I know a Jewish guy whose worried friend is the treasurer of the county level Democratic organization. She asked him if he thought she should take the mezuzah off of her front door. When the Democrats got their asses thumped in local elections she sent him a text celebrating their losses. If Jews are reevaluating their relationship with the Democratic and Republican parties it's because of BLM fliers that feature paraglider graphics and marches on college campuses where the participants chant "Glory to the martyrs".
I'm sure the comments are going to be a show here...but while I may disagree with a lot of what you're saying here, thank you. It is certainly helping me engage with a different POV on an intellectual level and I appreciate your writing it.
"It is not a conspiracy theory but rather a statement of bare fact that on no other issues are the risks of being cancelled more intense than when it comes to criticizing Israel."
Yes Freddie, and that's why you'll never see another #BLM flag again. I'm sorry that movement had to die this way...
The Bretton Woods Global Order is unraveling as it always was gonna do... because it was unsustainable. If you are opposed to Nationalism, you are going to be a very disappointed political animal.
Here is the problem with those that want to claim anti-Zionism is something different than antisemitism... and you test this simply. Admit to what you really want to see with respect to Israel. And if you are honest you will admit that you want Israel to cease to exist and the Palestinians fee to go loot the land and live there to make it all the same depressed and unproductive land as is the land they currently live on.
But what will happen to those millions of displaced Israeli Jews... the same tribes that occupied that land before the Arabs did from their bloody conquests?
If you were honest you would admit the warm fuzzy feelings in your blackened heart thinking of many of these Jews having no home and being exterminated.
And thus anti-Zionism is antisemitism. They are the same.
If you want to argue that then please, please tell us what the future should like like with respect to Israeli Jews.
I am in complete agreement with what you have said, but I want to add a lacunae to this, if you don't mind.
Zionists often argue that Israel is special in some manner because of the historic wrongs done to the Jewish people - that they deserve/need a religious ethnostate because it's the only way in which they will be safe. But anyone with a background in a small-to-midsized European nation state can tell you about the historical developments which led to nationalist resentment in their own nations. The foreign countries that invaded. The territory lost. The humiliation heaped upon them. Indeed, American patriotism is in some ways (lost cause aside) pretty strange in not having much in the way of a narrative of resentment.
Regardless, nation-states lead to nationalist resentment, and nationalist resentment in turn leads to a zero-sum mindset when it comes to how to address said resentment. My nation must win, so the other nation, therefore must lose. It's a trap that leads nowhere but genocide, if taken to its logical conclusion.
I make no apology for Israel being a Jewish state. And it is my fervent desire for it to continue to be one. For no other reason than it is important to the Jewish people, a tribe, a family, to which I belong.
Is that emotional and atavistic? Yes. But that's what's kept us surviving for millennia.
So, feel free to continue to write long posts about how nation-states are bad and marxism and whatever strikes your fancy. Write a million of them. You're not changing anything.
If you oppose nation-states, what is the alternative? In the real world, that usually means empires. It was really nationalism that stemmed the tide of political consolidation over the past 1,000 years or so.
I think the biggest conflict here is between the various nationalisms, which are clearly in conflict with the homogenized blob that seems to be the goal of left- and right-libertarians, and the idea of self-determination, which is also a cherished idea of the blob.
it seems to me the constant message from our thought-leaders is, "people must be free to do what they want, as long as it's something we approve of."
There are plenty of countries whose charter I disagree with. But that doesn’t mean that I sympathize with the intentional slaughter of their citizens or believe that they shouldn’t be allowed to defend themselves.
Once again, an extremely well thought out argument and articulately written. I am one of those that though I share the values and analysis that lead you to Marxism, I could not disagree more with the idea that Marxism is a path forward. That said, I very much appreciate your argument to this question.
Its probably naive of me, but I do hope that those now being censored and censured for their views on this conflict will see their common cause with those who have been ringing the alarm over challenges to our civil liberties these last few years.
Do you think most people who don't want Israel to exist do so for the same principled reasons as you? After all, you don't want any nation to exist, including the US I assume? I doubt that's where most anti-Zionists are coming from. Given that, perhaps it's understandable that being anti-Israel is correlated enough with being anti-Semetic that the two get conflated a bit? Not justified, but it shouldn't be perplexing.
Thank you for your thoughtful perspectives. Many years of watching this issue has made it clear to me, that although the clamour of those who would disagree with your perspective is loud, the substance is often thin, with little more than a repetition of what has been seen in a biased press for perhaps all their lives. I do wonder why it is so difficult for many of them to read the books by serious scholars, who did the actual research, many of whom are Israelis, and figure this out. The adamant positions on this issue, with zero facts in support, is astounding. To equate a 19th century concept, and political movement, with a religion that is thousands of years old, is intellectually dishonest and does a disservice to every intelligent person, of whatever faith or non-faith they might have.
Congress has passed a resolution assuring me that opposition to Zionism is ipso facto antisemitism.
I suppose that if Congress passed a resolution declaring me in fact to be a Labrador Retriever that I then would come when called?
"Imagine there's no country, it isn't hard to do. Nothing to kill or die for. And no religion too..."
You rule. (Not in a nationalistic sense, of course)
I know a Jewish guy whose worried friend is the treasurer of the county level Democratic organization. She asked him if he thought she should take the mezuzah off of her front door. When the Democrats got their asses thumped in local elections she sent him a text celebrating their losses. If Jews are reevaluating their relationship with the Democratic and Republican parties it's because of BLM fliers that feature paraglider graphics and marches on college campuses where the participants chant "Glory to the martyrs".
I'm sure the comments are going to be a show here...but while I may disagree with a lot of what you're saying here, thank you. It is certainly helping me engage with a different POV on an intellectual level and I appreciate your writing it.
"It is not a conspiracy theory but rather a statement of bare fact that on no other issues are the risks of being cancelled more intense than when it comes to criticizing Israel."
Yes Freddie, and that's why you'll never see another #BLM flag again. I'm sorry that movement had to die this way...
The Bretton Woods Global Order is unraveling as it always was gonna do... because it was unsustainable. If you are opposed to Nationalism, you are going to be a very disappointed political animal.
Here is the problem with those that want to claim anti-Zionism is something different than antisemitism... and you test this simply. Admit to what you really want to see with respect to Israel. And if you are honest you will admit that you want Israel to cease to exist and the Palestinians fee to go loot the land and live there to make it all the same depressed and unproductive land as is the land they currently live on.
But what will happen to those millions of displaced Israeli Jews... the same tribes that occupied that land before the Arabs did from their bloody conquests?
If you were honest you would admit the warm fuzzy feelings in your blackened heart thinking of many of these Jews having no home and being exterminated.
And thus anti-Zionism is antisemitism. They are the same.
If you want to argue that then please, please tell us what the future should like like with respect to Israeli Jews.
I am in complete agreement with what you have said, but I want to add a lacunae to this, if you don't mind.
Zionists often argue that Israel is special in some manner because of the historic wrongs done to the Jewish people - that they deserve/need a religious ethnostate because it's the only way in which they will be safe. But anyone with a background in a small-to-midsized European nation state can tell you about the historical developments which led to nationalist resentment in their own nations. The foreign countries that invaded. The territory lost. The humiliation heaped upon them. Indeed, American patriotism is in some ways (lost cause aside) pretty strange in not having much in the way of a narrative of resentment.
Regardless, nation-states lead to nationalist resentment, and nationalist resentment in turn leads to a zero-sum mindset when it comes to how to address said resentment. My nation must win, so the other nation, therefore must lose. It's a trap that leads nowhere but genocide, if taken to its logical conclusion.
I make no apology for Israel being a Jewish state. And it is my fervent desire for it to continue to be one. For no other reason than it is important to the Jewish people, a tribe, a family, to which I belong.
Is that emotional and atavistic? Yes. But that's what's kept us surviving for millennia.
So, feel free to continue to write long posts about how nation-states are bad and marxism and whatever strikes your fancy. Write a million of them. You're not changing anything.
Am Yisrael Chai.
If you oppose nation-states, what is the alternative? In the real world, that usually means empires. It was really nationalism that stemmed the tide of political consolidation over the past 1,000 years or so.
I think the biggest conflict here is between the various nationalisms, which are clearly in conflict with the homogenized blob that seems to be the goal of left- and right-libertarians, and the idea of self-determination, which is also a cherished idea of the blob.
it seems to me the constant message from our thought-leaders is, "people must be free to do what they want, as long as it's something we approve of."
There are plenty of countries whose charter I disagree with. But that doesn’t mean that I sympathize with the intentional slaughter of their citizens or believe that they shouldn’t be allowed to defend themselves.
Once again, an extremely well thought out argument and articulately written. I am one of those that though I share the values and analysis that lead you to Marxism, I could not disagree more with the idea that Marxism is a path forward. That said, I very much appreciate your argument to this question.
Its probably naive of me, but I do hope that those now being censored and censured for their views on this conflict will see their common cause with those who have been ringing the alarm over challenges to our civil liberties these last few years.
Do you think most people who don't want Israel to exist do so for the same principled reasons as you? After all, you don't want any nation to exist, including the US I assume? I doubt that's where most anti-Zionists are coming from. Given that, perhaps it's understandable that being anti-Israel is correlated enough with being anti-Semetic that the two get conflated a bit? Not justified, but it shouldn't be perplexing.
Thank you for your thoughtful perspectives. Many years of watching this issue has made it clear to me, that although the clamour of those who would disagree with your perspective is loud, the substance is often thin, with little more than a repetition of what has been seen in a biased press for perhaps all their lives. I do wonder why it is so difficult for many of them to read the books by serious scholars, who did the actual research, many of whom are Israelis, and figure this out. The adamant positions on this issue, with zero facts in support, is astounding. To equate a 19th century concept, and political movement, with a religion that is thousands of years old, is intellectually dishonest and does a disservice to every intelligent person, of whatever faith or non-faith they might have.