#i’m a fucking english citizen stop accusing me of being complicit in israeli war crimes

[coffeeinthelibrary]

okay okay i am NOT justifying any of the violence in israel or palestine but just a PSA for those of you who don’t know: Jews have only been regarded as “white” for MAYBE the past 50 or so years. a large percentage of Jews in Israel are BY NO MEANS white - most are the Arab refugees who were kicked out of every single middle eastern country in 1948 (and the jews who stayed died). there’s a large group of Ethiopian Jews who were saved in (i think) the 1960s by the IDF and now live in Israel (because they faced genocide in Ethiopia). Yemeni Jews, Iraqi Jews, Iranian Jews, Indian Jews, Jordanian Jews, Egyptian Jews are all major groups within Israel. the history of Jews in the Arabic-Islamic world is probably MORE extensive than the history of Jews in Europe. The main reason why people in the West think of Jews as “white” is because a lot of Eastern European and Western European Jews (Ashkenazi Jews) live in England and the US, and the Jews we most often see on TV are these Ashkenazi Jews.

Also, Jews historically have never been seen as white (even the white-passing ones). The whole fucking reason Jews have been persecuted was because they weren’t white.

I fully support calling out the Israeli government and holding them to account, but when someone calls Israelis “white settlers” it erases the entire history of persecution that Jews faced. The majority of Israelis I know moved to Israel after being forcibly kicked out of the surrounding middle eastern countries, and the white-passing Israelis I know are all descendants of Holocaust survivors - if you asked any of my family who were killed in the Holocaust if they thought of themselves as white they would have laughed.

Again, this doesn’t justify the violence against Palestinians being committed by the Israeli government. But calling Jewish Israelis “white settlers” is just factually wrong (and I won’t even go into how Jews are indigenous to Israel). Considering I have been approached in clubs and asked “are you jewish” (and then harassed when I said yes), considering that every time I have been a victim of antisemitism I have not been wearing anything that would mark me as Jewish (other than my ethnically Jewish features, which I can’t exactly change) i don’t feel white-passing. it might be less obvious than other ethnic groups, but my Jewishness is certainly obvious to antisemites.