded Attachments, and the Zionist Economy of Gratitude.” Women’s Studies Quarterly, vol. 42, no. 1/2, 2014, pp. 278–93. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/24364930. Accessed 11 Nov. 2024.

[chanaleah]

Today's Israeli claim to self-determination has no sense, since the vast majority of Israeli are Askenazi. They are litteraly mixed! And, have emigrated back to their land after over A THOUSEND YEAR. How can we still take seriously a claim to a land, you, supposevely, have habitated after a thousend? Gheddafi was right. Israel is a Rhodesia who has been succeful to replace the native population with white Europeans. Again, Askenazi are to be considered white Europeans, as they lost all of their middle eastern traits and completely mixed up with Europeans

again y’all let’s use our bestie Google!

the vast majority of Israelis are not Ashkenazi, which again, you would know if you took 5 minutes to do a quote Google search. But that doesn’t matter, because indigenity doesn’t expire.

Again, indigenity doesn’t expire.

The ancestors of today’s Ashkenazim were forced out of our land and prevented from coming back. But they never assimilated, and this can be seen in the food we cooked, songs we sang, and languages we spoke and prayed in.

How long must someone be prevented from returning to their land before they lose their indigenity? Are the Cherokee no longer indigenous to the southeastern US because they’ve been forced out of their land?

Not to mention that Jews maintained a consistent presence in א״י throughout the diaspora despite the constant empires trying to force us out.

Furthermore, while indigenity is not determined by genetics, genetic studies consistently show Ashkenazi Jews as plurally Levantine, and most every other Jewish diaspora group’s DNA is majority Levantine. This is corroborated by pretty much every reliable study of Ashkenazim.

Also, self-determination doesn’t require being an indigenous people. For example, Italians aren’t considered an indigenous people, but they do deserve self determination, and they currently do self determine in Italy. Jews have remained a distinct ethnoreligious group for around 3000 years, so just like any other ethnic group, we have the right to self determination. And right to self determination doesn’t and shouldn’t alienate the rights to self determination of any other group.

Your blood quantum BS isn’t appreciated here, anon.

[dragoneyes618]

During Hitler's first five years in power, the Nazis did a great deal to make the lives of Jews miserable. They revoked their citizenship, ejected Jewish students from German schools, boycotted Jewish stores, and banned Jews from a large number of professions. On occasion, individual Jews were sent to concentration camps; the Nazis, however, had not yet created death camps and, remarkably enough, people were sometimes released from concentration camps and allowed to go home.

On the night of November 9-10, 1938, the Nazis' discriminatory policy toward the Jews changed to wholesale violence as they carried out the largest pogrom in the history of the world. The official pretext for this action was the killing in Paris of a low-level Nazi diplomat by a seventeen-year-old Jewish boy, Herschel Grynspan. The boy's Polish-born parents had been deported several weeks earlier from Germany back to Poland. The Poles, however, refused to accept Grynspan's parents, along with seventeen thousand other Polish-born Jews deported by the Nazis. These unfortunate Jewish refugees were left to rot, penniless, in the no-man's land separating Germany and Poland. Cut off from contact with his parents, Gwynspan shot the German official in retaliation. When the man died, the Nazis decided to punish all of German Jewry for Grynspan's deed.

The pogrom that ensured became known as Kristallnacht, the night of the broken glass. On that night, the glass windows in almost every German synagogue, and in most Jewish-owned businesses, were shattered. Shattered, too, were the lives of almost all German Jews. Ninety-one Jews were murdered during Kristallnacht; thirty thousand more were arrested and sent to concentration camps, where hundreds of them died.

World leaders denounced the Nazi pogrom, and American Jewry reacted by forming the United Jewish Appeal, which soon became the greatest fundraising organization in Jewish history. The Nazis scoffed at the protests. They announced that Kristallnacht had been carried out in honor of the birthday of Martin Luther, the sixteenth century antisemitic religious reformer whom Hitler greatly admired. The Nazis also announced the imposition of a one-billion-mark fine against the Jews; they would be forced to pay for the damage the Germans had inflicted on their synagogues and property.

German Jewry now knew that their situation was hopeless. While large numbers of them had left Germany during the first five years of Nazi rule, half of the community of 600,000 had remained, hoping that Nazi antisemitism would moderate. After Kristallnacht, they recognized that such thinking was illusory; between that event and the outbreak of World War II, less than ten months later, virtually every Jew in Germany tried to emigrate. Few countries, however, were willing to accept them. The British imposed a White Paper in Palestine to ensure that it not become a haven for Jews fleeing Hitler. Some of the Jews who tried to emigrate to the United States succeeded; most did not. In Canada a high government official was asked how many Jewish immigrants the country could accommodate. "None is too many," he answered.

It is no coincidence that Kristallnacht brought about the formation of the United Jewish Appeal, later to become a major financial supporter of Israel. More than any other event of the time, Kristallnacht converted large numbers of Jews into Zionists; the price of not having a Jewish state, they realized, was too, too high.

- Jewish Literacy, Rabbi Joseph Telushkin, pages 390-391

[historicity-was-already-taken]

Conversation between me, and another high educated Jewish women whose opinions I respect

Her: What's missing here are the facts. If we stuck to the facts there wouldn't be so much intensity surrounding this issue. Me: But you and I are both highly educated Jewish women, and we can't even agree on the facts regarding the history of Palestine as a place name, ethnic identifier, and nation. If we can't even agree on those facts, how on earth can facts help anyone move forward?

There's the question. Not just for Jews, but for everyone involved in, or concerned with this conflict. How do we move forward if multiple sides of the room dispute the veracity of such basic statements as:

-Jews are a globally oppressed minority ethnic group, the hatred of which is deeply embedded in Western thought and rhetoric.

-The Naqba was a period of ethnic cleansing in which the government and military of the new State of Israel expelled Palestinian Arabs from their homes and property; a dispossession and a series of events which continue to traumatize and negatively impact the lives and livelihoods of Palestinians.

-The Holocaust was a traumatic event in the history of the Jewish people, the legacy of which is embedded in the psyches, world views, and collective trauma of the Jewish people, and invariably impacts how this group views global issues.

-Palestinian Arabs had a full developed sense of identity and statehood before the British Empire fucked off, and made their discomfort with increasing Jewish emigration clear to the British before the outbreak of the Second World War.

-Jews had nowhere to go before, during, or really, after the Holocaust; and the governments of many Arab States ethnically cleaned their own ancient Jewish communities in retribution for the creation of the State of Israel.

-The State of Israel does not exist because the Holocaust happened, or as an "apology" for said event.

THIS POST COMPRISES A SERIES OF RHETORICAL QUESTIONS MEANT TO MAKE US APPRECIATE THE DEPTHS OF THE DISCURSIVE PROBLEMS HERE; NOT A POST FOR "DISCOURSE" AND HATEFUL, AGGRESSIVE SHIT.

If you feel you have to do that, copy & paste into your own separate post.

[determinate-negation]

"Jewish Marxists have always rejected Zionism. In 1906, a leading member of the Bund published this polemic in Die Neue Zeit, the theoretical journal of the German Social Democracy. "A national economy would mean a territory where the Jewish people — and in the capitalist mode of production: the Jewish bourgeoisie — form the majority and oppress peoples who are in the minority, just as they have been oppressed until now." "Do the Zionist socialists intend to introduce … exceptional laws for immigrant, non-Jewish workers?"

Many people claim that Zionism and Judaism are identical, as if the Jewish people, for thousands of years, had obviously longed to return to Jerusalem. Yet Zionism is a relatively new political movement — a product of the era of bourgeois nationalism and colonialism. Theodor Herzl's programmatic manifesto only appeared in 1896, at a time when Jewish socialist groups had been active in London and other cities for more than two decades. Long before anyone thought of colonizing Palestine, Jewish revolutionaries had been fighting for socialism.

Zionism was far from hegemonic among Europe's Jews. In the largest Jewish communities, in the Pale of Settlement on the western edge of the Tsarist Empire, far more Jewish people were drawn to socialism. The most important organization of the Jewish proletariat was the General Jewish Labour Bund in Lithuania, Poland, and Russia, or the "Bund" for short. The Bund opposed the Zionist program of emigration with a program of class struggle and "doikayt," or hereness.

Herzl's Zionism was bourgeois, and he sought support from the Tsar's antisemitic ministers, the organizers of terrible pogroms — he saw they had a common interest in getting Jews to leave the Empire and stay away from revolutionary organizations. After the 1905 revolution, the rise of class struggle in Russia and the radicalization of Jewish workers led to the emergence of various hybrid forms of socialism and Zionism. "Socialist Zionism" was founded by Ber Borochov, and its most important organization was Poale Zion (The Workers of Zion).

Poale Zion had a contradictory program: sometimes it said that Jewish workers should focus on emigrating to Palestine in order to build a socialist society there; at other times its emphasized class struggle, while the construction of a Jewish national home in the Holy Land was declared to be a goal for the distant future. Due to this contradiction, Poale Zion did not last long; after the Russian Revolution, the left wing joined the Communist International, while the right wing became a reformist and colonialist party that founded the State of Israel.

In this 1906 essay, Chaim Yakov Gelfand, a leading member of the Bund, explained why socialist Zionism was a reactionary utopia. Socialism and Zionism were fundamentally incompatible: the former depended on the political independence of the working class, whereas the latter required long-term collaboration with both the Jewish bourgeoisie and with the imperialist colonial powers. This text appeared in Die Neue Zeit, the theoretical journal of the German Social Democracy, edited by Karl Kautsky. In his own book on the question from 1914, Kautsky also declared that oppressed Jewish workers should aim for a "revolution in Russia" instead of emigration to Palestine.

Gelfand's essay is tragically prophetic. Even in 1906, it was clear that Palestine was far from uninhabited, and that the establishment of an exclusively Jewish nation-state would inevitably lead to conflicts with the indigenous population. Marxists understood that colonization would create new forms of oppression and also new hatred against Jews. Gelfand made clear that a Jewish state could only be built in cooperation with imperialism and would therefore never be socialist.

It's interesting to read about the progressive ideals of sections of the early Zionist movement, prior to the foundation of the State of Israel. The contradictions of this "socialist" colonial project proved to be insurmountable. Over the decades, numerous young Jewish activists turned away from socialist Zionism and joined the Trotskyist movement — in some cases only after arriving in Palestine.

The most famous of them is undoubtedly Abraham Leon, a scholar-warrior who wrote a Marxist history of the Jewish people while leading the underground fight against the Nazis in Belgium, before being murdered at Auschwitz at 26. Left-wing Zionists from Berlin such as Martin Monath and Rudolf Segall also became Trotskyists — the former in exile in Belgium, the latter while working at a kibbutz in Palestine. Both, like many other former Zionists, became leaders of the Fourth International.

Today, the internationalist traditions of Jewish revolutionaries are being erased. This text, in its first English translation, is a reminder that Zionism is only a small and controversial part of Jewish history. Jewish-led protests against the war in Gaza are reviving these internationalist traditions."

[paper-mario-wiki]

genuine question coming from someone who is trying their best to support palestine but can't stomach condoning hamas's actions. how can you justify the murder of civilians and sexual violence that happened on october 7th? i know the fight for palestinian liberation is more important but they said orders to rape israeli women came from higher up in hamas. how can we support these people?

I will not be debating people in the notes of this post or in followup asks. I am not an authority on this subject, I am an individual giving commentary as I see it.

Do not attempt to follow this discourse up with intent to own me. You will waste your time and look stupid, I promise. Just unfollow and block me.

If your intent is genuine, and you are sincerely confused, then I will tell you that the first thing you must do is understand that your perspective of what happened on October 7th was not your own. It was made by a committee of communications officials and sold to you by news organizations to implant within you a version of what happened so that you would feel this precise feeling of hesitation, discomfort, and desire to withdraw yourself from the discussion. And that version is often full of blatant, contradictory, and easily fact-checkable lies. Israel knows that it doesn't have to make everyone support its cause to get away with it: if they can make enough people look away while they commit genocide, this too is a victory.

The sexual violence against Israeli women by Hamas has been vastly unsubstantiated, especially in comparison to the verifiable claims of IDF soldiers using sexual violence against Palestinian women. Go to any news articles and you will see "Claims of [number] of Israeli women raped by Hamas". You don't see firsthand reports, and you don't see consistent numbers, just people speaking for this group of unnamed and uncounted women. Further, many of the photos and videos of violence happening to women you see typically attached to these articles have turned out to be verified as Israeli soldiers assaulting Palestinian women during previous conflicts.

And that's another important note: previous conflicts. The date on everyone's mind has been October 7th, because that's when Hamas made an attack on the concert. Make no mistake, this was not the beginning of this conflict. And Palestine was not the aggressor.

Here is a graph of people killed as a result of the ongoing Israeli occupation of Palestine from 2002 to 2014. Notice, if you will, the yellow vs the pale blue. Can you guess which color represents which group? Just kidding you don't have to guess, the graph tells you.

After WW2, the European-Jewish population (which was 90% of the Jewish population at the time) emigrated to their holy land after over 1000 years. This land, now Palestine, had been under control by Muslim kingdoms since around 640 AD. The UN created a proposition following the Holocaust, submitted to create 2 states within Palestine: 54% would go to the Jewish population, and 46% would go to the Arab population. The Palestinian representatives rejected this proposal, but the Jewish representatives agreed, and over the next few years there would be a massive displacement of Muslims during what was called the Nakba; a cataclysmic event that saw 700,000 Palestinians (80% of them) displaced from the territory that the Israeli occupying force had claimed.

Since then there has been an ongoing pushing and cleansing of Palestinians over time. The remaining land that was not stolen during the 1948 mandate has been shrinking as Israel tightens its grip on the land and the people, exerting the force given to it by the United States to completely absorb the area. The process of which has been torturous and extraordinarily traumatic on the Palestinian population.

This map represents generations of murder, rape, and torture of Palestinians. A people who had their land forcefully taken from them, and have been made to be unwilling neighbors with their aggressors ever since. There are countless articles of IDF soldiers and Israeli citizens alike abusing Palestinians. Stealing their homes, starving their children, mocking their faith. This form of violent nationalism is born from Zionism, which was created by secular men, and has existed for less than a single century. The ideals of Zionism can only be seen out with the COMPLETE annihilation of the Palestinian people, something the terroristic Israeli force sees to go through with.

Hamas, at the moment, is fighting for the unconditional freedom of Palestine from their colonizers. We are seeing, in real time, the furious spirit of Palestine resisting what some of the worlds strongest military forces are trying to make to be their final death. In that impossible fight, they are seeing victories in urban warfare, and extreme coordination in guerilla tactics that we haven't seen since the Vietnam war. And during all of that, it has still been verifiably reported that they've been treating hostages well, many of them speaking positively about their time in captivity and expressing extreme dissatisfaction with Netanyahu's cabinet, something reflected in the staggering lack of direct interviews with hostages released.

Let's not mince words here, Hamas is absolutely killing people. Hamas is killing as many IDF soldiers as they possibly can, and yes, even some Israeli civilians have died. While it's true that these number significantly fewer than Palestinian civilian casualties, I'm not bold as to claim that that is not horrible. But this too is the fault of purposeful abuse of civilian population centers by the Israeli government. Ask yourself for a moment:

Why would Israel, being so aware of the horrifying whims of the savage Palestinians, allow a massive open-air concert to happen DIRECTLY on an unpatrolled border between Israel and Palestine? Why too does Israel insist on housing Civilian populations as close to Palestine as possible? They've already showed us: the military uses the deaths of their civilians as warrant to punish Palestinians in any way and to any extent they see fit.

Even if we're discounting the murderous occupier civilians shooting at Palestinian families and forcing them out of their life-long homes, it's still horrible to see otherwise incidentally innocent Israeli civilians die. Innocent death is inherently horrible. But even in a world where what happened on October 7th didn't happen, Israel intended to ensure the death, innocent or not, of all Palestinians who resist giving up their land. Hamas, Palestinian resistance groups, and now other Arab states have chosen to fight against this. Millions of people around the globe have chosen to unite and fight for them for this reason as well. It is why I support Palestine.

When a society lets mass atrocities happen in slow motion over decades, those atrocities become normal. And when those experiencing these atrocities fight back with economical blows of violence, it becomes a shocking disruption to the normal for those who haven't been paying attention, or were born into it; something the west relies on, and has packaged and sold as "terrorism" in the past few decades.

The modern Zionistic body of Israel has been a terroristic, murderous entity since its inception less than 100 years ago.

Do not let yourself be swayed into believing that murder, if done slowly enough, is not murder.

[shewantstobe]

Leftists have gotten real comfortable calling for violence/death to all zionists, and it really makes me wonder 1. how they define zionism and 2. whether they're remotely aware of how much of the world's Jewish population that includes. Based on the rhetoric I've seen condemned on here, I'm going to go with the very most basic definition of supporting a Jewish homeland in the Levant.

85% of the global Jewish population is in the U.S. or Israel. I'm assuming that any Israeli Jew who hasn't emigrated is fair game, so that's about 45% of all Jews there. According to Pew's most recent data, 82% of American Jews say that caring about Israel is "essential or important" to their Jewish identity.

Even if we just assume that every Jew in the world outside these two countries is staunchly anti-zionist (they're not), that's fully 80% of world jewry supporting Israel to some degree.

When you call for all zionists to die, you are calling for the death of 80% of Jews. Over 12 million people. That is the death toll of two holocaust.

I am appalled by the violence in Gaza. I support a ceasefire with release of hostages. I support self-determination and freedom of movement for Palestinians. I am deeply critical of the Israeli government. But I support a Jewish state. If that's the bar for deserving to die, you're a lot less pro-Jew than you think.