#sorry if this is excessively tangential OP

[ritavonbees]

I think we should also clarify that "Israel has no right to exist" doesn't actually mean "Israel must be destroyed by any means necessary" (which a lot of people seem to think is, like, unavoidably implied) (I'm personally not judging anyone for making that next step in their heads but i think it's important to understand that it is a step and they are separate things). Any nation state has pros and cons for the people in and around it, and taking one apart to start from scratch has plenty of negative consequences of its own. Plenty of borders were drawn with ethnic cleansing - hell, not just colonial ones, most of Europe too. And that sucks, and there are still people suffering to greater or lesser degrees because of it all over the world, and we still can't roll back the clock and make it unhappen. all we can do is go forward, and if that involves redrawing the maps again, it'll have its own pros and cons.

understand I'm not getting to make excuses here - I'm trying to steer around the crevasse of despair you can fall into trying to optimise the political world. we can't snap our fingers and dissolve the Israeli government/borders/military. Israel doesn't have a right to exist, and all methods for stopping it existing have to be carried out in the real world, meaning with the cooperation of other political entities that also have no right to exist. so, you know... probably not gonna happen, and if it does that's not the end of the story, and in any case it's not something we can do.

but there are things we can do, now and in the future, to resist, and to make life better for people. and that's more important. we can't hold out for magical solutions here. Israel shouldn't exist any more than Australia or South Africa should (in absolute moral terms), but whether or not any of them does is pretty much out of our hands.

so what "Israel has no right to exist" actually means in practice is "we see you. we're not falling for the bullshit." it means "people are not nations, and we care about people." it means when someone says "Israel has a right to exist," we are looking through that, we are saying "what do you actually, practically mean by that?" because we recognise it as a nonsense statement, an impediment to any kind of serious political discussion, and if someone wants to discuss what's going on in good faith they need to find a way past it. and I'm afraid talking like the complete political destruction of Israel is your actual, practical end goal (as opposed to, not inherently unacceptable in the unlikely event that's what ends up happening) is another impediment, to discussion and to action.

"Blank is not a zionist, they just acknowledge Israel's right to exist!" Acknowledging Israel's "right to exist" has ALWAYS been the definition of zionism. Yes, even if you're "critical of the government". Yes, even if you "feel sorry" for Gaza.

The reason zionists (who claim they aren't zionists, they just support Israel's right to exist) are suddenly bending backwards and doing incredible mental gymnastics to try to convince you that zionist doesn't mean what it has always meant and that instead it purely means "people who are cheering on the genocide" is that these zionists are trying to put distance between themselves with the "racist, bloodthirsty ones" because they don't want to confront that they are and have always been complicit in this genocide by acknowledging and normalizing the establishment of a settler-colonial project, by seeing ANY "right" to this ethnostate, by claiming there is any worth or good in apartheid. You ARE a zionist, and there's blood on your hands.