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
I feel this so much
It wasn't until about a week into this that I even began to process what had happened the week or 2 prior, when the entirety of Canadian parliament gave a standing ovation to a literal nazi SS officer as a "Ukrainian resistance fighter against the Soviets"
The Jewish side of my family has a Ukrainian side and family members whose names I'll never know were murdered in the Holocaust no different than what the Palestinians are being subjected to today and it wasn’t until after that first week that I really thought about how that specific SS officer was provably personally responsible for the murder of my family and that he got to live a long comfortable life without ever paying for what he did
It was in that moment of clarity that I thought, "Oh, this must be what Norman Finkelstein feels like all the time" I bet it's similar for Palestinians who have to see the faces of people on TV who are personally responsible for murdering their family members only it must be worse because they know the victims personally and the monsters they see on TV are in charge of everything, not just being honored for a day like that nazi
Words fail to describe my sorrow and rage