#and hey maybe don’t uncritically RB stuff from tankies

[notaplaceofhonour]

the fact that OP is a tankie aside, this line of thinking is exactly why so many Jews (including ones like myself who oppose Israel’s treatment of Palestinians) are so afraid right now

because the logic of “we’re going to protest injustice, and if our demands aren’t met, we’ll burn your house down” applied to a circumstance where the houses of the actual perpetrators (Netanyahu, representatives in the Knesset, etc) are out of reach and the people whose houses are in reach (diasporic Jews) have little-to-no power to shape whether those demands actually get met, the implicit threat quickly becomes “we’re going to protest Israel’s injustice, and if Israel does not cave to our demands, we’ll burn down the houses of the Jews who live in our country”

this is especially obvious to a lot of Jews when we consider the existence of the BDS Mapping Project, a database that claims to be mapping “Zionist” connections, but in fact just catalogs practically every single Jewish institution its geographic scope, and has already been promoted by White Nationalists as a resource for selecting Jewish targets. this is what that map looks like:

this is not a map of Israeli weapon manufacturers or anti-Palestinian propagandists; this is just a map of Jewish institutions in Massachusetts, including high schools & healthcare facilities.

“it’s anti-Zionist not anti-Jew” loses any credibility when the venn diagram of “things being labelled Zionist” and “things that are Jewish” are mapped out and it’s obvious to anyone with eyes it’s damn near just a circle

and this isn’t a fringe thing: the mapping project has been endorsed by some of the loudest & most influential groups organizing “Pro-Palestine” protests in the West (America especially) such-as-but-not-limited-to SJP, which has a history of targeting hillels & celebrated the October 7th massacre, and JVP, which has encouraged (and been caught) Jewfaking, while promoting & providing cover for blatant antisemitism, including blood libel & Holocaust denial

this should not be read as a condemnation of the mere act of organizing in favor of Palestinians by any stretch of the imagination—there are Jewish-Arab orgs actually run by Palestinians & Israelis like Standing Together that do that very well—but the fact that so many (primarily non-Palestinian & non-Jewish) people are choosing to organize under the leadership of the people pointing to the majority of Jews and saying “Zionist!” in demonstrations that carry the implicit threat of “if our demands aren’t met, we’ll burn your houses to the ground” is absolutely a reason for Jews to be terrified and for y’all to both validate those fears & use a critical eye to assess just who you are linking arms with to ensure you do not add to it

ive been to a lot of protests in my life and a thing that a lot of people dont understand is that a protest is a threat. its a large group of people saying “we are being nice now, but you must understand that if we stop being nice we have the power to cause you Problems”.

so everyone saying that protests have to be more polite or follow accepted rules is missing the entire point. the point of a protest is not to say “we disagree with you”, they already know that. the point of a protest is to make it clear that if they continue to do things you disagree with, you will burn down their house.

now this wont stop them because theyre stupid and arrogant and believe themselves to be beyond consequence. so here’s the really important thing and that’s that after they do it anyway, you have to burn down their house