Help I'm new to settler colonialism, is it bad when I'm fighting a war on 3 fronts and have 2 separate domestic uprisings in a week?
No it's a sign that you're winning because you are displaying your fearsome power.
If anything they should try opening up a few more fronts. Really intimidate their enemies.
"This just in: in response to a sudden increase in conflagrations, Israelis are apparently now being supplied with free fiddles by the government"
It is bad. ONLY 3 fronts? You gotta tell Europe you'll nuke them if they stop supporting your war crimes
They'll condemn the people who storm bases to not enlist, but they won't condemn the people who storm police stations to protect rapists.
The haredis are fascinating; how is it that you are so religious that you won't join the genocidal army, but not enough to move somewhere else?
The government of Israel pays them welfare in order to do "demographic warfare".
Aren't many of them descendants of Jews who lived peacefully in Palestine before Zionist settlement?
the 'orthodox' movements emerged from the ashkenazi so the ones in palestine are zionist, but there's a variety of views on the state and violence---some don't like the state because its too secular, some actually oppose the violence on palestinians, some want to get all the benefits of being settlers without raising arms.
Most Haredim are not zionist.
Edit: and not all Haredim are Ashkenaz either... Especially in Israel. There's Sephardic and Mizrahi haredim as well.
Edit 2: are you Jewish? This is just straight up false.
i don't know what you'd call groups that migrated to palestine and live in the zionist state other than zionist? just settlers? the great many orthodox outside israel it makes sense to not call zionist but it gives me some pause talking about groups inside israel.
but i didn't mean to imply orthodox sects were exclusive to ashkenazi ancestry, just that it came from eastern europe so its presence in palestine is related to zionism, even though its more diverse now
How many of these people are new settlers and how many of them are descendants? I'm kind of confused about the attitudes in this thread, I should probably actually read the post maybe the draft dodgers eat babies or something
This genocide of the Palestinian people as well as the creation of the settler state has been going on for decades now though, there's probably kids of kids at this point who grew up there as settlers
I don't have hard numbers for you, but there hasn't been large scale haredi migration to Israel since around the 50s, that is, 70-80 years ago. Most of the Haredi in Israel now were born there, we're talking about the kids and grandkids of settlers for the most part. Haredi tend to kinda stay in place, see New York.
Zionists settling and colonizing Israel of course is pretty recent, but huge chunk of the haredi there were born there at this point as I mentioned in another comment. We're talking about the kids and grandkids of settlers for the most part. Most of the people going to Israel these days though are reform/conservative Jews.
I'm from the USA. There's plenty of white people here descended from settlers that I wouldn't call settlers themselves, although settler culture is a still pervasive through the legacy of white supremacy. But yeah, it'd be disingenuous if I said oh every white person in the PSL believes in manifest destiny or something. For lack of a better analogy.
What I mean to say by all this is I only commented because it was an overgeneralization, anti-zionism is a defining characteristic of haredi Jews so it was just a little jarring to read. Certainly they aren't anti-zionists for the same reasons as you or I, but still
For lack of a better analogy
i actually think that is a pretty good analogy, embracing a genocidal ideology of manifest destiny/zionism is different from simply being in a settler state but articulating it takes more specificity.
Ultra-Orthodox is a very broad and arguably very artificial term for a wide variety of Jewish groups with very different views.
Technically alot of Palestinians are secretly Samaritans who converted to Islam apparently and technically the Samaritans are actually the best monotheists because they didn't get sucked into the Jerusalem power struggle even when it first started. I'd love to be corrected lol.
How did they move there to begin with, if they're broke?
Haredi don't tend to migrate in large numbers, and the last big wave was in the 50s. Most of them were born there. Their parents + grandparents + great grandparents mostly moved there either during Mandatory Palestine or right after Israel was established as a state. Most of the Jews moving to Israel recently are American and European reform/conservative Jews.
Most Haredi oppose Zionism as like a core principle. They think that only the Messiah can establish Israel, not humans.
But some that are born there live there for the same reason your average Death To America left type broke white person still lives in America.
idk it makes sense given we don't seem to think American comrades are bad for not moving (they pay taxes to the murder machine because they stay there) (America is a settler colonialist country)
Of course these people have probably like a 50% chance of just not wanting to be shot for the Zionist project but still benefit? I have no idea what's going on
This is what I've been trying to express but poorly, this is much more succinct.
I mean unless you're trying to make some sort of point, I don't know if these people are really bad at understanding how to draft dodge or if they have actual ideological commitment. Very confused
They have ideological commitment. I think there will probably gonna be some more riots if they continue to try to conscript them.
I'm talking about the crazy ukraine conscription efforts in general
They probably view conscription among Haredi jews as an existential need for the future of Israel as the population trend suggests they'll be the majority in the future. The Haredi oppose the existence of a jewish state.
Getting people into the military would be a place where they can attempt to re-educate them and generate nationalist Haredi to shift the block seems like the bare minimum they need to do.
They've been trying and failing to get them to enlist in exchange for free school, but it hasn't worked at all lmao. All the dudes wanna do is study Torah
well yeah, you cant fight in the IDF while studying the Torah.
however, you can study the Torah while fighting in the IDF...
Do they read the talmud or are they the ones who only read the books of moses?
You might be thinking of Karaites, which is a split from Rabbinical Judaism and they only think the Torah is valid and not the Talmud.
Karaites are a SUPER small religion worldwide, off the top of my head I'd say probably a couple thousand people. (Edit: more then I thought I guess, Wikipedia says 50k max)
The Haredi are definitely rabbinical Jews like 99% of jews worldwide and Talmud is extremely important.
Like important to the point where they dont even work a job, their wives work so they can study their entire life. But yeah "studying Torah" is just a shorthand for Torah + Talmud study.
removed from everything else, having a large group of actionable people who you grant special rights to who oppose the entire existence of your state is fucking stupid statebuilding. How many state level checks and hurdles do you gotta botch to arrive at this point
The Zionists needed the Haredi Jews to cloak their settler colonial project in Jewish clothing. Having a “Jewish State” while expelling the only ones in the land that actually practiced Judaism and knew what Judaism was would not have worked from a PR standpoint but it was always going to lead to this contradiction becoming untenable. I think their hope was that the Haredi children and grandchildren would buy into the Zionist project in a way their fathers refused to. And in some ways they were right with significant divides within the international Hardi community over the state of Israel and the emergence of “religious Zionism”. One major issue the state faces is that the military is one of its main tools of “education” for the Zionist religion or whatever you want to call it but the Haredi children were not being processed through that machine and were, therefor, not turning into “good Zionists”.
So ultra Orthodox jews have better praxis than reformed judaism?
I really don't get the current religion tbh, only thing I have to go off of is my vague theory that modern judaism is just the pharisees plus a smidgen of sadducees.
You may be surprised, especially when it comes to Zionism. This might get me in real trouble with any reform Jewish comrades lurking in here, so let me caveat it by saying that there are anti-Zionist reform congregations in the US that do great work support Palestine.
Because Reform Judaism stripped itself of all content of the traditional Jewish religion, it essentially evolved into a a denominational religion with its only difference with Protestant Christianity being essentially a “national” one. Couple that with the fact that it was created as a version of Judaism for rich, assimilated, German Jews, and it is pretty easy to figure out why some of the most radical Jewish Zionists emerge from reform synagogues. Compare that to Haredi Jews that get posted on here frequently meeting with Palestinian leaders, getting called “monsters” by white American Zionists for protesting the state of Israel, etc and it is easy to conclude that, yes, many Haredi Jews do have better praxis. They also have the advantage of deeply understanding what Judaism is and is not (or at least being taught it) whereas reform Jews (who are, basically by definition, assimilated westerners either living in or directly tied to the economy or the imperial core), unless they happen to have been raised in a radical leftist congregation (they exist), may have never been even presented with the basic facts of the connection (or lack thereof) of the religion they subscribe to and Zionism.
But if you are a real leftist, the support for the Haredi Jews must remain critical support. Even if they come down on the side of the anti-Zionists, they still grapple with and are dominated by highly reactionary viewpoint especially in regards to women. But that is like normal religious tension that you see in Muslim and Christian communities as well.
Which sect has the story of a guy who turned himself into a rock at the gates of heaven so he wouldn't have to go to hell? Not sure why but I am pretty sure there is some sort of picaresque jewish legend out there.
Not reform here, im reconstructionist. But yeah lots of Reform jews are Zionist and many many Conservative Jews are highly zionist as well.
To add to this, yeah Israel has done a lot of work to make people conflate Judaism as a religion with Zionism and muddying the waters, when Zionism is first and foremost a secular settler colonialist ideology.
Yeah i don't know what the longterm plan was. I guess they thought it would change.
I don't know what their plan is right now either. Assuming Israel is still around in 10 years time they will have to do widespread repression of 50% of the entire population.
If I wanted to end Israel I'd do it by organising them.
"Not because we're opposed to the war, we just think other people should die for our beliefs, not us."
They are opposed to the war though. They’re notorious for opposing the entire state of israel
I'm a little confused, how would that mindset make sense if they're saying they would rather die than enlist?
Because the "rather die" is an exaggeration people use to mean they really really do not want to do something
Example: "I'd rather die than eat British food."
It could be meant literally and in earnest, but I doubt it
in the article they're apparently using "we will die and not enlist" as a protest chant which feels far more specific than that
The ultra-orthodox draft is largely not about manpower, it's mainy about the contradictions in Israelis society (i.e. liberal rights/duties versus ethnoreligious identity) that take place in the base and the superstructure
You are TEARING ME APART, Contradiction of Liberal Rights Versus Ethnoreligious Identity!!!
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Can we at least harvest your sperm and make little nano uniforms for them, promoting each individual sperm into a full fledged field marshal? We're trying to reduce the average age of our ranking officers, but we ran out of positive numbers.
The Israeli public broadcaster KAN reported on Monday that 30 ultra-Orthodox Israelis showed up to conscription offices despite 1,000 being required to register that day.
get fucked
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I have no strong feelings on this one way or the other
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Except
I just read it. There's a distinct and almost glaring lack of reason explained by the article for why the religious leaders are telling people to avoid conscription, just vague gesturing at religious reasons and not any specific beliefs. It feels like it's trying to avoid mentioning it. Is this website usually based or
? If it's a based site than maybe these are just draft dodger settlers who don't want to die using weird rhetoric with no other reasoning, so there's no reasoning for the site to report. If it's a site than maybe they're trying to outright cover up anti-genocidal sentimentSome Orthodox Jews (even in Israel) are genuinely anti-Zionist, whole others just want to avoid military conscription because that shit sucks. I'm sure this is a mix of both.
Soon after Oct 7 there were videos of the IDF beating the shit out of Orthadox jews for opposing the genocide.
I'm a little lost, I've heard there was a religious group in Israel that despite not participating in the IDF are some of the worst reactionaries in the knesset; are the Ultra-Orthodox that group? I'm reading some posts in this thread that this group has people in it that are pro-Palestine? I'm lost on this one.
I'm also lost and dumb. But as I understand both groups exist. There are the ultra nationalist Orthodox that are also the main group settling the West Bank. Then there are other Orthodox groups that are religious but not nationalist, i.e. they are actually educated and seem to realize that God doesn't want all Palestinians to die.
All of the Orthodox groups have been exempt up until now. But I definitely think they want them to enlist not just for numbers but as others suggest as the opportunity for re-education
The ones who dislike the state and the IDF believe it’s an illegitimate entity because they were propped up by humans and not god.
I think there are like 8 versions of the ultra Orthodox, not to mention I think they tend to get super anal about which rabbi they descend from ideologically. It's hard generalizing a diaspora when you aren't a member of it.
Anti-zionism is not necessarily pro Palestine. But yeah, most of the haredi over there are anti-zionist.
I am seeing the point made in this thread that the many Ultra-Orthodox are opposed to Zionism or even the existence of a Jewish state.
Is that actually correct?
I was under the impression that outside of some commie-adjacent groups, there are virtually NO Israeli Jews who do not support Zionism.
There are Ultra-Orthodox sects outside of Israel that believe there should not be a Jewish state, but I was not aware of groups inside Israel that hold to that?
Like the Haredim, I was under the impression that they are every bit as Zionist as secular Israeli Jews if not more so, but that doesn’t mean they want to serve in the IOF. I thought their whole thing was that Israel is only held together by their devout commitment to studying the Torah and praying. And to force them to do anything other than studying the Torah means that Israel will incur God’a wrath. But in terms of killing Palestinians, they are a-ok with that.
Or am I completely wrong here?
Your confusion is extremely understandable and it is really hard to get a goo viewpoint into this exact issue from basically anywhere outside of the Haredi communities themselves. What makes it even harder is that there is not lock-step uniformity among "ultra-orthodox" Jews either in Palestine or outside. Traditionally, all Haredi Jews were anti-Zionist since they believed in the Jewish religion which, itself, is an anti-Zionist faith: some of the biggest offenses you can commit in the Jewish religion are (1) try to establish a Jewish state in the holy land (or even enter the holy land) through any means other than literally waiting for the literal God to literally come back to earth and literally resurrect the King David, thereby re-establishing God's kingdom on earth, (2) stealing anything from anyone, and (3) killing anybody. This is why Jewish communities rejected Zionism for 1800 years even though they knew what it was. HOWEVER, since the founding of the state, there have been massive campaigns to pressure the traditional religious adherents to adopt Zionism, including creation of new religious schools that are based on a Zionist version of Judaism. Making it even harder to distinguish from the outside - several communities of "ultra-orthodox" Jews in Palestine are comprised of former non-Haredi Jews who have adopted more traditional lifestyles while retaining their core Zionism. Add on top of that the general prejudices, racism, reactionism, etc. that already find fertile ground in fundamentalist communities of all monotheist religions, and you end up with a lot of people who look the same, dress the same, and talk the same taking radically different sides of the Zionism issue. However, the traditional Haredi communities who, for example, serve in the Knesset have often been anti-Zionist and, according to them, the reason they serve in the Knesset protect the traditional Jewish religious practice from the secular state that they fear. This has allowed them to ally with (or at least not oppose) genocidal, secular Zionists when they are doing ethnic cleansing in Palestinian territories because the primary concern of these ministers is letting them shut down their neighborhoods on the sabbath or prevent women form praying next to the men at the Western Wall, etc.
Honest question, isn't "modern"ultra Orthodox judaism kind of...weird to think that? I mean there were jews in Israel during the crusades.
There have always been Jews there - the expulsions weren’t total and people moved all over the place for thousands of years. There has always (post Roman expulsion) been a tension within Jewish communities about what the Bible/Talmud say about Jews going to the holy land. It all boils down to the idea that, according to the Jewish religion, the Jews were expelled from the holy land by God because they were not acting in accordance with his commandments. And according to that theology, once Jews and non-Jews live according to biblical law (613 commandments for Jews, 7 for everyone else) then god will return and re-establish the kingdom with the resurrected David. It was about proximity to the temple site, so to this day, traditional religious Jews will not set foot on the Temple Mount even though the state of Israel opens it to them. The Jewish community that existed in the holy land for thousands of years was, to the extent it wasn’t secular, Jews that wanted to live as closely as possible to the 613 commandments. There is actually an ongoing debate within the Hardi community whether this is even permitted or not. But what is absolutely clear and was universally the consensus prior to 1880 was that the state itself should not be “Jewish” (one of the 7 commandments applicable to non-Jews is to have civil governments that give Jews basic rights and Jews are, in turn, commanded to follow the laws of these non-Jewish governments). So the religious Jewish communities that remained in the holy land took very seriously their obligation to follow the laws of God which included not trying to establish a “Jewish State” but instead to create the conditions for god to return and re-establish the kingdom. That’s why most Jews who lived in Palestine prior to the 1890s were anti-Zionist.
Also, you have to be careful putting the word “modern” in there because the “modern orthodox” movement was and is a 20th century movement of Orthodox Jews who impose a re-interpretation of the texts that is explicitly Zionist (just to make it more confusing).
first time?
