I was chatting with a net-friend who is an Ashkenazi in Hadera, and they seemed very concerned about how Palestinians celebrate the release of prisoners who have killed people and so forth. It all seemed very brainwormed, for lack of a better word, but I myself don't know much about this topic. My impression is essentially that the release of Palestinian prisoners in Israel concerns (1) seeing the Israeli justice system as illegitimate and apartheidist, (2) being revolted by the conditions that Palestinian prisoners in Israel are kept under, (3) seeing many of the prisoners as either innocent or otherwise undeserving of punishment.
So all in all, it made me think of the "Congo case" here in Norway, where two Norwegian citizens were sentenced to death for murder in the DRC. The trial and conviction were seen as illegitimate in Norway, and a lot of people here pushed for the prisoners to be returned to Norway, believing that they were innocent. One of the prisoners died, the other was eventually returned. I also think about the Basque prisoners, the prison abolition movement, things like that, but I don't know much about the Basque prisoners, either.
But yet my friend still says that "Palestinian terrorists and murderers are given hugs and candy upon returning" (paraphrase). To me this feels like a propagandistic framing meant to make Arabs look like they thirst for the blood of Jewish women and children and whatnot.
So, what is the best way to deprogram my net-friend from this idea? Which Palestinian prisoners' returns are welcomed and in what ways? Is the celebratory welcoming of these former prisoners a good thing? Do some Palestinian prisoners face retrials in Palestinian courts? Please, give me some ammunition.
Edit: I should clarify that this primarily concerned the Gilad Shalit prisoner exchange, although it touched on the ongoing prisoner exchange as well.
I should clarify that they made sure to say that it was not "entirely terrorists and murderers", but that the Gilad Shalit prisoner exchange in particular "included terrorists and murderers" (paraphrase), naming specifically Mona Awana and Yahya Sinwar "among others" as examples, and that the release of these was met with celebration. The enby later stated that they "might have been confusing Mona Awana with someone else", presumably because they could not find evidence that Mona Awana was actually celebrated.
I have noticed on other occasions that the enby seems to be very naïve about the actions of the Israeli government and ignorant about a lot of things they seem to think they're an expert on. They can go from crying about the mistreatment of Ghazza residents by Israel, and criticizing the state of LGBT+ rights in Israel, to immediately, completely, and uncritically buying anything that the government says about Hamas, the PFLP, and the ongoing war. I just don't get how someone's brain can flip so quickly and easily from criticizing the government to believing every word it says...
You know, they might be more receptive if you show them what the historic Israeli state and it's current government think about and how they treat holocaust survivors. They take that German reparations money as a state, but historically Israelis believe that Holocaust victims were "weak" for "allowing themselves" to fall victim. Also something like 1/3 of holocaust survivors in Israel live in poverty. As an Ashkenazi, your friend might be receptive to the crimes of the state of Israel if you thoroughly shatter some of the founding mythos.
Yom haShoah is a while until, but if I remember it I'll try to bring it up then. Another thing I've been meaning to ask them about is the Yiddish language, because I believe we first connected over a shared interest in language learning.
Yeah that's something else interesting is the Israeli state treatment of Yiddish. It goes very hand in hand with the rest of the state treatment of holocaust survivors.
The specifics of Israel's treatment of Yiddish isn't something I'm familiar with, but I feel like I have sort of a similar story within my own family, because my mom is a Norwegian American and my dad was a, well, Norwegian from Norway. So I actually have heard family stories about how my grandpa on my mother's side was part of the first generation of the family to grow up not speaking its own language, and even as a kid I thought that this was kinda fucked up; and I can see the impact that this ended up having on my mom, as not learning Norwegian as a kid was indirectly the cause of her moving to Norway, marrying my dad, and learning Norwegian (and obviously this left a little learner's mark on her idiolect). And now one of my cousins in Montana has started learning Norwegian, too, which, because I was fortunate enough to grow up with the language, means that I can help him with that to some extent. "Nature is healing", we could say — although the other part of that healing might also be replacing English with Indigenous languages, I'd think.
The point is that I see kind of a parallel to all of this in Yiddish's decline in favor of Hebrew in occupied Palestine, and that I hope that there can be more cases where Ashkenazim move back to their ancestral homelands and revitalize their own language, like my own family did with Norwegian. The big difference, as far as I understand, is that at least Norwegian has a stable speaker-base in Norway, whereas Yiddish is also endangered in the other countries where it is spoken. It's a tragic situation for such a beautiful and historic language all-around.
I'm certainly no expert, and it is interesting from an academic perspective how Hebrew was revived. But I think your story definitely gets at the situation. In order to create a uniform identity for the ethnostate, the actual cultural identities of the people that settle it have to be elided, and that has included discouraging Yiddish.