#Like you can't understand Israel without understanding the Holocaust

[todaviia]

Hey! I'd really like to learn more about the (recent) history of Israel and wanted to ask if there are any books you can recommend?

Hey I've thought about this ask quite a while and there's just so much stuff about Israel, what exactly do you qualify as "recently"? Like since 1948, since the 1967, since 1990s etc?

There's quite a lot of books and tbh, it also really depends on what you're interested in and if course, you should also read Palestinian stuff along with it. Personally, the Israeli writers/intellectuals I really enjoy are Yehuda Amichai (mostly poetry but really political), Yoram Kaniuk (his book "1948" is, I think, the closest to the true story of the founding of the state from the Israeli POV that you're going to find, even if many people won't admit it, also his book about the Exodus is really really good) and Yeshayahu Leibowitz (who has some really interesting thoughts especially about the relationship between state and religion, which is a super complex issue in Israel). I also remember enjoying Rabbi Sachs' book about the future of the state of Israel and a lot of people say he's very approachable even if you know very little about this whole issue.

From the Palestinian side, of course reading Mahmoud Darwish is just as important as reading Yehuda Amichai is for Israel, Edward Said is also considered important enough that you have to read him even though I honestly am kinda ambivalent about him. There's also currently a lot of debate at least in Germany about the book "A minor detail" (which deals with "the other side" of Kaniuk's 1948) and while I felt like that book left a lot of things out (like the fact that all of the Israeli soldiers involved in the main action of the book faced criminal charges and the whole thing was not just treated as a minor detail but rather a big scandal in the Israeli army) it is an important part of the story.

If you want more recent history, I've read both Pfeiffer's biography of Bibi (which was HILARIOUS because that guy very obviously hated Bibi and was using the weirdest opportunities to be petty about him) as well as Bibi's autobiography and I feel like there is no understanding current Israel without understanding Bibi and while I absolutely have zero love for the guy as a person or a politician, he is also very much a product of his circumstances.

Also this isn't a book but my boyfriend is currently obsessed with a YouTube channel called "The Ask Project" where people can send in questions and he asks Palestinians or Israelis that, and I think a lot of the questions are good and he really makes an effort to be fair.

#There's just so much Stuff #Like you can't understand Israel without understanding the Holocaust #Or without understanding the nakba #Or without reading about those last two Jews left in Afghanistan who hilariously hated each other #Until one of them died and the other had to flee from the Taliban takeover #Or the last jew of Yemen who is currently being tortured by the houthis #whose slogan contains the words death to Israel and curse the Jews #and who fire missiles at us #and innocent Palestinian children being bombed in Gaza right now #and how two weeks ago we were at an Arab Jewish peace group meeting and the sirens went off #and we ran into a nearby synagogue #and Ahed Tamimis they called me a lioness #(and also her Instagram post where she said what Hitler did to you will be a joke compared to what's coming) #you won't understand the fascist horror of Ben gvir without understanding that the entire Jewish Community of Iraq was ethnically cleansed #and you won't understand any of it also without reading the Bible #which plays less of a role than you'd think

[matan4il]

I have a query and I'm sorry that this question is going to upset you in advance. I see a post circling on here about Holocaust survivors apparently saying that Palestinians are exactly like them during attacks on Gaza. I just scroll past it because I have poor attention span that cannot stay focused more than one sentence but I wanted to know your opinion on this post or if you have seen it. Again, deep apologies that this ask is upsetting. Thank you for still being here and sharing with us.

Hi Nonnie!

Thank you for the kind way you approached this.

I have seen a post that might be the one you're referring to... It's a screenshot of a tweet:

The original tweet shows an interview with one Holocaust survivor. The response falsely expands this to survivors, in the plural, as if this one tweet shows a whole movement of Holocaust survivors, that people simply refuse to listen to.

The original tweet comes from an account that calls itself a "media company," but has no website (something I would expect from an actual media company), and is at least 80% tweets that are anti-Israel and anti-Jewish. I'll give you an example. We all know Elon Musk has allowed antisemitism to thrive on Twitter, all kinds of it, including the white supremacist type, and others that have nothing to do with Israel. In an attempt to educate him, he was invited to a tour of Auschwitz. But apparently, according to this "media company," that was just meant to stop anti-genocide speech on his social media platform:

Of the up to 20% of tweets this "media company" posts or shares, many are anti-democratic or in support of dictatorial regimes.

This account also amplified the words of Julius Malema, leader of the South African EFF party, as he justified the Oct 7 massacre, and demanded support for the (genocidal) Hamas and its "resistance."

Malema himself has repeatedly sang, "Kill the Boer," a song which many understand as a genocidal chant against the Boers, the South Africans of Dutch descent. This guy is a controversial figure at best, doesn't seem to have an issue with an actual genocide, and this "media company" upholds his words as if he is a role model.

But if this account tweets Israel hate, then I guess the Tumblr user who passed the tweet along has no issue with how questionable of a source this is.

I recognized the face of the survivor. This is what it looks like in the cut off screenshot in the Tumblr post I saw:

So how did I recognize him? Because the number of anti-Zionist Holocaust survivors is SO small (around 5), and I have seen every single one of them repeatedly tokenized by antisemites so much, that I'm familiar with the name and face of each. The man in this vid is Hajo Meyer, who died in 2014. He couldn't possibly make any comments about Hamas' massacre on Oct 7, 2023 and the war in Gaza since, unless this "media company" has managed to somehow contact the afterlife. Here's a screenshot from Google, showing a recent re-upload of this vid to IG:

And here's a very brief bio, mentioning his date of death:

I'm guessing that "media company" didn't name him, or specify the date out of the vid, because it didn't want people to know the guy was dead, and the views he expressed were pre-Hamas' massacre.

Hajo Meyer was, without a doubt, an anti-Zionist. But would he still be using this rhetoric after Oct 7, after the biggest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust, after better understanding the kind of threat that Israel and Jews worldwide (since Hamas has tried to target Jews in European countries as well, including in the Netherlands, where Meyer lived) are facing from this genocidal terrorist organization ruling Gaza? IDK. I'd like to think he would be better than to continue distorting the Holocaust through this false comparison, but I can't say for sure, and I'm not about to claim that I do, putting words in his mouth just to exploit a dead Holocaust survivor. The fact that the anti-Israel crowd would continue to tokenize (meaning, exploit) a dead survivor like that, as if anyone could know for sure that Meyer would continue to toe the same line, just shows there really is no moral low they can't stoop to.

And here I wanna emphasize how wrong this antisemitic practice is, tokenizing Jews. Because no marginalized group is immune to the hatred spread against it, there will ALWAYS be some of its members, who will internalize and embrace poison aimed at it. There were gay Nazis (the notorious Ernest Roehm was the highest ranking one) and we also have contemporary gay neo-Nazis. So, should we use them in order to pretend that Nazi ideology is not homophobic? That it didn't harm hundreds of thousands of gay people? No, we know that the overwhelming majority of gay people suffered due to it, and would insist that Nazism IS homophobic. So, using those few exceptions to ignore (and embolden) the homophbia of this ideology, ends up being homophobic in itself. Embracing the unrepresentative few over the representative, mainstream majority of a marginalized group in "exonerating" what the group says is hateful and harmful towards it, ends up being hateful and harmful in itself.

And that's what people who only listen to the few anti-Zionist Holocaust survivors are doing. They're basically saying, "Listen to Holocaust survivors!" but they mean only the few who say what the anti-Israel movement does. All the other survivors they ignore, dismiss, silence or even erase.

They're ignoring the voices of the overwhelming majority of Holocaust survivors who WERE (and are) Zionist. Who do not agree with this distorted narrative. Yad Vashem estimates that two thirds of Holocaust survivors came to Israel at the end of WWII, and many more supported Israel even when they chose to settle elsewhere. Just recently, we had a group of 870 American survivors (along with their descendants, altogether 2,500 Jews) thank Biden for standing with Israel after the Hamas massacre. These anti-Israel haters are also erasing the survivors who were themselves targeted on Oct 7, whether threatened, kidnapped, injured or murdered (I've talked about several in my posts on this blog). This anti-Israel mob is exploiting Hajo Meyer even in ignoring that if he had been alive and present in Israel, even just to visit a friend or family member, he would have been targeted, too. These haters are ignoring survivors who said that what Hamas has done is similar to what the Nazis did (I've talked about several of them in my posts on this blog, too. All can be found in my Israel tag).

It is unconscionable, to treat most Holocaust survivors like they don't count, and only see a (literal) handful of anti-Zionist ones as if they do. And it certainly does NOT show the respect the anti-Israel haters imply survivors are owed, through the demand that we all defer to the opinion of the survivors, but ONLY the few anti-Zionist ones.

All that said, off the top of my head, here's a small number of HUGE differences between the Holocaust, and the Israeli-Arab conflict, and anyone ignoring them IS guilty of distorting the Holocaust.

-> The Holocaust did NOT start due to Jews repeatedly murdering Germans on German soil, in an attempt to keep Germans down and prevent them from establishing self rule in the German ancestral land. The Holocaust was completely unprovoked, unjustified and one-sided. Every oppressive measure taken by the Nazis against the Jews, was motivated by antisemitism, and was NOT a reaction to Jewish anti-German terrorism, that the Nazis had to protect their German citizens from. Speaking of unprovoked, unjustified and for a very long time one-sided, that describes the Arab anti-Jewish violence that preceded the establishment of the State of Israel by almost 100 years. But Jewish self-defense in this conflict, which only started about 50 years after said violence began, was provoked, was justified, was a response to what was done to the Jews first.

-> The Holocaust did NOT consist of Jews on German soil collaborating militarily with several Jewish countries surrounding Germany, with the goal of these combined Jewish armies invading and wiping it off the map, in order to prevent German self rule. Guess what the Arabs did to the Jews...

-> The Holocaust did NOT entail repeated German efforts to find a solution for how Jews and Germans could live together on the same land. In pre-state Israel, Jews did try repeatedly to reach an understanding that would allow Jews and Arabs to peacefully share (and co-exist in) the Jewish ancestral land.

-> When Jews finally started rebelling against the Nazis, they did NOT try to get as many Jewish civilians as possible killed. On the contrary, the outbreak of the most famous Jewish revolt, the one in the Warsaw Ghetto, was postponed until the Nazis entered, and the Jewish fighters believed this to be the final 'liquidation' of the ghetto (meaning, the deportation and extermination of the roughly 60,000 Jews still alive there). Only then did they fight back, because (in their own words), they did not want their decision to rebel to cost another Jew "even one hour of life." Compare that to how Hamas has been using Palestinian civilians as human shields. Or even to the Arab leadership back in 1948, which did not hesitate in risking or displacing the entire Arab population in the Land of Israel, in favor of fighting what they called "an extermination war" against the Jews.

-> The Holocaust did NOT see a single day where Germans worked en masse to try and alleviate the suffering of Jews, whether by providing them with humanitarian aid, or by moving them to areas where they would be safe from death. That's in direct contrast to Israel's efforts to make Palestinians' lives better, whether through humanitarian aid, work permits in Israel that guarantee a higher salary and better social rights, medical treatments, warnings when a terrorist target is about to be struck, etc.

-> The Holocaust was NOT supposed to end with even one Jew alive at the end of it. The Germans were going for total extermination of the Jewish people. All Jews who had German citizens were stripped of it in 1935, even before the most murderous parts of this genocide commenced. In contrast, Israel did NOT seek to kill all Arabs, there were many calls for Arabs not to flee Israel and the war which the Arab leadership had started, at the end of the war Israel gave citizenship to 150,000 Arabs who did not leave and did not take arms against Jews, and there was even an offer for tens of thousands of Arabs to return (Weitzmann presented it to the UN), if they do so peacefully. Just a few thousands accepted that offer, but those who did, got citizenship and land.

-> The Nazis were so eager to kill every Jew, that they came to the conclusion they HAD to industrialize their genocide of the Jewish people. That's why they built extermination camps with gas chambers at their core. Auschwitz alone could, on certain days, kill about 20,000 people. No Jew was meant to leave those camps alive. The crematoria were mass murder factories. ANY crime that you want to compare to the Holocaust specifically, you have to show that it includes this industrialization element. Currently, NO GENOCIDE, no matter how horrific, has. And God help us all, I hope it stays that way (this is one of the reasons why the Holocaust mustn't be distorted or minimized. We can't prevent something from happening, if we don't understand what HAS happened, and that we're trying to stop from being repeated). There is not a SINGLE thing in the history of the Israeli-Arab conflict that comes CLOSE to being an industrialized form of massacre. Even the brutality of Hamas on Oct 7, the single bloodiest day in the history of this conflict for either side, doesn't come close.

-> While there are still Jews around, meaning the Holocaust as conceptualized by the Nazis failed, it was so deadly, that it DID lead to the murder of around 70-80% of the Jews living under the Nazi occupation over a short number of years. Even more than 80 years after the end of the Holocaust, Jews have not recovered demographically. Meanwhile, the Palestinian population has increased by about 10 times since Israel's Independence War. But let's say people wanna claim that just this current war is comparable to the Holocaust. There are presently around 7 million Arabs in the territories of the Jewish ancestral land, of which about 2 million are Israeli citizens. I'm gonna go with the anti-Israel narrative for a second, which claims ALL of them are occupied and oppressed by Israel (even though they're not). In order for the ruin of Palestinians to be indeed on the same level, that would mean 70-80% of them would have to be murdered by Israel during the war. Let's go with the lower percent, so it's easier for the anti-Israel crowd to reach the number of deaths that would support their claim. To have killed 70% of 7 million, that would mean Israel would have to kill 4.9 million Arabs in this so-called "genocide." Even if we exclude Israeli Arabs, and only focus on the 5 million Palestinians living in areas where the Israeli army currently operates (imagine the German Nazis allowing Jews safety inside Germany, and only killing them outside it *eyeroll*), that would mean at least 3.5 million Palestinians killed. But after almost 5 months of this war, the number of Palestinian fatalities, as claimed by Hamas, is around 30,000 people (I'm putting aside the fact that at least 12,000 are Hamas terrorists). The gap between what is happening, and what people who make this false comparison are implying is happening, is incomprehensible.

Sorry for the length, but I hope this is helpful!

(for all of my updates and ask replies regarding Israel, click here)

#resources #israel #antisemitism #israeli #israel news #israel under attack #israel under fire #terrorism #anti terrorism #hamas #antisemitic #antisemites #jews #jew #judaism #jumblr #frumblr #jewish #ask #anon ask

[sophie-frm-mars]

Hi Sophie! In light of the genocide in Palestine and the conspiracies around it, do you have any thoughts on how to avoid conspiracy thought?

You pointed out in Conspiracy on the Left that conspiracists will often switch from using language that recognizes incentives and structures, to language that indicates direct malice and intent. I've seen this in real time with Zionism where people will stop using it as a term to describe the ideology and actions of Israel and America (economic and military interests, the historical inertia of the british empire, the interest of capital and western nations using Israel as a base in the Middle East), to using it as a placeholder for jews (people accusing individual people (usually american) of attempting to silence voices with media platforms)

I was gonna say I find this one really straightforward, but at the same time I myself have actually rushed into condemnations of Israel that gave too much leniency to antisemitic ideas, so there probably is a bit more to it. I'll get to it

Firstly, the straightforward part of it is that there are jews all around the world who absolutely fucking despise israel and its genocidal project, so even saying "Israel doesn't represent jews" is too mild. Israel actively denies citizenship to ethiopian jews for instance. I think the main thing is to recognise it for what it is - an outpost of imperialist white supremacy in the Middle East - and to recognise Zionism as a primarily American and imperial core phenomenon rather than a jewish one.

Once you have those ideas down it's pretty easy to separate it out because assuming that any jewish person or org supports Israel just because they're jewish is clearly antisemitic. But here's the rub, Israel uses jewish identity as a shield to justify its actions. At the same time that there are illegal settlers literally giving interviews saying "I describe myself as a fascist" the Israeli state claims that Hamas reads Mein Kampf and that Palestinians are literal Nazis. Not only that but Israeli statesmen use references to things like Amalek to signal their genocidal intentions, basically using the cultural references of Judaism to simultaneously hide behind and also attack.

Where I fell into something antisemitic was when I found out about the IDF cumjacker squad, the guys who go out to get the semen of Israel's fallen dead. the Jizzrael Defence Force if you will. Someone who was talking about it said that the justification had some kind of origin in the hebrew bible and I parroted this without thinking until a jewish friend pulled me up on it. There was no source and there was frankly no reason to repeat it even if it had been true, right? but I got carried away. The reality is that the cumjacker battalion exists for the same reason as sterilisation & organ harvesting programs, because Israel is a Starship-Troopers-Ass fascist nightmare state that sees the bodies of the pure and good as essential to the domination of the future and the bodies of the impure and wrong as wretched at worse and resources at best.

How I think we can avoid the trap of sharing these rhetorical points is by remembering what Israel's relationship to judaism is, which is primarily as a shield. "Shoot and Cry" is the phrase to remember. Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir said "We can forgive them for killing our children but we can never forgive them for making us kill theirs". This bogus remorse over their genocide of palestinians (because they understand genocide because of the holocaust, see?) and constant preemptive counterattack (Amalek attacked Israel first, see) is the place where Israel touches base with jewish identity, but if you can't see any benefit to Israel's strategy in association with jewish identity, it's likely someone is just trying to say The Jews instead of Israel or repeating the talking point of someone who is.

[criptochecca]

ngl i actually do hate how israel has made discussing and acknowledging antisemitism so much harder with how theyve worked to try and equate jewish identity with zionism bc especially in the past few months theres been some larger fascist twitter accounts that have had their followers SOAR just by sort of...sliding their bigotry into going 'look at how evil israel is' while still being bigots (ntm how ppl will make vile comments about how hitler was right or some shit when they see the ongoing genocide)

like. the adl is zionist and other groups that track antisemitism tend to get absorbed or overpowered by them, which makes it a legitimate issue where you can't tell if the offical statistics you see of rising anti jewish sentiment are accurate bc they also include normal pro palestine protests and phrases, but you can personally find people online passing around blood libel/uncritically repeating other antisemetic tropes without sources and saying jewish people control the media (ntm how israel itself is holding up aspects of the holocaust as worthy of emulation?) it feels like the actions of israel are making it actively more unsafe for jewish people globally bc they claim they commit this behavior for the sake of jewish stabilty when they do it for the sake of colonialism and its incredilby concerning because even before this it felt like antisemitism was rising again.

what people who say israel controls everything dont really understand is that israel functions as a settler colony of the usa so it benefits the usa/the western world for its celebrities and government to support it across the board-its not that Israel controls the media, but that it benefits western systems of power for there to be a white supremacist colony in the middle east to protect their own interests.

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[menalez]

Sorry to use your inbox to vent but I am just SO frustrated with being accused of antisemitism any time I post ANYTHING about palestine. Like I really don't feel like it is, obviously, but when it just happens every single time I dont know what to think, because how do I know? I'm not jewish, maybe I'm just stupid and uneducated because they all seem to know more than me, but I also just don't feel like I need to have that in-depth of knowledge about judaism and israel to be able to say what's happening right now is bad??

And I've been told that, as an american, I've been raised with antisemitic ideals so I can't look at israel without that even if I don't think I am, and I just. Really don't understand that!! Like obviously antisemitism is a real thing but am I being stupid for just not feeling like I was?? Like literally the only thing I every learned about jewish people was hanukah exists and they were targeted in the holocaust, I just don't see how I was apparently raised to hate israel. It just makes me feel a little crazy lately...

honestly i cannot tell you if you did or said anything antisemitic bc i have not seen what u have done or said but, that said, there has been this weird push to label any criticism of israel as antisemitic and to frame it as an attack on jewish people as a group. its bizarre, because its also framing israel's violations of humanitarianism and international law as if its somehow innate to jewish people. as if its a Jewish Trait to kill tens of thousands of civilians and starve them and displace millions and expell millions from their lands and take their land and their homes and and and... and honestly this insinuation that opposing these things is to hate jewish people is what actually feels antisemitic to me. this constant equating of israel with jewish people as a whole, this framing of israel as defining jewish people is something both antisemitic anti-zionists would do AND zionists are doing and its bizarre, and frankly comes across as far more antisemitic than advocating for treating civilians humanely and advocating against committing a genocide on palestinians could ever be.

[loneberry]

never again...for anyone.

Mayor David Azoulai, head of Israel's Metula Council called for Israelis to "Turn Gaza into Auschwitz. Let it become a museum."

The Israeli official said, "The entire Gaza Strip should be emptied and leveled flat, just like in Auschwitz. Let it become a museum, showcasing the capabilities of the State of Israel and dissuading anyone from living in the Gaza Strip. This is what must be done to give them a visual representation."

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Poland’s Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum strongly condemns an Israeli mayor’s call for depopulating the Gaza Strip and turning it into an open-air memorial...

“David Azoulai appears to wish to use the symbol of the largest cemetery in the world as some sort of a sick, hateful, pseudo-artistic, symbolic expression,” a spokesperson for the museum writes on X.

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On the same day I visited the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp complex this exchange took place between an Israeli official and the museum. Some photos from the somber and terrifying trip:

The notorious "Arbeit macht frei" ("Work sets you free") gate at the entrance of Auschwitz.

Auschwitz II-Birkenau gatehouse

Women's barrack at Auschwitz II-Birkenau

When I think about the Holocaust, I feel an intense sense of existential vertigo. How. How could humans allow this to be done to other humans? I just can't understand it. What the fuck were people thinking? But then I look at the genocidal rhetoric Israelis are using against the Palestinians and must face that we are witnessing the normalization of genocide right now.

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Only 1.8% of Israeli Jews think the IDF has used too much force in Gaza, in a campaign that has now (according to the Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor) killed over 25,000 Palestinians, including over 10,000 Palestinian children. "57.5% of Israeli Jews said that they believed the IDF was using too little firepower in Gaza." "48% of Jewish Israelis say that the suffering of Palestinian civilians should not be taken into consideration when planning the next phase of fighting in the Gaza Strip. 36% of Jewish Israelis said that it should 'not so much' be taken into consideration." Truly stunning, this near-consensus support in Israel on wiping out Gaza.

Recently, the #1 song in Israel calls for genocide of Palestinians, where Palestinians are referred to as rats and sons of Amalek. Do I need to remind you about what the Hebrew Bible says in the passage about Amalek?

Now go, attack the Amalekites and totally destroy all that belongs to them. Do not spare them; put to death men and women, children and infants, cattle and sheep, camels and donkeys.’

It's not just the "fringe" of Israeli society that is calling for the genocide of Palestinians in Gaza. "Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, meanwhile, evoked a biblical analogy referring to the Israelites’ enemy, largely interpreted as a genocidal call to wipe out Gaza."

“You must remember what Amalek has done to you, says our Holy Bible - we do remember,” he said during an official video statement.

Then there are Gallant's early comments. “We are fighting human animals, and we are acting accordingly,” Israel’s Defence Minister, Yoav Gallant, said. “We will eliminate everything - they will regret it,” Gallant added.

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Moshe Feiglin, the founder of Israel's right-wing Zehut Party and former Likud representative in Israel’s parliament:“There is one and only (one) solution, which is to completely destroy Gaza before invading it. I mean destruction like what happened in Dresden and Hiroshima, without nuclear weapons,” he said. In another statement, Feiglin said Israel’s end goal should not be to eliminate Hamas, but rather, “Gaza should be razed and Israel’s rule should be restored to the place. This is our country".

Amit Halevi, a Likud member in parliament, said, “There should be two goals for this victory: One, there is no more Muslim land in the land of Israel … After we make it the land of Israel, Gaza should be left as a monument, like Sodom”.

Nissim Vaturi, deputy speaker for Israel’s parliament: “Nakba? Expel them all.”

Ariel Kallner, a member of Israel’s parliament: “Nakba to the enemy now! .. Right now, one goal: Nakba! A Nakba that will overshadow the Nakba of 48. A Nakba in Gaza and a Nakba for anyone who dares to join!”

When I ask myself how the Holocaust could have happened, I have to look no further than what I see happening in Palestine. While US politicians are wringing their hands about whether or not the IDF is "intentionally" targeting Palestinian civilians, Israeli officials including the PRIME MINISTER are straight up calling for genocide. And the US is sending them the arms to carry it out.

Yesterday I wept for the Jews killed at Auschwitz, the unfathomable catastrophe that was the Holocaust. I am not one to downplay the horrors of antisemitism. t's no secret that many of my favorite writers and thinkers are Jewish: Hélène Cixous, Susan Taubes, Paul Celan, Spinoza, Kafka, Clarice Lispector, Alejandra Pizarnik, Amelia Rosselli, Simone Weil, Karl Marx, Freud (yes, psychoanalysis is a Jewish tradition, as my analyst used to say). Antisemitism is a truly vile ideology that was incubated in the heart of Christian Europe.

Around two-thirds of Europe's Jewish population was exterminated, along with disabled people, communists, gay people, Roma people, and Slavs under German occupation. I will never forget what it was like to see a gas chamber where thousands were murdered daily, to hear the names of those killed, along with the stories of the smell of burning corpses, the medical experiments, the daily humiliations, the sadism. Never again. We will always resist Nazis and fascists wherever they appear.

As antiauthoritarian leftists, we have always been categorically opposed to fascism in all its manifestations. What is truly maddening about contemporary discourse is the conflation of leftist support for Palestinian liberation with antisemitism, when it is actually the far-right that is pushing an antisemitic agenda. Again, I am thankful for the moral clarity of Jewish peace activists who urgently remind us that "never again" means NEVER AGAIN FOR ANYONE.

[jewishvitya]

at this point i really don't think it's possible to talk about palestine without on some level talking about the holocaust. zionism bas been trying to intertwine the two (and mostly succeeding) for so long there is really no way to avoid the subject and still be heard. and it sucks. using a genocide to justify another is just beyond vile. especially when they're using rethoric and tactics (like the "children of darkness") from the first one. idk it's just really horrible

I understand what you mean, and, yeah, you're right, Israel and zionism did a lot of damage to the conversation about the holocaust. But here's the thing for me:

Talking about the holocaust to discredit the way Israeli propaganda is misusing is - not a problem. Important. For example, a friend of mine just said to me "It takes a special kind of evil to put this star on yourself while you’re basically following Nazi protocols yourself." This, to me, isn't an abuse of our trauma. It's a response to the manipulative actions of Gilad Erdan and his delegation. And it's referring to the silencing of dissenting voices and the talk of shooting protestors and, obviously, committing genocide.

Talking about the nazis among other fascist regimes as case studies to highlight fascist sentiments, policies, and practices we see in Israel - same, it's important. These things need to be pointed out and talked about. Especially as Netanyahu tries to make things more and more authoritarian.

I also talk about it when I say I refuse to be silent about becoming the face of similar oppression. I'm not pretending that because we're Jews and because we suffered, we can't possibly commit atrocities as bad as what was done to us.

But if you single out naziism just to call a Jewish zionist a nazi, that's abusing our collective trauma. Naziism is specifically built with antisemitism at the core. What we see here is a different kind of fascist ideology. Picking naziism to throw at them is like using a known trigger to make a point. And I think fascist is a strong enough term, and more accurate.

And I'm not shying away from talking about Israeli fascism (though I didn't really do much of that on my blog, it's often an irl or dm questions thing). And I understand that the holocaust will always be part of this conversation. But it's about how it's brought up, more than just avoiding it entirely.

Basically, if you want to talk about the holocaust in relationship to zionism, give it the gravity it deserves. Don't use it like the word "nazi" is a swearword you can throw in for emphasis. It's not "fuck." And I've seen it misused like that.

Does that make sense?

#riki babbles

[stripedwolf88]

Are you kidding me?

I can't. I literally cannot understand how you got the message but then proceeded to completely throw it out the window.

Hate and indifference and feelings of entitlement can happen from anyone at anytime. That is the point of the film. It's a warning to not fall into the mistake of easily making others suffer or allowing others to suffer when the situation benefits you.

I think we all need to remember that the people commiting this violence in Palestine are still human because it reminds us of the great evil any of us are capable of.

Fuck off for making it seem like the film was trying to diminish the horrors of the Holocaust when right now Israel and the US are ACTUALLY diminishing the murders of children and the destruction of bloodlines everyday that this genocide continues.

Just another example of the media trying to erase Palestinian existence and suffering. We will not be manipulated. Justice for Palestine. Ceasefire now and forever.

#ceasefire now #permanent ceasefire #palestine #free palestine #free gaza #gaza genocide #palestine genocide #justice for Palestine #Justice for gaza #stop the ignorance #Stop the hate

[nation-of-bros]

Regarding the Ukrainians, the West applauds any counter-reaction, no matter how barbaric, against the Russian invaders. On the other hand, the West expects unconditional passivity and willingness to sacrifice from the Palestinians…

No pity for Jewish Nazis

It is precisely because of these actions that I have absolutely no pity for Israel. They have been causing the hatred they complain about for generations. Their entire identity is based on contempt for others and playing the victim. Furthermore, every time you criticize it, they pull out their holoc… shit or tell tall tales like that about "Anne Frank", one of many fictions of Ashkenazis to gain pity for their own advantage (key word: holocaust industry). Yes, it is evil; But if you, as a German, are indoctrinated with this garbage from birth, you either a) become a self-hater or b) you are one of the few organisms that develop immunity to it. When I saw through all these lies, it was hard for me not to become a true Nazi, I'll be honest. I was never a neo-Nazi, let alone a racist, but I suddenly saw history differently. Therefore, my opinion towards the Third Reich is much more diverse today than one would expect from me, where everything has to be demonized unconditionally. But the truth is usually hidden somewhere in the middle, in the big gray area that is neither pure black nor pure white!

In any case, I can't emphasize often enough how Israel is living out everything they accuse the Germans of. They are the real Nazis, but in an unmanly version, because they play the victim like a pussy instead of having the balls to own up to their own shit. No, they are trying to deceive the world with their fake democracy.

Trost

Therefore, it is a satisfaction for me that the Arab invasion of Europe at least has the advantage of ending this guilt complex. And this is also self-inflicted, because people like George Soros himself direct the flow of refugees to Europe through their NGOs. It is so paradoxical that these Ashkenazi clans are encouraging their own second expulsion from Europe; while demonizing right-wing parties that actually fraternize with Jews and Israel against the "common Muslim enemy".

I'll honestly admit that I don't really understand this shit; just as the Pope himself blesses and even demands mass immigration of Muslims to Europe. They're all pretty crazy, like they're afflicted with brain parasites that cause their host bodies to behave in completely self-destructive ways.

Bad thoughts

The evil part of me, my demonic side, wishes the Arab countries would band together to attack and destroy Israel from all sides in order to return the land to the Palestinians. This is of course not nice or right, and contradicts my pacific German attitude due to two lost world wars, but I despise Israel so much because it is the epitome of lies, a scourge of humanity that must be defeated. But ultimately everything levels itself out, for Israel has long since destroyed itself; it's just a matter of time. So there's no need to get your hands dirty, just wait and watch as the angry Palestinians double in size every 30 years and eventually overrun Israel.

Meanwhile, Biden wants to transfer hundreds of billions of dollars more to Ukraine and Israel. It's so absurd. I wonder how long Americans will continue to support these parasites while problems continue to pile up in their own country.

Without all the annual money from America and Europe, Israel would have been finished long ago.

I recently learned that, for cost reasons, Israel's anti-missile defense system only intercepts missiles headed for populated areas. This means that as an Israeli you have to be prepared to be killed by a rocket at any time outside of the "safe" residential areas. It takes a lot of perseverance and pure fanaticism to choose this life voluntarily. They could live so much better in America. It's really quite insane that for generations they have chosen this life in Israel just to live out their Bible bullshit about "holy land". They argue with Arabs over deserts because they imagine that as "God's chosen people" they have a right to this land, even though their religion actually forbids it as long as the Messiah is not there:

Do you have to understand that?!

I'm really out of it at this point.

#politics #essay #Youtube

[liblib620]

Why do you support genocide

Not confident to say that without anon, are we now? Okay. Let's start off with how it's literally not a genocide no matter which way you look at it. Why not to explain it to your itsy bitsy brain I compare the current situation in Gaza to an actual genocide, i.e. the holocaust.

FUN FACT:

The term "genocide" was coined by a polish Jew after World War 2 to give a name to the crimes comitted by the Nazis against their targetted populations.

The dictionary definition of genocide is, and I quote, "the deliberate killing of a large number of people from a particular nation or ethnic group with the aim of destroying that nation or group." There's two main parts of this definition.

The deliberate killing of a large number of people from a particular nation or ethnic group.

And...

2. Having the aim of destroying that particular nation or ethnic group.

In the holocaust six million Jews were killed. That includes the 2.7 million of us killed in killing centers (places specifically designed with the intent to commit mass murder), another 2 million in mass shootings organized by the Nazis, add in another million from concentration camps, and a couple hundred thousand in other acts of violence committed against the Jews during that time. Now this is very simplified and I can link to you my source right here, but all of this to say is that the holocaust took out 40% of the world's population of Jews. To this day, we haven't been able to get our population number back to where it was before WWII.

Let's now talk about Palestine, shall we? Now what I believe you are referring to is the "75 years of genocide". That's something that's been going on, but it can't be further from the truth. Israel as a nation has actually only been around for 76 years. Our independence day was this past month so obviously we counted up. That doesn't change the fact that Palestinians were not systematically murdered in those 76 years, and war casualties are not considered genocide. If they were, all the allies in WWII were also committing genocide when they bombed cities. In fact, almost every war would be a genocide then. In 1960 the Palestinian population was at 1.1 million. In 2023, there were 5.3 million. This is not a genocide.

This is taking a while so I'll wrap this up. Palestians have not be deliberately murdered in large numbers with the intention of destroying the entire population.

Now, you're probably not reading this, anon. I mean, it's a large wall of text and you get your information from 60 second TikToks, but I just wanted to say to you, personally, I really hope this is a geniune question from you to better understand the war. I would like to imagine that you have yet to hear the opinion of someone who stands for Israel and that this question came from genuine confusion from someone who's only heard from the other side. More realistically, you asked this not to learn or hear my thoughts, but to attack me. Please, can it not be the latter? I wish the best for you.

#israel #stand with israel

[matan4il]

hey sorry if this is disrespectful as a non-jew but ive been reading up on stuff and thinking about i/p and.

War is synonymous with mass death. There has not been a single war in the history of mankind that has not resulted in suffering. Even Sun Tsu, in his 25-century old The Art of War, emphasized the importance of peace and of nonviolent resolutions. so i really do not understand the watermelon-fixated dumbasses who cheered on the oct. 7 massacre then decried Israel's self defense as genocide. this is the "globalized intifada" they've been clamouring for. this is *exactly* what you're asking for when you cheer on hamas and their genocidal buddies. sorry that yank school never taught you that war is bad but this is how reality works. the real pro-palestine stance would be staunchly against hamas.

Hi Nonnie!

I'm not gonna lie, whenever I think about war, the one sentence that gets stuck in my head is, "war is hell." It is death, destruction, mayhem, and cruelty that has no bounds, even when it's not committed on purpose. Even the most justified of wars. I think one of the reasons we all keep going back to WWII is because it was simultaneously maybe the most justified war ever, literally fought to stop a fascist regime and its dictatorial partners from expanding their conquests of more and more land, occupying more and more people, bringing about more and more suffering (including the most extreme case of genocide in human history), and yet at the same time, it was also the single bloodiest conflict ever, and the war itself was cruel and brutal, certainly when we talk about acts committed by the Nazis and their collaborators, but on occasion there were atrocities committed by the allied soldiers, too (not to the same degree, and not as a part of their government's policy, but my point is that even fighters who are in battle for the best of reasons, as the allied soldiers were, have some among them, who commit terrible crimes. In part, because war blurs the lines of normal reality and morality).

And I'm saying all of this, because I truly believe that we, as human beings, should always aspire to avoid war whenever possible. I would have given EVERYTHING I could in order to stop Oct 7 from happening. Because the second that the massacre started, that's when this war began, and so many innocent lives were doomed, along with the terrorists. From the POV of what is internationally accepted as an act of war, Hamas firing 4,000 rockets into Israel in one day qualifies. Hamas breaching Israel's border and invading it with thousands of armed fighters qualifies. And without a doubt, Hamas committing the biggest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust, while intentionally targeting civilians, and compounding the horror of so many deaths, with the rape and beheading and torture and abuse and then kidnapping of even more victims, it beyond qualifies as an act of war. In fact, on August 25, 2023 (a month and a half before the massacre), Hamas senior Saleh al-Arouri explicitly said in an Arabic interview that IT IS THEIR GOAL to, that THEY WANT to, start a "total war" with Israel.

Once Hamas made and executed that choice, it doesn't matter how much and how many Israelis may aspire to avoid war. We were already in one. We should always aspire to avoid war, but we also have to recognize that sometimes, the choice simply isn't in our hands. It wasn't in the hands of the British on Sep 1, 1939. And it wasn't in ours on Oct 7, 2023.

And the thing is that war IS hell. Like I said, the massacre of Oct 7 was already war. Which means, it was already hell. Certainly for its victims, but it also was already a hell that every Israeli will carry with them for decades to come. And if we don't want ANOTHER war, if we don't want ANOTHER HELL, then we have to be sure that Hamas, those who chose to start this war, will pay for it in such a way that they can't start another one, and so that others will be deterred from starting one, too (I'm thinking mainly of Hezbollah and Iran, but all Islamists need to see a western democracy not backing down from defending itself in a war it did not choose).

THAT is the meaning behind the ancient Latin phrase, "Si vis pacem, para bellum." If you want peace, prepare for war. It's the understanding that sometimes, for the sake of peace in the long run, you have to be prepared to fight in the near future.

(remember in 2014, as the pope released doves in a symbolic gesture of hoping for peace in Ukraine, and they ended up being attacked?)

I want peace. I have always wanted peace. I was the ridiculous kid, who had a "peace diary" where I wrote every day about how much I wanted peace, and how I hoped it was coming. I'm not writing that diary anymore, but I still want it, and I still believe that one day, we WILL have peace.

But it's not going to happen as long as there are extremists on Israel's borders, who still believe they can genocide us a second time, and are willing to start a war to achieve that. When they give up on that "dream," when they finally see that it will always fail, and in the process, they will suffer hell along with us to such a degree that it just won't be worth it, that's when we'll have real peace. That's when both Israelis and Palestinians will finally be safe from the threat of another hell being unleased on us. We'll have real peace, not the kind made to get something from the other side, but because both sides want peace over war for themselves (that's what the crucial mistake of the "land for peace" formula was IMO. It should be "peace for peace." With agreed land concessions, obviously. But it should be clear that the big prize both sides get is peace itself, and not that one side is doing the other a favor, and giving it peace in exchange for something material, because that kind of peace is an abstract concept, that can be withdrawn at any moment when it's not something the "giver" values for themselves. That's what happened with the Oslo accords, the PLO got territories, self rule and international legitimization, then as admitted by Imad Faluji, the Palestinian Communications Minister, Yasser Arafat planned the launch of the violent riots and wave of terrorist attacks known as the second intifada once he concluded he got as many material prizes out of the accords as he could).

On a side note, when the total number of people killed on both sides during the two intifadas was in the thousands, and the injured in the tens of thousands, IDK how anyone can claim that the call to "globalize the intifada" is anything other than a call for violence and death. The fact that this chant is coming from the same crowd that claims to be pro-peace when they demand a ceasefire now is truly deranged, and can only be rightly addressed with memes...

Sorry for the length, I guess it's still hard to process the inability of people to understand that sometimes, we don't want a war, but we do grasp that we have to fight one, even at the cost of possibly our own life or the lives of those dearest to us, even when it's bloody and nasty and hell, and civilian casualties are impossible to avoid thanks to Hamas' choice of using Gazans as human shields. I'm not sure if this helped, but I hope it somehow did! xoxox

(for all of my updates and ask replies regarding Israel, click here)

#israel #antisemitism #israeli #israel news #israel under attack #israel under fire #terrorism #anti terrorism #hamas #antisemitic #antisemites #jews #jew #judaism #jumblr #frumblr #jewish #ask #anon ask #resources

[rebelwheelsnycpoetry]

A Good Jew (written in 2023)

by Michele Sommerstein

Pt 1 Wednesday, Los Angeles, white supremacists same rhetoric spewing, lies antisemitic, oozing, while, Zionist Jews in Israel, play theft again, in Palestine, these, violence unjust

and I feel fucked up, unsure, walking this high wire, delicately balancing poorly stacked and trembling plates & china of various sizes pondering what is my place, my lane, my right, my responsibility in this As an activist, a person of Jewish ancestry, this history that I awkwardly dance with awkwardly

unsolicited two cents, as people tell me how I should be. If I am to be “a good Jew” (if I am not to cause harm) as if speaking out against the occupation, especially during attacks from anti-Semites - causes harm has me questioning if and how and when I should speak?

this identity, that I do not list in my bio, for it would somehow feel fake as if I somehow haven't earned enough points to declare it, and yet whip out strategically, like a card in my wallet, when it comes to politics for I know of it's value, of its weight & and at times privilege Dear Senator, I write to you as a Jewish constituent.

It's been decades but I remember going with my mother temple too warm, small child drowsy, rabbi speaking, drones on and on, slow near monotone, and I am, disconnected from the meaning, not understanding, attending out of some weird obligation expectation that somehow came with my birth, and why? forget that it was often in another language that I did not understand (nor yet appreciate) sometimes I'd drift off day dreaming, mid sermon, of those after service cookies served in the basement that never really felt worth it nor were they ever that good. and yet every Thursday night on repeat

I remember, small child, inquisitive, inquiring But if God is everywhere, why do we have to pray in temple? For I was told that good Jews go, that god favors those, who attend

but the women in the two back rows, always gossiping I said even if they're not even paying attention? Yes, even if someone prays in the forest sincerely, he is less favored? Yes and it didn't make sense

Don't ask so many questions. Why can't you be more like your peers? Who ask nothing (they are good) and although still a child, it all just felt like bullshit that Jewish was just this thing you go along with without really knowing why & so by 13 “I did my time” and got out. L'Chaim.

Pt 2 I recall, late teens, paternal, grandparent's Oldsmobile (boxy with no power steering), grandfather (typically passive) parked in the Jersey driveway when the Queen Matriarch (my grandmother) turns to me, asking if I was yet dating, and I was, but she said “Well, when you're serious, he'll be Jewish.” For years I'd always inquire “Why?” “It's tradition” without fail she replied “But why is it tradition?” but tradition, presented as infallible and was not to be questioned. (why must you ask so many questions)

until one day, 19 years, late teens, backseat. Oldsmobile, boxy with no power steering, in frustration “But why is it tradition?!” This expectation to follow without reason And she, rooted in Zionism & trauma (and the intersections of) said “OK, you're old enough to know…” Spoke of my duty as a “pure blooded” Jewish woman a what? To marry, to mate with a pure blooded Jewish man and your pure blooded – she said again – Jewish children will be part of a collective army, so when – not if but when the next Holocaust comes, this time, we will. be, ready… Stunned and silent but with the blaring awareness that pure blooded was a term that Hitler had used against us and what the fuck?

But at the time I dared not utter a word because she was the Queen Matriarch, and respect, an elder with a free pass And I dared not utter a word because the women in my family were raised to be subservient to the men, who were then underfoot to The Queen (this also never made sense) I dared not utter a word because we had led very different lives not that this justified what I was hearing but I, who never had to escape by night, by boat, as a child from Russia so what right did I have to speak my mind? To tell her how to deal with her trauma? (a word that was never used, but influenced most things in my family)

I remember at the party DJ playing Hava Nagila (mandatory but welcomed) and everyone danced, loose & drunk-like, floppy though sober but not my grandmother. She, who moved with intention and purpose. With pride like a form of protest. In ways I did not comprehend at 13, why so serious (for no one really talked about the past, and you knew not to ask questions) but in that moment, she danced for all the times in Russia, she and her family could not Their culture, their religion, their existence, persecuted to no end I wish I was told more as a child, so I too would not have taken it for granted.

Pt 3 I don't remember ever hearing the word Palestine in Hebrew School. Nor seeing it on the maps they had us color in as kids But as I got older, I learned of its existence,

And the actual history, the hypocrisy, falsely justified as if those who were oppressed, could never become the oppressors. As if our history justified it all – it does not.

I saw Zionists twist the term anti-Semite to mean anyone who criticized the occupation, even when valid watering down the meaning of the word

I saw a video of Palestinian people who could not even wave their own flag without persecution. and I could not help but to notice the similarities

I saw Zionism exploiting the trauma of the holocaust, perpetually jabbing the wound, insisting “you need this to keep you safe!” but always failing to do so.

And when I spoke up, making art and poetry that points this out. I was yelled at, all caps, put down told to not ask so many questions, that I am bad, a self hating Jew

but I am not & nor am I alone

I've marched with Jewish groups protesting conservative Zionists who had teamed up with white supremacists on the topic of Israel – and what?!

I've met Jewish activists in solidarity with Palestine, who cry out “not in my name” taking a stand because “If Not Now, When?” teaching the history of Jewish rebellion & good good trouble

I've seen protest signs carried that read: “Zionism is not Judaism” (because that needs to be said) I've seen temples, boldly religious but not as in controlling, oppressive - restricted as in joyous, inclusive, ask the questions! as in love, community, as in growth, as in connection, this that was healing this that I wish younger me could have seen because then I would have known there were other people like me because then I could have separated the wisdom from the trauma and acknowledged and learned from both and Jewish would've been in my bio along with Queer and Disabled and writer and nerd and activist all the things I declare with pride.

Monday, New York City, white supremacists same rhetoric, spewing, lies antisemitic oozing, while Zionist Jews in Israel, play theft again, in Palestine, may it be known & without apology - these, violence unjust

#poetry #poem #disabled poet #palestine #israel #gaza #colonialism #unlearning zionism #taking a stand #jews for palestine #jewish #judaism #jewish history #jew

[lordystrange]

I’m 6 days late to replying because I was busy but the post you reblogged right before you answered my ask is the racism I’m talking about. How many times do we, as Palestinians, have to tell you that you cannot support us and be a Zionist? Zionism has taken away our homes, our land, our rights, our freedom, our ability to live. Our decades of suffering aren’t enough for you to denounce Zionism because you are racist. We know what Zionism has done better than anyone. I don’t care what it might mean to some people in their minds. All of it has oppressed and colonized us. The holocaust was horrible, but that doesn’t make it okay to displace for over 75 years and harm us instead. If we weren’t Arab you would listen and understand. Idc if you like Noah Schnapp famous people mean nothing to me, but Zionism is why there’s a genocide right now and decades of oppression before that. Our genocide and pain isn’t bad enough to you because we’re not considered white.

Thank you for the ask. I have tried to explain the following many times in the past and sometimes people see what I mean and sometimes they don't. I can try and be as thorough as possible, but that's really all I can do. The rest is up to you.

Firstly, I'd like to say that yes, I support the jewish people's right (and all people's right) to live in a safe land, but no, I don't support murdering or harming anyone in anyway for that to happen. Does that make me a zionist? I honestly have no clue.

Why don't I have a clue? Well, that's because I don't really know what zionism means to people. I have read about it a lot since last fall, but it's not taught in schools here, and even if it was, it would most likely be from the white and western pov.

From what I've gathered, the core idea of zionism is the idea of jews having a safe land for them to live in. An understandable wish, since they have throughout the history been very oppressed. Now, what seems to cause the most issues here are the many different types of zionism, or rather the lack of acknowledging that. I hate when people say that they either support or don't support zionism without specifying which type. There are very radical types, in which people believe they have a right to destroy Palestine and Palestinians, and there are a lot less radical types, in which people believe that Israel doesn't even need to be a jewish state for it to be safe for jews. And some more or less radical types in between.

It would be a lot easier if zionism simply meant one thing and everybody could agree on it, right? Sure it would be. But who gets to decide? Not me for sure, which is why I can't do it.

It would be very reasonable that the Palestinians suffering from the horrific acts done in the name of zionism get to decide. White/western nations in general should pay attention to the world around them more and we have a lot to learn about the racism we practice. But this brings us to Noah. Because no matter what we, or you, or anyone decides about zionism now, it doesn't change him having a completely different idea of it back then.

His crime was not knowing better. Should people have called him out for that? Yes, absolutely. Should they have taught him to know better? Yes, but instead they chose to make learning process harder for him by destroying his life. "But he supports killing Palestinian babies, he deserves to have his life destroyed-" No. He doesn't support that. I'm very sorry for anyone who's been so screwed over in life so badly that they would choose to believe such horrific claims, but no.

Idk if you're familiar with Haraway's (1988) God Trick, but basically all people perceive the world from where they stand, and no one can see everything from nowhere. There is no universal objectivity. I will always perceive the world from a northern european standpoint. But that doesn't mean I shouldn't listen to you.

White/western people should absolutely learn to see and hear and acknowledge Palestinians (and other non-white/western people) better. But it's not the same as learning math. I can practice math in my everyday life. I can't practice being treated in a racist manner. So it will take me a lifetime of making mistakes and letting people educate me and I still won't master it perfectly. But I can try.

Fortunately for me, I've had some Palestinians discuss about these topics with me. And I know Noah has those people and conversations too. I do feel horrible about the genocide everyday and I keep internally screaming to the United Nations to do something. But I hopefully won't ever have to experience genocide and I hope people are decent enough to not wish such thing to happen just to make me see how they feel. The goal is to make human rights happen for all of us equally, not to take those rights away from all of us equally.

I really hope this clarified things for you. And if I'm wrong, I'm sorry.

And for the anons who after this accuse me of being a radical zionist and a raging antisemitist: Hi! You really prove my point about the God Trick and having different interpretations.

[be-good-be-safe-be-kind]

holocaust remembrance day

nothing i say can even begin to cover what this is about, and i've been thinking about is all day and still have nothing, but i need to put these thoughts down somewhere.

there's something... off, i guess, about it being called international holocaust remembrance day. yom hashoah is understandable, it corresponds to the warsaw ghetto uprising, it acknowledges the many roles of the jewish people in the holocaust, but today is only for the liberation of auschwitz concentration camp. which isn't to say that shouldn't be commemorated, it absolutely should, but it places the focus more on the liberators finally taking action than all the prisoners who lived and died there between 1939 and 1945. i understand wanting to bring attention to the holocaust, to set a date for the international communities to be together, but shifting the focus to the liberation in 1945 as opposed to the ghetto uprising in 1943, or the resistances in the extermination camps between 1942 and 1944, or literally any other date which remembers the people who actually went through the holocaust instead of the people who showed up towards the end - i don't get it.

i mean, i do and i don't, because people only seem to care about us when it's in relation to themselves. either jewish people need to be persecuted, or they need to be rescued, but they can't just be jewish people doing their own things and living their own lives. the holocaust can be remembered, but the pogroms before it aren't worth mentioning, because then the saviors are too close to the 'them' than the 'us' and they don't like that. places like the ghettos only matter to the people who showed up after 1945, not before 1939, because how can they acknowledge that invasions and segregation were occurring if they didn't jump in to stop it? they try to play the guilt card, the 'well we did show up, didn't we' card, as if we're not sitting here now full of 'what if's and 'should i even be here's and 'you were too fucking late's.

as tiring as it is to try explaining that the holocaust was more than a few years, that it was built off thousands of years of antisemitism, that it was more than labor camps and medical torture and gas chambers and mass graves, it's absolutely nothing compared to the exhaustion of my grandparents and their families. it's nothing compared to what 6 million jewish people went through, what their families experienced, what the survivors continue to experience. and it seems than rather than actually remembering these things, rather than learning and sharing and talking about them, people are using today to make comments with minimal thoughts behind them about how it's okay to criticise israel, just not to be antisemitic about it. of all days to bring up israel, and to bring up the crappiness of its current government, to bring attention to palestine, maybe the day to remember how the jewish people were systematically exterminated across europe and some managed to flee to that land during and afterwards, maybe that day is not the day for those comments.

i know i'm considered one of the lucky ones. my grandmother's mother and her family were able to move to palestine (yes, after the first world war it was called palestine under the british mandate) and later to america. my grandfather and his sisters lived in europe throughout the holocaust, and later moved to america as well. they worked for scraps as children, because they had no parents, and somehow managed to survive. my grandmother is fortunate to have great-grandchildren, and even though she now has a difficult time remembering her own children, she knows we're all here. my grandfather is no longer with us, but throughout his life he catalogued the stories and experiences of holocaust survivors, and left us with fond memories of himself as well as collective memories of our people.

we're able to remember the holocaust because we never got the chance to know life without it. we're named for the people who would have been our uncles and aunts. we grow up with stories about them and who they could have been, and we carry them with us forever. we say 'never again' and we fucking mean it, because we know this pain and we shouldn't, because no one should. we talk about remembrance because we don't have the option to forget.

i remember meeting my great-grandmother, along with my siblings, when we were quite young. i couldn't understand why she cried; we were the ones meeting a new person, and new people are scary when you're small. i only learned after that we share the names of her family, the ones who didn't make it out, the ones who were frozen in her memory at our ages. as scared as i was of meeting someone new, someone much older and bigger than me, i can't begin to imagine the fear of seeing kids with her cousins' names, living and breathing and smiling.

i remember passover preparation at my grandparent's house, along with some of my cousins. i remember looking for chametz in the attic with them, with our little flashlights, while the adults checked the main floor. i remember how angry they got to find us huddled up in some corner, i remember thinking maybe we would only be in trouble for playing when we were supposed to be doing a mitzvah, and i remember the pieces clicking the next night at the seder when they spoke about l'dor v'dor.

i remember reading the boxcar children, thinking it would be nice to live like that, before a teacher pointed out that jewish children in train cars isn't something to be desired.

i remember doodling on my arm, adding the date of something significant at the time, and being sent to the bathroom to scrub it off.

i remember learning that my mother's family had been in america since the early 1900s, and i couldn't wrap my head around it, because until that point, i thought the only jews in america were the ones who couldn't make it to shanghai or palestine or somewhere else.

i remember having picture books in kindergarten about the holocaust. i remember reading a different book about it each year for elementary school yom hashoah projects, and then learning about it more in depth each year after. i remember sitting in the hallway with a bunch of other 15 year olds as we wordlessly made collages from copies of what little pictures of our families we had left. i remember the kids whose families came from iran and persia and morocco who sat there with us, sharing their own histories.

i'm not sure where i'm going with this, and i know it doesn't make much sense or make a point or anything, but it is a day of remembrance and i have to do the bare fucking minimum and remember.

#✡️ #📝

[stedesbonnets]

I don't mean to sound agressive, I genuinely want to learn and understand. In a recent post you shared, it said that this showed that a bunch of people "had a sleeper antisemite agent and it got activated", and the next person added "I'm not talking about people who want to help Palestinians or people who criticize the Israeli government. (...) What is not normal about this situation is Jewish people all over the world getting harassed, threatened and attacked." So I completely agree with the second statement. Attacking Jewish people because of this war is dumb, goes against "defending innocent people". But from my perspective (which I will admit is very limited, I am a non-Jewish french person) it looks like most people are not critizising Jewish people as a whole, but the Israeli government specifically? Of course, there are idiots that are attacking Jewish people around the world, which is terrible, but it definetely doesn't feel like "87% of the world" to me. I do understand that antisemitism is real, and people pretend it doesn't exist and "has been solved" when like... many of the contenders for president here in France were openly antisemites. So yes, antisemitism is real, it's terrible, and it's usually hidden under the rug by "well meaning people". But is critizising the irsaeli government, and how it is handling this war, not what the second poster was talking about? Like, I feel there is a difference between "I don't like how the israeli government is treating palestinians" and "I don't like Jewish people". How is "I don't like how the israeli government is treating palestinians" inherently antisemite? Anyway, I know you're not here to educate anyone, sorry if this message is too long and annoying. I just really want to understand the perspectives of everyone involved in this, beyond the safe "I'm far away and it's easy to judge from here" stand.

hi anon, thank you so much for approaching this with understanding and good intentions. i'm at work right now, so i can't find the post you're talking about right now and read it again

criticizing the israeli government is not antisemitic, but a lot of the people are starting to slide into hating israel as a whole, and tying the citizens of israel to its government. to me, there is no hating israel as a whole that isn't antisemitic. you can't call for the destruction of a country without harming its citizens. there's a post circling, from a person who's not even from israel, about how removing the current government is not the solution, and that not even the israeli left is interested in the well being of palestinians. this post is absurd to me. not even israeli citizens are aware of every single thing the government is doing, so an outsider saying even our left is completely useless? and saying the solution is to dismantle the government (as a system) as a whole, without giving a shit about what happens to the israeli jews? it's just a fancy way of telling us to die

to what you said "it looks like people are not criticizing the jewish people as a whole" from october 7th, the second worst massacre of jews since the holocaust, i've read:

go back to your countries

to back to your penthouses in NY

every bomb launched at you is deserved and more

tumblr is hiding pro-pali posts bc the owner is jewish

saying everything is controled by the jews

calling us white colonizers

calling most if not all jews zionists on the spot

i personally gotten an anon asking me if i'm a zionist or "just living here"

holding jews both outside and inside of israel responsible for the actions of the government

and that's including murdering jews throughout the world, burning synagogues, sparying doors and graves of jews with swastikas, killing jewish college students, and many more hate crimes.

so yeah, it does feel like 87% of the world to me. i'm still losing followers talking about antisemitism. i have friends outside of israel who are worried about their safety, or had their families harmed

so no, criticizing the government is not antisemitic, but a lot of people have used it as an excuse to hate the citizens.

if you have more questions, or if you wanna send a dm (i promise i don't bite), feel free

#answered

[fandomsbecausewhynot]

WARNING! POSSIBLY TRIGGERING! MENTION OF WHAT IS GOING ON WITH ISRAEL AND PALESTINE! JUST A VENT!

My twin sister's (21) boyfriend (23) flew back to Israel Friday the 13th as his dad told him that it was his "duty" to fight as the boyfriends grandfather was a holocaust survivor and his dad also fought. My sister is understandably devastated.

I am not sure when I mentioned it, I don't think I did, maybe she just figured it out but I am pro Palestine. She text her boyfriend this and he replied asking if that meant I wanted him and all jewish people to die because that is what the Palestine's and Hamas want. (Even though all tangible evidence I have found points to the fact that Isael has been oppressing Palestine for decades and are the much more powerful state)

I, of course, told her that I just wanted peace, the Palestine people to be free, and for her boyfriend to come back safe.

I honestly don't like this guy, I won't go into detail but my sister is extremely codependent (like our mother) along with being autistic (like myself) and he has made it clear he either doesn't care about her or can't take care of her. She left our hometown with him after only knowing him after 3 months, only a week after I left for uni. None of our family really know him but it's clear how indoctrinated he is.

I am really worried about her because she is now alone, across the country, with no support system, and health issues with the only medical care a regional hospital.

She is incredibly trusting, and even though we are the same age, I feel years older than her. On top of that, she is saying stuff like, "If Palestine had no weapons, there would be peace. If Israel had no weapons, there would only be unaliving" or something similar.

I only wanted to support her, but with me being vocal about my opinions, she started shutting me out again. She has really unhealthy coping mechanisms. Idk what to do... I can't lie to her and take back what I said. The topic can't be avoided, and neither of us has impulse control in conversation. I can't lose her, I'm already losing my little brother, my dad is emotionally repressed, my mum is abusive (she is working on it), and my elder brother is evil.

Honestly, it's 2am, and I couldn't sleep without getting this out and I am not comfortable talking to anyone in my family, and I have no friends, irl, or on the internet. I just needed to vent. If you read this, I am impressed. Thank you. Idk how to fix any of this. Work cut me back to 1 day a week until the 14th of November and I am really stressed, plus my adoptive mother (emotionally) who I normally talk to about this stuff doesn't like to talk politics and its very hard to have a nuance discussion about it with her.

I posted here because I trust tumblr more than reddit.

Thanks for reading, advice is appreciated.

#palestine #pro palestine #free palestine #vent post #feel free to ignore #potentially triggering