#(for which an American zionist blocked me: why should an American's opinion on this be most important?)

[aeolianblues]

I'm trying not to block people. But there's only so many times I can go 'give people the benefit of the doubt' and then click their blog and what's literally the third or fourth post on their blogs? They talk about middle eastern people like savages who can't control their violent urges. And of course, more than half of them are Americans. After posing for 20 years, the masks that temporarily went up when anti-war activists criticised the American war in the Middle East are slipping, some of you never really believed brown people to be your equals did you? Get the fuck off my blog.

[aterimber]

Hi!

I saw your posts in the tags about deleting all reblogs! I went thru your blog to see what was wrong and it looks like Zionists have been harassing you about antisemitism until you stop talking about Palestine.

In so sorry about that and don't fall for it!!

To clear down things up: nativenews isn't antisemitic. They're pro-Palestine and support a decolonized solution which Zionists HATE and that's why they're saying nativenews in antisemitic. Zionists are calling ANYONE who doesn't support Israel or a 2state solution an "unsafe" person for Jews which doesn't even make sense.

That'd be like if Americans said "you're anti-american and unsafe to my well being because you think native Americans deserve equal rights. Natives obviously just want rights to get revenge on us, how could you possibly suggest supporting them."

That doesn't even make sense and it's obviously just a racist excuse for Americans to keep their privileges over natives right?

Same exact situation is happening.

Jewish Zionists like to pretend Israel is a Jewish state but it isn't. There are Christians and Palestinians and Muslims who live in Israel too. It isn't specifically anti-Semitic to criticize a government, regardless of it's population.

People criticize the USA all the time and who are the only people that get mad about it? Patriots and racists who want to ignore their problems, right? And should we stop talking about those things cuz they're uncomfortable? Course not. They are the Reason we talk about it, right?

Zionists are the same. And the doubt they are planting in you about your voice is their goal. One less voice speaking up for Palestine helps theirs get louder.

Please don't delete your reblogs.

Nothing you've done has helped out Jewish lives in danger JUST because they are Jewish. And that's what antisemitism is.

Antisemitism is not when you have opinions Jewish zionists don't like or reblog from people that Jewish zionists don't like, I promise.

Hi Anon!

Thank-you for the message!

Also, thank-you very much for that explaination. What you said definitely makes sense to me. As I've said, I'm not very knowledgable about what has been happening and was only attempting to help, which it had been pointed out to me that was not what happened.

I'm attempting to learn so I can make informed decisions going forward and listen to the people who I was attempting to help.

To clear things up: I am against murder. Period. (Yes this includes animals, but that's not the point of this post)

If you are pro-murder, I do NOT agree with you. Unfollow me, block me, whatever.

This is why I felt sick when I was told the post I reblogged from NativeNews could possibly get people killed. That is why I went to the extreme lengths of taking down every other post I had reblogged mentioning Israel and Palenstine and wrote the apology post.

I was trying to spread information to stop people from dying, not contribute to it.

[ruminativerabbi]

Learning to Listen

The Israeli-Palestinian dispute has many unique features, by which I mean qualities that it specifically does not share with similar geo-political disputes and which are features particularly of the parties to it. But there are other features that it does share with other disputes between nations or peoples, into which category I would put those aspects of the problem that are specifically not especially unique to the players involved. I suppose there are probably many different aspects to the endless sikhsukh between Arab and Jew in the Holy Land that could be included in that second category, but I think probably the most prominent of them all—and paradoxically both the most difficult to resolve and, in other ways, also the simplest—is the inability both sides show with remarkable regularity to see the people on the other side of the fence at all clearly. Or to hear them when they speak. Or to listen without prejudice to what they wish to say.

There are circles, as I am well aware, in which even the suggestion that the responsibility for the situation as it has evolved to date could or, worse, should be shared by the involved parties is anathema. I have fallen prey to that line of thinking myself. And although I find some scant comfort in the fact that I was in excellent (and famous) company in that regard, the reality of the situation no longer affords anyone who longs for peace in the region the luxury of listening only to his or her own voice. To describe those willing to listen to dissenting opinions as terminally gullible seems beyond childish at this point: it seems counterproductive and morally indefensible to imagine that peace can ever be made between people who are not prepared even formally, let alone intently, to listen to each other and to respond honestly and genuinely to what the other party has to say. It is certainly so that lots of what people say about the Middle East is nonsense, their arguments baseless blather and their positions intellectually and morally indefensible. The problem is that there’s no way to weigh the worth of other people’s opinions without listening to them carefully, and doing so generously and without prejudice. To do that, however, requires that you at least occasionally stop talking yourself. But that inability to fall silent with someone else speaks turns out, more than slightly paradoxically, to be one of the major things Israelis and Palestinians actually do have in common.

All this by way of introducing to you a very interesting book I finished reading earlier this week, Yossi Klein Halevi’s Letters to My Palestinian Neighbor. Published just last month by HarperCollins, the book is remarkable in several different ways and I would like to recommend it as serious, thoughtful summer reading for anyone who wants to understand—and on a particularly intelligent, reasonable plain—the underlying reasons that the Israeli-Palestinian dispute seems so intractable.

Halevi has framed his book as a series of letters to an unidentified neighbor living in Iswiya, the Arab town on the other side of the separation fence that blocks access to French Hill, the modern Israeli neighborhood adjacent to the Mount Scopus campus of the Hebrew University in which Halevi lives. For readers unfamiliar with the geography of Jerusalem, the basic principle is that, with certain famous exceptions, most Arab villages—including ones inside the municipal boundaries of Jerusalem—and the Jewish communities almost adjacent to them are sealed off from each other, if not precisely by law, then by custom: my own apartment in Arnona is not half a mile from the Arab village of Jabel Mukaber, but I’ve never been there and wouldn’t think of going there—it would be unsafe and unwise—and neither do I know anyone who has ever gone there. That’s just how it is. Yet I see Arab families all the time in the shopping malls in Talpiyot, the neighborhood directly to our west, and no one seems to notice or care. It’s all a little hard to explain, but Halevi’s idea—which I think he manages to carry through successfully—is both to notice and to care…and also to imagine that where people shop contiguously and eat at adjacent tables in restaurants, they could also speak to each other honestly and from the heart…if they felt that there was someone actually listening. A little bit, he’s tilting at windmills. But he’s also taken the remarkable step of having his entire book—this book that I’m writing to you about—translated into Arabic and posted for free download on a website that should be easily accessible to all Israeli and Palestinian Arabs.

The author writes frankly and from the heart. To the Palestinians, he offers the clear message that they are doing themselves a disservice and more or less guaranteeing that almost no Israelis will listen seriously (or even at all, really), when they speak as though the Jewish connection to the Land of Israel began in the nineteenth century and refuse on principle to take the preceding millennia into account, millennia which included centuries of Jewish autonomy in that place and of ongoing spiritual, emotional, and intellectual attachment to it. Indeed, when Palestinian leaders insist—passionately but ridiculously—that the entire Bible is a falsification of history, that there never was a Temple on the Temple Mount, that the Davidic kingdom never existed, that all the archeological evidence that ties the Jewish people to the Land of Israel is bogus and phony, they are more or less guaranteeing that no Israeli with any sense of pride in his or her nation will still be listening after the first sentence or two. But when Israelis, and particularly religious Israelis, wave away the Palestinians as mere interlopers because their ancestors only arrived on the scene a mere twelve centuries ago, they are guaranteeing no less surely that no thoughtful Palestinian born in that place and whose whole sense of identity is tied to his or her national sense of self is going to continue listening after the first few words either.

In other words, what both sides have accomplished magnificently is the discovery and honing of precisely the right kind of code words to use so as to be able to guarantee that no one will actually be listening when you finally do stand up to speak.

Halevi addresses painful, difficult topics in the course of his letters to his unidentified neighbor across the security fence. He talks openly—and passionately—about the way that terrorism has taken its toll not only on the specific individuals who have died as the result of Palestinian terror attacks, but on the national consciousness of Israelis as well. And he also writes, in my opinion remarkably openly, about the specific reasons so many Israelis do not feel themselves able to believe truly that their Palestinian neighbors wish to live in peace. Indeed, when he asks, not guilelessly but sharply and acidulously, why the Palestinians have turned down so many different offers of statehood—at Camp David and at Oslo, but also on other occasions as well—if they truly wish to negotiate a settlement and get on with the work of nation building, he is merely doing his part to hold up his end of the dialogue honestly and candidly.

One review I read suggested that the best way to read this book would be first to read an entirely different one: Hillel Halkin’s Letters to an American Jewish Friend, published in 1977 and still in print. I was in my final year at JTS when that book came out and I remember reading it and feeling both inspired by its argument, yet unjustly marginalized by its conclusions. The book angered me—which I’m sure was exactly the response the author hoped to provoke—but also challenged me to revisit my feelings about living in the diaspora and about my personal relationship to Israel. I recommend the book highly to all my readers, however: here is a truly passionate argument for aliyah that all who wish truly honestly to engage with the Zionist ideal should read.  

For most, it will not be pleasant reading. But political writing at its best is not meant to soothe, but to irritate—somewhat in the way sand irritates oysters into producing pearls—and to allow readers to confront their complacency and address the logical flaws or moral sloppiness in the way they approach the philosophical or political issues that engage them the most passionately. I see that reviewer’s point and second the motion: to read those two books, one after the other, would truly to engage with the twin axes of Israel life: the x-axis of Jewishness which connects Israelis with Jews in all the lands of our dispersion, and the y-axis of rootedness in the land which ties Israelis, whether they like it or not, to the Palestinians who self-define in terms of their own rootedness in that same soil. And for those of us whose hearts beat with Israel, that kind of engagement with the grid can only produce insight into what we all understand is a very complicated situation.  Anna Porter, who wrote a very intelligent review of Halevi’s book for the Toronto newspaper, The Globe and Mail (click here to read it), wraps up her appraisal by noting that “Israel is a very complicated country.” That, surely, we can all agree is true. But books like Halevi’s are attempts to shed more light than heat on the precise issues that make life in the Holy Land so complicated…and to inspire a dialogue, for once, that is rooted in reality rather than rhetoric.

Since I am not a Palestinian, I am presumably not the intended audience for a book entitled “Letters to My Palestinian Neighbor.” Nor will the large majority of people reading this be. Nonetheless, I recommend this to you all wholeheartedly as an opportunity to look out at the world, and the Middle East in particular, through Yossi Klein Halevi’s eyes. Particularly for young people eager to understand their parents’ deep commitment to Israel but unsure of where they personally stand, this book will be an eye-opening, inspiring read.

[marmara]

Opinion 544 OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR Confessions of a Digital Nazi Hunter Foto Credit: Bryan Thomas for The New York Times By Yair Rosenberg Dec. 27, 2017 Like many Jewish journalists who reported on Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, I spent the 2016 election being harassed by a motley crew of internet racists who coalesced around the future president. They sent me threats, photoshopped me into gas chambers and hurled an uncreative array of anti-Semitic slurs my way. A study by the Anti-Defamation League found that I’d received the second-most abuse of any Jewish journalist on Twitter during the campaign cycle. My parents didn’t raise me to be No. 2; fortunately, there’s always 2020. As a result, I’ve become something of an unintentional expert on alt-right trolls and their tactics. For the most part, these characters are largely laughable — sad, angry men hiding behind images of cartoon frogs, deathly afraid that their employers will uncover their online antics. But there are also more insidious individuals, whose digital skulduggery can be more consequential than the occasional bigoted bromide. And so last November, in the wake of Trump’s victory, I decided to turn the tables on them. My target? Impersonator trolls. You probably haven’t heard of these trolls, but that is precisely why they are so pernicious. These bigots are not content to harass Jews and other minorities on Twitter; they seek to assume their identities and then defame them. The con goes like this: The impersonator lifts an online photo of a Jew, Muslim, African-American or other minority — typically one with clear identifying markers, like a yarmulke-clad Hasid or a woman in hijab. Using that picture as a Twitter avatar, the bigot then adds ethnic and progressive descriptors to the bio: “Jewish,” “Zionist,” “Muslim,” “enemy of the alt-right.” An impersonator troll creates a fake account (left, bottom) appropriating the image of Ephraim Mirvis (right), Chief Rabbi of the United Kingdom. False identity forged, the trolls then insert themselves into conversations with high-profile Twitter users — conversations that are often seen by tens of thousands of followers — and proceed to say horrifically racist things. You have 1 free article remaining. Subscribe to The Times In this manner, unsuspecting readers glancing through their feed are given the impression that someone who looks like, say, a religious Jew or Muslim is outlandishly bigoted. Thus, an entire community is defamed. An impersonator troll offers racist responses to stories tweeted by several major publications. This deception is relatively simple, but it is disturbingly effective. Most casual users aren’t likely to reverse image-search a troll’s avatar to see if it was stolen from someone else or peruse the account’s other tweets and realize that it only shares racist material. Twitter lacks the cultural competency to police such impersonators, even if it were interested in doing so. So I set out to unmask them. I asked my own Twitter followers whether it might be possible to create a bot that would reply to these impostors and expose their true nature to any users they tried to fool. Neal Chandra, a talented developer in San Francisco whom I’ve never met, replied, “I can try to throw something together this evening.” And so, after a week of testing, Impostor Buster was born. Using a crowdsourced database of impersonator accounts, carefully curated by us to avoid any false positives, the bot patrolled Twitter and interjected whenever impostors tried to insinuate themselves into a discussion. Within days, our golem for the digital age had become a runaway success, garnering thousands of followers and numerous press write-ups. Most important, we received countless thank-yous from alerted would-be victims. The impersonator trolls seethed. Some tried changing their user names to evade the bot (it didn’t work). Others simply reverted to their openly neo-Nazi personas. A few even tried to impersonate the bot, which was vastly preferable from our perspective and rather amusing. Then the problems began — but not from where you might expect. The Nazis realized they couldn’t beat the bot, so they started mass-reporting it to Twitter for “harassment.” Just as they duplicitously cast themselves as minorities, they disingenuously recast our response to their ongoing abuse as harassment. Twitter sided with the Nazis. In April, the service suspended Impostor Buster without explanation and reinstated it only after being contacted by the ADL’s cyber-hate team. Over the next few months, we fine-tuned the bot to reduce its tweets and avoid tripping any of Twitter’s alarms. As the trolls continued to report the bot to no avail, we thought the problem was resolved. But we were wrong. This month, Twitter suspended the bot again, and this time refused to revive it. The company’s justifications were both entirely accurate and utterly absurd. “A large number of people have blocked you in response to high volumes of untargeted, unsolicited, or duplicative content or engagements from your account,” we were informed. This was true; Impostor Buster had been blocked by many neo-Nazis. “A large number of spam complaints have been filed against you.” Yes, by neo-Nazis. “You send large numbers of unsolicited replies or mentions.” Yes, to neo-Nazis. The real threat, apparently, was not these trolls — who today continue to roam the platform unchallenged — but our effort to combat them. The great irony of this whole affair is that Impostor Buster was doing Twitter’s job for it. The platform has been notoriously prone to abuse since its inception and has struggled to curb it. Rather than asking Twitter to provide a top-down solution, however, we created a bottom-up one. We used Twitter’s tools to police itself — until Twitter fired the sheriff. If the platform is going to rescue itself from the trolls, it will need to foster these efforts, not fight them. Given the terabytes of data uploaded daily to platforms like Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and Instagram, it is simply unfeasible to expect them to effectively regulate their content. It is also unwise, because we should not trust giant corporations governed by profit motives rather than the public interest to decide what we can and cannot say on the internet. But perhaps more important, the top-down approach is wrong because it assumes that the problem of bigotry and abuse is something we can simply sweep under the rug through better censorship, rather than by building a better online community that actively sidelines bigots and abusers through self-policing and collective norms. Ultimately, the only way to fix social media is through nurturing a healthier culture below, not imposing diktats from above. The vast majority of users are not racists and can be mobilized through communal projects like Impostor Buster — a bot built by two people on different coasts using a database compiled by users around the world — to marginalize those who are. The problem with Twitter, in other words, wasn’t too much Impostor Buster. It was too little. The sooner companies like Twitter understand this, the better off we’ll be. Yair Rosenberg (@Yair_Rosenberg) is a senior writer at Tablet Magazine. Follow The New York Times Opinion section onFacebook and Twitter (@NYTopinion), and sign up for the Opinion Today newsletter.