aronarchy

[aronarchy]

I was reminded of this when I read this article from a few months ago:

“The thing you need to understand about the ruling class is that they’re all high-stakes gamblers whose vision for the future only extends to, on average, the next quarter. The pandemic is the perfect example: do you find yourself continuously flabbergasted with how shortsighted the ruling class has been and continues to be with their strategies around the pandemic? Even when doing so will, long-term, be to the detriment of their own interests? It’s because they do not live in the same world, with the same long-term thinking required to live in it, that the rest of us do. The ruling class is in a bubble of reality all their own, and they only interact with other people in that same bubble. Shutting down the country, forgiving student and rent debt, housing people, offering free healthcare to all, and paying people to stay home would long-term absolutely be far better for their economy than literally any of what they are doing now. But they don’t think that way. In their minds, they’re only thinking about the profits that can be accrued NOW. Are they aware of the risks of not taking adequate precautions? Absolutely they are. But they’re gamblers, and the potential payout of never slowing down is too great for them to resist. That’s EXACTLY what happened with the 2008 recession, and the collapse of the housing bubble. The ruling class *knew* that there were immanent and massive consequences, but they kept going because they wanted to get as much as they could before those consequences arrived. Same goes for climate crisis. They’ve KNOWN this was coming from a loooooong time. It’s not a new concern by any stretch of the imagination. They just haven’t been able to abide the idea that they would have to, even for a moment, lose growth and profits to mitigate it.”

— Your Friendly Butch Anarchist, @butchanarchy (via closet-keys)

[aronarchy]

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In Israel, this ideal was summed up in the IDF’s concept of “Purity of Arms.” Drawn from its official code of ethics, “Purity of Arms” holds that Israeli soldiers are particularly noble when fighting with restraint and maintaining their “humanity even in combat.” In America, journalists ran with this notion and fashioned their own Lost Cause of the IDF. In the September 1967 issue of The Atlantic, in an article titled “The Swift Sword,” Barbara Tuchman wrote of Israeli soldiers “fighting and crying,” describing them as “lions” who “fought with tears” while assuring her readers that the Israelis, because of their own history, were a different kind of army. “The Jewish people are not accustomed to conquest, and we receive it with mixed feelings,” General Yitzhak Rabin told Tuchman.

When A Distant Mirror was published years later, Tuchman warned against a hagiography of violence, citing the knights of that period:

“King Arthur’s knights adventured for the right against dragons, enchanters, and wicked men, establishing order in a wild world. So their living counterparts were supposed, in theory, to serve as defenders of the Faith, upholders of justice, champions of the oppressed. In practice, they were themselves the oppressors, and by the 14th century the violence and lawlessness of men of the sword had become a major agency of disorder.”

But back in 1967, the story of this seemingly ragtag force fighting honorably and crying while shooting proved too seductive. As did the urge to apply the most disreputable pseudoscience of that era.

The Anglo-American Committee saw in Israelis a transformation—“a new generation of Jews rising free from the stigma of the ghetto”—that was not just spiritual but physical. “Many of the Jewish children I saw were blond and blue-eyed, a mass mutation that, I was told, is yet to be adequately explained,” wrote the committee’s commissioner, Bartley Crum. “It is the more remarkable because the majority of the Jews of Palestine are of east European Jewish stock, traditionally dark-haired and dark-eyed. One might almost assert that a new Jewish folk is being created in Palestine.” In 1951, journalist Kenneth W. Bilby wrote that the Israeli Jews were becoming physically separate from “their Semitic cousin in the Arab world.” After visiting with a group of children in a kibbutz, Bilby wrote, “I would have defied any anthropologist to mix these children with a crowd of British, American, German and Scandinavian youngsters and then weed out the Jews.”

Bilby’s note speaks to the racecraft at work in the West, and to the absurd boundaries of whiteness and Jews’ uncertain place within it. …

from The Message by Ta-Nehisi Coates

[aronarchy]

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… I thought back to my conversation with Avner and Guy and how hard it is to truly acknowledge your place in a system whose actions indict your conscience. But now, seeing the shape of my travels these past couple of years, I think of Josiah Nott, of D. W. Griffith, of all the literature assembled to hide the truth of an oppressive class from itself, to assure itself that it is indeed right with the universe.

The Zionist corpus is filled with such entries, and many of them are little more than analogues for America. The boats bringing fleeing Jews to Mandatory Palestine are referred to as “the Mayflowers of a whole generation,” the combatants fighting to seize power from the British are likened to “the men of Concord or Lexington,” and the phrase “It’s 1776 in Palestine” is marshaled as a rallying cry. When the American journalist Frank W. Buxton visited a kibbutz as part of the 1946 Anglo-American Committee, what he saw was his own national genealogy. “I’ve always been proud of my own ancestors who made farms out of the virgin forest,” Buxton said. “But these people are raising crops out of rocks!” The sense, that if Buxton’s ancestors had created a state out of an unpopulated void so could the Zionists, predated Buxton. In 1881, as a wave of pogroms was unleashed on Russian Jews, American clergyman William E. Blackstone despaired that “these millions cannot remain where they are, and yet have no other place to go.” But for Blackstone the tragedy was compounded by the fact that there was an obvious solution to the Land of Palestine—“a land without a people, and a people without a land.”

Blackstone gave language, pithy and poetic, to an idea that would recur repeatedly in Zionist thought: that the Palestinian people did not exist. “It was not as though there was a Palestinian people in Palestine considering itself as a Palestinian people and we came and threw them out and took their country from them,” argued Golda Meir. Buried in the claim is another notion—that the worth of a people is defined by their possession of a homeland incorporated as a state. The Palestinians, lacking such a state, had no right to the land and perhaps no rights at all. The charge of being without a homeland or “stateless” was often lodged at Jews themselves. Zionists sought to answer that charge, but they did not dispute its premise. Their model was America’s “pilgrims” or “Minutemen,” and the role they saw for Palestinians was thus predictable.

In 1958 Leon Uris published his bestselling novel Exodus, which was later adapted into a movie starring Paul Newman. Uris hated any depiction of “weak Jews” and believed that many Israelis felt the same due to their “strong feelings about Jews who will not fight back.” And the people that they were to fight back against was clear. “This is Israel,” wrote Uris in a 1956 letter to his father, the “fighter who spits in the eye of the Arab hordes and dares him.” Thus, the Jewish people could restore the honor lost to the Nazis by warring against Arabs in the breach. But better than substitute Nazis, the Palestinians gave Israel savage Nazis, third-world barbarians embodying the depraved native in the colonial mind. The Aztec. The Indian. The Zulu. The Arab. In Exodus, the image of marauding Arabs, cowardly and prone to rape, will be familiar to anyone who has seen the depiction of Black people in Griffith’s Birth of a Nation. For just as the vulgar caricature of Black people served the cause of white Redemption, so too did the Arabs in Exodus serve the cause of Zionism.

A fan of the Western genre, Uris wrote Exodus to appeal to American “gentiles.” The reception for his book, which dovetailed with the cause of Israeli redemption, was rapt. Nine years after Exodus’s publication, the Six-Day War consecrated an American martial love of Israel. It was 1967, and America was embroiled in a war with a colonized enemy in which it was losing both the physical battles and the moral high ground. But in Israel, Americans saw Western warriors vanquishing the savages. These were not soldiers but righteous, reluctant defenders of a long-persecuted people, killing only when forced to the brink.

from The Message by Ta-Nehisi Coates (emphasis added)

[aronarchy]

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We turned off Route 60 into the Israeli settlement of Kiryat Arba. A guard who seemed to be of East Asian descent held us at the checkpoint for a moment. Avner handed him his ID, and they talked in Hebrew; then the guard let us in. Guy parked the truck, and I followed Avner out into Kahane Park—a small garden named for Meir Kahane, the Jewish supremacist who as leader of the Kahanist movement (and a member of the Knesset) promoted the permanent annexation of the West Bank and Gaza and the enslavement of Palestinians. Kahane’s political party was banned by the government in 1985, and he was assassinated in New York in 1990, but his disciple Baruch Goldstein took up his mantle. Four years after Kahane’s death, Goldstein entered the Ibrahimi Mosque in Hebron and gunned down twenty-nine Muslims while they were worshipping. In the park, we stopped to look at a small cylindrical memorial to Kahane and then walked a few paces more until we reached a massive stone slab raised just above the ground. It was the tomb of Baruch Goldstein, and across its top were twenty or so small stones. Avner explained that this grave is a kind of shrine, regularly visited by those who see Goldstein as a martyr. Kahane and Goldstein were both officially pariahs—Kahane was shot in Manhattan, and Goldstein’s mass murder was condemned by the Israeli government. But whatever one wishes to make of the official denunciations of Kahane and Goldstein, I was standing in a park bearing Kahane’s name in which he and his mass-murdering acolyte were memorialized, a park that rested in a settlement sanctioned and subsidized by the state that claims to denounce him.

Goldstein’s rampage was stopped by the Palestinian worshippers themselves, who rose up, disarmed him, and beat him to death. In the wake of the street protests that exploded in the city, Israel segregated the streets of Hebron and set curfews for its Palestinian residents. To this very day, the legacy of that crackdown endures. Walking the streets of Hebron, as I had, seeing the shuttered storefronts and the soldiers patrolling the streets, it was hard to avoid the feeling that Goldstein had won. And this feeling held true for me across the West Bank, where the pace of colonization and settlement had expanded, not declined, since the 1994 massacre. In 1993, when the Oslo Peace Accords were signed, the settler population was 111,000. Today it’s half a million.

Goldstein and the subsequent Israeli reaction to Palestinian unrest in Hebron are manifestations of an uncomfortable reality: This putative “Jewish democracy” is, like its American patron, an expansionist power. Zionism demands, as Levi Eshkol, prime minister of Israel during the 1960s, once put it, “the dowry, not the bride”—that is to say, the land without the Palestinians on it. And every expansionist power needs a good story to justify its plunder.

…

… Sometimes, you are blessed with a moment where all the dissembling, all the shame, all the politesse are stripped, and evil speaks with clarity. Sometimes it’s in a park named for a nineteenth-century slave trader. And sometimes it’s in a settlement that honors a twentieth-century advocate of that same system. In either case, the clarity is a gift and we should listen close. In this memorial to Meir Kahane and his disciple, the gift spoke of Israel’s deeper designs.

Settlements like Kiryat Arba are not the work of rogue pioneers; much like our own redlined suburbs, they are state projects. In the settlements, first-time homebuyers are eligible for subsidized mortgages at low interest rates to build houses on land they lease at discounted rates—a discount made possible on account of the land being stolen. Factories and farms are propped by an array of discounts and subsidies. All infrastructure—roads, water, power, public synagogues, and mikvahs—is paid for by the state. In this web of subsidies is an incentive to further colonize the land of Palestinians, because further colonization advances a primary interest of the Israeli state—the erosion of Palestinian claims to their native land.

Standing there looking at Goldstein’s grave, having visited Al-Haram Al-Ibrahimi only a few days earlier, I felt the horror of Goldstein’s spectacular violence intimately. But what I was beginning to see was that settlement, itself, was violent. When Israel constructs settlements in the West Bank, it extends its borders past the settlements themselves—sometimes onto Palestinian farmland. Palestinian access to this land is almost always contested and generally granted based on a maze of permits or the mood of the security forces who guard the settlements. In any clash between Palestinians and settlers, the soldiers can be expected to take the side of the settlers. And the settlers are, themselves, often armed perpetrators of violence. “The settlements play a political and a strategic role in taking over land,” Avner explained. “Imagine a pond. You throw a rock in a pond and it creates a ripple, right? The settlements create a ripple effect of violence everywhere they are. That’s the way they’re built.”

What I could now see was something more than bad actors or individual zealots but a system at work. I asked how Avner and Guy, knowing in detail this system that I was just beginning to comprehend, could reconcile it with their stated desire for a “Jewish democracy.” There was quiet in the car for a moment. Avner answered first. He said he believed in self-determination for the Jewish people and that questions of where that self-determination should play out were now theoretical. “We’re here,” he said. “The question is, can there be a way to have right to self-determination for Israelis and to Palestinians? I think the answer is yes, there has to be. I mean, there’s no other way. But I do think that there are very dangerous things that have grown out of this concept of Jewish nationality, which has transformed into Jewish superiority or Jewish supremacy, which goes beyond Kahane or Goldstein. I mean, this is deeply rooted within Israeli society, within Zionist ideology. There is a wish and a want for self-determination. I don’t think that’s inherently wrong. I think what’s inherently wrong is one nationality coming on the expense of the other. That’s sort of my attempt…”

Avner trailed off. Guy did not speak of such pragmatics. “For myself, I understand that I see the establishment of Israeli as a sin. I don’t think it should have happened,” he said. He spoke of Israel as “a center of Jewish supremacy,” which he did not see changing. “So, it’s something that I can’t live with. And I think that in order to have some kind of sustainable, reasonable life here, there should be a real change.”

When I was young, I felt the physical weight of race constantly. We had less. Our lives were more violent. And whether by genes, culture, or divine judgment, this was said to be our fault. The only tool to escape this damnation—for a lucky few—was school. Later I went out into the world and saw the other side, those who, by genes, culture, or divine judgment, had more, but—as I came to understand—knew less. These people, white people, were living under a lie. More, they were, in some profound way, suffering for the lie. They had seen more of the world than I had—but not more of humanity itself. Most stunningly, I realized that they were deeply ignorant of their own country’s history, and thus they had no intimate sense of how bad it truly can get. A system of supremacy justifies itself through illusion, so that those moments when the illusion can no longer hold always come as a great shock. The Trump years amazed a certain kind of white person, largely because they had no reference for national vulgarity, for such broad corruption and venality, until it was too late. The least reflective of them say, “This is not America.” But some of them suspect that it is America, and there is great pain in understanding that, without your consent, you are complicit in a great crime, in learning that the whole game was rigged in your favor, that there are nations within your nation who have spent all of their collective lives in the Trump years. The pain is in the discovery of your own illegitimacy—that whiteness is power and nothing else. I could hear that same pain in Avner’s and Guy’s words. They were raised under the story that the Jewish people were the ultimate victims of history. But they had been confronted with an incredible truth—that there was no ultimate victim, that victims and victimizers were ever flowing.

from The Message by Ta-Nehisi Coates (emphasis added)

[aronarchy]

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Israel’s formation, the light out of the Shoah’s darkness, has long been held up as an uplifting coda to the Holocaust, an exemplar of the long arc of the moral universe bending toward justice. I saw the connection made right there at Yad Vashem in one of its last exhibits: a black-and-white reel of David Ben-Gurion declaring the creation of the Israeli state. This arc��from Holocaust to nation-state—has been traced in film, literature, and global memory. The relentless grimness of Schindler’s List finds its relief in the unwanted, wandering Jews, saved by Schindler, finding a home in their Promised Land while “Jerusalem of Gold” plays in the background. In this way the want of relief can be permanently sated: Two thousand years of wrong has at last been righted, and a people, persecuted, hunted, and subjected to industrialized genocide, has not only survived but found its way back to a God-given home.

Home—with all its implications of safety, warmth, and family—is only half of Israel’s national story. It is not just that the Jewish people were finally left to cultivate their own Promised Land, free from the terror of gentiles, but that upon that Promised Land they erected a Jewish state, which to say the Jewish nation cleaved to an official Jewish flag, an official Jewish language, and an official Jewish army. And what that meant was not just freedom but power. After mass murder in the Rhineland, after expulsion from Spain, after Dreyfus and Shylock, after all civilization had abandoned them to the gas chambers, after two thousand years of European and Christian depredations, the Jewish people had taken its place among The Strong. The shape of this story is not just the curving arc of justice but something more: a perfect circle. Not merely a righting but a restoration, a redemption.

And this redemption was evident the moment I entered Yad Vashem, because the first thing I saw there was not an exhibit but a row of twenty-odd soldiers in brown fatigues, carrying guns the size of small children. And they were almost children themselves—barely out of high school, by their appearance—and engaged in some kind of banter known only to them. I stood there staring, probably longer than I should have. There was something incongruous about so many guns being so flagrantly wielded in so solemn a place. I knew that they were there to protect this site from those would wish Hitler’s work more complete. But by then, I knew that that was not all the soldiers of this country were of this country were protecting.

On my first full day in Jerusalem, I walked with a group of fellow writers, editors, and artists into the Old City of Jerusalem. We were staying in East Jerusalem, which has been under Israeli occupation, along with the West Bank and Gaza, since 1967. There were about a dozen of us total, pulled from all over the world—South Africa, Kashmir, the U.K., and America—at the invitation of the Palestine Festival of Literature. For five days our hosts took us from city to city so that we might see Palestine from the ground. The sun hung big and brilliant in a cloudless open sky, but the air was relatively cool. Our group of companions walked to the brink of the Lion’s Gate, where we met the custodian of one of Islam’s holiest sites: the Al-Aqsa complex, which includes the Al-Aqsa Mosque and the Dome of the Rock. This was the object of our visit, but it was made difficult by the phalanx of soldiers who examined our passports and then, for no discernible reason, made us wait.

The land of the Al-Aqsa complex is holy to both Muslims and Jews. Muslims believe that Al-Aqsa is where the prophet Muhammad ascended to heaven. The Jewish people have a different name for the Al-Aqsa complex: the Temple Mount, the historic site of two temples—one built by King Herod I and the second by King Solomon—and, for some, the site of a third, as yet unbuilt temple whose construction will mark the coming of the Messiah. The Western Wall at the edge of Al-Aqsa is all that remains of Herod’s temple and is also the area allotted for Jews to worship under an agreement called the “status quo,” which divides the Old City into separate worship zones for Jews, Christians, and Muslims. Modern Jerusalem itself is divided between East and West, the former is mostly populated by Palestinians and the latter by Israelis. Advocates of a two-state solution have long imagined West Jerusalem as the capital of Israel and East Jerusalem as the capital of the Palestinian state. But the Old City is in East Jerusalem, and such a settlement would put some of the holiest sites for Muslims, Jews, and Christians within the borders of a Palestinian state. For the moment, a Jordanian-funded Waqf exercises nominal control of Al-Aqsa. But the real control belongs to the occupying power, with predictable results: Israel regularly allows groups of Jewish worshippers access to Al-Aqsa, while barring Palestinians from the Western Wall.

We stood at the Lion’s Gate for the next forty-five minutes or so, talking amongst ourselves, unsure of what was happening or why we had been stopped. Was it that we had cameras? Was it that our guide was Jordanian? No justifications were given, no questions asked, no instructions offered. The soldiers just stood there with their enormous guns, blocking the Gate. I leaned against a nearby wall and watched as groups of tourists streamed in and out of the Gate, unmolested and unquestioned. But no one visibly Muslim passed through the Lion’s Gate in all the time we were made to wait. I could not quite put words to what I was seeing, but watching those soldiers stand there and steal our time, the sun glinting off their shades like Georgia sheriffs, I could feel the lens of my mind curving to refract the blur of new and strange events.

The next day, I was with this same group, walking through the old city of Hebron with Walid Abu al-Halawah, a local urbanist. Al-Halawah, in tinted glasses, dark jeans, and a long-sleeve green shirt, explained that when he was a child, this city had been open and bustling, with a thriving market and streams of pilgrims coming to visit Al-Haram Al-Ibrahimi, which is traditionally believed to be the burial ground of Abraham, Sarah, Isaac, and Jacob. But as in the Old City, Israeli soldiers exercised total control over all movement through the town. We were standing at the gate to Al-Shuhada Street, which was once the main market street of Old Hebron. Palestinians are now barred from Al-Shuhada Street, while settlers move as they please through the whole town. “There are 126 Israeli cameras filming and recording the whole way here,” Walid said. Then he pointed toward the rooftop after rooftop and said, “There is a camera there. A camera over there. A camera there.”

The city’s most visible feature was its amazing variety of checkpoints—some of them were just soldier lingering around, others massive gates with metal turnstiles. As we approached one, I watched two Palestinian schoolchildren being stopped by a soldier and directed back down the street from which they had come. And then it was our turn. One by one we approached. They checked our passports and allowed us to proceed. These soldiers roam as they feel, stopping and interrogating according to their whim. Later, after I had just lunch and was walking alone to a local shopkeeper I hoped to patronize. A soldier walked out from a checkpoint, stopped me, and asked me to state my religion. He looked at me skeptically when I told him I did not have one and asked for my parents’ religion. When I told him they were not religious either, he rolled his eyes and asked about my grandparents. When I told him they were Christian, he allowed me to pass.

If this had happened in America, I would have told you that the soldier who stopped me was Black, and I guess he was here too. In fact, there were “Black” soldiers everywhere lording their power over the Palestinians, many of whom would, in America, have been seen as “white.” Again I felt the mental lens curving against the light and was reminded of something I have long known, something I’ve written and spoken about, but still was stunned to see here in such stark detail: that race is a species of power and nothing else. And I knew here, in this moment, how I would have fallen in the hierarchy of power if I had told that Black soldier that I was a Muslim. And on that street so far from home, I suddenly felt that I had traveled through time as much as through space.

For as sure as my ancestors were born into a country where none of them was the equal of any white man, Israel was revealing itself to be a country where no Palestinian is ever the equal of any Jewish person anywhere. This fact is not hard to discern. Beyond my own initial impressions, there is the law itself, which clearly and directly calls for a two-tier society. Jewish citizens of Israel who marry Christians from Scotland can pass their citizenship on to their spouse and children; Palestinian citizens of Israel cannot. Jewish Israelis in Jerusalem are citizens of the state; Palestinians in the city are merely “permanent residents,” a kind of sub-citizenship with a reduced set of rights and privileges. In Hebron, Jewish settlers are subject to civil law, with all its rights and protections, while stateless Palestinians in the same city are subject to military courts, with all their summary power and skepticism.

The separate and unequal nature of Israeli rule is both intense and omnipresent—something I saw directly. The roads and highways we traveled were marked off for license plates of different colors—yellow, used mostly by those who are Jewish, and white with green lettering, used almost entirely by those who are not. As we drove these roads along the West Bank, our guide pointed out settlements—a word that I had always taken to refer to rugged camps staked out in the desert but in fact the settlements are more akin to American subdivisions, distinguished from the villages of the Palestinians by homes with large red roofs, as surely as a white picket fence denoted the suburbs of twentieth-century America and not its teeming cities.

On many of the Palestinians roofs I saw large cisterns for the harvesting of rainwater. These cisterns were almost certainly illegal—the Israeli state’s hold on the West Bank includes control of the aquifers in the ground and the rainwater that falls from above. Any structure designed for gathering water requires a permit from the occupying power, and such permits are rarely given to Palestinians. The upshot is predictable—water consumption for Israelis is nearly four times that of Palestinians living under occupation. In Gaza—before the most recent war—90 percent of all water was contaminated. But in the Israeli settlements of the West Bank you can find country clubs furnished with large swimming pools. On seeing these cisterns, it occurred to me that Israel had advanced beyond the Jim Crow South and segregated not just the pools and fountains but the water itself. And more, it occurred to me that there was still one place on the planet—under American patronage—that resembled the world that my parents were born into.

And now I was in that world, even as I walked haltingly through Yad Vashem, which is, among other things, a grand narrative of conquered ancestors built by their conquering progeny. I can see that, now that I have studied the land. But there was a time when I wrote about this history from afar, invoking it in service of what I perceived to be a more important story. It hurts to write that. I was wrong, and I learned that here. In Jerusalem. In Haifa. In Ramallah. So, this letter is another story about power and stories, about writing and settling accounts, a story not of redemption but of reparation.

from The Message by Ta-Nehisi Coates (emphasis added)

[aronarchy]

USAmericans: This pride month, talk to the queer people who actually live in all those bad evil icky red states and find out what it's actually like, how we actually feel about it, and who here is actively fighting against it. No more telling us to "just leave" or reducing us to innocent victims who are "trapped" here. There are so many of us and we live here for so many reasons, none of which should be justified. We are resilient, we are powerful, and we are fighting against the fascist laws working to eradicate us or scare us away. Being trans in a red state right now is in and of itself an act of resistance. That being said, pay attention to the brave souls on the front lines, pushing against the laws, making good trouble, and refusing to be silenced.

I won't let myself be talked about like I'm stupid to live here.

I won't let myself be talked about like I'm a helpless victim who's trapped here.

If you can't join the fight by standing beside us, then the least you can do is empower us, amplify our voices, and pay more attention to the ones who are FIGHTING AGAINST THESE LAWS than you are to the chucklefucks trying to pass them.

[aronarchy]

Huh. Okay, what had confused me was because the situations are pretty different (e.g. foreign/foreign-backed imperialist forces are the main drivers & violence perpetrators of the current genocide/oppression of people living in Congo instead of the government/government-aligned military, oppression/harm carried out by the Congolese government is generally against the Congolese people themselves instead of an external underclassed national group, most progressive activists criticizing oppression in Congo also recognize that it is a situation of antiblack oppression itself and bring it up in the context of opposing antiblackness, dispelling stereotypes linking people to their government or all Black people to a certain country is very much not a focus/particularly necessary for that current pro-Congolese activism), so it just felt like an odd/counterintuitive example to me because pretty much everyone in related discourse wouldn’t go down that train of thought.

Even right-wing white supremacists trying to justify antiblackness because of something to do with Congo generally seem to focus on demonizing Congolese people themselves/as a whole, including/mainly ordinary people, civilians, etc., the main targets and victims of the current armed conflict/war/genocide, use tropes about Black racial inferiority or need for slavery and ecological/land/resource exploitation in general, etc. They don’t seem to have as clear of a fixation on/delineation of the government and if they do want to demonize on that basis, it’s still usually more with general tropes about African political instability/disorganization/insufficient development/government weakness/inability to protect civilians or conform to Western norms of acceptable governing/always being in conflict, with rather different dynamics from what is allegedly being said in discourse about Israel. So I just hadn’t know how to interpret/respond to that.

"stop crying about antisemitism, your government is killing Palestinians"

Ok but both of these things are bad, or are you saying that antisemitism is ok because the Israeli government is bad?

Imagine saying to a black man that racism towards him is ok cos of Congo or some shit like that

[aronarchy]

When I hear about supposed “male privilege” experienced by “passing trans men” “because they are men” (“[and thus it’s accurate to say all men can/do experience ‘male privilege,’ because they’re men]”), I wonder what the person would think about, say, a cis woman who decided to pretend to be a cis man for some reason, “passed” and was treated in a similar way. Would she be a beneficiary of “male privilege,” be part of a privileged/oppressor class oppressing most other cis women as a class, or would they recognize that the situation is not so simple as to be easily reduced to such terms? (“Oh, but she isn’t a man, so the logic to apply here must be totally different, she doesn’t count here, I can suddenly explain very well how she’s being patriarchally oppressed by this situation.”)

(If it were actually just about present external perception and treatment, completely unrelated to any prejudices or reductive/essentialist/cissexist assumptions about internal identity, then it wouldn’t all hinge on the subject necessarily being a man himself/identifying as a man and the supposed or actual relation of that with his changed treatment.)

Do they say the same things about closeted or pre-realization trans women who are perceived as men by cis people around them, if appearance, perception is everything? (Obviously, even wrt those factors, it’s much more complicated than something which could be reduced to such a simplistic labeling/conclusion.)

Do closeted trans men have “cis-passing privilege” if they’re perceived as cis women?

Or can we please theorize gender issues with more nuance?

[aronarchy]

It’s not what “bothers” me here, it’s what’s confusing me. I just don’t understand what you meant by it/how it makes sense.

"stop crying about antisemitism, your government is killing Palestinians"

Ok but both of these things are bad, or are you saying that antisemitism is ok because the Israeli government is bad?

Imagine saying to a black man that racism towards him is ok cos of Congo or some shit like that

[aronarchy]

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Imagine saying to a black man that racism towards him is ok cos of Congo or some shit like that

I am genuinely curious about how you intended for this analogy to work ngl.

"stop crying about antisemitism, your government is killing Palestinians"

Ok but both of these things are bad, or are you saying that antisemitism is ok because the Israeli government is bad?

Imagine saying to a black man that racism towards him is ok cos of Congo or some shit like that

[aronarchy]

#to all the TERFs in the reblogs saying remodeled versions of: “this is pornbrain” “this is coomerbrain” please know that #the incels are way ahead of you and the nofappers and porn abstainers are just as misogynistic as the “non-radical” shithead men #whomever said “low T behavior” should be ashamed of themselves #feminism #the discourse #fuck terfs #cw fatphobia #cw homophobia #cw misogyny #source: twitter #source: 4chan

[aronarchy]

Louis Theroux interviews a Palestinian in Nabi Saleh for BBC documentary Ultra Zionists (2011)

[aronarchy]

I think people would armchair diagnose bad people with cluster B disorders much less if psychiatric disorders hadn't all been given names by ableists who of course picked the traits most unberarable to "sane" people to name them rather than, you know, the ways it affects the people that have them. It's like, when doctors are all "this disorder gives you extremely low self esteem. and it's called the Selfish Fucking Asshole Disorder" or "this disorder makes you want to die so bad. and it's called the Hysteric Bitch Disorder" or "this disorder disconnects you from your peers. and it's called the Insane Evil Cunt Disorder" and so on and so forth, so of course you have people going "oh, this person is a selfish fucking asshole, they MUST have Selfish Fucking Asshole Disorder! this further proves that all people with this disorder are like that in the first place!" Do You See It

[aronarchy]

Please, do not ignore my story💔😭

I am Rania Mahmoud, 30 years old. I live in Gaza City. I am married and have two children. I support my children and my family. My father and mother are elderly. I lost my home and was displaced more than once. Every time, I was escaping death amidst the screams of my children under war and death. I currently live in a tent in the heat of the summer and the cold of the winter.💔 Life is very difficult, like hell. I need to buy milk, diapers, food and drink for my children. I need your help to save my family and children from the war of extermination in Gaza.💔 I want them to live in safety, so I ask you to extend a helping hand to save them from death so that I can get them out of Gaza safely to obtain a safer life for them.💔😭

Your donation and sharing this message is a part of your humanity and support for us. Every help, no matter how small, makes a huge difference in my life and my children's lives. Be our voice, be the hope for those who have lost everything." 🇵🇸🍉🙏🏼

Share, donate, help us survive. 🕊️❤️

In a corner of Gaza, my family and I are drowning in destruction, with the echoes of suffering surrounding us. I sat beside my modest tent, hastily erected after losing my home in the latest bombing. The faces of my family tell stories of patience and resilience, with lines of time etched upon them, as if they were records of unforgettable events. 🇵🇸⏳🍉

my campaing vetted by:

nabulsi

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[aronarchy]

I judge people based on what they do. Your historical inaccuracies aside, there is a clear ideological issue here where you seem to believe that having been oppressed somehow makes someone ontologically incapable of becoming an oppressor in another context. (*Unless the oppressed is Arab, of course.)

I don’t believe that any group is ontologically incapable of harm or that no oppressed person can ever be an oppressor too. It’s nonsense. Zionist settlers express/ed racist sentiments and perpetrate/d forced displacement and ethnic cleansing. That can be seen from what they did (and do). That is what happened, and the particular identities of the perpetrators don’t change that fact. A person doesn’t get a free genocide pass after having been victim of a genocide. One genocide doesn’t magically cancel out another genocide (especially a genocide perpetrated upon people who were not even responsible for the previous genocide).

The Zionist settler-colonial project has largely been an attempt to assimilate into the dominant global white-supremacist colonial/imperial system. Deciding to stop one’s own oppression not by supporting the end of all racial/ethnic/religious oppression, but by becoming an oppressor oneself, having a colony of one’s own to rule over just like the other whites, gaining access to the power to be viewed as superior in relation to settler supremacist, Orientalist, anti-Arab, and Islamophobic bigotry. Certainly, the white-supremacist far-right Western governments are happy to fanatically back Israel right now with rhetoric and monetary support and weapons and shared participation in oppressing Palestinians, and vice versa, continuous with how early Zionists had made appeals to Western imperialist powers to back their project, citing shared interest.

There are similar discussions regarding how many white American Jews have been able to assimilate into the US white supremacist hegemony to a degree by adopting similar views about Black and Indigenous people and benefitting from their dispossession and exploitation, as well as problematic attempts to resolve antisemitism via means which displace violence downward e.g. relying on and validating the racist police institution to protect them from antisemitic attacks. Criticizing such choices doesn’t mean claiming that antisemitism didn’t or doesn’t exist.

Many people who have been victims of white supremacy become white supremacists. Many people of color are white supremacist and hate their fellows as well as, often, themselves. There are an unfortunate amount of assimilationist racists. Many have experienced a great deal of historical or even ongoing oppression yet still elect to continue buying into the oppressive system. I don’t see why this should be off-limits for discussion, or off-limits for discussion regarding Jews. That is unreasonable.

I feel like ppl get bogged down in semantics so let me make it real simple for you. A zionist is someone who supports the state of Israel. Zionism is the belief that a Jewish ethnostate called Israel should be developed in the Levant region (Palestine and Lebanon and Syria) regardless of the existence of Palestine, Syria and Lebanon and their people. When any pro-Palestine person says someone is a Zionist, that's not a synonym for Jewish, nor is another word for "person I don't like". When we call someone a zionist it's because they support the existence of Israel as a colony. And just so we're clear: it does not matter if a zionist says they're sad about Palestinian suffering or they want to "live in peace" with Palestinians because as long as they support the existence of a colonial ethnostate called Israel then they're still doing Zionism. If I came to your house and just started living there and tried to starve you out and torture you so you would leave your house, it wouldn't matter that I felt "sorry" for you because I'm the reason you're suffering at all. That's why when you try and say "well, Neil Druckman says he wants the war to stop" that doesn't matter. He's still a zionist. He still wants Israel to exist as a colonial state which will always be at the expense of Palestinians. Do not fall for liberal Zionists. Get it in your fucking head that there's no "progressive" Zionism because there's no "progressive" way to support a state that necessitates the elimination of whole peoples.

[aronarchy]

#in my experience a lot of self proclaimed zionists didn’t even understand there was colonialism involved #their only understanding was the land without a people for people without a land thing

How do you write these tags and still not see where the problem is.

YES, THEY SEE PALESTINE AS A “LAND WITHOUT A PEOPLE” THERE FOR THEIR TAKING. THAT IS THE PROBLEM. THIS IS CLASSIC SETTLER-COLONIAL ENTITLEMENT. HOW DO YOU NOT SEE IT AS INTRINSICALLY VIOLENT AND COLONIAL THAT THEY BELIEVE AN ENTIRE PEOPLE DOES NOT EVEN EXIST? THAT PEOPLE WHO ARE THERE, THEY THINK THEY’RE NOT EVEN THERE, THEY ERASE THEIR ENTIRE EXISTENCE?

This is what white European settlers thought when they saw Turtle Island as a terra nullius too, saw a “land without a people” which was their Manifest Destiny to conquer and own and settle in and carried out a devastating genocide which reduced the indigenous population by millions upon millions.

Holding that “understanding” puts someone on the same level as a genocidal white supremacist/colonialist, a Nazi or other fascist, and they will be treated accordingly, because their ideology is that horrifically violent and inexcusable. Historical revisionism about the meaning/implications of the name of a genocidal/fascist ideology is never tolerable and should never be accepted, nor is it ever completely unrelated to specific material policy positions.

Of course many today don’t understand that the colonialism they believe in is called “colonialism” (or at least, that’s what they tell you). Nazis today (though decreasing over time now) also tend to aggressively disavow that they could possibly be “Nazis,” and even gaslight you back for daring to call them that. Most abusers and rapists think what they’re doing is not at all abuse or rape. But if you walk in and demand that marginalized advocates censor themselves, cater to the oppressors’ sensibilities, and decline to use accurate words, you’re letting them get away with and benefit from their lies and/or obfuscation, with dangerous ignorance and/or malicious deception, while suppressing the victim’s voice and needs. You are taking away their words and their right to speak for themselves with honesty and openness.

But i also just *don’t* use the word Zionist whenever possible because people define it so differently that it makes communication harder. And this is a situation where we need to understand each other.

No the fuck it is not. This is a typical abuser/oppressor tactic, claiming that the reason why there is “conflict” between them and their victim is because of “bad communication,” “miscommunication,” innocent lack of understanding, that if the victim just “communicated better,” more accurately, more precisely, more understandably, then somehow the problem would magically be resolved. That if they just used the right word this time. And some oppressed people and their allies fall for this shit and sink countless hours and days and years of effort/labor into trying to figure out where they’re going wrong and viciously surveil themselves and internalize stigma about their manners of speech and advocacy and try desperately hard to meet the bar which always just rises higher and higher.

But of course, it was never actually a “communication problem.” You cannot rationalize to someone who did not develop their bigoted ideology through rational thinking. No amount of evidence will persuade someone who’s not looking for evidence. No amount of terminology correction will reach someone who does not actually take issue with what a concept is being called, but the concept itself. You cannot win over someone who is approaching the conversation already with an intent to dominate, to stamp out the dissenting voice. There is no point in “communication” when the problem is one of power: that one side has to appeal to their oppressor’s goodwill in the first place, while the oppressor does not even have to listen, and can already do whatever they want no matter what, because they have the power to.

To a lot of people, Zionist just means “Jews have the right to self determination” or “Jews have the right to be safe”.

This is about as honest as a claim that someone’s white nationalism can just mean they “believe white people have the right to be safe” or that “white people have the right to self-determination,” in a total vacuum, with nothing at all having to do with their views on migrants, border enforcement, state/legal infrastructure, racial/ethnic/national identity/exclusionism/supremacy, etc. At the very least, even liberal Zionists agree that you have to support the existence of the state of Israel to be a Zionist. No self-proclaimed Zionist would agree that an anti-Zionist who supports Jews having the right to self-determination (without the state of Israel) and the right to be safe (without the state of Israel) could qualify as a “Zionist” just on those grounds.

What this here is really saying is that they’ve bought into the colonialist security-state logics of so-called “safety” being defined as a privilege a settler-subject deserves to possess at all cost, granted by the exclusion of perceived undesirables from their vicinity, like how white America defines its own “safety” in terms of enforced civility, curation of their private property to remove all perceived blemishes/transgressions to order, defining it against “crimes” and “criminals” and enforced by violent policing. Zionists saying that don’t just mean they support “Jewish self-determination”; they mean they support it and that Jewish self-determination is achieved through the state of Israel. Zionists saying that don’t just mean they support “Jewish safety”; they mean they support it and that Jewish safety requires the state of Israel.

Settler citizens so deeply internalize the notions of safety-as-privilege/privilege-as-safety that they become adopted as a very part of their identities themselves, conflated with their very own selfhood and basic subject position, so that “self”-“determination” to them is synonymous with their possession of a security state, the safety of their privileged “self” at the expense of the “Other.” When you strip away all the window dressing, this core pattern of thinking is something you will find in everyone who aligns themself with settler-colonial ideologies, labels, states, regimes, occupations. Your taking those phrasings at face value reveals a huge blind spot, a refusal to interrogate what lies behind the notions of “safety” and colonial state-right and nationalist exclusion which underlie the fundamental epistemic frameworks of modernity.

You taking Zionist claims about Zionism just being simple support for mere “Jewish safety” or “Jewish self-determination,” that total lack of specification or critical thinking, at face value reminds me a lot of this meme:

So of course, if you call yourself an antiZionist, they’re horrified.

This moral panic is typical of racists and all bigots. Oh the shock. Oh the horror. Clutch the pearls. Gasp, those SJW freaks think this racist thing we’ve so normalized is actually wrong! Who could possibly!!

May Zionists be horrified by anti-Zionism every day. May they experience even a fraction of the horror Palestinians experience from Zionism, actual material violences which actually deny their safety and self-determination and devastate their lives. If someone have built their sense of safety and security over the bodies of the oppressed, they deserve for it to be shaken. If they feel “horror” at the introduction of anti-oppressiveness, that is their problem, an indication that they are deeply wrong, and they should feel it until they fix their attitude, not have anti-oppression activists cater to their fragile sensibilities. Every racist cracker always goes on about their “hurt feelings” from supposedly excessive antiracism to justify hurtful actions against the colonized. Too bad for the racists. White/settler ignorance is not innocence. They are able to be ignorant of the presence or realities of the natives, able to forget, because their predecessors had committed ethnic cleansing in their name. No system of oppression/normalization is unsettled without actions which are, well, unsettling. Keeping up the polite face goes against the entire point.

Racism/colonialism is always based on a power imbalance. The oppressed understand the oppressor perfectly well already, because they have been forced to to survive. They do not need to be “told” or “taught” anything. The lack of understanding is always one-sided. The oppressor does not understand the oppressed’s perspective, and their entire position as the oppressor depends on this willful ignorance. Of course they’re “not going to know” what Zionism and anti-Zionism actually mean, or that an anti-Zionist could actually believe xyz; settler-colonialism is all about whitewashing itself, hiding away the ugly realities, relegating the oppressed perspectives to the realm of the unthinkable. You don’t uncover the ugly realities by letting them stay hidden, you don’t help someone improve by relentlessly coddling them, you have to rip off the bandaid. You don’t move the needle by upholding the comfort of the oppressor in their bigotry because the comfortableness of it is precisely the problem, they’ll keep falling back on the status quo unless something unsettles the situation and makes them have to change. You milquetoast libs keep taking the perspective of the oppressor, keep blatantly disrespecting the Palestinian people and ignoring what they want, can’t even utter “anti-Zionist,” and then act so surprised when some activists get impatient with this charade and do things which are more drastic to bypass the bullshit and get to the goals quicker.

There is no right to be Zionist. Zionists are not entitled to have their space free of self-proclaimed anti-Zionism. Their feelings are not sacred. Pro-Palestinian activism does not have to and should not cater to them. They will always police our words and defend their right to continue saying and believing in and doing offensive shit; that is how oppression operates. Fix your racist entitlement.

I’m just trying to point out a problem I’ve noticed and a way to help.

Fuck off with your condescending bullshit. Nobody needs this kind of garbage “help.” Fuck Israel. Fuck Zionism. Fuck Zionists.

I feel like ppl get bogged down in semantics so let me make it real simple for you. A zionist is someone who supports the state of Israel. Zionism is the belief that a Jewish ethnostate called Israel should be developed in the Levant region (Palestine and Lebanon and Syria) regardless of the existence of Palestine, Syria and Lebanon and their people. When any pro-Palestine person says someone is a Zionist, that's not a synonym for Jewish, nor is another word for "person I don't like". When we call someone a zionist it's because they support the existence of Israel as a colony. And just so we're clear: it does not matter if a zionist says they're sad about Palestinian suffering or they want to "live in peace" with Palestinians because as long as they support the existence of a colonial ethnostate called Israel then they're still doing Zionism. If I came to your house and just started living there and tried to starve you out and torture you so you would leave your house, it wouldn't matter that I felt "sorry" for you because I'm the reason you're suffering at all. That's why when you try and say "well, Neil Druckman says he wants the war to stop" that doesn't matter. He's still a zionist. He still wants Israel to exist as a colonial state which will always be at the expense of Palestinians. Do not fall for liberal Zionists. Get it in your fucking head that there's no "progressive" Zionism because there's no "progressive" way to support a state that necessitates the elimination of whole peoples.