#National Jewish Historical Society

[whereserpentswalk]

The nazis that you see in movies are as much a historical fantasy as vikings with horned helmets and samurai cutting people in half.

The nazis were not some vague evil that wanted to hurt people for the sake of hurting them. They had specific goals which furthered a far right agenda, and they wanted to do harm to very specific groups, (largely slavs, jews, Romani, queer people, communists/leftists, and disabled people.)

The nazis didn't use soldiers in creepy gas masks as their main imagery that they sold to the german people, they used blond haired blue eyed families. Nor did they stand up on podiums saying that would wage an endless and brutal war, they gave speeches about protecting white Christian society from degenerates just like how conservatives do today.

Nazis weren't atheists or pagans. They were deeply Christian and Christianity was part of their ideology just like it is for modern conservatives. They spoke at lengths about defending their Christian nation from godless leftism. The ones who hated the catholic church hated it for protestant reasons. Nazi occultism was fringe within the party and never expected to become mainstream, and those occultists were still Christian, none of them ever claimed to be Satanists or Asatru.

Nazis were also not queer or disabled. They killed those groups, before they had a chance to kill almost anyone else actually. Despite the amount of disabled nazis or queer/queer coded nazis you'll see in movies and on TV, in reality they were very cishet and very able bodied. There was one high ranking nazi early on who was gay and the other nazis killed him for that. Saying the nazis were gay or disabled makes about as much sense as saying they were Jewish.

The nazis weren't mentally ill. As previously mentioned they hated disabled people, and this unquestionably included anyone neurodivergent. When the surviving nazi war criminals were given psychological tests after the war, they were shown to be some of the most neurotypical people out there.

The nazis weren't socialists. Full stop. They hated socialists. They got elected on hating socialists. They killed socialists. Hating all forms of lefitsm was a big part of their ideology, and especially a big part of how they sold themselves.

The nazis were not the supervillians you see on screen, not because they didn't do horrible things in real life, they most certainly did, but because they weren't that vague apolitical evil that exists for white American action heros to fight. They did horrible things because they had a right wing authoritarian political ideology, an ideology that is fundamentally the same as what most of the modern right wing believes.

[stephobrien]

Is your pro-Palestine activism hurting innocent people? Here's how to avoid that.

Note: If you prefer plain text, you can read the plain text version here.

Over the last few days, I’ve had conversations with several Jewish people who told me how hurt and scared they are right now.

To my great regret, some of that pain came from a poorly-thought-out post of mine, which – while not ill-intentioned – WAS hurtful.

And a lot of it came from cruelty they’d experienced at the hands of people who claim to be advocating for Palestine, but are using the very real plight of innocent Palestinians to harm equally innocent Jewish people.

Y’all, we need to do better. (Yes, “we” definitely includes me; this is in no small part a “learn from my fail” post, and also a “making amends” post. Some of these are mistakes I’ve made in the past.)

So if you’re an advocate for Palestine who wants to make sure that your defense of one group of vulnerable people doesn’t harm another, here are some important things to do or keep in mind:

Ask yourself if you’re applying a standard to one group that you aren’t applying to another.

Would you want all white Americans or Canadians to be expelled from America or Canada?

Do you want all Jewish people to be expelled from Israel, as opposed to finding a way to live alongside Palestinian Arabs in peace?

If the answer to those two questions is different, ask yourself WHY.

Do you want to be held responsible for the actions of your nation’s army or government? No? Then don’t hold innocent Jewish people, or Israelis in general (whether Jewish or otherwise), responsible for the actions of the Israeli army and government.

On that subject, be wary of condemning all Israeli people for the actions of the IDF. Large-scale tactical decisions are made by the top brass. Service is compulsory, and very few can reasonably get out of service.

Blaming all Israelis for the military’s actions is like blaming all Vietnam vets for the horrors in Vietnam. They’re not calling the shots. They aren’t Nazis running concentration camps. They are carrying out military operations that SHOULD be criticized.

And do not compare them or ANY JEWISH PERSON to Nazis in general. It is Jewish cultural trauma and not outsiders’ to use against them.

Don’t infuse legitimate criticism with antisemitism.

By all means, spread the word about the crimes committed by the Israeli army and government, and the complicity of their allies. Criticize the people responsible for committing and enabling atrocities.

But if you imply that they’re committing those crimes because they’re Jewish, or because Jewish people have special privileges, then you’re straying into antisemitic territory.

Criticize the crime, not the group. If you believe that collective punishment is wrong, don’t do it yourself.

And do your best to use words that apply directly to the situation, rather than the historical terms for situations with similar features. For example, use “segregation,” “oppression,” or “subjugation,” not “Holocaust” or “Jim Crow.” These other historical events are not the cultural property of Jews OR Palestinians, but also have their own nuances and struggles and historical contexts.

Also, blaming other world events on Jewish people or making Jewish people associated with them (for instance, some people falsely blame Jewish people for the African slave trade) is a key feature of how antisemitism functions.

Please, by all means, be specific and detailed in your critiques. But keep them focused on the current political actors – not other peoples’ or nations’ political or cultural histories and traumas.

Be prepared to accept criticism.

You probably already know that society is infused with a wide array of bigotries, and that people growing up in that environment tend to absorb those beliefs without even realizing it. Antisemitism is no exception.

What that means is, there’s a very real chance that you will screw up, and get called out on it, as I so recently did.

If that happens, please be willing to learn and adapt. If you can educate yourself about the suffering and needs of Palestinians, you can do the same for Jewish people.

Understand that the people you hurt aren’t obligated to baby you. Give them room to be angry.

After I made a post that inadvertently hurt people, some were nice about it, and others weren’t. Some outright insulted my morals and intelligence.

And I had to accept that I’d earned that from them.

I’d hurt them, and they weren’t obligated to be more careful with my feelings than I had been with theirs.

They weren’t obligated to forgive me, trust me, or stop being mad at me right away.

I’ll admit, there were moments when I got defensive. I shouldn’t have. And I encourage you to try not to, if you screw up and hurt people.

I know that’s hard, but it’s important. Getting defensive only tells people you care more about doubling down on your mistake than you do about healing the hurt it caused.

Instead, acknowledge that they have a right to be angry, apologize for the way you hurt them, and try to make amends, while understanding that they don’t owe you trust or forgiveness.

Be aware that some antisemites are using legitimate complaints to “Trojan horse” antisemitism into leftist spaces.

This is a really easy stumbling block to trip over, because most people probably don’t look at every post a creator makes before sharing the one they’re looking at right now.

I recently shared a video that called out some of the Likud and IDF’s atrocities and hypocrisy, and that also noted that many Jewish people are wonderful members of their communities.

I was later informed that, while that video in particular seemed reasonable, the creator behind it is frequently antisemitic.

I deleted the post, and blocked the creator. I encourage you to do the same if it’s brought to your attention that you’ve been ‘Trojan horse’d.

EDIT: Important note about antisemitism in leftist spaces:

While it's true that some blatant antisemites are using seemingly reasonable posts to get their foot in the door of leftist spaces, it's also true that a lot of antisemitism already exists inside those spaces.

This antisemitism is often dressed up in progressive-sounding language, but nonetheless singles Jewish people and places out in ways that aren't applied equally to other groups, or that label Jewish people in ways that portray them as acceptable targets.

If you want to see some specific examples, so you can have a better idea of what to keep an eye out for, I suggest reading this excellent reblog of this post.

Fact-check your doubts about antisemitism.

Depending on which parts of the internet you look at, you’ve probably seen people accused of antisemitism because they complained about the Likud and/or IDF’s actions. So you might be primed to be wary, or feel unsure of how to tell what counts as real antisemitism.

But that doesn’t mean antisemitism isn’t a very real, widespread, and harmful problem. And it doesn’t mean many or even most Jewish people are lying to you or being overly sensitive.

So if someone says something is antisemitic, and you aren’t sure, I encourage you to:

A. Look up the action or thing in question, including its history. Is there an antisemitic history or connotation you aren’t aware of? For best results, include “antisemitic” in your search query, in quotes.

B. Understand that some things, while not inherently antisemitic, have been used by antisemites often enough that Jewish people are understandably wary of them. Schrodinger’s antisemitism, if you will.

C. Ask Jewish people WHO HAVE OFFERED TO HELP EDUCATE YOU. Emphasis on WHO HAVE OFFERED. Random Jewish people aren’t obligated to give you their time and emotional energy, or to educate you – especially on subjects that are scary or painful for them.

@edenfenixblogs has kindly offered her inbox to those who are genuinely trying to learn and do better, and I’ve found her to be very kind, patient, reasonable, and fair-minded.

Understand that this is URGENTLY NEEDED.

In one of my conversations with a Jewish person who’d called me out, they said this was the most productive conversation they’d had with a person with a Palestinian flag in their profile.

THIS IS NOT OKAY.

I didn’t do anything special. All I did was listen, apologize for my mistakes, and learn.

Yes, it feels good to be acknowledged. But I feel like I’ve been praised for peeing IN the toilet, instead of beside it.

Apologizing, learning, and making amends after you hurt people shouldn’t be “the most reasonable thing I’ve heard from a person with a Palestinian flag pfp.”

It should be BASIC DECENCY.

And the fact that it’s apparently so uncommon should tell you how much unnecessary stress and fear Jewish people have been living with because of people who consider themselves defenders of human rights.

By all means, be angry at the Likud, the IDF, and the politicians, reporters, and specific media outlets who choose to enable and cover up for them.

But direct that anger toward the people who deserve it and are in a position to do something about it, not random people who simply happen to be Jewish, or who don’t want millions of people to be turned into refugees when less violent methods of achieving freedom and rights for Palestinians are available.

Stop peeing beside the toilet, people.

[bill-the-dog-for-the-check]

I don't think goyim properly understand the fear and change that the wave of antisemitism currently taking place in the wake of the October 7th massacre has induced in the Jewish community.

In a wide-lens view, Jews have become a 1000% more wary and introspective. This isn't limited to diaspora Jews--the headlines pouring out of Israel until October 7th have been of division, polarization, and conflict. Conflict over the 2018 Nation-State Law. Over Bibi's premiership. Over the judicial reform laws. Over the Orthodox Rabbinate. Over this. Over that.

But Israeli society is more unified than ever right now. The judicial reform laws were shelved shortly after the war began and the protests ended on October 8th. Some of it is the rally around the flag effect, yes, and will probably fade as time passes--politics never stops--but the era of Israelis being at one another's throats? Of forgetting that we are all one people and we are all under attack? Gone. It died on October 7th.

In the Diaspora, Jews are once again asking themselves the question--will I need to flee? Guys, a fifth of Gen Z--my generation, that I attend university with--believes the Holocaust was a myth. Two thirds of them think Jews are oppressors. That's terrifying. And the reason we don't take comfort in people saying, 'They're kids with no political power.' is that that won't be true forever. Today's slacktivists who casually say that Israel has no right to exist are tomorrows lawmakers. They will grow up and set policy.

We don't know if they'll grow out of it. I pray to HaShem that they will, but how do I know if they will?

And that's tomorrow's world. Today's world is already bad enough. I don't wear my Star of David necklace to the self-defense classes I've started taking because being surrounded by burly dudes learning how to fight people better isn't a great place to potentially learn that I'm surrounded by antisemites.

Jews--in the year 2024--are being doxxed, seen their homes and synagogues vandalized and threatened, walk past Palestine protests screaming for the death of Zionists, and antisemitism has increased in the United States alone by more than 400%. It's worse elsewhere--Turkish shop owners have been barring Jews from their stores and France has seen antisemitic incidents increase by 1000%. Jews have been leaving social media sites like Tumblr, Reddit, Tik Tok, and Twitter in droves, chased away by the constant, unceasing stream of anti-Jewish hate.

Gentiles need to understand that their words and actions have very real consequences. Jews are not dumb. We're not imagining things. We aren't 'getting our just desserts'. Our fears are grounded not only by historical context but by our current, everyday, lived realities. To gentiles, reading 'antisemitism has gone up by x percent' is a factoid. To us, it is a serious threat and a deep concern.

EDIT: I'm tired of pro-Palestine people sharing this post and using it to back their agenda. You are not welcome to use my experiences to suit your agenda. I am a Zionist! This post is Zionist! Stop taking my words from me and using it against my people.

[determinate-negation]

maybe I am wrong but I think there's an interesting paradox in zionism's denial of the diaspora and it's appropriation of the diaspora because it can't form a culture without taking from the diaspora itself

its a paradox of zionism in general, from its start its been a movement that took cultural and political influence from its surroundings– being 19th century europe– its a colonial and nationalist project modeled after other colonial and nationalist european projects, yet tries to portray itself as indigenous. part of this is from shifts in political atmosphere and self-perception of zionism over the past 100 years. but there is an 'israeli culture' you can point to that is not taken from the diaspora but rather an inversion of what it conceives the diaspora to be, for the diaspora to be seen as weak, sickly, overly intellectual, cosmopolitan and disconnected from the land, thus israeli culture is more militaristic, chauvinistic, with an emphasis on the masculine, fetishizing labor and agricultural work. the paradox is this cultural conception is basically lacking everything that made jewish diaspora culture interesting and leave a long lasting mark on western history, jewish culture as a minority culture in particular. i think the cultural output of colonial or imperial nations mostly interested in projecting strength and militarism is generally poor, chauvinistic, and easily forgotten because it lacks the qualities that make particular things significant historically artistically etc. like look at the cultural atmosphere of the weimar republic, or even imperial germany (after relative) jewish emancipation and the influence of minority cultures vs cultural production in the nazi period and afterwards, or american settler culture in the colonial period vs cultural forms created by oppressed people in america. if you are interested more specifically in israels conception of itself as like a negation of the diaspora the artist eli valley made a cartoon about this, israel man and diaspora boy. israeli society historically tried to erase diaspora culture within israel, like discouraging people from speaking yiddish and banning yiddish cultural production. but also needed to construct a positive cultural identity (i dont mean positive to mean good, just like as in creating something rather than negating or destroying) and appropriated palestinian culture, through taking indigenous names, food, etc. if you want to read about this process in israel as well as other settler colonies like australia and canada and the us the article settler colonialism and the elimination of the native by patrick wolfe is a pretty significant article. i would say as far as i can tell israeli culture today seems to be mostly predicated on this, not appropriation of diaspora jewish culture, which they seem to look down on generally. but theres not much interest in israeli literature or art worldwide, besides in germany (lol), and perhaps their failure to create anything worthwhile is part of why israeli archival and academic institutions seek to claim ownership of diaspora jewish culture. part of it is just to legitimize themselves and give themselves prestige as well i think

[germiyahu]

I also don't like the assertion that Jews are trying to conflate "criticism of Israel with antisemitism/the Israeli state with Jewishness as a whole" because you... YOU... did that first and you do it more easily than you breathe.

You interrogate every complaint of antisemitism, just to make sure it's not actually whining about someone being mean to Israel. You investigate the person's social media history to make sure they're not a Zionist. You turn around and act so enlightened and wise when you say "Right because Netanyahu wants Jewish people to think criticism of Israel is antisemitic, and he wants Jewish people to think that they have to have ties to Israel and that Israel is the only place they'll feel safe, that plays right into his hands," like you're doing this for Jewish people's benefit. Like you're not one of the people making Jews feel unsafe.

The fact of the matter is that Israel is intrinsically Jewish. By design yes. But also for the fact that it's just logically true? Most Israelis are Jewish. Most Diaspora Jews have friends and family in Israel. It's not a function of flags or national anthems. It's a function of people. Saying "Well conflating Israel with the idea of Jewishness is antisemitic," changes nothing about that. It's words with no value. It's empty air. Because what have you done to advocate for Diaspora Jewry and make them feel like they're not subordinate to Israel? What have you done to assure them that your disdain for a country that most of them have personal familial and cultural ties to is not motivated by bigotry? What have you done to include them and center their safety when advocating against Israel's policies?

Yes, the more people are antisemitic and weird about Israel to Diaspora Jews' faces, the more of them will gravitate closer to Israel. But that's not the point. The point is that if your criticisms of Israel were normal, we wouldn't have a problem. 99% of Diaspora Jews would join you. But you tell them they're not allowed to defend Israel in any context and they're not allowed to defend themselves when your "criticism" of Israel harms them. You don't want to admit that these can overlap. You just want them to silently add a rubber stamp of approval of whatever you say or they can leave.

It's clear you don't see Jews as a marginalized group. This is not how Leftists treat marginalized groups. This is how they treat the oppressor group, the dominant group. Diaspora Jews are at best an ally to Palestinian liberation. Because you don't see them as different from Israelis, you see them as the group that benefits from the oppression of Palestinians, not as a group that has nothing to do with Palestine and is historically and contemporarily marginalized by Western society, the society you live in.

And yet for all you conflate Diaspora and Israeli Jews you clearly want to keep Israel and the Diaspora divided, isolated from each other. They can't show solidarity with one another because that's (((ZIONIST COLLUSION))) and confirmation of a media controlled conspiracy or something. You want Diaspora Jews under your thumb and you want Israeli Jews dead. You're not as subtle as you think you are.

[beardedmrbean]

I bet the last thing Bernie Sanders expected upon his arrival in Ireland and Britain was to be met by angry protesters—to find himself heckled and damned as a sellout by the kind of radicals who would have been shouting his praises just six months ago. And yet that is what happened: Some of Britain's Bernie Bros have morphed into Bernie bashers.

Why? Because he refuses to describe Israel's war on Hamas as a "genocide" and he doesn't approve of the boycott, divestment, and sanctions movement against Israel.

Quick—cast him out. Unperson him. He has ventured outside the parameters of acceptable Left-wing thought and must be punished.

It all kicked off in Dublin. Senator Sanders, who is on these isles to promote his book, Why It's OK To Be Angry About Capitalism, was speaking at University College Dublin. A group of pro-Palestine protesters assembled at the entrance to the venue, all wearing the uniform of the virtuous: a keffiyeh. "It's OK to be angry about capitalism, what about Zionism?" they chanted.

It got heated inside, too. Sanders was interrupted by audience members. "Resistance is an obligation in the face of occupation!" one shouted. "Occupation is terrorism!" yelled another.

Sanders kept his cool with his reply: "Good slogan, but slogans are not solutions," he said.

It continued at Trinity College the next day. Sanders was in conversation with the Irish journalist Fintan O'Toole. Outside, a small but noisy gaggle of anti-Israel agitators displayed a banner that said: "Boycott Apartheid Israel."

"Free Palestine!" they chanted. (Deliciously, a woman who was queuing for the Sanders event bellowed "from Hamas!" every time they said it.)

Again, Sanders was heckled by hotheads. "Ceasefire now!" they shouted. At one point, in the words of Trinity News, Sanders "threw up his right arm in frustration and looked at O'Toole, as if to ask him what would be done."

It is little wonder he felt frustrated. Sanders was there to talk about capitalism, yet angry youths kept badgering him about Zionism. He is used to a fawning response from Socialist twentysomethings, and yet now some were effectively accusing him of being complicit in a "genocide." It's quite the downfall for one of the West's best-known leftists.

The turn on Bernie is underpinned by a belief that he is too soft on Israel. The radical Left will never forgive him for initially supporting Israel's war on Hamas. Even his more recent position—he now says there should be a ceasefire—is not good enough for these people, who seem to measure an individual's moral worth by how much he hates the Jewish State.

They want Bernie to say the G-word. They want him to damn Israel as uniquely barbarous. They want him to agree with them that it is right and proper to single Israel out for boycotts and sanctions.

In short, they want him to fall into line. They want him to bend the knee to their Israelophobic ideology.

These illiberal demands on Bernie to bow down to correct-think continued when he arrived in the U.K. A group of communists protested against him in Liverpool. Normally, Sanders would have been shown only love in a historically radical city like Liverpool, said the Liverpool Echo, but this time, "the atmosphere was different," for one simple reason: "his refusal to brand Israel's actions in Gaza as 'genocide'."

Sanders' resistance of the G-word haunted him in his media interviews, too. Ash Sarkar of Novara Media, a key outlet of Britain's bourgeois Left, asked him three times if he would call Israel's war on Hamas a "genocide." He refused and it went viral. Armies of ersrtwhile Bernie fans damned him as a "genocide denier."

There is something quite nauseating in this spectacle of an elderly Jewish man being pressured to denounce the world's only Jewish State as genocidal. Millennial Gentiles who want to trend online might be happy to throw around the G-word. But Senator Sanders, who lost family in the Holocaust, clearly has a deeper moral and historical understanding of what genocide is. And it seems he is not willing to sacrifice that understanding at the altar of retweets or an easy ride.

Good for him.

Sanders' father was born in Poland, where most of his family were exterminated by the Nazis. Sanders is a son of the Shoah, a descendant of survivors of the greatest crime in history. To subject him to the modern equivalent of a showtrial in which you demand that he scream "Genocide!" at Israel feels unconscionable. As does branding him a "genocide denier."

Why won't he call Israel's war on Hamas a "genocide"? Maybe, says a writer for the Jewish Chronicle, it's because he lost so much of his family to Hitler's gas chambers and therefore he "knows what a genocide is, what a war crime is." He knows that while the war in Gaza, a war started by Hamas, is "horrible," to use his word, it cannot in any way be compared to the Nazis' conscious efforts to vaporize an entire ethnic group.

There has been a Inquisition vibe to some of the Bernie-bashing in Britain. At times it has felt cruel. The sight of fashionable, privileged Israel-bashers haranguing a man who will have heard stories from his own father about the genocidal mania of the Nazis has come across like Jew-taunting rather than political critique.

More broadly, this unseemly episode gives us a glimpse into the authoritarian impulses behind the Left's obsessive opposition to Israel. Israelophobia, it seems, is less a rational political stance than a borderline religious conviction. There are true believers, who dutifully repeat the G-word like a mantra, and sinful outliers, who refuse to treat Israel as uniquely "problematic."

One's moral fitness for radical society is increasingly judged by one's willingness to treat Israel as the most wicked nation in existence. The dangers of making hostility to the Jewish State a requirement of being a Good Leftist should be clear to everyone.

Sanders is wise to resist this tyrannical zeitgeist, and to say what he believes rather than what he believes will be popular.

Brendan O'Neill is the chief political writer of spiked. His new book, A Heretic's Manifesto: Essays on the Unsayable, is available now.

The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.

[gothhabiba]

For the Zionist movement going as far back as the early 20th century, the construction of a food culture mirrored that of a nation. It was meant to breathe into the Zionist identity in Palestine a sense of historical connection to the land.

In an effort to establish themselves as the "natives", European Jewish settlers adopted the cultural characteristics and customs of Palestine’s local population.

[...] [B]eginning in the 1920s, Jewish settlers embraced the culinary symbols and practices of the native Palestinians. The list was extensive, from Sabra (from the Arabic sabr, prickly pear, appropriated to mean the "new Jew" in Palestine) to Jaffa oranges, all the way to falafel, tahini and hummus. All are representative of the Palestinian production cycle, life and culture. 

Unlike European Zionists, Palestinians could anchor their national identity in an existing society that, among other things, had its own cuisine and was deeply entwined with the region’s culture and history. 

That provided Zionism with a set of native recipes - literally - to facilitate the construction of an "indigenous identity" for European Jews with varied cultural backgrounds, none of which organically linked to the region. 

A settler-colonial endeavour, the Zionist notion of "nativisation" inevitably changed from adopting the local culture, including the food, to claiming it as its own. 

In the first Zionist cookbooks from the 1930s onwards, Palestinian dishes were referred to as "Israeli". When the evidence was lacking, as always is, they were attributed to Mizrahi Jews who arrived in the Zionist state from Arab countries.   

To establish historical legitimacy, some of the culinary appropriation was justified as another "return". The return this time is not only to the so-called ancestral land of Eretz Yisrael after two millennia of exile, but to the ancient Jewish/Biblical customs that Palestinian Arabs have preserved since the 6th century. 

For instance, hummus, goes the claim, was an ancient Biblical dish and has roots in the Biblical words hamits and himtsa (chickpeas). The words, however, are likely a reference to a blend of fermented chickpeas used as animal fodder in ancient Canaan.    

Moving from adopting the local culture to appropriating it could not have been done without the denial of the culture’s originators.

Native Palestinians were erased both physically and symbolically from the Jewish state’s collective memory and public spaces.

Those who resisted the erasure and remained in their land now face dispersion and control. 

As such, the acknowledgement of a rooted Palestinian culture, let alone admitting that Zionism needed that culture to build a separate political entity and identity in Palestine, is threatening to Israel’s assumed historical entitlement and claims of indigeneity.

That dynamic has also created a painful paradox where the Zionist superior and racist attitude towards Palestinians had to go hand in hand with the adoption of their "inferior" culture, including their local cuisine.  

— Emad Moussa, "The politics of hummus: Israel's search for cultural identity," 2023.

[jewish-sideblog]

What is Zionism? What is anti-Zionism? These are genuine, serious questions, because everybody seems to have a different answer and those different answers are causing a lot of trouble.

Zionism used to have a clear message. “The ethnic group of the Jewish people should have the right to self-determination in our own country.” That was it. Theodor Herzl didn’t even specify that the country in question should be based in our historical homeland. At the time, anti-Zionism was simply a clear opposition to the ideal of Jewish self-determination.

Now Israel does exist. It’s now a fact, not a hope. So what does Zionism look like now? Some people think it means “Some kind of Jewish state should continue to exist,” and some people think it means “All Palestinians should die.” There are a million different interpretations of modern Zionism between those two extremes.

Revisionist Greater Israel Zionists want Israel conquer and expand, eventually taking over the entire Levant. Labor Zionists prefer a peace solution with Palestinians and Arab nations, and want to establish a socialist Jewish worker’s community in Israel. Christian Zionists want all the Jews in the world to go to Jerusalem so that Christ can come back and smite us all for being nonbelievers. Reform Zionists want to establish a more tolerant, inclusive, and pluralistic society for all within Israel. Is opposition to any of those ideologies “anti-Zionism”? I think it would be difficult to fully agree or fully disagree with every single one of those movements. Many of them contradict each other. Plenty forms of Zionism are even antithetical to each other.

It’s far simpler for the undereducated who aren’t connected to the people or the land to define Zionism as “Jews who support the genocide of Palestinians” and define anti-Zionism as “Any and all support for Palestinians”. But that’s exactly the mentality that leads ostensible leftists to parrot actual Nazi propaganda and recycle ancient antisemitism.

There are similar issues to defining Zionism as “Not wanting the all Jews in Israel to be mass-slaughtered by Arab supremacists” and defining anti-Zionism as “Wanting the all Jews in Israel to be mass slaughtered by Arab supremacists”. That mentality leads to unfair and violent practical treatment of Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank, and it leads to unfair conceptions of what Palestinian self-determination means to those living abroad.

Both Zionism and anti-Zionism are being used as tools for political gain. Both have been used as tools to justify death, persecution, and oppression. Zionists cannot erase the overwhelming number of Islamophobic Christian supremacists that identify with and act in the name of “Zionism”. And anti-Zionists cannot erase the overwhelming number of antisemitic supremacist groups that identify with and act in the name of “anti-Zionism”.

So genuinely— and I know I’m inviting a flame war here— what is Zionism to you? What is anti-Zionism to you? I honestly believe that most people are decent-minded, and that those who are decent-minded believe in peace and self-determination for all the native peoples in the Levant. And I think we can come to more meaningful solutions when we have genuine conversations with each other and better understand how the terminology is failing us.

[probablyasocialecologist]

There are several historical contexts for what is going on now in Israel-Palestine that cannot be ignored. The wider historical context goes back to the mid-19th century, when evangelical Christianity in the West turned the idea of the “return of the Jews” into a religious millennial imperative and advocated the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine as part of the steps that would lead to the resurrection of the dead, the return of the Messiah, and the end of time. Theology became policy toward the end of the 19th century and in the years leading up to World War I for two reasons. First, it worked in the interest of those in Britian wishing to dismantle the Ottoman Empire and incorporate parts of it into the British Empire. Second, it resonated with those within the British aristocracy, both Jews and Christians, who became enchanted with the idea of Zionism as a panacea for the problem of anti-Semitism in Central and Eastern Europe, which had produced an unwelcome wave of Jewish immigration to Britain. When these two interests fused, they propelled the British government to issue the famous – or infamous – Balfour Declaration in 1917. Jewish thinkers and activists who redefined Judaism as nationalism hoped this definition would protect Jewish communities from existential danger in Europe by homing in on Palestine as the desired space for “rebirth of the Jewish nation”. In the process, the cultural and intellectual Zionist project transformed into a settler colonial one – which aimed at Judaising historical Palestine, disregarding the fact that it was inhabited by an Indigenous population. In turn, the Palestinian society, quite pastoral at that time and in its early stage of modernisation and construction of a national identity, produced its own anti-colonial movement. Its first significant action against the Zionist colonisation project came with al-Buraq Uprising of 1929, and it has not ceased since then.

[hero-israel]

Here's the thing about this narrative that Palestinian resistance no matter what form is acceptable. Jewkilling cannot exist in a bubble. It cannot be politically neutral. 1000 years of European (and Arab) antisemitism culminating in genocide have ruined that. Sorry to Palestinian activists but that's just how it works. You can't murder a Jew without it being a tragedy, without it contributing to the continued global oppression of Jewish people.

And all that said, that's just if Hamas and others only targeted soldiers and police (or at least tried as best they could). The IRA didn't go out of its way to purposefully target noncombatants. Why? Probably because there isn't thousands of years of history of English people being seen as subhuman, there isn't thousands of years of anglophobic propaganda showing English people as twisted monsters preying on children and secretly undermining Irish society. The Irish national movement was not born because English refugees returned to their historical homeland and challenged the notion of Irish Supremacy. It was a pragmatic liberation movement. Resist military occupation, undermine military infrastructure designed to oppress the people. The descendants of English and Scottish settlers would even be allowed to stay if they had won. Imagine that.

These things are all tied up in each other. I'm against police brutality, I'm against the escalation and the militarization and the mistreatment of Arabs in Israel and in Judea & Samaria and Gaza and Golan and everywhere. But killing Jews can never be righteous. Sorry to anyone who feels that way but it can't. Antizionists NEED to understand that. Jews will always feel defensive and ready themselves for retaliation because of history, because of that context. Jews keep saying "prove to us a post zionist society where we all share the land won't be antisemitic" and their concerns are completely brushed off.

There's no empathy at all. A little girl can be stabbed to death and antizionists celebrate because she was a "settler," and that brave Palestinian man was defending his indigenous homeland, by targeting the weakest of his enemies. And since Israel has mandatory military service the antizionist can surmise that no Jews are Innocent. An Israeli Jew cannot be a noncombatant. They have to, otherwise the only other explanation for why Jewkilling is acceptable to them, or even feels good to them, is that they hate Jews. And as of right now, the optics are still against that. I have a sinking feeling the optics won't be against them much longer. I inherently don't trust a "liberation" movement that's all too eager to make murdering Jewish civilians praxis. I'm sick of the internet falling for this bullshit.

One of the best asks I have ever received. Thank you for sharing it and I agree with every word.

The entire progressive intersectional social-justice frame has failed Jews (or, alternately, has succeeded in excluding them), due to being intellectually colonized by a clearly fascist ideology of incessantly hating the Jew as a poisonous alien. Try to get an online activist to critically deconstruct the social assumptions they were raised with about Jews in their Muslim, Christian, or very slightly post-Christian society... it won't go well. Funny how Jews have lived in India and China for thousands of years yet you will look in vain for examples of bitter bloodthirsty kill-your-nextdoor-neighbor antisemitism in those societies. That's because the origin, the core, of Chinese and Indian societies was not "We're the people who are better than Jews."

From a review of Richard Landes' new book "Can the Whole World Be Wrong?":

[During the Second Intifada] Israelis were described at the time as the new Nazis. But the malice that was unleashed was even worse. As Landes writes, “It was mostly about being freed from a sense of obligation to the Jews, a chance to take up again the Jew-baiting so long denied Europeans by a politically correct post-Holocaust sobriety.” Landes quotes a poisonous comment made by a member of the House of Lords and reported in the Spectator, “Well, the Jews have been asking for it, and now, thank God, we can say what we think at last.” During that time, I was told something horrifyingly similar to my [=the reviewer's] face.

Your example of Irish nationalists not going out of their way to murder British children is a good one. The oft-reached comparisons between Palestine and South Africa are frivolous for many reasons as I have explained here before, and the ANC advocating and normalizing a vision of enduring racial diversity and equality is high on the list of reasons (made possible because black African identity is not predicated on a thousand-year history of hating and oppressing whites). The case of Rhodesia is even more instructive. Robert Mugabe - ROBERT MUGABE! - pleaded with the whites to stay, to live as equals, as brothers, and work together in building a better society in Zimbabwe. Ian Smith, last white PM of Rhodesia, agreed with him and stayed in Zimbabwe. If a so-called "liberation" movement is more openly dedicated to straight-up exterminating their enemies than Robert Mugabe ever was, maybe, just maybe, it shouldn't be described as "liberation" at all.

[girlactionfigure]

We Won’t Be Fooled Again

Let's play a little word association game:

Palestinian…. Terrorists

Palestinian…. Hijackers

Palestinian…. Guerillas

See where I'm going with this?

 Those who are trying to erase these old word associations with new ones like 'Israeli… colonizer', 'Israeli … genocide', and 'Israeli… apartheid', are being used as dupes by those who want you to forget that for the past half a century we've all had to wait in line at airports for hours because of the Palestinian penchant for threatening and taking the lives of innocent people in the name of their so-called 'struggle' to wipe out the Jewish state.  

There is a reason the word 'Palestinian' associates so naturally in your head with the words I wrote.  They have the ring of historical truth.  

 The world has funneled more aide money to the poor Palestinians than all of Europe received after WWII under the Marshall Plan (yes, even adjusted for time)!  And yet, the Palestinians remain in abject poverty… except, of course, for the terror leaders who are all billionaires!  

I wonder where they got their money?  I wonder why you continue to fund them and demand no accountability???

It is so plainly obvious that antisemitism is fueling this misguided endless support for a medieval, anti-woman, anti-gay, anti-humanist, anti-western, death cult.  

There is literally nothing you anti-Semites won't ignore or forgive if the perpetrators are killing Jews.  You’ll even sacrifice a thousand years of progress and enlightenment.  

 Wake up!  

You have been duped and used by a genocidal ideology masquerading as a gentle self-determination movement.  You are willfully ignoring the fact that the right to national self-determination is inviolate… except when it comes at the expense of another people's right to exist.  And that  - the destruction of Israel and annihilation of the Jewish people – is explicitly written in the charters of these Palestinian terror organizations you are trying to turn into folk heroes and freedom fighters.

Well, guess what? 

We will never forget this, nor forgive this.  Not again.  Never again!!!

We no longer depend on your tolerance or largess for our existence.  A day of reckoning is coming… and those who choose once again to be on the wrong side of history will not be able to wash the blood from their hands by paying reparations or conducting simpering education programs to assuage their individual and collective guilt.  

You are choosing your murderous bedfellows… but you'll find that once your societies are swallowed up by this seventh century death cult you call 'resistance', you will never again be allowed to sleep.

I suggest you google the term 'Dhimmi'.  But by the time you understand the significance of the word, it will be too late.  

[stephobrien]

Is your pro-Palestine activism hurting innocent people? Here's how to avoid that. (Plain text version)

I kept getting "needs pt" tags on the original post, so here's the plain text version:

Over the last few days, I’ve had conversations with several Jewish people who told me how hurt and scared they are right now.

To my great regret, some of that pain came from a poorly-thought-out post of mine, which – while not ill-intentioned – WAS hurtful.

And a lot of it came from cruelty they’d experienced at the hands of people who claim to be advocating for Palestine, but are using the very real plight of innocent Palestinians to harm equally innocent Jewish people.

Y’all, we need to do better. (Yes, “we” definitely includes me; this is in no small part a “learn from my fail” post, and also a “making amends” post. Some of these are mistakes I’ve made in the past.)

So if you’re an advocate for Palestine who wants to make sure that your defense of one group of vulnerable people doesn’t harm another, here are some important things to do or keep in mind:

Ask yourself if you’re applying a standard to one group that you aren’t applying to another.

Would you want all white Americans or Canadians to be expelled from America or Canada?

Do you want all Jewish people to be expelled from Israel, as opposed to finding a way to live alongside Palestinian Arabs in peace?

If the answer to those two questions is different, ask yourself WHY.

Do you want to be held responsible for the actions of your nation’s army or government? No? Then don’t hold innocent Jewish people, or Israelis in general (whether Jewish or otherwise), responsible for the actions of the Israeli army and government.

On that subject, be wary of condemning all Israeli people for the actions of the IDF. Large-scale tactical decisions are made by the top brass. Service is compulsory, and very few can reasonably get out of service.

Blaming all Israelis for the military’s actions is like blaming all Vietnam vets for the horrors in Vietnam. They’re not calling the shots. They aren’t Nazis running concentration camps. They are carrying out military operations that SHOULD be criticized.

And do not compare them or ANY JEWISH PERSON to Nazis in general. It is Jewish cultural trauma and not outsiders’ to use against them.

Don’t infuse legitimate criticism with antisemitism. By all means, spread the word about the crimes committed by the Israeli army and government, and the complicity of their allies. Criticize the people responsible for committing and enabling atrocities.

But if you imply that they’re committing those crimes because they’re Jewish, or because Jewish people have special privileges, then you’re straying into antisemitic territory.

Criticize the crime, not the group. If you believe that collective punishment is wrong, don’t do it yourself.

And do your best to use words that apply directly to the situation, rather than the historical terms for situations with similar features. For example, use “segregation,” “oppression,” or “subjugation,” not “Holocaust” or “Jim Crow.” These other historical events are not the cultural property of Jews OR Palestinians, but also have their own nuances and struggles and historical contexts.

Also, blaming other world events on Jewish people or making Jewish people associated with them (for instance, some people falsely blame Jewish people for the African slave trade) is a key feature of how antisemitism functions.

Please, by all means, be specific and detailed in your critiques. But keep them focused on the current political actors – not other peoples’ or nations’ political or cultural histories and traumas.

Be prepared to accept criticism. You probably already know that society is infused with a wide array of bigotries, and that people growing up in that environment tend to absorb those beliefs without even realizing it. Antisemitism is no exception.

What that means is, there’s a very real chance that you will screw up, and get called out on it, as I so recently did.

If that happens, please be willing to learn and adapt. If you can educate yourself about the suffering and needs of Palestinians, you can do the same for Jewish people.

Understand that the people you hurt aren’t obligated to baby you. Give them room to be angry. After I made a post that inadvertently hurt people, some were nice about it, and others weren’t. Some outright insulted my morals and intelligence.

And I had to accept that I’d earned that from them.

I’d hurt them, and they weren’t obligated to be more careful with my feelings than I had been with theirs.

They weren’t obligated to forgive me, trust me, or stop being mad at me right away.

I’ll admit, there were moments when I got defensive. I shouldn’t have. And I encourage you to try not to, if you screw up and hurt people.

I know that’s hard, but it’s important. Getting defensive only tells people you care more about doubling down on your mistake than you do about healing the hurt it caused.

Instead, acknowledge that they have a right to be angry, apologize for the way you hurt them, and try to make amends, while understanding that they don’t owe you trust or forgiveness.

Be aware that some antisemites are using legitimate complaints to “Trojan horse” antisemitism into leftist spaces. This is a really easy stumbling block to trip over, because most people probably don’t look at every post a creator makes before sharing the one they’re looking at right now.

I recently shared a video that called out some of the Likud and IDF’s atrocities and hypocrisy, and that also noted that many Jewish people are wonderful members of their communities.

I was later informed that, while that video in particular seemed reasonable, the creator behind it is frequently antisemitic.

I deleted the post, and blocked the creator. I encourage you to do the same if it’s brought to your attention that you’ve been ‘Trojan horse’d.

EDIT: Important note about antisemitism in leftist spaces:

While it's true that some blatant antisemites are using seemingly reasonable posts to get their foot in the door of leftist spaces, it's also true that a lot of antisemitism already exists inside those spaces.

This antisemitism is often dressed up in progressive-sounding language, but nonetheless singles Jewish people and places out in ways that aren't applied equally to other groups, or that label Jewish people in ways that portray them as acceptable targets.

If you want to see some specific examples, so you can have a better idea of what to keep an eye out for, I suggest reading this excellent reblog of the original post.

Fact-check your doubts about antisemitism. Depending on which parts of the internet you look at, you’ve probably seen people accused of antisemitism because they complained about the Likud and/or IDF’s actions. So you might be primed to be wary, or feel unsure of how to tell what counts as real antisemitism.

But that doesn’t mean antisemitism isn’t a very real, widespread, and harmful problem. And it doesn’t mean many or even most Jewish people are lying to you or being overly sensitive.

So if someone says something is antisemitic, and you aren’t sure, I encourage you to:

A. Look up the action or thing in question, including its history. Is there an antisemitic history or connotation you aren’t aware of? For best results, include “antisemitic” in your search query, in quotes.

B. Understand that some things, while not inherently antisemitic, have been used by antisemites often enough that Jewish people are understandably wary of them. Schrodinger’s antisemitism, if you will.

C. Ask Jewish people WHO HAVE OFFERED TO HELP EDUCATE YOU. Emphasis on WHO HAVE OFFERED. Random Jewish people aren’t obligated to give you their time and emotional energy, or to educate you – especially on subjects that are scary or painful for them.

@edenfenixblogs has kindly offered her inbox to those who are genuinely trying to learn and do better, and I’ve found her to be very kind, patient, reasonable, and fair-minded.

Understand that this is URGENTLY NEEDED. In one of my conversations with a Jewish person who’d called me out, they said this was the most productive conversation they’d had with a person with a Palestinian flag in their profile.

THIS IS NOT OKAY.

I didn’t do anything special. All I did was listen, apologize for my mistakes, and learn.

Yes, it feels good to be acknowledged. But I feel like I’ve been praised for peeing IN the toilet, instead of beside it.

Apologizing, learning, and making amends after you hurt people shouldn’t be “the most reasonable thing I’ve heard from a person with a Palestinian flag pfp.”

It should be BASIC DECENCY.

And the fact that it’s apparently so uncommon should tell you how much unnecessary stress and fear Jewish people have been living with because of people who consider themselves defenders of human rights.

By all means, be angry at the Likud, the IDF, and the politicians, reporters, and specific media outlets who choose to enable and cover up for them. But direct that anger toward the people who deserve it and are in a position to do something about it, not random people who simply happen to be Jewish, or who don’t want millions of people to be turned into refugees when less violent methods of achieving freedom and rights for Palestinians are available.

Stop peeing beside the toilet, people.

[etz-ashashiyot]

So what’s the modern interpretation of the laws about keeping slaves? I’ve heard that said laws where a lot more kind to slaves then the surrounding nations but, like, it’s still slavery?

Hi anon,

With Pesach coming up, I'm sure that this question is on a lot of people's minds. It's a good question and many rabbanim throughout history have attempted to tackle it. Especially today, with slavery being seen as a moral anathema in most societies (obviously this despite the fact that unfortunately slavery is still a very real human rights crisis all over the world), addressing the parts of the Torah that on the surface seem to condone it becomes a moral imperative.

It's worth noting that the Jewish world overall condemns slavery. In my research for this question, I came across zero modern sources arguing that slavery is totally fine. I'm sure that if you dug deep enough there's some fringe wacko somewhere arguing this, but every group has its batshit fringe.

Here are some sources across the political and religious observance spectrum that explain it better than I could:

Chabad (this article is written by Rabbi Tzvi Freeman, a wonderful rabbi whose words I have learned deeply over the years. He is one of my favorite rabbis despite not seeing eye to eye with a lot of the Chabad movement)

Conservative (to be clear: this is my movement; it's not actually politically conservative in most shuls, just poorly named. We desperately need to bully them into calling themselves Masorti Olami like the rest of the world. It's [essentially] a liberal traditional egalitarian movement.)

Conservative pt. 2 (different rabbi's take)

Reform (note that this is from the Haberman Institute, which was founded by a Reform rabbi. Link is to a YouTube recording of a recent lecture on the topic.)

Chareidi (this rabbi is an official rabbi of the Western Wall in Israel, so in a word, very frum)

Modern Orthodox

I want to highlight this last one, because it is written by the Rosh Yeshiva of Yeshivat Chovevei, which is a progressive Modern Orthodox rabbinical school. They work very hard to read Torah through an authentically Orthodox lens while also maintaining deeply humanist values. As someone who walks a similar (if not identical) balancing act, this particular drash (sermon) spoke very deeply to me, and so I'm reposting it in its entirety**

[Edit: tumblr.hell seems real intent on not letting me do this in my original answer, so I will repost it in the reblogs. Please reblog that version if you're going to. Thanks!]

Something you will probably notice as you work your way through these sources, you'll note that there are substantially more traditional leaning responses. This is because of a major divide in how the different movements view Torah, especially as it pertains to changing ethics over time and modernity. I'm oversimplifying for space, but the differences are as follows:

The liberal movements (Reform, Renewal, Reconstructionist, etc.) view halacha as non-binding and the Torah as a human document that is, nevertheless, a sacred document. I've seen it described as the spiritual diary of our people throughout history. Others view it as divinely inspired, but still essentially and indelibly human.

The Orthodox and other traditional movements view halacha as binding and Torah as the direct word of G-d given to the Jewish people through Moshe Rabbeinu (Moses) on Mt. Sinai. (Or, at a minimum, as a divinely inspired text written and compiled by people that still represents the word of G-d. This latter view is mostly limited to the Conservative and Modern Orthodox movements.)

Because of these differences, the liberal movements are able to address most of these problematic passages by situating them in their proper historical context. It is only the Orthodox and traditional movements that must fully reckon with the texts as they are, and seek to understand how they speak to us in a contemporary context.

As for me? I'm part of a narrow band of traditional egalitarian progressive Jews that really ride that line between viewing halacha as binding and the Torah as divinely given, despite recognizing the human component of its authorship - more a partnership in its creation than either fully human invention or divine fiat. That said, I am personally less interested in who wrote it literally speaking and much more interested in the question of: How can we read Torah using the divinely given process of traditional Torah scholarship while applying deeply humanist values?

Yeshivat Chovevei does a really excellent job of approaching Torah scholarship this way, as does Hadar. Therefore, I'm not surprised that this article captures something I have struggled to articulate: an authentically orthodox argument for change.

[the-garbanzo-annex-jr]

If you analyze the major criticisms of Israel, you will discover that every one of them is based on unstated but very real assumption that reveal not the truth about Israel but the anti-Jewish bias of the accusers.

These criticisms are framed in such a way that the truth, which are not antisemitic, is not even considered. As a result, facts that contradict the antisemitic assumptions are discarded and only the cherry-picked facts that support the antisemitism are mentioned.

This pattern becomes startlingly clear when you look at the major criticisms of Israel with both the antisemitic and non-antisemitic assumptions in mind.

Here are some examples.

Settler-Colonialism

The charge: Israel is a settler-colonialist state where Jews arrived from outside and claimed the land for themselves, pushing out the natives.

The unstated antisemitic assumption: Historically, Jews are not a people or a nation, and today's Jews have no history in the Land of Israel. 

The truth they want their audience not to consider: The Jews have been a people and a nation since Biblical times, a people whose lives remained centered around the Land of Israel in their daily prayers and dreams for millennia. 

When you remove the false antisemitic assumption, you see that the Jews were returning to their ancestral lands, not invading land that was never theirs. That is a narrative that the critics ignore and exclude from discussion. 

The charge is based on antisemitism, and when you remove the antisemitism, the accusation disappears.

"Pinkwashing," "Aidwashing" and others

The charge: Israel only pretends to hold progressive-friendly positions and engages in liberal, progressive activities (like being gay-friendly or sending doctors to disaster areas) in order to distract from and hide its crimes from the world.

The unstated antisemitic assumption: Jews are deceptive and liars.

The truth:: Jews generally tell the truth at least as much as other people, and it would be difficult to lie in an open, free society without serious repercussions. 

These kinds of charges cross the line into conspiracy theories, where the entire nation of Israel is colluding to fool the world and its entire purpose is immoral. The praiseworthy things it does are converted into evil, and the assumptions do not allow any other explanation that does not damn Israeli Jews.

[gepgep2]

"So: what is the Israeli long-term strategy, really?

Insofar as there’s an answer, it seems to be that they simply don’t have one; the Israeli government no more has a long-term strategy for dealing with their future in the region than Exxon Mobil has a long-term strategy for dealing with climate change. They seem to just figure that, if US power does collapse or give up on them, something will turn up. No doubt too they have people in thinktanks brainstorming that, too, coming with reports and scenarios, but all this is basically an afterthought. The driving force behind the colonization of ’67 Palestine is not any sort of grand strategy; it’s a kind of terrible confluence of short-term political and economic advantage.

First, the settlements. They were originally the project of a relatively isolated, if well funded, collection of religious zealots. Now everything seems to be organized around them. The government pours in endless resources. Why? The answer seems to be that since at least the ‘90s, rightwing politicians in Israel have figured out that the settlements are a kind of political magic. The more money gets funneled into them, the more the Jewish electorate turns to the Right. The reason is simple. Israel is expensive. Housing inside the 1948 boundaries is exorbitantly expensive. If you are a young person without means, you increasingly has two options: to live with one’s parents until well into your 30s, or find a place in an illegal settlement, where apartments cost perhaps a third of what they would in Haifa or Tel Aviv—and that’s not to mention the superior roads, schools, utilities, and social services. At this point the vast majority of settlers live on the West Bank for economic, not ideological, reasons. (This is especially true around Jerusalem.) But consider who these people are. In the past, young people in difficult circumstances, students, well-educated young parents, have been the traditional constituency of the Left. Put these same people in a settlement, and they will, inexorably, even without realizing it, begin to think like fascists. Settlements are, in their own way, giant engines for the production of right-wing consciousness. It is very difficult for someone placed in hostile territory, given training in automatic weapons and warned to be constantly on one’s guard against a local population seething over the fact that your next-door neighbors have been killing their sheep and destroying their olive trees, not to gradually see ethno-nationalism as common sense. As a result, with every election, the old Left electorate further dissipates, and a host of religious, fascist, or semi-fascist parties win a larger and larger stake of the vote. For politicians, who can barely think past the next election, the lure is inescapable.

...I only came to fully understand the agony of the Palestinian situation when I came to understand that the entire point of life, in traditional Palestinian society, is put oneself in a position where you can be generous to strangers. Hospitality is everything.

...Wherever we went, Palestinians would tell us about all the different sorts of people they had historically welcomed to the Holy Land: Armenians, Greeks, Persians, Russians, Africans, Jews… They saw the Zionists as originally their house- guests. Yet they were the worst house-guests one could possibly imagine. Every act of hospitality, of welcome, is turned into license for appropriation, and the world’s most skillful propagandists leapt into action to try to convince the world that their hosts were depraved inhuman monsters who had no right to their own homes. In such a situation, what can you possibly do? Stop being generous? But then one is absolutely, existentially defeated. This is what people really meant when they talked about a life of calculated degradation. People were being systematically deprived of the physical, the economical, and the political means to be magnanimous. And to be deprived of the means to make that kind of magnificent gesture is a kind of living death."

https://davidgraeber.org/articles/hostile-intelligence-reflections-from-a-visit-to-the-west-bank/

[gothhabiba]

[...] [F]ood culture, because of its ubiquitous and everyday nature, can serve as a medium through which to examine issues concerning how the imagined community is perceived (internally by its members, and externally by others), expressed, engaged with and maintained as well as [to] point out processes and trends that are [...] generally overlooked in the study of identity, nationalism and culture. Additionally, food culture is [...] a useful tool for examining issues concerning the place of indigenous people and their culture, and I would add the other, within the national culture and narratives of settler colonial societies, of which Israel is an example. This includes issues relating to cultural appropriation as well as inclusion and exclusion from the nation.

The relationship between food culture, Zionism and the creation of a new Jewish-Israeli national identity might not appear strong at first. However, from the onset of the Zionist project, food played an important part in the construction of a new Jewish and later on Israeli identity, including its collective memory, national psyche and political aspirations. According to Raviv, from the early stages of Zionism, food was one of the main elements used for national boundary setting and the establishment of a separate Jewish political and economic society in Palestine. Many of the symbols of the new Jewish identity in Palestine, and after 1948, Jewish-Israeli identity, are food related: from Sabra (prickly pear, the name given to a Jewish-born Israeli) and Jaffa oranges (one of Israel’s symbols of production and primary exports), to postcards depicting a pita with falafel and the flag of Israel (one of Israel’s most recognisable postcards) and cottage cheese—a product that has been shortlisted as one of the main symbols of the state of Israel.

This relationship between food and Zionism is also apparent in the historical importance attached to food production, especially agricultural produce, and consumption. In their attempt to establish a separate Jewish society and economy in the pre-state period, Zionist leaders tried to regulate agricultural labour and produce, in order to, among other things, exclude Arab labor and produce. Jewish businesses and private individuals were therefore pressured to buy and consume Jewish only produce. The Zionist emphasis on Jewish only produce, from the Hebrew banana to the Hebrew butter, drew a clear link between national identity, food production and consumption and communal boundaries. This link is still evident in the symbols and coat-of-arms of many of Israel’s cities and regional councils, which are dominated by and or include agricultural tools, fields and orchards and specific agricultural produce.

De-Arabizing Israeli Food Culture

[...] What is interesting about Israeli food writers musing about the origins of and contributions to Israeli food culture is that they provide an indication of the dominant discourse used by the Jewish community in Israel. This discourse, while highlighting the various contributors and contributions to Israeli food culture, omits or fails to mention either an Arab or an Arab-Palestinian element. There are different manifestations or layers to these omissions, the most glaring of which is the presentation of Arab-Palestinian food elements and items present in Israeli food culture, for example hummus and falafel, as part of the Mizrahi-Jewish culture and so as part of Jewish tradition. Other layers of this omission include the representation of Arab-Palestinian food as belonging to a Jewish Israeli food culture; the representation of Arab-Palestinians as vessels that enabled the preservation of older Jewish-biblical traditions; and the depiction of the territory between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea, which includes the West Bank, as either Israeli or part of the Land of Israel (Eretz Yisrael).

The failure, either by design or by default, to mention the Arab and Arab-Palestinian people and their contribution to Israeli food culture is prevalent and present in most Israeli cookbooks. In fact, until very recently you would have been hard pressed to even find the words Arab and or Palestinian in Israeli cookbooks and food writing. This state of affairs is particularly striking when one takes into account the importance Arab and Arab-Palestinian restaurants, food terminology, dishes and culinary items have in everyday Israeli life and culture, and the fact that a significant number of dishes identified by leading Jewish-Israeli chefs as national dishes are also part of the Arab-­Palestinian kitchen—one of these chefs even identifies the “Arab salad” as Israel’s national dish!

Mendel and Ranta argue that two related historical dialectic processes have shaped Zionist and, after the creation of the state of Israel, Jewish-Israeli attitudes towards Arab and Arab-Palestinian food culture. On the one hand, the construction of a “rooted,” “modern” and “native” Israeli food culture was based on fascination with, leading to adaptation, imitation and appropriation of, Arab Palestinian culinary elements, while, on the other hand, Israeli food culture went through a process of de-Arabization—that is to say, the Arab-Palestinian contribution had been erased and overlooked. As the conflict between Zionists and Arab-Palestinians intensified, the balance shifted from fascination and adaptation, to appropriation and de-Arabization, in line with the Zionist aim of replacing the Arab Palestinian people in Palestine, rejecting their political aspirations and establishing a separate Jewish polity.

Early Zionist settlers came to Palestine to establish not only a new state, but also a new nation. In terms of food, this meant rejecting the heavy slow-cooking traditions of Eastern Europe for a lighter, and, in line with the then prevailing concepts of nutrition, also healthier, diet based on dairy products, raw fruit and vegetable and less meat. According to Claudia Roden, “the early pioneers and the first immigrants from Europe … were happy to abandon the ‘Yiddish’ foods of Russia and Poland as a revolt against a past identity and an old life … and foods that represented exile and martydom.”

One of the mechanisms of creating the new food culture was adapting and imitating the local Arab-Palestinians, and to some extent also Bedouin, food traditions and culture. It is important to note, in a similar fashion to other settler-colonial groups, that adaptation and imitation was done at times out of choice, at times out of necessity.

– Ronald Ranta, "Re-Arabizing Israeli Food Culture." Food, Culture & Society 18(4):611-627 (December 2015). DOI: 10.1080/15528014.2015.1088192