#i just. i feel like such a fake jew all the time!!

[vurren]

i wish there was hebrew school for adults :( i'd do anything to have gotten a jewish education and live a jewish childhood, even if i'd decided later on that i didn't believe in god

[jewish-vents]

something i’ve noticed lately is online leftists being ignorant to some (most) forms of antisemitism, but vocal ONLY about jokes/stereotypes about jewish ethnic features.

they can point out the big nose stereotypes all day long (and they should) but when we beg them to have more concern for conspiracy theories, double standards for jews/israel, disinformation about jewish history and the war, holocaust inversion/denial/fake care for survivors, using zionism as a get out of jail card for judenhass, generalizing all israelis and diaspora jews as genocidal, denying that most jews identify with zionism, misusing jewish terms, demonizing jewish culture and hebrew, actual modern day blood libel, tokenization, accusing jews of “stealing culture”, denying indigeneity, painting ashke jews as white colonizers/villains, completely disregarding other diaspora groups, calling for israelis to be murdered, trying to “revoke” israelis’ jewishness, falsely calling the jewish people /only/ a religious group, redefining or goysplaining words/concepts they learned last week, using historically antisemitic canards, desecrating jewish monuments, houses, businesses, schools, and synagogues, AND literal, physical violence against jews….

it’s silence. crickets. it’s excuses and justifications. it’s thoughtless conversation enders. it’s refusal to sit with discomfort and address one’s mistakes. it’s a buzzword copy and pasted with a flag. “death to israel” or “kys zionist”. it’s “antizionism ≠ antisemitism”.

if you refuse to acknowledge the many forms antisemitism takes, of course you’d hyperfocus on one specific type. racist tropes about jews in media are awful. they’re harmful and part of dehumanization.

but if your understanding of antisemitism starts and ends at “greedy long nosed goblins in harry potter,” and you refuse to listen to jews, and refuse to see how antisemitism functions outside of pop culture and how it manifests into verbal and physical violence, you are no ally.

spreading antisemitism will not help palestinians at all, and it’s so fucking devastating that online activists can log on and feel vindicated and like they’re all heroic just for harassing random jews. meanwhile they’re wasting time and energy that could go towards something that ACTUALLY helps the palestinian people.

(also funny that they wanna call jews white when these stereotypes are about non-white ethnic features. and they stem from nazi propaganda about jews/jewish blood “ruining” white genetics. i could go on and on about the weird racial science lefties have ran with since oct7, especially within what we understand as race/ethnicity as social groupings, what makes someone indigenous, the weird blood quantum shit, noble savage trope, and the infantilization of palestinians)

.

[starlightomatic]

Hi! I saw your tags on unlearning zionism and I was wondering if you've ever spoken about that/the kind of processing you had to do? I think it's... Interesting (for lack of a better word) how this is a sentiment I've seen reflected on pretty much all explicitly non-zionist Jewish blogs I follow, and how much that reflects both how closely entwined the concept and Jewishness has become and the fierce zionism in some people.

Obviously you're free to not discuss this at all, I also understand it's deeply personal. (I'm also not intending to make anyone change their mind, I believe this is a process Jewish people should be afforded on their own terms; I'm really just trying to understand where they're coming from). ♥️

The tl;dr was through talking to people, breaking my rigidities, and being lucky enough to encounter people who were kind, committed to dialogue, and not dismissive.

Longer version under the cut.

In winter 2019 I started dating a non-zionist, so a lot of the early stuff was through conversations with them.

Here are the specific things I recall through them:

They validated my experience of having felt traumatized by a negative experience I had at a protest. I felt very on the defense, and dismissed, as a zionist who wanted to be in leftist spaces and they validated that. I don't know if they were faking it or not, but it felt real, and being heard and not dismissed was super important to building trust and safety. Ultimately, building trust and safety was the most important thing.

They would sometimes patiently poke holes in things I said. Matter of factly, not confrontationally. For example, once I said I didn't like the separation wall dividing Israel proper from the West Bank but that it was necessary to prevent terrorist attacks, and they were like "no, that wasn't the wall, it was a change in PA policy." Another time I was like "I don't understand [West Bank] settlers, if they want to be pioneers and settle more land they should settle the Negev, where they're not encroaching on Palestinians!" and they explained to me more about the situation between Israel and Bedouins and how that actually still would involve encroaching/displacement.

They're very religious, and so they had the tools to poke into my "but just open a siddur! you can see all the references to returning to Jerusalem!" and discuss how that differed from and predated zionism the political ideology. They were able to break through my dismissiveness/derision of Chareidi antizionism and help me understand that it has legitimate religious underpinnings. (They're not Chareidi though.) They affirmed for me that they do feel connected to Eretz Yisrael and they love Eretz Yisrael.

They also explained that indigenous doesn't mean "from a place" but rather describes a relationship to colonialism. It still didn't totally click for me, and they and I have both since come to understand that there are a lot of definitions of indigenous, but what it did help me understand was that when people push back against "Jews are indigenous to EY" they're not always trying to say we're not from there.

In general it helped me break down what I thought an antizionist was. I thought that an antizionist was someone who didn't think Jews had a meaningful spiritual and communal connection to EY, thought we weren't from there, didn't give a shit if all Israeli Jews ended up pushed into the sea, hadn't opened a siddur to see references to return to Jerusalem, etc. I was also pretty rigid in my thinking and had collected a bunch of talking points, mostly that I'd co-created with other members of Jewbook (Jewish facebook). They helped me break out of that rigidity and once I'd done that I was open to learning more.

What happened next is that in fall 2019 is I did a fellowship that, while unrelated to the topic, put me in contact with other Jewish antizionists.

There was one person whose project we visited during an outing on the fellowship, who had discussed their project's antizionism. I was bothered by it and asked them one question: Did they feel Jews were connected to Eretz Yisrael? Did they feel connected to Eretz Yisrael? They responded yes of course.

Another person was my roommate on the fellowship, a leftist antizionist Syrian Jew. For a while one of my sticking points had been Mizrahi support of Zionism -- my thought process here had a few pieces. One, it seemed like white privilege to go against what most Israeli Jews of color believed and wanted. Another was that I felt that a lot of antizionists were dismissive of and racist towards Mizrahim and don't understand or care to understand their needs, history, or motivations (I do still think that's true). I also saw the expulsions from SWANA and the fact that Israel took in the SWANA Jewish refugees as proof of the necessity of Zionism.

So, I think that interacting with a Mizrahi antizionist both taught me expanded perspectives on the issue, and taught me that it's possible to be antizionist and still in solidarity with Mizrahim. I learned more nuance, for example around Israel's taking in of the refugees; I knew they had been mistreated, but I think it helped me connect the dots about what that meant about the entire Zionist project. That was also the year A-WA's album Bayti fi Rasi came out, and when I listened to Hana Mash Hu Al Yaman, I think that's when it clicked for me that Israel taking them in was not some sort of miracle or blessing in disguise but rather a last resort for people who did not want to go but had no choice. The main characters in that song wanted to stay in Yemen which is I think something that hadn't clicked for me before. That may not be the majority Mizrahi perspective but it is a perspective and one I hadn't previously considered.

By the same token, my partner at the time (the one I talked about at the beginning of the post) was raised as a Yiddish speaker, and we talked about Yiddish suppression during the early days of the state, as well as Ben Yehuda's disdain for Yiddish, and the general early Zionist disdain for Eastern European Jewry and "old world" Jewish culture. I was already aware of the New Jew concept (the idea that the old Jew was studious and unathletic, but we should put that behind us to become strong and agricultural). They helped me frame this in terms of antisemitism, connecting it to the vitriol Chassidim receive from other Jews, antisemitism directed towards Jewish men and the ways it's about gender and goyish and Jewish constructions of masculinity, anti-circ rhetoric that depends on the Hellenistic idea of the body as perfection, and Naomi Klein's analysis of the dislike of Yiddish by Ben Yehuda et al as sexist due to their association of it as "feminine" and therefore lesser.

We also talked about the ways that Zionism devalues diaspora culture. I definitely see this in the ways that eg Jewbook zionists used to see the Ashkenazi past in Eastern Europe as simply a time of pogroms and violence with nothing generative or valuable. It seems that zionism posits Israel and Israeli culture as the "right" or "completed" version of Judaism, and discourages us from mourning the loss of culture we experienced during the Holocaust and our subsequent exodus.

I think there is nuance here; there are Israeli Yiddishists, there are people practicing all kinds of diaspora Jewish cultures in Israel, etc. I think this is a case where antizionists take something real and over emphasize it to sound bigger and more harmful than it is. It's not Israel's fault that European Jewry got destroyed and it's not Israel's fault that A-WA's family had to leave Yemen. Sometimes it feels like antizionist project those harms onto Israel and Zionism.

At the same time though, there is a kernel of truth in the way at least that many North American zionists view Ashkenazi culture, thought I can't say how much of that is their Zionism and how much is the legacy of American assimilationism (even among religious Jews).

In any case, 2020 is when I started on my journey to deepen my understanding of old world Ashkenazi culture and history. I started with a day spent in the kids' section of the Yiddish Book Center using the beginner education resources there to start teaching myself Yiddish (I had a lot of familiarity because my extended family speaks it, but I didn't yet). About half a second later the pandemic started, and the chaos from that took all my attention for a while, but by the end of the summer I did a deep dive on my genealogy and spent two weeks tracking down documents and names and towns. At that point my family history was no longer abstract, and I started wondering more about what their lives were like in the old country.

I started watching Yiddish plays on zoom, including a production of the Dybbuk that I fell in love with. I got involved in the shtetlcore movement, which was a social media aesthetic fad that was basically the shtetl version of cottagecore. That spring the duolingo Yiddish course came out and I did a six month streak. The following winter I went to a virtual Yiddish conference. I went again two more times in person, and last summer I went to a week-long retreat where we were only allowed to speak Yiddish. I also do Yiddish drag and burlesque.

With this emphasis and knowledge it's hard for me to accept any framing that the only "right" place for Jews to live is Israel, or that diaspora cultures are lesser-than. At some point I encountered a belief among some zionists (though I don't think most believe this) that the Jewish people's differentiation into a myriad of different cultures was a bad thing, and constituted negatively picking up pieces of non-Jewish culture, and that it's good we're back together in Israel so we can become just one culture again. I obviously strongly disagree and I while I wish we had not had to experience the trauma of Khorban Beis Hamikdash and the ensuing displacement, I think the variety of different cultures we split into is beautiful.

Ironically, Israel is actually a place of great cultural exchange between those cultures. And yes, I do worry there will be cultural loss if everything blends together melting pot style, but that's more of a function of how societies work as opposed to official state policy. And I also think the Jewish subcultures will endure. Also the cultural loss is the fault of the Holocaust, the Soviet Union, and nationalist SWANA countries way way more than it is Israel's.

At this point I've come to view the idea that Zionism is detrimental to Jewish culture as weak, but I still am not a Zionist, and that's because the issue with Zionism is not that it harms Jews but that it harms Palestinians.

In early summer 2020, I, along with many other white people were called to reckon with the realities of white supremacy in the US, and our part in it, far more deeply than we had before. I learned to understand how racism functions as a pillar of the US's underpinnings, how white supremacy morphs to sustain itself, how I as an individual and Jews as a group were being used to maintain white supremacy. It fundamentally shifted how I view these topics and how I understand the way that states function.

It was impossible not to apply these concepts to Israel-Palestine. While it is obviously not a one-to-one comparison and I am frustrated with folks who seem to think it is, the concepts and analyses I learned in June 2020 were very elucidating in understanding Israel as a state, and how white supremacy and Jewish supremacy operate in Israel-Palestine.

One of those concepts is a deeper understanding of power dynamics and the oppressed-oppressor relationship. While that is not the be-all end-all, and it is still possible for an oppressed group to do harm and commit war crimes (as they did on Oct 7), it helped me understand the ways it makes no sense to view Palestinians and Israelis as equal parties or to view Palestinians as "the aggressor" as many zionists do. Riots are the language of the unheard and, yes, so is violence. Do not imagine that I excuse, condone, or celebrate Oct 7, but I understand why it happened.

These past seven months have forced a magnifying glass on Israel-Palestine and I have spent a lot of time thinking and talking about it. I have had many experiences and interactions that have illuminated different things to me, but I'll leave you with this one.

In 1956, a young man named Ro'i Rothberg was killed in Kibbutz Nahal Oz by Palestinians who lived in Gaza. Moshe Dayan came to give a eulogy and in it, he said:

Why should we declare their burning hatred for us? For eight years they have been sitting in the refugee camps in Gaza, and before their eyes we have been transforming the lands and the villages, where they and their fathers dwelt, into our estate.

Which is to say, he is stating point blank that the Nakba happened, and that Nahal Oz -- and in fact Israel -- is built on land that had been farmed and inhabited by Palestinians. The hasbarist canard of "we didn't steal their land" falls away when Moshe Dayan himself admits it, doesn't it?

He is acknowledging, also, that he understands why the people of Gaza are enraged, and why some of them express this rage as violence. He gives his solution: That the Israeli people, and especially the people of Nahal Oz, must always be on their guard. Must never become peaceniks and forget the rage of the people of Gaza. He says "we are a generation that settles the land and without the steel helmet and the cannon's maw, we will not be able to plant a tree and build a home."

His vision is of an Israel that is always militarized and militant, always on its guard, never to know peace. A people who will send their children to the army generation after generation after generation. Never to rest. Never to be able to lower their guard.

And that is awful! Not just for Palestinians, but for Israelis! Dayan lays out here that if the Nakba is not redressed, this will continue forever. He wants it to continue forever; I want the Nakba redressed.

He knew Nahal Oz would be attacked again. And he was right. On the morning of Simchat Torah of this year, 5784, twelve residents of the kibbutz were brutally murdered. A family that my family knows hid there in their bomb shelter for ten hours with their small children until they were rescued. The kibbutz was destroyed.

And Moshe Dayan knew it would happen, all the way back in 1956. And yet did nothing to change our trajectory. I cannot forgive him that.

In the months since the destruction of Nahal Oz, we have seen Gaza pummeled with a terrifying vengeance. For years I have encountered, albeit few and far between, people who have clammored for Gaza to be "turned into a parking lot." I was horrified by them, but did not take seriously the threat they represented. Yet now, their genocidal flowers have borne fruit. Gaza lies in ruins. 60% of the roads and infrastructure are destroyed. The descendants of refugees are refugees again, chased from their homes by the descendants of refugees. The live in tents, they scrabble for water and food. They live under threat of bombing, or being shot, or dying of illness and malnutrition.

And still Nahal Oz remains destroyed. The Jewish dead of Europe remain dead. The synagogues of Tunis and Algiers remain empty. Nothing is fixed, only more and more broken.

Is it to continue this way? Is this the world we want?

I say no. I say another world is possible. And on a quiet day, I can hear her breathing.

[dearlittlefandom-stalker]

Imagine being one of the Roman soldiers though. Imagine having to do what you thought would be a normal execution one day.

Three convicts, two of which are thieves. As for the third… I mean, yeah some people say this guy is the “messiah” (whatever that means, you’re no Jew) and there is talk of miracles and the religious nuts really seem to hate him, but you have him nailed to a cross all the same, so what? If he is a god then he can join the club; Caesar knows that the Romans have enough gods to fill their pantheon and then some. Most likely he’s just a man with some hefty delusions that cost him his life.

But then earthquakes happen. Weird but can be written off as chance, right? Then the sky goes dark midday. A blood moon rises.

That ain’t normal.

Feelings unlike anything you’ve ever felt arise in your gut. The man cries out with a loud voice “It is finished!” and dies immediately after. You shiver. Uncanny, that is.

“Surely this Man is the Son of God,” a fellow Soldier exclaims beside you. At this point you might agree, but the spear still pierces through his skin all the same and you think (hope) that whoever this God-Man was that he isn’t your problem anymore, seeing as he’s dead. Hopefully you can forget the whole thing. (Somehow you feel that this scene will haunt you for a long time)

But the debacle is not over with the burial, as you had assumed. The religious nuts get real anxious and noisy, so to shut them up Pilot has a watch set to guard the body of a dead man. A dead man.

You personally have seen many dead men in your time, but never have you seen one move. Never have you seen or heard of people particularly wanting to touch dead bodies, either. You almost say as such when you are one of the men assigned the last watch, but decide you’d rather like to keep your tongue than chance losing it. You expect it to be rather a boring job, all told.

And it is. Until these, these beings of light and lightning descend on top of you from the Heavens and the last thing you can think before you know no more is whatever god whose body I’ve been guarding please spare me

You wake up, despite all your expectations to the contrary. You almost wonder if it would have been better if you died.

Those religious nuts come to you and your fellow guards and give you some coin along with a fake story to tell. They offer to save the skin off your back so you are not put to death like others who’ve been killed for less. You go along with the story because to be honest there is still a part of you that hopes this was all a dream. But the borrowed words taste like ash in your mouth and the coins jingle in your pockets with all the weight of a chain.

You go through the rest of the day (and night, and the next day and night) after the event in a haze. Your feet walk where you know not and you don’t care to correct them.

But then you see Him.

The same Man you saw die.

The same Man whose body you guarded.

This Son of God, in the flesh, you see stand in front of a crowd with your own two eyes and you can scarce believe it but all the same you know more than you’ve ever known anything before that this is real, that this Jesus is truly not just a god, but The God.

And so you decide to follow Him.

Just imagine that for a minute.

[spot-the-antisemitism]

Genuine question, and I don't know if you answered this previously, but how do you feel about the Palestinian citizens? Like, if you ignore whatever the fuck Hamas has going on and just look at the innocents, what are your thoughts on the genocide? Do you think Israel is justified in bombing the Gaza strip? If you think think that Israel isn't justified, what are your thoughts on the people that do?

I'm not trying to start shit or anything, this is all asked out of genuine curiosity, and there isn't a wrong or right answer (everything is objective when it comes to opinion based questions such as these)

have a good timezone

Dear anon,

My heart goes out to them and any answer that doesn't extend at least some compassion for people trying to survive in a dictatorship is wrong.

There is a middle ground between "these brown people don't understand how to not be antisemtic and not murder it's their CuLtUrE" and "All palestineans are complicit in hamas war crimes, even NO especially the refugees who weren't even in Gaza"

There is some normalcy and compassion that can exist between fetishization and racism

'your thoughts on the genocide?' STOP APPOPRIATING THE HOLOCAUST WHEN TALKING ABOUT GAZA.

You call it a genocide only because you don't want to call October 7th a war crime. Would you call the Iraq-Iran war a genocide? NO? Why not? Is it because the Jews aren't the ones doing the killing? I see.

"If you think think that Israel isn't justified, what are your thoughts on the people that do?"

I have spoken to those people. They feel like they HAVE to support the IDF to counter the "IDF belong in hell" Westboro baptist church style nonsense. It's kinda sad. PSA: you don't have to excuse your sides war crimes either.

I promise you if you can extend compassion for the Gazan civilian who bears some complicity in what Hamas does because they control everything in Gaza you can extend it to the average kahanist likudnik

Curent timezone time is: early morning

I am open about living in the southern us because I don't fake ethnicities for clout unlike my enemies

I WILL have a good morning

Cecil

[cree-n-jewish-thoughts]

I still hear the terrible voices yelling "7/10, 10 times, 100 times, 1000 times"

Why are we not allowed to mourn, to grieve?

When will the goyium see

We are just human beings?

When will we be able to stop fighting to exist?

Why the nazi salute

When you claim you stand for human life?

If your goal is not to continue their pursuit?

We cry, we mourn we bleed red when cut with a knife.

Why are we not allowed to be free?

Why does everything seem to come down to

"the Jews are lying to you"

All we want is to feel safe again

To be able to live in our culture

But I feel like that is fleeting

I feel like words have lost their meaning

We aren't the people fiending for blood

The world has turned it's back so many times

It's ingrained in our memories like nursery rhymes

They tear us down through their screens

Using a fake name

Placing us with all the blame

Without any education on any players

Big or small that started the game.

If you think we will drop to our knees for you

You're not only uneducated, but delusional too.

We can't mourn the dead

Because there are still missiles and bullets flying around our heads.

When we will finally be free

To be the Jewish in a land of peace.

[focaccia-nose]

This comment on one of my recent posts pretty much sums up what I am going through as an american Jew.

My post was about the pain I have experienced navigating within my community and in leftist circles. It was about how I feel unsafe and hurt by people I thought were close to me. It was about how the escapism I was using to cope is being infiltrated by antisemitic rhetoric.

I was at a house show the evening of October 7th and people in my small leftist town CHEERED for the murder and rape of people like me. How am I supposed to feel safe knowing that lives like mine are considered disposable? That nobody would have cared if I was gunned down at a music festival, just because citizens in Gaza have it worse. That doesn't cancel out the fact that Jewish people everywhere are struggling. Just because it's not as bad as being in a war zone, doesn't mean that it's not real.

It's been said so many times that many things can be simultaneously true that I want to tear my hair out.

This is the ultimate gaslighting and so reductionist that I don't even know how to where to begin. The idea that we all lived together peacefully before Israel was established is bullshit.

If your response to suffering is to invalidate their lived experiences, make fun of them, put words in their mouth, or accuse them of faking it, you are fucked in the head.

Propaganda is working on you.

[hatsunevitu]

both kyle and cartman joined the debate club in high school. kyle thought it would help him with his public speaking skills and improve his critical thinking, meanwhile cartman was just looking for an opportunity to release the anger and stress he had and fucking destroy someone in a verbal fight.

and – uh-oh, such a coincidence – they both joined it at the same time without knowing it.

kyle was obviously pissed off, and he was actually thinking of quitting, because the idea of spending school hours arguing with cartman didn’t really seem appealing to him, but eventually his pride wouldn’t let him simply give up.

“I can be in any club I want, and I won’t let Cartman fucking ruin it for me! You’ll see, dude, he’ll drop out in one or two meetings when I absolutely win him in a debate!” as he then explained to stan.

kyle was preparing for the first debate harder than for any of his normal school activities. he would spend nights perfecting his reasoning and making a plan for his speech, until he was absolutely sure cartman had zero chances to win.

the theme was something controversial like, i’m not sure, politics or something, and kyle was totally sure that cartman would come unprepared, because he hates anything homework-like, and he ususally prefers improvising.

he was wrong, though, as cartman has been preparing. he entered the classroom with a small stack of papers with his reasoning on them, he was smiling brightly and joking, and kyle for the first time felt insecure about his skills. he felt rather nervous as he knew that cartman’s charisma and the ability to tell lies in the blink of his eye made kyle look worse in a debate, but he still hoped the teacher had some common sense and wouldn’t let cartman blind them with his confident smiles and fake politeness.

but the nervous anxious feeling in kyle’s chest wouldn’t go away, so when cartman started speaking, kyle couldn’t just stay quiet, sighing irritatedly when cartman said things like “violence is bad”. as kyle knew damn well that’s not what cartman actually thought.

so when the debate was coming to its end and cartman was giving another hypocritical speech, kyle just couldn’t be silent anymore, interrupting cartman with his new counter arguments (and adding some insults as well). cartman, of course, lost his temper too, and the constructive discussion instantly became a heated bickering. teachers tried to stop it but when kyle and cartman are fighting literally nothing can distract them.

cartman: Look, capitalism is just the natural way of things. It's the perfect system, without it everything would fall apart!

kyle: How can you be sooo blind and ignorant to everything?! Capitalism breeds inequality, it's the reason behind a lot of problems in our society, you just don't know it because you haven't experienced all the struggles, you fat privileged fuck!

cartman: Oh, I’m privileged?? Well, you’re just a whiny jew who can't handle the truth. You're just jealous your greedy ass can't make money yourself!

kyle: Shut up, Cartman, I’m warning you!

after a few antisemitic-fatphobic-homophobic slurs they were both kicked out and banned from entering the club again.

they both seemed disappointed and annoyed by it, but cartman had a smug smirk on his face, feeling proud of making kyle mad.

they wouldn’t stop their fight though, arguing all the way back home, without being pressured or watched, and kyle caught himself thinking that arguing with cartman is pretty, well, addicting and he might actually be enjoying it.

at the end they decided it’s a tie, and for the goodbye cartman says something like “Well, you’re annoying as fuck, but I gotta hand it to you, you’re good at debating. Who even needs that stupid club, anyway?”

and kyle smiles, nodding. “Next week, the same time” he says already walking away from Cartman.

and they meet again, choosing a topic and preparing for the debate by themselves because they don’t need a club to argue with each other.

[jewishvitya]

A lot of things I hear and have a resistance to, I find hard to untangle and figure out. Is this Israeli propaganda I haven't unpacked yet, or is it that these people are applying a lens that doesn't fit the situation?

For example, the idea that Israeli music is appropriated when it sounds Middle Eastern, is it correct or is it because 60% of Israeli Jews are Mizrahi, coming from Arab countries, have a long history of making music like this? What did we appropriate and what did we bring with us? I don't know how to look into that, I don't understand music enough. Same with food, what's appropriated and what did people just bring with them? A lot of us never left the Middle East. So I don't know. I have no idea how to check which is which. I can point to the erasure of Palestinian culture as lending itself to appropriation, because it's real and it's insidious, but the rest I personally don't know how to pick apart.

But there's also something I hear more and more about how Israelis changed our names into Hebrew names to sound more indigenous. On one side of my family, the original name was Levi because of the tribe of Levi. It was changed to hide that we're Jewish and avoid violence in diaspora. Are people changing names because they finally feel free to have visibly Jewish names, or is it some attempt to obscure a history in diaspora? This isn't music, this is something I can look at a bit more easily.

I'm sure for many of us the freedom to go back to our roots is valuable. It's true that a lot of us had Hebrew names we used among ourselves, and "localized" names (not sure what else to call it) we used in official documentation etc. I'm named after my great great grandmother's Hebrew name that she had while living in France, and she never moved to Israel. I'm sure she would have loved the safety of using her name officially. So, of course, many people jumped on this opportunity. You give them the ability to register with a new name, and they use the name they had in the safety of their own community.

A Jewish person changing their name to Hebrew is often shedding a false identity they were forced to adopt.

But at the same time.

When Jewish refugees were brought here in early immigration waves, their names were changed often not by their choice. Leadership had a whole thing about imposing Hebrew names on people. I remember a story from history class, I don't remember which aliyah it was about, but we were told about people standing there and someone being like "All of you - your name is this. And this bunch - your name is that." There was a joke stereotype about Ethiopian Israelis having names that start with the letter alef because that's the first letter of the alphabet and their names were picked from an alphabetized list.

When my family members came to Israel, they kept their non-Hebrew surname, but they were given a list of Hebrew names to choose from. I think this was recently enough the they would have been able to say no to it, though. So they took their Hebrew names willingly.

I don't know if it's accurate to say the intention was to sound more indigenous. Because, at the time that this was mostly happening, the zionist movement was proudly colonialist. They separated between us and the Palestinians, placing the Palestinians as the indigenous population, as a way of placing us above them.

I think it was an attempt to homogenize Israeli society. To make it into something cohesive. Part of the melting pot. Another thing that was happening at the same time was all kinds of abuses to try to strip Jewish immigrants and refugees from their cultural and religious practices. Zionism had a very complicated and toxic relationship with Judaism, especially in those days. It had a goal of founding a state with Western enlightenment values, but for Jewish people. It relied on Judaism as an ethnicity for the definition of an in-group, and hated Judaism as a religion.

But about the names. I don't think it's to fake indigeniety. I think in some cases it's a genuine return to our own language now that we're comfortable, and in other cases, forced assimilation.

[marstonie]

MY THOUGHTS — i beg to read to the end. saying that zionism and israeli jews are epitomizing "white supremacy" has to be the worst fucking opinion i have ever had to witness. god, you fucking antisemitic pigs are unbearable. yes, antisemitic, not antizionist — believe me. if you would just spend one serious minute of your life to indulge yourself in the history of israel, in the history of HOW it came to be, and especially WHY it came to be, all of you naive, ignorant people would see pretty clearly that this isn’t an aggressive, "settler colonialist" (😭) state, but it’s the reaction to thousands of years of opression, to an ACTUAL genocide of over 6 million jews, to the fact that no place on earth wanted to harbour them in safety — so first question, where else to go? and please enlighten me, after you’ve spent actual time reading in a history book or attending a real school, how israel was the initial aggressor in this conflict? how jewish people back then were doing something bad or fundamentally different than what every single group of people had done in the history of humanity — to migrate and to settle. do we want to go over the settler history of arab states and nations together? do you want to enlighten me, what makes the arabs settling good, and the jewish settling evil? do you care to provide any information that isn’t solely based on bias or — how do i say — hatred for jews? one pattern i have been very much observant of, is that the majority of the pro-palestine movement is uneducated, and refuses to use any actual historic facts or historic depth as backup for their cries to eradicate the only safe home that jewish people have on this messed up world. and i, too, believe the expansion politics of israel to be wrong, and strongly believe that palestine should exist in a free, individual state — however, the pro-palestine movement is calling for palestine to demolish the jewish state. to eradicate and murder millions of israeli jews. they are saying things like "resistance isn’t terror", and believe this is a cry for peace — when the hamas terrorists raped women, murdered children, beat teenagers and elderly in blood and kidnapped hundreds — terror remains TERROR. you can acknowledge this terror, and still call for palestine to be free! i AM calling for palestine to be free! yet, i am asking you, how do you expect to have diplomacy, when the leading political force of gaza is currently, a terror organization. tell me, how? but you won’t want to tell me, because to you, the murder and rape of jewish, innocent people is resistance. i hope you fake and disgusting activists choke. i am a shockingly pacifist person, but this bullshit makes me feel rage and sadness beyond words. i hope you all wake up from this disgusting lunacy, and turn to actual activism, turn to actual advocacy for peace. i will always be advocating for peace and the freedom of both these states. you guys are doing neither.

[aspiringwarriorlibrarian]

Hello,

Ive been following you for years and I love your blog. In all my years on this website I have never posted, sent an ask or a message, commented or interacted with anyone on this website in any way. However seeing your recent posts about Palestine made me feel like I had to say something.

Just because you support the “weaker” side, it doesn’t make you immune to lies and propaganda.

Please educate yourself before you spread misinformation and/or misleading info.

I am a citizen of Israel. This conflict started when Hamas brutally murdered hundreds of innocent civilians, including elderly and children. They kidnapped over a hundred more. They are known for being a terrorist organisation whose stated goal is to murder jews.

I am terrified. My people are forever scarred. I and everyone I know have lost loved ones in this war. And the fact that people like you in these terrible times choose to focus solely on the suffering of the Palestinians, ignoring and justifying our suffering, speaks volumes.

The bombings you speak of, are a retaliation for the slaughter of October 7th. Israel warns citizens in advance, in order to prevent as many casualties as possible. But we cant just ignore the murder, kidnapping, rape and harm to our people like you do. We have no choice but to defend ourselves.

We have no interest nor desire to commit genocide against the Palestinian people. If we did, we would have already done so. Instead we financially support Palestine, despite the fact they use this money not to better their lives, but to instead attack our civilians.

Beware of misinformation like the accusations against Israel for bombing the hospital in Gaza. That is a straight up lie that was proven false, and the Hamas spread it along with lies about how many people got hurt, in order to convince people like you that they are justified. And its working.

Before you accuse others, maybe check your own biases and think to yourself why a Palestinian life is worth something to you and an Israeli one isn’t.

Can you even imagine what it feels like to go online after such a tragedy for a little relief, only to see people like you calling for my death?

And yes, that is what you’re doing by supporting and encouraging the actions of Hamas. An organisation that cares more about killing innocent civilians like me than protecting its own people.

I hope that if you can’t take the time to properly understand this complicated situation, you will at least stop talking about something that you clearly don’t understand.

You know, I put all of this in a private post initially. I've been largely focused on spreading charity posts, actual concrete things that can be done to save the innocent people caught in the crossfire. But clearly, my message has been mixed, so I'll define it right here.

This is just something that seeps into my bones and I had to say it somewhere: the sheer refusal by both sides to admit what they're doing. Oh, we thought that music festival was soldiers....wait no we didn't, it was random Gazan civilians who did it instead, not us, hurt them instead. Oh we are going to wage all out war....no those innocent civilian casaulties weren't us, it was them! (No, the cause of the explosion has not been independently proven. It has, however, been proven that Israel shelled the place three days earlier as a "warning" then called ordering an evacuation shortly before.) Put down an evacuation order so short and so sudden the UN protests that civilians can't possibly get out in time, then bomb one of the convoys. Tell your countrymen the evacuation order was fake so you get more human shields. More rockets! More airstrikes! More "accidents" to the tune of hundreds of civilians dead, and you never have to carry the burden or the blame for any of it. Shoot from far enough away, target enough civilians, makes it easy, makes it fun. The glory of war with none of the guilt and none of the risk! Ain't that a wonderful thing. Ain't that a fucking joke.

I grieve for the innocent Israeli citizens slaughtered because Hamas cowards wanted to kill the defenseless. I grieve for the people in Gaza getting slaughtered because neither side cares if they live or die. The difference between the two is not that one life is worth more than the others. That is morally repugnant and fundamentally absurd. The difference is that Israel is getting aid from many nations, while other nations only give aid to Hamas, not the people of Gaza. They need humanitarian aid, they need someone to speak for them and beg for restraint, which is why I'm primarily reblogging posts that call for humanitarian aid to them and for a ceasefire so they can, at the very least, have the evacuation time they should have been allowed. It is not because their lives are worth more, but because to far too many, their lives are worth less.

I understand your pain and fear, and I am deeply sorry for your loss. I too find those rooting for Hamas or declaring that the victims deserved it for being settlers repugnant. But the people of Gaza did not do this, and if it's a choice between them living and Hamas dying, I will choose their lives every time. I will always choose life. And I refuse to apologize for that. Violence like this is a cycle, revenge and revenge and revenge again because you cannot kill an idea with bombs, only keep destroying until nothing is left to fight over. You cannot stop a cycle by continuing to spin.

[spacelazarwolf]

I was not on leftbook, entirely, but my friend joined a leftbook messenger group chat for mutual aid and communism and stuff, typical anti-cap, and since I had messenger app (to talk to friend), I joined the group chat and bruh I remember the antitheist, the body shaming, the anti-sex work, intersexism, etc. there was a conversation about religion at some point, religion and faith and one of the group chat leaders there was atheist and he said there would be no room for ANY religion post-revolution because “all we have is each other, not some fake person in the sky”, and I was like “okay but for some, they Need that faith and for many, their faith and religion actually inspires the hope needed to do xyz” “no they don’t because all religion is *blah blah*”. It made me feel incredibly uncomfortable because that meant Islam and Judaism would be obsolete in this persons dream world. I remember the barely disguised antisemitism, tho I wasn’t, at the time, as learned about antisemitism because I only knew The Big Stuff and was tbh still really just barely leaving libertarianism at this point. (I knew it was bad but I was raised to believe that was the only possible actuality, so I didn’t believe in it to be a good thing, just inescapable necessity so I was trying to learn how to challenge capitalist thoughts by being around leftists and then realized leftists are whew god VERY racist, antisemitic, and ableist). There were some good ones in the chat too but yikes.

oh yeah leftbook was so fucking antisemitic it was actually nuts. one of my jewish friends was called a racist bc they said that there were some antisemitic tropes in a song that came out that everyone was raving about. i’m like 75% sure it was a kanye song which like is hilarious considering he’s a nazi sympathizer now and has been deeply racist and antisemitic for years. but yeah. being a jew in leftbook was scary.

[creekfiend]

Just wanted to say thanks for "people from culturally Christian backgrounds" because that seems like a good way to phrase it, and I'm going to try to remember to use it when I'm talking about this sort of thing. (I try to not be a dick to people, when possible, and trauma's messy and complicated.) I'm sorry that some people are being horrible in this whole discussion, and I hope you are doing okay.

I'm doing fine! I really sympathize with most of the people involved in this tbh (except the outright antisemites of course lol) bc like I HAVE seen a lot of reactive and reductive and unkind blanket statements about this by some jumblr people in which they are condescendingly explaining other people's realities to them. Which is my LEAST favorite thing. Jumblr can also be really... umm, dog pile-y in a way that I find frustrating and unproductive. However. I think it's also fairly obvious that most of these reactions are trauma responses, and while that isn't an excuse it is an explanation and provides additional context that I do not feel is irrelevant. For jews we have constantly been told 'well simply stop being jewish' like all the time by everybody, often at gunpoint. So like, when I see nonjewish atheists assert that stuff jews are TELLING you they have gone through "literally never happens" that ALSO REALLY SUCKS. like so so bad. Cannot overstate how much that sucks. Cannot overstate how much it sucks to see ppl I sympathize with deeply wrt their mistrust and hatred of like, organized religious authority, align themselves with people who refer to jewish atheists as "religious nationalists" for refusing to divorce themselves from their ethnic backgrounds/culture/community/traditions. That rhetoric is Just antisemitism in a form that has been used to cause real and violent harm to us in living memory.

Also really alienated by the idea that one must be This Vitriolically Angry About Religion to "count" as an atheist. Like what? That is bonkers. I do not understand why the people making seemingly reasonable posts about "actually here's some interesting writings by people from Islamic cultures or majority Hindu cultures or orthodox jewish cultures outlining the ways that the authorities in these societies have used religion to cause harm on a systemic level" (objectively true) seem to be aligning themselves with people who are doing the SAME THING TO JEWS that they resent being done to them -- e.g. condescendingly explaining to us that our negative experiences with a certain type of atheists Don't Exist or Don't Count or cannot possibly be rooted in antisemitism.

I find the whole thing depressing and troubling. I don't tend to follow jumblr because of the aforementioned issues I have w it but this backlash seems to me to be disproportionate and really hateful in a way that... combines poorly with the increased antisemitic sentiments being lobbed at jews from all ideological sides recently. I wish we could all be more congizent of 1. the role trauma is playing here for everyone and 2. the inherent lack of productive discussion that can be had when two parties are simply Trauma Responsing at each other back and forth endlessly.

Then there's the people who just get super aggressive about people "believing fake things" but I'm not sure there's any help for them. Sure wish that the nonjewish atheists who are not like that would disavow them though! I certainly am more than happy to say "acknowledging a cultural/societal dynamic that privileges one religion and culture as default and that existing in thay culture might cause people to have unexamined assumptions about other religions and cultures" should not be weaponized against individual people in order to bully them by insisting they are a thing that they manifestly are not (atheists aren't Christians. The fact that atheists from Jewish backgrounds will have Jewishness shackled to them regardless of their degree of identification with Being A Jew is actually bad and a function of antisemitism; it is not an aspirational dynamic we should be applying to other people simply because their cultural background is privileged over our own in our society.)

Like can we stop talking past each other and try to understand where people are coming from

People are expressing a lot of hurt and anger about atrocities and systems of oppression that I ultimately feel are totally interconnected. Because of this hurt and anger most people are not being precise in their language or prioritizing connecting or actual dialogue about this and instead focusing on dogpiling and gotchas. It's discouraging.

I'm a secular humanist jew with complex feelings towards both jewishness and atheism as concepts and movements. I want to understand and connect with people based on our common ground.

This is I guess all me being a big baby who is unsuited to internet fights but this one specifically feels really hurtful to me because I feel like my reality is being ignored and denied. I suspect a lot of people are also feeling that way. Which might be a good place to START the discussion to be honest.

[roomofshroom]

kyman headcanons part 2 !!!! SFW (cartman oriented!!!)

since yall liked my kyman headcanons so much i thought id give it another try and write down sum more ! :D

part 1: here

cartman would plan little fucking schemes to see if kyle really loves him (text him from a fake instagram profile, pay a girl to make a move on him, shit like that)

motherfucker craves attention so much, so he like pretends he's sick or dying or that something really serious happened to see if kyle comes running to him

kyle quickly realizes this is not a one time thing and is really annoyed w him but manages to come running everytime cartman pulls something like this, eric always treats him with a big smile when hes at the doorstep ("you came! :D " "ofc i came you said ur fucking mom was dying?! where is she?" "oh she just went shopping" "so you made it up?! you know how fucked up that is?!" "technically, my mom IS dying, we are ALL dying every second of every day ever since we were born, kHAL...")

cartman uses like an unhealthy ammount of emojis in every message, sends shit ton of tiktoks, reels, youtube shorts and has a completely different types of conversations w kyle on every social media platform all at once (like on instagram he's venting to him about how he doesnt feel appreciated enough by the world while hes sending him memes on discord and streaming himself playing fall guys or smth i dont fucking know)

kyle's style of texting is very simple, he doesnt like long messages, he doesnt really send memes or tiktoks or anything but he religiously watches everything eric sends him, responds to him asap and writes medium sized messages with emojis because cartman is super fucking clingy and goes on a rampage if kyle doesnt respond for more than 3 hours or if his response isn't "enthusiastic" enough (*eric sends a meme of cats with a "this is so us" comment* kyle: <3 eric: do you hate me? kyle: no wtf i dont??? why? eric: idk just seems like you hate me)

cartman hangs out w kyle's mom and makes kyle's mom unknowingly share embarrassing details of kyle's life just to tease him w the information later, they also look through baby pictures together

eric and kyle's mom love gossiping together and they watch say yes to dress together and critique the dresses ("the mermaid style dress with HER LEGS!? i thought she'd wanna show them off!" "yes, such a shame, wasted potential")

sometimes cartman just goes to kyle's house solely to hang out with his mom ("oh hey cartman, i wont be able to hang out today, i need to-" "no worries, I'm here to watch tlc w your mom")

cartman's love language is words of affirmation, obviously, and he makes kyle say everything he loves about him at least twice a week as a "communication exercise, so that their relationship stays good and they both feel appreciated" (its honestly just a way for eric to get praised, he loveeees that shit)

he knows kyle's love lang is acts of service (hes known him for years, kyle didnt even need to tell him) so while he's at his house he'll wash the dishes and fold his clothes but he won't admit to it, he actually hides it and feels embarrassed, kyle just knows ("hey, did you clean my room while i was downstairs?" "no?" "look, its clear you did, just say so" "i don't fucking know what you're talking about, khal" "...thank you, eric" "...shut the fuck up, jew, as if I'd touch your dirty ass room")

cartman's actually very shy with showing affection when its just two of them and when kyle says something sweet unprovoked, cartman usually blushes and shuts him down, turns it into a joke or straight up ridicules kyle ("you're actually very pretty, cartman" "yeah, you're pretty too... pretty gay, HAHA")

kyle's shy with showing affection in front of others and cartman fucking takes that and runs with it sometimes, doing everything to make kyle uncomfortable, he's being all lovey dovey infront of kenny and stan to see kyle cringe internally and awkwardly smiling on the outside to 'not seem like a bad boyfriend' (cuz when he once couldn't take it and told cartman to shut the fuck up, cartman got fake sad and stan came to kyle afterwards and gave a speech about "sometimes having to put up with stuff you don't like to make your girl, uhm sorry, to make your... significant other happy")

[internerdionality]

Lightly edited rant containing unpopular opinions. If you like Christmas, that's fine. Please just move on and don't read this. I'm not interested in helping anyone through a fragility meltdown today.

It annoys me when people say Happy Holidays. It feels like fake multiculturalism and only *slightly* better than people who just wish everyone Merry Christmas. Sometimes I actually *prefer* Merry Christmas because at least they're being honest? IDK I really just wish people wouldn't force me into their celebrations.

Liberal American Christians love to talk about how "well practically every religion has a holiday in December so it's just a spiritual time that we should all acknowledge, darkest time of the year, bring back the light blah blah blah" but that's actually pretty much just BS?

Like, most religions have lots of festivals and observances throughout the year. Plenty of other times of the year have groupings of holidays. The winter solstice isn't any *more* important on a global scale than the other major turnings of the year. So then why do we say happy holidays at midwinter and not at the other equinoxes and solstice?

It's because America is a Christian country, and Christian "values" and "culture" get forced on all of its inhabitants. And Christmas in particular is used as this *bludgeon* to inextricably bind Americanism to Christianity. And if you push back against it, you get seen as anti-American and antisocial. (Which, admittedly, for me is fair, but hey!) And that's not just from conservatives. I've had LOTS of discussions with liberals about Christmas and the "winter holidays" that can basically get summed up as "well, it's just basically secular and has universal themes of family and love and generosity so you should just be happy to celebrate it."

Except that Christmas *cannot* be separated from its Christian roots and tying it to American neocapitalism just makes it more toxic. I don't want to celebrate it and I'm *so tired* of living through two (if I'm lucky) straight months of forced observance of someone else's religion.

And yeah, happy holidays just reinforces that, it doesn't make it better. As a Jew, if you say happy holidays to me during Hanukkah and not during Passover or the Days of Awe, it's pretty obvious that it's about Christmas (and forced assimilation) and not about inclusiveness. If you say happy holidays for Bodhi day but not Vesak, that's not about multiculturalism. If you say happy holidays during Kwanzaa but not on Junetheenth, that's not about diversity. If you say happy holidays during Ramadan (on the rare occasions that Ramadan even falls in December) but not on Eid al-Adha (or vice versa), then it's pretty obvious that's not about anything other than making sure everyone else is forced to join in on YOUR celebration.

(And if anyone's going, "well, but everyone celebrates the New Year"—nope. While the US’ year end can be traced back to Rome, it was Christianity that spread it throughout the world and is responsible for us celebrating in midwinter. Other calendars vary wildly. Many aren't actually fixed to the solar year, but for those that are, beginning the year at the end of summer or the end of winter is actually more common than midwinter. But anyway, using happy holidays to refer to New Year's Day isn't much less Christian-centric than using it to refer to Christmas).

And like, no judgment to people who like happy holidays and want everyone to use it, I'm just tired.

[mariacallous]

The Spectator asked me to write about George Galloway’s victory in Rochdale. I found it hard to feel anything but despair about working-class Muslim voters, who once again turned out in huge numbers for a white saviour and tankie[i] who had saluted Saddam Hussein, Bashir Assad and Vladimir Putin.

After all these years of exposure, no one has the right to feign ignorance about Galloway’s record. It’s not that his supporters do not know who Galloway is. It is that they know but do not care.

A large chunk of Muslim voters and an element on the white left adore him because he hates Israel and that is​ all that matters.

There’s a lot of drivel going around this morning that Galloway’s victory is a disaster for Labour. In the short-term that cannot be true.

Leave aside that Labour got into such a mess it did not even run a candidate, an analysis by Prof Rob Ford of Manchester University, and friend of this Substack, shows that Labour seats with a large Muslim vote are safe.

In the long run, though, it is a different story.

Lyndon Johnson is meant to have said that the skill you need most in politics is the ability to count. As the Muslim population grows and as Palestine becomes not one issue for the wider left but the issue, left politics will change

Here is how I ​see it

The Rochdale by-election raises a question that Labour will find hard to duck in government: can a European left-wing party survive without a pro-Islamist foreign policy? They can’t win with one, as Jeremy Corbyn proved twice. But the shocking success of George Galloway last night shows that the arguments of the Corbyn years have not been settled.

No one can pretend they do not know who the loudmouthed old ham really is after all this time. Just before Muslim voters propelled him to victory, Galloway received the endorsement of none other than Nick Griffin, the former leader of the British National Party (BNP). 

To use an overused label correctly for once, the BNP is genuinely neo-fascist. And yet Griffin had no qualms in recommending that his followers ‘get out and vote for George Galloway’ and ‘stick two fingers up to the rotten political elite and their fake news media cronies’.

 Like cocktails before a dinner party, obsessions about Jews bring all the extremists together.

What better illustration could you have of the horseshoe theory?

Admirers of dictators admire each other. Galloway ‘saluted’ Saddam Hussein, whose forces killed tens of thousands of Muslims. He praised Bashar al-Assad, as the Syrian president’s forces slaughtered the country’s Sunni Muslim population, for maintaining the ‘fortress of the remaining dignity of the Arabs’ – the grandiosity of Galloway’s pompous language was in inverse proportion to the misery Assad inflicted.

None of this concerned Muslim voters in Rochdale. Opposition to Israel was all that mattered.

There’s an argument doing the rounds this morning that Labour’s disastrous performance was just a blip. Galloway is a narcissist, it runs, who won’t last long. Muslim voters responded to his anti-Iraq war campaign and gave him victory in Bethnal Green in the 2005 general election. He was out by 2010. He won the Bradford by-election in 2012, and the voters rejected him in the 2015 general election. The voters of Rochdale will almost certainly do the same later this year.

Labour sounded confident. ‘George Galloway is only interested in stoking fear and division,’ the party told the BBC. Labour will ‘quickly’ select a new candidate for the upcoming general election, the spokesman said, adding the party wants to deliver the ‘representation and fresh start that Rochdale deserves’.

I am sure they will. Labour’s poll lead is so great, it can afford to be confident. But Rochdale raises a question about how Labour will deal with the obsessions of a large section of the left once in power, which are unlikely to go away.

The best way to think about it is to look at the threats to MPs and the endless denunciations of Keir Starmer. They are absurd on the face of it. Labour is in opposition. It has no influence over the Israeli government or Hamas whatsoever. What it says is supremely irrelevant.

But the explosion in rage makes sense if you see the anti-Starmer campaign as an attempt to bolster the chances of independent left-wing candidates and to change party policy. (For one, Jeremy Corbyn, kicked out of the party in October 2020 will be thinking of running in Islington North after Galloway’s victory.)

To date it has been a mess. Tom Baldwin, Keir Starmer’s biographer, says​ that the Labour leader and his team had simply not thought about Israel when they gave Benjamin Netanyahu a blank cheque after the Hamas atrocities in October. My guess is that they were so appalled by Labour’s anti-Semitism scandals of the 2010s they swung to the opposite extreme.

You can see how extreme they became by watching a YouTube clip from four months ago of Starmer telling Nick Ferrari that Israel had the right to ‘cut off power, cut off water’ to civilians in Gaza. It has been played tens of thousands of times by Starmer’s opponents. 

Now he has spoken to the Israeli left, government figures in Qatar and Jordan, and the Biden administration and has embraced a standard centre-left suspicion of Netanyahu as a result.

I could go on about the Labour leadership’s naivety. How can you not have a settled view on the Israel/Palestine question when Israel so dominates leftist thinking? When, indeed, supporting Palestine is now for a large faction on the left almost the definition of what it means to be left-wing? It’s astonishing.   

It is equally astonishing that due diligence did not spot that the official Labour candidate held views about Jews that weren’t just anti-Israel but were simply racist. Now Labour has moved on, and I can easily see a Labour government offering full diplomatic recognition to the Palestinian Authority as a compromise.

But that is no more than a Conservative government is likely to do. The activists are crying ‘from the river to the sea’ on the streets, and the Labour left do not want compromise. They want Labour to be like France’s largest left-wing party La France Insoumise (LFI), which is for electoral, as well as ideological, reasons pro-Islamist.

LFI repeatedly declined to call Hamas a terrorist group (a conclusion the EU came to about Hamas a full 20 years ago). Their initial communique on 7 October used Hamas’s own language about itself, calling the attack ‘an armed offensive by Palestinian forces’ that came ‘in the context of the intensification by Israel of the policy of occupation of Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem’.

Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s party can’t win a presidential election any more than Corbyn could win a general election.

And as with Corbynism, its foreign policy is not just about Palestine but includes a softness towards Vladimir Putin and the other dictators George Galloway salutes. On the other hand, LFI captures a large chunk of the Arab-French vote because it is pro-Islamist. And no French left-wing party can succeed without that vote.

Labour is so far ahead at present it can shrug off the mess in Rochdale, and predict with assurance that it will retake the seat at the election.

It can say it has learned from its mistake in underwriting Netanyahu and his extremely right-wing government and moved on.

In power, however, things will be different. What Labour says and does will finally matter, and elements in its electoral coalition will be making their demands very clear.

Labour hopes that Joe Biden’s ceasefire initiative will work, and that Israel will just go away as an issue.

That hope, as anyone who knows the history of the Israel-Palestine conflict since 1948 will guess, is likely to be vain.

This is the conflict that never goes away.