Like the situation is not black and white. I saw people gang up on a self-avowed non Zionist pro Palestinian Jew for having boundaries when it comes to supporting Palestine. They ganged up on them for saying antisemitism should still be called out and is not necessary to support Palestine.
But when I saw with my own two eyes Palestinians on twitter begging Westerners to retweet and spread shit straight from the Protocols of the Elders of Zion and Mein Kampf, as if that would help free Palestine... I mean no Linda, this is not an example of "not speaking over oppressed people," not when those oppressed people know that certain tropes and canards can be used to target Jews around the world and they know that Westerners are receptive to them.
They are trying to use you and your naivete to collectively punish all Jews in the world. They know they're not powerful enough to kill the Jews of Israel so they want you, their loyal allies, to be radicalized into trying to hurt Jews in the Diaspora. That's the only way a lot of people in the Arab/Muslim world can think of to punish Jews. They do not see a difference between Israeli and Diaspora Jews. This is not spreading awareness, this is not #freeingPalestine, this is not "they're just trying to do whatever they can think of to get the bombs to stop falling on their children," this is just petty spiteful sadism, and they know you'll go along with it, because both of you are antisemitic at heart.
So you do have to be skeptical. You can't uncritically spread things. That goes both ways of course. But since you already interrogate every claim of antisemitism, and preemptively dismiss it as crocodile tears, Hasbara, or thinly veiled calls for Islamophobic violence... that side of the aisle is not an issue for you, clearly. But if you can't even go to the other side of the aisle and clean up house even a little bit, you're not a serious activist.
38 notes
·
View notes
Trump says “finish the job,” while this administration actively helps them do it. Y’all want to pretend that not using the same words makes any substantive difference, but it does not. And you know that. You just don’t care.
as a survivor of some pretty horrific abuse and housing situations where i nearly ended up dead, i know for a fact that there is a substantive difference between "actively wants you killed by all and any means, immediately" and "would prefer not to kill you, but will to save their own pathetic hide".
trump is the former. self-admittedly. he's proud of it. it's a selling point to his supporters.
and this admin is, to its credit, slightly better than the latter: rather than sitting idle until prompted, joe biden has pushed for aid to gaza and continues to try pressuring netanyahu into backing off; going further, kamala harris has been actively calling for a ceasefire since last year
side note: kamala is, as far as i'm aware, the highest-ranking person in govt right now who has basically up and said israel is committing war crimes. (she cannot say it verbatim without potentially worsening negotiations, but in politician-speak she has absolutely implied they're acting in violation of international humanitarian law by saying they needed to respect it. not amazing, sure, but way more than i expected from someone that high up)
now, i almost got into a whole lecture about the samson option and how the shitty, frustratingly glacial pace and lopsided nature of negotiations with israel and palestine is actually part of the mechanism of nuclear deterrence (aka mutual assured destruction), but you wouldn't read that. you're not sending me this because you're interested in doing anything but expressing frustration.
and i do hear that! i'm frustrated too! but i'm willing to get my hands dirty to prevent more needless suffering. there's an inescapable baseline of misery here, and it's tragic and bullshit and we should never, ever shut up about it, but--and i cannot stress this enough--that doesn't mean it's ok to let it get worse
especially since we actually have the means to prevent that, and maybe even improve things if we could stop doing this useless virtue signalling 'both options are equally bad' bs
some chance of survival always beats none at all. always.
17 notes
·
View notes
before i forget to tell you all
on wednesday my history professor pulled me out into the hall and asked me how me and my family doing. i told him about how we're trying to get people out of gaza but it's getting harder and egypt is upping the prices to leave. he nodded and then said "today i wanted to talk about the biden administration and how they're handling the situation in class" and i nodded and right before we headed back in, i stopped him and said "by the way palestinians are really sensitive over using the correct words for this situation. we don't like hearing 'conflict' or 'war' because that implies there are two militaries against each other and palestinians don't have a military, and 'war' implies it's an equal fight when it's not." and he nodded and said "okay what words do you want me to use" and i said "genocide. call it a genocide, that's what it is." and the LOOK. the LOOK he gave me. i can't even describe how horrible it was. just a pure look of surprise shock and disgust and it was like every single microaggression i've ever received all put in one face. you could instantly tell he was uncomfortable. i then said "you can also call it a humanitarian crisis" and he stared at me for a while and then nodded uncomfortably and said "yeah i'll just call it a humanitarian crisis". i shrugged, nodded, and we walked back into class.
the fact that people are SO uncomfortable with using the word genocide and refusing to use it to describe the situation in palestine is just so fucking frustrating. of COURSE genocide is uncomfortable, it SHOULD make you uncomfortable. but palestinians are suffering from censorship and people refusing to call it genocide is not helping our cause. call it what it is. a genocide.
20K notes
·
View notes
A pro-Palestine Jew on tiktok asked those of us who were raised pro-Israel, what got us to change our minds on Palestine. I made a video to answer (with my voice, not my face), and a few people watched it and found some value in it. I'm putting this here too. I communicate through text better than voice.
So I feel repetitive for saying this at this point, but I grew up in the West Bank settlements. I wrote this post to give an example of the extent to which Palestinians are dehumanized there.
Where I live now, I meet Palestinians in day to day life. Israeli Arab citizens living their lives. In the West Bank, it was nothing like that. Over there, I only saw them through the electric fence, and the hostility between us and Palestinians was tangible.
When you're a child being brought into the situation, you don't experience the context, you don't experience the history, you don't know why they're hostile to you. You just feel "these people hate me, they don't want me to exist." And that bubble was my reality. So when I was taught in school that everything we did was in self defense, that our military is special and uniquely ethical because it's the only defensive military in the world - that made sense to me. It slotted neatly into the reality I knew.
One of the first things to burst the bubble for me was when I spoke to an old Israeli man and he was talking about his trauma from battle. I don't remember what he said, but it hit me wrong. It conflicted with the history as I understood it. So I was a bit desperate to make it make sense again, and I said, "But everything we did was in self defense, right?"
He kinda looked at me, couldn't understand at all why I was upset, and he went, "We destroyed whole villages. Of course we did. It was war, that's what you do."
And that casual "of course" stuck with me. I had to look into it more.
I couldn't look at more accurate history, and not at accounts by Palestinians, I was too primed against these sources to trust them. The community I grew up in had an anti-intellectual element to it where scholars weren't trusted about things like this.
So what really solidified this for me, was seeing Palestinian culture.
Because part of the story that Israel tells us to justify everything, is that Palestinians are not a distinct group of people, they're just Arabs. They belong to the nations around us. They insist on being here because they want to deny us a homeland. The Palestinian identity exists to hurt us. This, because the idea of displacing them and taking over their lands doesn't sound like stealing, if this was never theirs and they're only pretending because they want to deprive us.
But then foods, dances, clothing, embroidery, the Palestinian dialect. These things are history. They don't pop into existence just because you hate Jews and they're trying to move here. How gorgeous is the Palestinian thobe? How stunning is tatreez in general? And when I saw specific patterns belonging to different regions of Palestine?
All of these painted for me a rich shared life of a group of people, and countered the narrative that the Palestininian identity was fabricated to hurt us. It taught me that, whatever we call them, whatever they call themselves, they have a history in this land, they have a right to it, they have a connection to it that we can't override with our own.
I started having conversations with leftist friends. Confronting the fact that the borders of the occupied territories are arbitrary and every Israeli city was taken from them. In one of those conversations, I was encouraged to rethink how I imagine peace.
This also goes back to schooling. Because they drilled into us, we're the ones who want peace, they're the ones who keep fighting, they're just so dedicated to death and killing and they won't leave us alone.
In high school, we had a stadium event with a speaker who was telling us about a person who defected from Hamas, converted to Christianity and became a Shin Bet agent. Pretty sure you can read this in the book "Son of Hamas." A lot of my friends read the book, I didn't read it, I only know what I was told in that lecture. I guess they couldn't risk us missing out on the indoctrination if we chose not to read it.
One of the things they told us was how he thought, we've been fighting with them for so long, Israelis must have a culture around the glorification of violence. And he looked for that in music. He looked for songs about war. And for a while he just couldn't find any, but when he did, he translated it more fully, and he found out the song was about an end to wars. And this, according to the story as I was told it, was one of the things that convinced him. If you know know the current trending Israeli "war anthem," you know this flimsy reasoning doesn't work.
Back then, my friend encouraged me to think more critically about how we as Israelis envision peace, as the absence of resistance. And how self-centered it is. They can be suffering under our occupation, but as long as it doesn't reach us, that's called peace. So of course we want it and they don't.
Unless we're willing to work to change the situation entirely, our calls for peace are just "please stop fighting back against the harm we cause you."
In this video, Shlomo Yitzchak shares how he changed his mind. His story is much more interesting than mine, and he's much more eloquent telling it. He mentions how he was taught to fear Palestinians. An automatic thought, "If I go with you, you'll kill me." I was taught this too. I was taught that, if I'm in a taxi, I should be looking at the driver's name. And if that name is Arab, I should watch the road and the route he's taking, to be prepared in case he wants to take me somewhere to kill me. Just a random person trying to work. For years it stayed a habit, I'd automatically look at the driver's name. Even after knowing that I want to align myself with liberation, justice, and equality. It was a process of unlearning.
On October, not long after the current escalation of violence, I had to take a taxi again. A Jewish driver stopped and told me he'll take me, "so an Arab doesn't get you." Israeli Jews are so comfortable saying things like this to each other. My neighbors discussed a Palestinian employee, with one saying "We should tell him not to come anymore, that we want to hire a Jew." The second answered, "No, he'll say it's discrimination," like it would be so ridiculous of him. And the first just shrugged, "So we don't have to tell him why." They didn't go through with it, but they were so casual about this conversation.
In the Torah, we're told to treat those who are foreign to us well, because we know what it's like to be the foreigner. Fighting back against oppression is the natural human thing to do. We know it because we lived it. And as soon as I looked at things from this angle, it wasn't really a choice of what to support.
26K notes
·
View notes
Harris has been a staunch supporter of Israel for years. In 2017 she addressed the American Israel Public Affairs Committee’s (AIPAC) annual conference and reminded attendees that the first resolution she co-sponsored as a senator was aimed at combating “anti-Israel bias” at the United Nations.
“Let me be clear about what I believe. I stand with Israel because of our shared values, which are so fundamental to the founding of both our nations,” she told the crowd.
In 2018 she gave an off-the-record speech to the organization, but eventually released her comments.
In that speech she claimed that she raised money for the Jewish National Fund as a Girl Scout.
“Having grown up in the Bay area, I fondly remember those Jewish National Fund boxes that we would use to collect donations to plant trees for Israel,” she told the audience. “Years later, when I visited Israel for the first time, I saw the fruits of that effort and the Israeli ingenuity that has truly made a desert bloom.”
For those unfamiliar with the Jewish National Fund (JNF), they're a Zionist organization that has been instrumental in the ethnic cleansing of Palestine.
See Stop the JNF for more information on their history, the way they operate, and their decades-long campaign of greenwashing (i.e. destroying native plants, crops, and agriculture under the banner of 'making the desert bloom').
Continuing, the Mondoweiss article goes:
“The vast majority of people understand the importance of the State of Israel,” she added later. “Both in terms of its history and its present in terms of being a source of inspiration on so many issues, which I hope we will talk about, and also what it means in terms of the values of the United States and those values that are shared values with Israel, and the importance of fighting to make sure that we protect and respect a friend, one of the best friends we could possibly have.”
While running for President in 2019, Harris was praised by the lobbying group Democratic Majority for Israel (DMFI) for running to the right of Obama on the Iran deal.
On the campaign trail Harris told Kat Wellman, a voter affiliated with DMFI, that she would reenter the agreement but “strengthen it” by “extending the sunset provisions, including ballistic missile testing, and also increasing oversight.”
“I was very impressed with her. I thought she gave an excellent speech, she gave a very detailed, responsive answer to my question,” Wellman told a local paper after the exchange. “I’m pro-Israel, so I was I was very concerned and all about making sure we limit nuclear missiles in any country that could possibly destroy us all. I thought her answer was very good.”
Harris has condemned the BDS movement and claimed that is “based on the mistaken assumption that Israel is solely to blame for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.” However, she voted against an anti-BDS bill in 2019 citing First Amendment concerns.
For the full article, which includes Kamala's response to Israel post Al-Aqsa Flood, see Mondoweiss (July 22, 2024)
3K notes
·
View notes
at this point i will fully just be blocking anyone who says they're voting third party idk how to get it into your brains that by voting third party YOU ARE VOTING FOR DONALD TRUMP. if he wins, you're not getting another chance to vote, you're not getting another election, because he WILL become the dictator. he has smart people behind him, horrible people, but people who know what they're doing and know how to manipulate laws and twist them in ways where trump can do whatever he wants.
if you are voting third party, you are taking away our one chance at winning this thing.
kamala harris is a good candidate. she is the most pro-palestinian candidate we are EVER going to get who actually has a shot at winning this thing. she's a black and south-asian woman who understand the struggles that minorities face and does her best to fix them. she is smart, she is pro-abortion, she is literally the most liberal candidate we will EVER HAVE who has a remote chance at winning. she has a positive stance on lgbtq+ rights and worked to make sure the gay and trans panic defense was removed. she protected children and women and people of all kinds who were sexually assaulted. she made it so that children who were SEX TRAFFICKED wouldn't be prosecuted for BEING TRAFFICKED.
she is a good candidate. hell, she's a GREAT candidate. she's leagues better than biden, at this point i honestly don't know what you all are hoping for. we are never going to get the hyper-liberal, massively far left candidate some of you seem to be hoping for. that's just not a possibility: this is politics. you can't appeal to that tiny corner of the population and still hope to win. i wish you could, but that's just now how it works at this moment in time. kamala harris might be the best presidential candidate in the history of the united states.
and even if she wasn't: have you forgotten what 2016-2020 was like?! have you forgotten who we're fighting against?! because donald trump is a nightmare scenario. he is literally the opposite of everything that liberals and far-left people like myself stand for. when bush was running against al gore, the only reason that there was even a supreme court case that appointed bush was because too many people voted third party. you can't do that shit. i wish you could, i wish we had more options, but we just fucking don't.
so, yeah: come november, go out and vote, and when you do, vote for kamala harris. vote for her so we don't lose everything that we as liberals are fighting for, vote for her for those of us who are too young, vote for her for the best-case scenario that the palestinian people will ever have in this current political climate.
please. please, please vote harris. it's the only option atp.
(i will not be doing discourse in the replies or reblogs. don't even try it.)
2K notes
·
View notes