#jewish indigineity

[ieatratsforbreakfast]

This message goes out to any women, POC, trans, queer, disabled, mentally ill, neurodivergent, indigenous, muslism & jewish, and palestinian people out there in the US:

Keep living, thrive even. Keep going out of spite, keep going because living as yourself is an act of defiance. I love you <3 (heart)

[arunswild]

Absolutely, it makes me more susceptible to propaganda, but I also have a more nuanced view of the situation because I'm experiencing it myself. Also, needless to say, my knowledge of Israeli history, Hebrew, Arabic and Jewish studies is definitely better and more thorough than most Americans, making it easier for me to see the historical side of things, read more sources from BOTH sides, and speak to more people. And I don't want to say that I'm more entitled to an opinion, because that sounds stupid, but actually I kind of am?

Except, your point is weak in the first place, because the fact that not ALL the Jews were exterminated doesn't really mean that we should sit around waiting for it to happen. The fact that miraculously some people survived doesn't mean that there's no need for a Jewish home. It's great, but it doesn't cancel out the need for a home base.

Well, I'm sorry, do you know what my friends, family and community have been doing for almost a year? Showing up, every single weekend, by the thousands, in front of Netanyahu's house, protesting his insane actions and demanding that he resign. We've literally sued the government. The fight we've been putting up is actually insane. There were multiple attempts to impeach him, there were multiple attempts to restrain him, he's being tried for multiple crimes, his government was sued this summer, none of it worked (some attempts to restrain him did, but not enough). Anyway, I don't even remember why we brought the Likud up because Netanyahu made it very clear he would not support any renewed Jewish settlement in Gaza.

Don't be ridiculous. The Zionist return to Israel began in 1881, and although there were some tensions, the earlier settlers admired the Palestinian Arabs, they employed them constantly and made huge efforts to learn Arabic and communicate with them. Almost all of the settlements were built on disgusting land the Ottomans sold them. The first armed Jewish groups were formed in response to highway robbers who would attack merchants. Later on settlers tried to boycott Arab workers for ideological reasons, but their boycott failed. Obviously things were tense, but not tense enough to justify ANY of what was done after, under the British. Breaking into family homes, splitting open skulls (???), attacking hospitals, and looting and burning ENTIRE VILLAGES. That's not self defense, because they weren't hurting the belligerents (who, by the way, were not innocent either). They also weren't reacting to anything, because they started the attack. Peace was not attempted before 1900. Duh. Who exactly would mediate what? The Jewish population was miniscule and weak, the Arab Israeli population didn't have an entirely developed national consciousness yet (because Israel wasn't its own province in the Ottoman Empire, it was part of the Syrian province. The idea of the borders of Israel the way they are now is based on the Jewish tradition) and the Ottoman's were trying to keep their collapsing empire together and probably couldn't care less about negotiating peace. What they did care about was limiting Jewish immigration to Palestine, but that's unrelated. However, and this is interesting because rarely anyone knows this, Peace WAS attempted after, under British rule in 1919. It nearly worked, too, except a bunch of stuff messed it up, including both sides disagreeing with regards to a caveat added after the treaty was signed. The agreement was signed by a representative of the Zionist organization who later became the first Israeli president, and the king of Iraq and also technically of Syria. The agreement was for the future Arab and Jewish states to work together to encourage immigration, protect the peasants and the holy sites and develop the economy of both states. Point being, even before the two state solution which was rejected twice by the Arabs, peace was attempted and almost achieved. I probably won't reply if you do, I'm absolutely swamped. Sorry.

These kinds of comments really bug me because it's so clear how confused the person who wrote them is.

So let me clear this up for you, @nagashii

Israel has not stolen Palestinian culture. Of all the ridiculous claims you could make, this one is probably the most silly because it's absolutely meaningless. I'd love to hear what cultural things you think we "stole", but I'm just letting you know that whatever you think it is, you're wrong. I'm not gonna bother elaborating

You're making a very important distinction between Jews and Israel, which is great except you screwed it up. You are assuming that the existence of Jews is not dependent on the existence of Israel, while ignoring the fact that the REASON Israel exists is to protect the Jewish people. Even if there's a very Jewish person who has no interest in Israel, Israel has helped them in more ways than you can imagine. Israel gives money and aid to Jewish community and it's also gained the right to prosecute people who commit antisemitic hate crimes in other countries. So you can say that Jews are okay but Israel needs to die, but you're basically saying Jews need to die, which is, obviously, antisemitic and disgusting.

Israel doesn't have genocidal ideals, don't be idiotic. If Israel wanted to commit genocide, believe me, there would be no humanitarian aid, no warnings, no attempts to evacuate gazans. The IDF has absolutely no interest in harming anyone who isn't part of Hamas, don't let anyone tell you otherwise. The fact that Hamas uses its civilians as human shields makes this incredibly hard. I know people who are currently fighting in Gaza. Trust me, killing more people is the last thing they want. Obviously there are some morons who want to kill everyone and take Gaza back, but they're idiots and nobody really gives a shit what they think because they're being childish and narrow. Those few people do not represent Israel.

The Jewish people are absolutely and completely entitled to have a country of their own, and the fact that Israel was the land chosen has not only Historical and Traditional but also Legal reasons. I'll reblog this with links to useful explanations. As I said, Israel is essential to the continued existence of the Jewish people which means that yes, we are entitled to it. Absolutely. Whether or not all the actions of the Israeli government are okay is a completely different story. The botton line is that Israel must and will continue to exist.

Hope this helps.

[ace-hell]

Ok so my grandma(dad side) went to a special institution that do research on you family name and give your this weird certificate that explains sruff about the family name, origin, meaning etc. So she did on 4 family names:

Her husband's

Hers-dad side

Her mother's - dad side

Her mother's (again)- mother side

And APPARENTLY i have a linage of THREE important rabbis(which one was literally a sofer stam) but that's not all- one of the family names can be traced to RASHI(רש"י) himself???

AND NOT ONLY THAT, which is HUGE, but there's a big fat chance RASHI is a descendant of THE KING DAVID?????

"european" MY ASS NOT ONLY IM NATIVE JEWISH I ALSO MIGHT HAVE A ROYAL HERITAGE????

I know there are another like thousands who should have it too but literally wtfff

I am so psyched out of my mind WHAT THE HELL

[secular-jew]

1881, Jews rebuilding their ancestral country out of an empty, desolate, malaria infested land. Very few Arabs lived in Israel until the 1920's when the British arrived after the Ottomans withdrew, and some Arabs were drawn to the area for new economic opportunities, from Egypt, Syria, and other Muslim countries. The only Palestinians there were the Jews, many of whom had been there since Judaism was born there 3500 years earlier; small numbers of Arabs also present were called Arabs or Moslems, and did not identify as Palestinians. That came later in 1964 when Nasser and Russia came up with the idea and invented the "Palestinian" people as a weapon against Israel. They recruited Arafat, an Egyptian, to play the role of a "Palestinian" and cultivate a false nation.

[infiniteglitterfall]

jewish shower thoughts

A Reddit comment I can't stop thinking about: "If you think whiteness is bad, Jews are white to you. If you think whiteness is good, Jews aren't white to you."

[faggotry-enjoyer]

You ever see something that's just so wrong and cruel and callous you just don't even know where to begin

[infiniteglitterfall]

Yep. That was when the Greco-Roman Empire renamed the area "Syria Palaistinea" ("Palestinian Syria" - It's hard to read the ancient Greek lettering on this map, but it looks like it ends in an A here too).

Renaming and making it a part of Syria were ways to erase the indigenous population whose revolt it had just brutally crushed.

You can see that the "large red letters" are still smaller than the ones below them that say "ARABIA PETREA." That's because Arabia Petrea was a Roman province, while Palestine was a region in the province of Syria.

Wikipedia has a completely different version of this map for some reason. This is what they show as Ptolemy's map from 150 CE:

On this one it's labeled "Palestina-Iudea."

Wikipedia also has a modern reproduction of one from 135 CE, right after the Bar Kokhba Revolt that had been crushed.

In this one, the region is a province named "IUDAEA," or Judea. That's the pre-revolt name. You can see how the transition progressed.

The kingdoms of Judea, or Judah, and of Israel, went back more than 1,000 years.

Judah "was an Israelite kingdom of the Southern Levant during the Iron Age. Centered in the highlands of Judea, the landlocked kingdom's capital was Jerusalem.

"Jews are named after Judah and are primarily descended from it."

This is Wikipedia's map of what the region looked like around 3,000 years ago:

The indigenous Jews had already been invaded by the Babylonian Empire, persevered through its widescale massacres, regained their independence, been invaded and oppressed by the Greeks, and revolted against them twice.

The third revolt was their last. After achieving three years of freedom, all the hundreds of thousands of indigenous Jewish rebels were either killed or enslaved.

Historian Cassius Dio wrote, "50 of their most important outposts and 985 of their most famous villages were razed to the ground. 580,000 men were slain in the various raids and battles, and the number of those that perished by famine, disease and fire was past finding out. Thus nearly the whole of Judaea was made desolate."

Emperor Hadrian outlawed Judaism entirely. Executed Jewish scholars. Publicly burned sacred scrolls at the Temple Mount, and built giant statues of Roman gods there.

He expelled the indigenous Jews from Jerusalem, made Judea a part of Syria, and renamed it "Palaestina" after the horrible Philistines (who had basically been very violent pirates).

He died three years later, and many of his proclamations ended.

But Wikipedia's page on the Bar Kokhba Revolt adds, "A further, more lasting punishment was also implemented by the Romans. In an attempt to erase any memory of Judea or Ancient Israel, the name Judaea was dropped from the provincial name, and Provincia Iudaea was renamed Syria Palaestina" - the only time the Empire reacted to a revolt by expunging a nation's name.

And it worked.

Even though the Jews managed to maintain a presence in the region, and to become the majority population again, the Arab Empire would eventually take over.

It's been nearly two thousand years after the area was renamed. About 1300 years since it became majority Arab. Roughly 100 years since Arab people living there slowly started calling themselves Palestinians.

And people assume that the Palestinians, not the Jews, are the indigenous people there.

The oldest Ptolemy map of Palestine is dated 150 AD. The large red letters in the center say in Greek: Παλαιστινης or Palaistinis.

[apas-95]

As it apparently needs to be restated - race, ethnicity, and nationality are not themselves the basic drivers of history. Political-economic class is.

The European practice of placing African people into chattel slavery was not carried out on the basis of any innate characteristics of 'blackness' or 'whiteness' - those categories did not exist before the slave trade, they were created in support of it. Europe at the time found it would be beneficial to have a class of slave workers for its colonial projects, and it had the military, political, and economic might to subjugate Africa and African people to that end. Had you asked a Prussian and a Scotsman prior to the institution of African slavery if they were both members of a common 'race', they would have found the idea ridiculous - and yet, transport those two ahead in time, and perhaps to settlements in the Americas, and suddenly they were both Whites. Whiteness (and its necessary counterpart, blackness), then, is not some intrinsic quality based on the tone of someone's skin, but a political and economic category constructed to differentiate between those people that could be oppressed and made chattel by the slave trade, and those that could not.

This is true for all these systems of oppression - though they may be divided on supposed lines of biology or locality, they are not inherently based on biological factors, those are functionally coincidental, and are constructed as justifications for a system necessitated by purely political and economic reasons. Nazi oppression of Jewish, and Roma, and Slavic [and etc.] people was not fundamentally based on any inherent quality of e.g. Judaism, but on the economic needs of German capital under the burden of postwar reconstruction and 'war reparations' paid to the victorious powers. It was not blind hatred, but the inevitable result of a society built in pursuit of profit - one whose ruling class held a cold, calculated need to expropriate wealth, weaken worker organisation, and seize and depopulate land to strengthen the composition of capital. It was still necessary for this system to split the population into one group of 'legitimate targets' for victimisation, and one of reassured, protected accomplices, though there were no obvious physical, 'biological' features to base these on - so they were constructed, both through propaganda that exaggerated physiology, and through the appending of obvious badges and marks onto those targeted. Again, these were sets of features, and categories, created to support a system of oppression and exploitation, not the reasons it came into being in the first place.

Again, these are fundamentally political and economic categories, and can only be properly understood as such. If not properly understood as being based, first and foremost, on material interests of classes, then any analysis of them is unstable. For example: appeals to the supposed ancestral claim of zionists to the land of Palestine, and thereby to indigineity, can only be refuted with an understanding that indigeneity is a political and economic characteristic, of relation towards the oppression of a settler state, and not some characteristic of where one's ancestors were born. None of this is to say that race, nationality, etc don't function as axes of oppression - but that they must be understood as manifestations of the existing political and economic material interests of classes that drive the development of history, if they are to be fought against.

[lem0nademouth]

i will never not find it funny that the watermelon began as a symbol of Jewish self determination and Israeli nationhood in the 1940s. every time i see a self important goy comment a bunch of watermelon emojis on a post of a Jewish person existing I think “do they know they are using a symbol of Jewish indigineity and socialist/labor Zionism?”

[secular-jew]

[low-cole-timothy]

If you ask a non-jew what is the symbol of a Jewish wedding they will say it's breaking a glass. But why?

What you don't know is that when the groom breaks the glass the couple are already married. The rabbi has technically already pronounced them husband and wife (though there isn't really that part in a Jewish wedding).

The glass is crushed to represent the grief of the destruction of the temple. The groom says "If I forget you Jerusalem may my right hand be lost, may my tongue stick to the roof of my mouth if I don't remember you and don't put Jerusalem at the top of my joy" (my translation) Even at the happiest event of our lives we will always remember Jerusalem and Zion (i.e Israel) and how it was destroyed and how we were exiled from it. Then and only then, you may kiss the bride.

The verse is from the same psalm that starts with "By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, yea, we wept, when we remembered Zion"

This has been Jewish tradition for over 2,000 years and it doesn't matter if it was Jews in Europe, Africa, Asia - we always yearned to return to the land of Israel.

So if you say we aren't indiginous to the land of Israel or that we have no claim to the land, you need to educate yourself.

[faggotry-enjoyer]

oh i'm definitely gonna lose some friends for this one huh

[apollos-olives]

i wish people would stop saying that the israeli-palestinan "conflict" is just muslims vs jews. it's literally not. i wish you people could comprehend that it isn't just one religion vs another.

it's a settler colonial racist government stealing land from the indiginous people. it's not "jews vs muslims". it's colonization hurting indiginous people. palestinians are muslim, christian, jewish, atheist, etc. palestinians are diverse. palestine is the birthplace of christianity and judiasm. i have friends and family members who are jewish and christian and athiest, and they all are palestinian and stand with palestine. a lot of israelis are not even religious either. it's NOT religion vs religion. it's a corrupt government using religion as an excuse to hurt the people who belonged there first. that's all it is.

i fucking hate it when people use religion to try to justify their "neutral" stance on the occupation and apartheid happening there.

“If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor. If an elephant has its foot on the tail of a mouse, and you say that you are neutral, the mouse will not appreciate your neutrality.” ― Desmond Tutu

[jewish-vents]

I had an ugly thought, but the more I chew it over the more I’m realizing I’m correct

The reason that (white, Western) leftists are so eager to put a time limit on Jewish indigineity is because if you can time it out, then they know they can wait out having to contend with 1) what they did to indigenous peoples in the Americas, and 2) what they did to enslaved Africans. If they drag someone off their land and forcibly cut them off from their language and pieces of their culture, they just have to wait and then oops! Too late! Not my problem! Victim of the good ol’ cultural melting pot!

But if Jews are still indigenous and still keep our culture after this long, there’s this looming specter from other corners that they are so, so frightened to contend with

And rather than do the work to untangle all this, it’s just easier to lash out at us and revise history

I’m so tired of being their scapegoat

.

[jewreallythinkthat]

Ok so ... Today's absolutely fucking batshit post that I had to read with my own two eyes

We all know Mohamed Hadid is a foaming at the mouth antisemite but this is a new level.

Let's start with the caption:

1. The implication all Jews are American? Insane, untrue, erasing all Jewish history in Israel which dates back to before the Arabization of the middle east.

2. No one has a single percent of Semite in them because Semite is not a race, it's an obsolete term for a family of languages (including both Hebrew and Arabic) however I need to specify that "Antisemitism" was coined as a term specifically about Jew hate. That's what it means, it's actually nothing to do with the language Hebrew at all, it was an attempt to sciencify "judenhass" and make it sound acceptable.

Now to the post itself:

3. If you demand an end to colonialism, boy have I got something to explain about why the official language of Morocco, a country the width of a continent away from the Arabian Peninsula is Moroccan Arabic... Or to be honest, the reason that Arabs are the main demographic anywhere outside the Arabian Peninsula where they originally came from. I understand that peoples migrate but that involves moving from one place to another, not expanding our and literally colonising everything around you. The Arab conquests of the MENA region are a well documented part of history...

4. Demanding a ceasefire is all well and good but we are all aware that we will never be going back to the status quo of before - which frankly is all a ceasefire with no actual work done to rebuild and move towards peace will do. A ceasefire neccestiates thought on what happens next. This is not to say people shouldn't be advocating for an cease to the fighting, they should, this all needs to end. What people have to also do is also be discussing what happens next. The old status quo was unsustainable, and with the mounting evidence that Gazans who worked in Israel helped with the planning of Black Saturday, we will never again see the relations between the people in southern Israel and those in Gaza go "back to normal".

I would love a ceasefire but we need to talk about what happens next in the same conversation. To ignore that is at best naïve and at worst, willfully ignorant because just stopping and Israel withdrawing will do nothing to help rebuild because we all know that everyone will lose interest if that happens, as has happened over and over again.

5. It's well known that Jews are indigenous to Israel and the ancient kingdom of Judea. It's literally in the etymology of the world. Now, obviously multiple groups can be indiginous to one area, but length of time residing there is not a marker of indiginunity, it's literally a childlike playground tactic. Straight up rewriting history... We all know how bad that is.

Mohamed Hadid has over a million followers. His daughters have a total of 130 million. They can post misinformation and almost ten times the number of Jews who exist in the world will see it. This is so dangerous and frankly this level of deranged lying on the internet does not nothing to help end the war, it just puts Jews outside of Israel more at risk. We are being murdered in the streets, in our places of work and everyone is cheering it on.

The irony of people applauding the murder of Jews calling us neo-nazis is not lost on me and it's unreal that we aren't even allowed to stand up to it. Let's be very blunt here, if you are justifying the slaughter of Jews, who's the real nazi?

An additional Edit:

There will never be a ceasefire without release of the hostages and bodies kidnapped into Gaza. Like it's so stupid to think otherwise. Especially with Hamas currently refusing to give a list of who is still alive (they said they couldn't give a list until they knew the terms of a ceasefire which clearly means they COULD do it, but they are choosing not to)

[hero-israel]

It seems to me that the left's reluctance to acknowledge that both Jewish people and Palestinians are native to the Levant (both seem to be descended from the Canaanites?) is because then they wouldn't have a neat little westernized narrative that tells them who the good guys are and who the bad guys that deserve rape and murder are. I think they don't want it to be complicated because they're intellectually lazy and they delight in violence against acceptable targets, and they need Jewish people to be their white European colonizer stand-ins because otherwise they might have to have an original, nuanced thought. How can one counter claims about Jewish indigineity without being accused of cosigning everything the Israeli government has ever done?

.