What I didn't want this post to be is a checklist of different attitudes in which I call what sentiments are antisemitic like a referee. It sounds like that same stupid/sinister cocktail of 'how to be a better ally' that Robin DeAngelo and Ibrahim Kendi make millions on.
The most basic point is this: Jews somehow don't count. The very antiracists who use every other oppressed demographic as a trump card don't care a fig for how Jews are oppressed.
But the point is not that people should be a better anti-antisemite, the point is that the very idea of allyship is a farce. The reason I stopped writing this the other day is that there's no way to sugarcoat that truth. Antiracism makes every minority into children for whom everybody needs to approach with kid gloves in order to be to be koshered as a decent human being. It's a farce when every other demographic demands it, and it's as much a farce when Jews demand it. Are we adults who live in the real world, or do we approach dialogue in a manner in which everybody has to surrender their individuality at the door of a sinister playhouse where you either speak to each other with pre-digested dialogue that comes to a foreordained answer about what the problems are, or risk losing lifelong friendships? It's a literally impossible standard of human interaction, and the more you demand it, the more totalitarian groups like Hamas and the FSB can exploit your ideals to perpetrate the worst sort of human crime. Once upon a time, Marxists demanded similar sorts of interactions to be the ally of the lower classes, and it lead to the crimes of Stalin and Mao and Pol Pot and a dozen other genocidal dictators - probably over 100 million people murdered. You may laugh at these warnings or think you're preventing murders exactly like this. Many well meaning groups before you have done the exact same thing, and their impossible ideals the world to mass murder in every century.
That is probably the most contentious claim I will make in this post.
There are so many things currently happening are clearly antisemitism that I think anybody with the most basic understanding of the world would understand what they are the moment they read them. They're just a google search away, and the people who would read them and not consider them antisemitic are beyond reaching.
But if we're going to have a reasonable dialogue about this, we have to consider the points of both sides without getting angry. If you find yourself getting angry with the points I'm making, take a breather and perhaps come back when you find yourself able to approach things with a cooler head.
It's not worth talking too much about slogans, but when you say 'From the river to the sea, Palestine must be free', or a simple 'Free Palestine.' Whatever meanings that holds about a Palestine free of oppression, you also have to take into account that it means many other things: does it mean two states living side by side? From the river to the sea certainly sounds as though there is no room for Israel. And even if you believe there should only be one un-Jewish state, there are millions who hear those slogans as a call to the murder of Jews, not just a few Jews, millions. Both sides have to take the other into account, and just because you've chanted it does not mean you're an antisemite, but if you want a peaceful solution, you will stop partaking of those chants. If, however, you want a war against the Jewish state, there's no reason to stop. If that's what you want, you're not necessarily even an antisemite, just incredibly naive for thinking that a Palestinian army as currently constituted would seek vengeance rather than targeted strikes with a clear objective in mind. If you believe in avenging for the Palestinian state, then yes, you're beyond doubt as an antisemite and a particularly dangerous one - and every first world country clearly has thousands. If you think there is at least a good reason for that sort of vengeance, you're not necessarily an antisemite, but you're nearly as bad - a slimy, ugly fellow traveler to antisemites enabling the wars you claim you want to end.
But there is something arguably worse than an antisemite, and so common that there are millions in every first world country, sometimes tens of millions, and that is an anti-Jew. Antisemitism as we currently think of it is a racial prejudice, and as so many specialists on the issue from David Nirenberg to Max Diamant point out, it really only goes back to the mid-19th century. Anti-Judaism, or anti-Hebraism, goes back at least 3000 years, and with that, there is almost no daylight between being anti-Judaism and being anti-Jew.
Zionism is not just a fringe part of the religion that one can divorce from it. The longing for Zion is not just a fringe part of the religion like the injunctions against homosexuality and permission to own slaves that are mentioned once each in the Torah. Zionism is Judaism's eleventh commandment, only not listed among them because the covenant to the land of Israel is scrawled around nearly every one of the Torah's other column. If you have a problem with that, you have a problem with Judaism. If you have a problem with Judaism, you have a problem with every one among the millions Jew who practice it.
We may not have called it Zionism until the late 19th century, but the longing for Zion goes back to the second century expulsion. It is in well over a dozen prayers Jews have chanted multiple times every day ever since. Believing that Jews are white, or European, or not native of Israel, in every sense, a denial that Jews are from the Middle East.
Think about it for a minute, how do you think so many European Jews got white skin? Jews were low enough in the social hierarchy that it was unthinkable to marry a Jew in well over 90% of European societies. What was, though, permissible was rape. The only reason Jews look white is because the European gene pool was forcibly introduced into Judaism from the invasion of the Greeks, continuing unabated for 2300 years with only a few interruptions.
Even if a Jew has European blood, Jews are Jews, Jews are Israeli, Jews are Judean, Jews are citizens of the Palestinian land. There is no conceding an inch on this, and anyone who denies it is anti-Jew. We were thrown off of it by the very imperialism today's anti-Jews so decry, and we have always deserved our own country upon it, even though other people deserve their own country in it too.
There are other precepts that make a Jew, but alongside those others, Zionism is far more Jewish than corned beef and matzoh balls. If you throw us out again, we will never stop longing for Zion and never stop trying to get it back. You may think when the most violent anti-Zionists come for us, you will stand up for us, but why should we ever believe you if you didn't stand up for us when we still had a state?
Zionism IS Judaism. If you don't like that, you don't like Jews. The rest is commentary.
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