I was at a pro-Palestine campus protest and there were times where I was instinctively uncomfortable because they were really hammering in the whole bit about reported 'antisemitic action on campus' being a non-issue and I had to remind myself that they aren't talking about people acting against Jews, they're talking about people acting against Israel.

It's my most personal and privileged grievance against Israel. I no longer know if a supposed threat to my safety is a bullshit bludgeon to silence pro-Palestine voices or if the yank reich is actually in town and I need to commute for the rest of the week.

I'll never forgive them for it. I'll never forgive them for a lot of things, but this is the most personal grievance I have, and since I'm born and raised a cracker suburbanite, it's the only one I truly, directly feel in my personal life.

I don't want this to override, you know, the actually important grievances that are at stake for Palestine here, and I don't want to make myself the center of this issue when I'm very much not at all, but I guess I've just been stewing in this for a bit, and I want to uncap it before it somehow causes me to become a weird crank through lack of addressing the root of the issue and it festering into my belief system shrug-outta-hecks

  • the_kid
    ·
    edit-2
    8 months ago

    this was always the problem with a country calling itself the 'Jewish state', putting the Star of David on their flag, and claiming to represent all Jews - all the while committing horrific atrocities. firstly, they use anti-semitism as a cudgel to silence support for Palestinians and trivialize the term. but there are also a non-trivial amount of people out there who are going to blame all Jews for Israel's actions. Israel then benefits from creating this anti-semitism because more Jews think "maybe it's true I'm not safe here" and either support Israel or decide to move there to further colonize it.

    • Tachanka [comrade/them]
      ·
      8 months ago

      Israel then benefits from creating this anti-semitism because more Jews think "maybe it's true I'm not safe here" and either support Israel or decide to move there to further colonize it.

      which is doubly ironic, because the worst thing you could possibly do to avoid genocide is move all your people into one small place.

      • RamrodBaguette [comrade/them, he/him]
        ·
        edit-2
        8 months ago

        It's interesting to me how, just like many other settler groups like the Boer republics and the founders of Rhodesia, the early zionists managed to huff enough of the cracker supremacist ideology that they thought trying to establish a small independent ethnostate surrounded by "hostile" neighbors would be feasible in the long run and not end badly. Doubly-so for the ones who convinced themselves that they could "resist imperialism" and get by without a superpower patron to shield them (all the nutters in Lehi and Irgun, Golda Meir initially), when that's practically the only reason Israel stands today. Must have been quite the sobering moment when they saw all the settler-states they modeled themselves after fall one by one.