what with all these white jewish people in the imperial core who suddenly just NEED to go live in the middle east and commit war crimes and genocide along the way? Just... go buy a house in Arizona or something if you REALLY want to live in the desert? These people who are moving into Israel presumably had a place to live before moving across the planet. Why do they specifically need to move to Israel of all places? Who the fuck is waking up in the morning thinking "I need to murder brown children so I can live in that very specific bit of desert on the other side of the world"?
I think this post is kind of obtuse tbh.
I think it’s easy to understand the appeal of living in a warm climate where everyone is part of your culture and community. Having kosher restaurants as the default made me so happy as a kid when I was there. Not to mention the rich history and architecture.
Unfortunately, this can’t exist without genocide, so you either realize that or find ways to convince yourself it’s okay.
dumb random question, but can a kosher burger place serve a hamburger with a side of cheese fries? And is it still kosher to pour some gravy on those bad boys and turn it into poutine? like I know you have to separate the milk from the meat but how separate are we talking?
...
Nevermind, just looked it up. The answer is very separate.
New idea: Falafel house with veggie gravy poutine fries! Get all the meat out of there and save the cheese!
You can’t cook a cow in it’s mother’s milk is the saying that’s thrown around, but it makes no sense because you should then be able to mix chicken and dairy. There actually is a rabbi who considers mixing poultry and dairy to be kosher, but it’s not like official.
So basically because reasons.
Charlie Kelly is an iconoclast in both the secular and religious senses of the word.
Hot take , there's little difference between buying a house in Arizona vs. the West Bank, colonially
Then there's no difference unless you're an AIM member or something
While I am not a Zionist, I was raised in a fairly Zionist environment, so I can share some insight here.
However, I also have to distinguish between 2 different things. There are those who believe in making Israel effectively an exclusive Jewish state, and those who simply want to move to Israel. A good analogy here would be the difference between a German-American who wants to go to Germany and recreate the Nazi party and a German-American who wants to go back to Germany and connect with their culture.
I'll address the second part first, that is, why do many Jewish people want to move to Israel?
The main reasons are religious/cultural and to escape antisemitism. Many Jewish people view moving to Israel as a way to reconnect with their heritage or as a religious obligation (to do things such as pray at the second temple.) Escaping antisemitism is another big reason. Historically, Jews were consistently persecuted in Europe and kept as a transient population. A big motivation for early Zionism was to get enough Jewish people to Israel so they could defend themselves against pogroms. My family came to the US to escape a pogrom for example. These factors continue to play a modern role.
Another reason many modern Jews want to move to Israel is that most Jewish communities in Europe were essentially destroyed, and in the US there are only a few very specific (and expensive) spots you can go. If you want to live in a place with a significant enough Jewish population to avoid being othered for it, it is one of the few options many Jews have.
Where things get really wild is where people get into the nationalism of it. There is a view among many that Jewish people have a right to ownership of Israel due to heritage and religions reasons, to the extent of essentially blood and soil nationalism. You are also presented from a young age with a very different telling of history than is fact, which acts to reinforce the idea that Israel was always peaceful and only had to act in aggression due to being attacked.
If you want my opinion, the real problem with Israel is not Jewish people moving to the area, but with the exclusion and mistreatment of Palestinian people.
Hmmm, thank you. This had been the most thorough explanation I've got of it in a way that isn't condescending because honestly I just don't know shit about this
a German-American who wants to go back to Germany and connect with their culture
that's decol tho...
your comment's a good point, but that's a bad analogy
Jewish people were forced into diaspora from Israel. It has been thousands of years, but it still is an ancestral homeland and bears the cultural significance as such. I think it's kinda weird to discuss Jewish people in Israel in the same terms as Europeans in the US.
I think it’s kinda weird to discuss Jewish people in Israel in the same terms as Europeans in the US.
then why are you using them as an analogy?
I was talking about Jewish people living in the US in that part, specifically in reference to OP's question of why a Jewish person living in the US might want to move to Israel.
To put it simply: Jewish people found out the hard way what happens to people who don't have a nation-state to represent and protect them. International politics is fucking brutal, and without an army you are mostly helpless to prevent larger states from trampling all over you. Indigenous people all over the world have been genocided just because they were living on a piece of land too valuable to somebody else, so after the Shoah the world thought that giving the Jewish people a state would protect them. Now Israel's actual formation is much more complicated since only a select minority of Jews were part of that specific project but that's the basics.
The issue now is that Israel became one of those strong nation-states that trample all over weaker defenceless people. Now Palestinians are the (functionally) stateless ones that are stripped of their basic human rights for being born in the wrong place. The core problem of ultimate state sovereignty leading to ethnic cleansing still remains, just the targets have shifted over time as peoples move up and down the geopolitical ladder.
TLDR: "what if we just gave the Jews their own ethnostate? then if they keep getting killed no one can blame us anymore because they would be in charge of their own security" - UN post-war trying to solve fascism while nearly blacking out from liberalism
So instead of going after the underlying issue of why a genocide was being committed against a (generally) unprotected minority group, they just shifted some shit around on the pecking order and now the same thing is give or take happening with some roles reversed?
Yeah basically. There was already prior political pressure from the Zionist movement before WW2, and when the UK decided to get the fuck out of Mandatory Palestine they signed off on Zionists' plans there. The UN was then quite generous to Israel in the partition plan, and hoped that they could live in harmony with the Arab in an economic union with equal rights and everything. But then Israel, with it's population and army swelling from post-war immigration, realized that there would basically be no consequences if they just took more Palestinian land by force (insert "it's free real estate" meme). And well, Israel has been trying to ethnically cleanse the territory ever since.
tangentially related but this is what gets me about the whole zionist situation and WWII in general is that stateless people or anyone who isn't part of a broader sovereign group always gets trampled on, so how exactly do anarchists think stateless societies would handle that for oppressed groups, poorer classes, and those who are oft-used as scapegoats for broader societal issues? it's why I skew closer to the ML ideal that there needs to be centralized authority in some sort of state body (maybe not as heavy-handed as Stalinist USSR) that can give legitimacy and sovereignty to groups that aren't being protected by liberalism and its bodies (nato, the UN, etc)
Before I knew anything, I thought it sounded romantic (sense of purpose, sense of community). And the budding communist in me loved the idea of ideal of kibbutzim.
Kibbutzim date to at least Ottoman times though. Obvi there are more now, but I thought some pre-dated the colony
Like all things, comrade, economic relations and the base comes first - then the social relations and superstructure flows from that.
Who are the settlers in Palestine? The poor and dispossessed from Israel and from around the world. Of course they are, these neighborhoods arent exactly safe or nice AND they're often subsidized directly or indirectly by the state or ngo's. The poor move in there because Israel proper is getting priced out. Same thing happened with settlers in America and Canada. They even gave land for FREE to settlers in western Canada (provided they cleared the forest on it within a year or something).
The poor move there because they have to, because they're driven by economics. That doesnt make what they do forgivable or right, but if you want to understand why its happening and begin to figure out how to stop it you must understand the base and economic reasons it exists. Plus, all that violence is abstract enough - the IDF and police handle it all, the settlers never have to actually see it or do it.
In the end, we can solve this when the Israelis and the settlers realize they have more in common with the Palestinians they're displacing than they do with bourgeoisie that are depriving them of shelter and wealth back home, even though they may share a religious faith with those bourgeois. If some critical mass figures that out, we can break this system like a dry twig and there can finally begin an actual peace process and reconciliation and justice in the middle east.
Who are the settlers in Palestine? The poor and dispossessed from Israel and from around the world.
Is this really the case though? I know there are some Israeli Haredi groups (with members living below the poverty line) that sponsor settlers, but I've also known some perfectly comfortable Americans that move out near Bethlehem.
Some of the settlements have pretty comfortable conditions even by U.S. standards, and even as nearby Palestinian neighborhoods still have to ration daily water.
It's still an economic motivator to go there, since they get benefits from the state of Israel. If Israel didnt provide tangible benefits to people, like stolen housing, then no one would be moving there
The cheaper price of the settlements comes partially from benefits but also its less valuable land because you're under threat of counter attack. There's a premium on distance from those tensions within Israel. The settlers get benefits to move out. I'm sure there are plenty of ideological settlers that go so that in some potential peace deal they can grab up the land, but I'd bet a significant majority are poor or downwardly mobile and are attracted primarily to: the cheap rents and the subsidies Israel gives to settlers,
If you're not ideological and from America , you don't go to a settlement unless you're poor. You move to a regular neighborhood in Israel. It's just not worth the risk or the tension to be in a settlement if you can afford an apartment or house normally.
I thought Israel was a fairly comfortable place with air conditioning and other amenities you would expect in an imperial core area. Though come to think of it, I honestly have no idea what day to day life is even like in Israel, I just assumed it was rather cushy
Comfortable but under tension and possible counter attack. You pay extra for DISTANCE from that in the west and Israel. Listen to real estate agents when they sell you stuff on youtube or whatever, they sell you distance from tension.
With those pictures surfacing the other day of Israeli citizens watching Palestine getting leveled by artillery fire in fucking lawn chairs cheering it on, I didn't exactly think your average Israeli citizen was that fearful of how far they are from danger
I thought Israel was a fairly comfortable place with air conditioning and other amenities you would expect in an imperial core area.
It is but it also has an insane cost of living. Rents and real estate costs in Israel proper are crazy high right now. The new settlements being thrown up in Palestinian land are cheap McMansions for people who can’t afford anything near Tel Aviv.
I mean if they're the "mah homeland" kind of settlers they're already too far gone
They want to feel a part of a culture beyond soulless consumerism. Same reason white people pretend to be Native American or black or whatever.
antisemitism is a thing yo
becoming a settler is the wrong way to deal but a lot of the world aint exactly tryin to be hospitable
You can find religious significance in a place without actually having to move there?
Yeah but using a 2000+ old book to justify genociding a group of people today
You're thinking way too narrowly, without any context. What's the appeal of National Socialism? What's the appeal of Manifest Destiny? Why did chuds leave cushy middle class enclaves to get blown up in Rhodesia? If all Mussolini ever talked about was beating up farmers and factory workers I'd doubt he'd have gotten anywhere.
You’re thinking way too narrowly, without any context
Correct, which is why I'm asking questions on an internet forum to find answers
And I'm telling you why your answers aren't satisfying so you can change how you think about it. The way you imagine most zionists/colonizers in the first place is wrong. Senseless brutality alone doesn't sell anything.
But you didn't say how I was wrong in how I was thinking about it, you just stated a bunch of other vaguely relevant questions that I also do not really know the answer to other than "racism"
Well I told you why your approach is wrong in the very first sentence lol. Those nationalist/colonial movements have more widely discussed basis of popular support, I thought linking them to Zionism would help you make the connection. It rested on too many assumptions, my bad.
