I think the majority of anti-Zionists who don’t have ties to the Middle East don’t know much more about the history of Jews in the area beyond what they have seen on TikTok.
That’s a pretty obvious truism. What Nazis believe about Jews is also highly dependant on what the Nazis believed the Jews were like, too.
No, I don’t understand that, because yes, Netanyahu calls himself a Zionist, but so do all of his opponents. Every day, loudly and proudly. Far left, Socialist Israelis who oppose Netanyahu every day and proudly declare themselves to be Zionists. And not just in Israel; people lile @iiandyiiii, who are plenty critical of Israeli actions, but who pay attention to the situation, and not just twice a decade when it makes headlines, use the term correctly on a daily basis.
So I don’t have to accept you sitting half a world away from the action and dictating to me what my culture means. If it was any other culture, you’d probably see that, too; but as we discussed earlier in the thread, the indigenous oppressed/colonialist oppressor lens that’s used so universally tends to leave one quite myopic in placed like the Middle East, where the same places have been continously inhabited by many different groups for hundreds and thousands of years.
There are hundreds of thousands and millions of self-identified Zionists, in Israel and out of it, who have no issue whatsoever being strongly Zionist while also strongly opposing Netanyahu. If that boggles the minds of some dumbass college kids who couldn’t find the Middle East on a map, that’s their problem, not ours.
So you think it’s OK that Jewish students should be denied rape counseling services? Or is it somehow less bad in your eyes if Jews are given the opportunity to recite the anti-Zionist loyalty oath and be forgiven for the shame of their heritage?
My 2 shekels worth:
Kimstu is one of my favorite posters, and I was disappointed to see that their condemnation of making anti-Israel loyalty oaths a condition of receiving rape crisis services included a “but…” I would like to apologize for the intemperate tone of my previous post.
Babale is also one of my favorite posters and I am disappointed that he is defending Netanyahu for “mostly giving lip service” to the idea of Palestinian self-determination.
When Israelis have elected Netanyahu six times, it’s hard to strongly argue that these are people who deserve the right to elect their own leaders. I feel about Israelis the way I feel about white Americans…we’re part of the same nation and I’ve got their back in case of foreign invasion, but DAMN, most of those people are just fucked in the head.
FWIW, I consider “anti-Zionist” to mean someone who believes the State of Israel should not exist. It’s not someone who just objects to the treatment of Palestinians, any more than being a BLM supporter is being “anti-American”. Some of these people, some of whom I respect, mean by this that there should be one pluralist liberal democratic State for everyone between the river and the sea. I find this view naive and unrealistic, but not anti-Semitic.
Frankly, I feel that identifying as a “Zionist” or “anti-Zionist” in 2024 is like identifying as a supporter or opponent of the Hapsburgs; it’s an argument that was settled in the last century. I want everyone in the region to be able to live in peace and security, and I don’t see any realistic way for that to happen in the near future without a two-State solution, one of those States being Jewish-majority. If that makes me a Zionist, then so be it.
On the other hand, I have no more desire to move to Israel than I do to move to Alabama. It is my opinion that the Jewish community in America is much more spiritually advanced than that in Israel, where almost all Jews are either completely secular or racist lunatics who describe themselves as “Orthodox”.
The basic purpose of the existence of the Jewish nation is that we’re supposed to set a good moral example for the rest of y’all, and conduct ourselves in such a way as to be universally admired as the wisest and kindest of nations. I can’t help but feel that running a highly militarized ethno-nationalist State has been counterproductive with regard to that goal. If that makes me an anti-Zionist, so be it.
Anyway, happy Passover to all and thank you for listening to my ramblings.
I’ve been at the anti-Netanyahu protests on Kaplan Street in Tel Aviv, both last year and a few weeks ago, and the place was a veritable sea of waving blue-and-white Israeli flags. Every hour or so, the protest would stop so we could sing the national anthem. Have you ever heard 100,000 people sing together, from the heart? So don’t tell me who is or isn’t a Zionist.
Let me be super clear, I am certainly not defending Netanyahu or his actions there.
Like I said, Netanyahu very clearly has not moved us closer to a Two State Solution, and in fact, has moved us away. That’s why now, after Oct 7, he can go around claiming he has always opposed Palestinian statehood so long as it causes a security concern for Israel.
I was very specifically countering the claim that many poweful Israeli politicians have been saying for decades that a two state solution is impossible. That’s simply not true; even politicians like Netanyahu have paid lip service to the idea, and of course, many politicians to his left actually did work towards a two state solution. And the politicians who do putright oppose it, like Ben Gvir, are a new force on the political landscape; there was no one “extremely powerful” in that camp one decade ago, much less many.
So Kimstu’s claim that Israeli politicians have for decades painted a clear picture where Zionism is incompatible with a Palestinian state is absolutely false.
Once again, this is not a defense of Netanyahu. If anything, the fact that he pretended to support a two state solution in the longer term is a bad thing about him, because it aided him in getting elected. If he started talking like Ben Gvir ten years ago, I doubt he’d have been this dominant in Israeli politics for this long.
I agree with you almost entirely here. I’ll add one quibble, Zionism is about Jewish liberation and self-determination in a Jewish homeland. Most Zionists believed that the path to accomplish this involved statehood in Israel (and I’d argue that in hindsight they were very right), but a pluralist, liberal country does not have to be a barrier to that. Some Zionists, like the aforementioned Ahad Ha’am, thought this could be accomplished under Ottoman rule, for example.
But I also agree with you that expecting to set that up successfully, rather than having the whole thing collapse into bloodshed immediately, is hopelessly naive.
I sincerely hope that as a species, we someday grow completely beyond the need for Westphalian nation-states. But that day is not today.
The only other note I will add is that while wanting this single liberal state from the river to the sea can make sense without being anti-Semitic in theory, IN PRACTICE I am highly suspect. These people aren’t calling for the war in Ukraine to end with Russia annexing Ukraine and then establishing a pluralist democratic state from Kamchatka to Ukraine. They’re not calling for the abolition of all Muslim and Christian states, too. They’re npt advocating for a secular world government where all humans are citizens and all citizens are equal. No - there’s pnly one state where they insist on playing through their laboratory experiments, and it just so happens to be the only Jewish one.
That doesn’t necessarily mean they are anti-Semitic, but I find it extremely suspect, unless they’re also on the record seeking to abolish England and Jordan and Iran and Russia.
As Secular myself, I don’t see the problem with the first option 
As a Reform Jew, i would not want to live in Israel, where i don’t think I’d be able to practice my religion, and where I’d be forced into all sorts of awkward stuff by ultra-Orthodox fanatics.
One of the guests at my seder last night was a Russian Jew, born in Russia. (Or actually, in the USSR.) She said that much of the Russian Jewish community believes that the USA is the promised land for the Jews.
Wait, what?
An ultra orthodox guy coming up to ask you if you want to put on Tefillin happens to me about as often in Israel as a Christian or Mormon guy asking if I’ve heard the good news. But at least the Orthodox guy is dressed like a penguin, so I know what he’s up to. The Mormons are more subtle, but who else wears a short sleeve collared shirt and a tie? The regular Christians, though… they’re in street clothes, and they make conversation for a few minutes before they drop their church in. Insidious.
The Old City in Jerusalem, or other super orthodox neighborhoods in various cities, that’s a different story, they get brazen and harass people there. But frankly, there is very little reason to go to those places if you aren’t Orthodox. I’ve been to far more Arab towns than Orthodox ones.
Hey, I live in America. It’s a great place to be Jewish. For now.
Maybe shit like the “Jews will not replace us” marchers dies down, and we never see that again. Or maybe it ratchets up. I’d rather not bet my (and my family’s) life on the idea that “it can’t happen here”.
I was thinking more that it’s really hard to buy a sandwich on the Sabbath. Maybe that’s just Jerusalem, but a lot of people in my tour group were really cranky about missing supper.
Not the last time I was in Jerusalem, but the time before THAT - I spent my Saturday night club hopping with some friends, and in between clubs we hit up liquor stores to buy cheap drinks. In Israel it is legal to drink in public (drunk and disorderly is still a crime, but simply having an open container is fine) so we would take our drinks on the path and finish them by the time we got to the next club.
Again, this was a Saturday night, and we had no issues finding things that were open.
I’m sure it’s different in the Old City, but downtown Jerusalem is a city like any other.
Public transport is closed on Saturdays, which is one of the major ways that Orthodox shove their faith in everyone else’s faces.
Outside of a religious context though, shops tend to have somewhat shorter hours than here in the US, in my experience. Here in California, the earliest that grocery stores close is 10 PM, and some are open till 2, or even 24/7 (less so since COVID). That’s not gonna be the case in Israel, and I could see an unfamiliar American tourist getting stuck with no dinner options because they waited too late, even on a weeknight (outside of a busy downtown area).
Forgive my rank ignorance, but I thought Friday night would be the issue?
You are correct, sorry - had a brain fart - on Friday night we say “Shabbat Shalom”, so of course, that makes it Saturday (Shabbat), right?
To think of it another way: Friday night is “Shabbat Eve”, which in my pre-coffee brain turned into “Saturday Night”.
We went out on a Friday night, after a group Shabbat dinner.
It was 5:30pm, Friday evening, and they weren’t in the old city. They were at a hotel that wasn’t really walking distance to a lot of things. The hotel dining room and bar were closed, the nearby convenience store was closed, and public transit was closed. And there were a lot of cranky hungry people in the group. (I arrived Sunday morning, but that’s pretty much all anyone talked about when i got there.)
Gotcha. That does sound like a crappy situation, although I am not sure it is exclusive to Israel, other than the public transit thing which is indeed a travesty. I took my family to San Diego about a year ago, and we ended up at a hotel with a restaurant underneath and nothing else in walking distance. The restaurant closed from 12 to 4 so we were screwed for lunch (I had to drive 30 minutes round trip to pick up food while my wife stayed with our napping daughter, which ruined the little bit of free time the two of us had together that day…)
And that night we ran out of milk which meant another 30 minute round trip to an open grocery store.
Israel doesn’t have ridesharing apps like Uber, because only licensed taxi drivers can provide that service, but nowadays there’s an app called GETT that’s basically an Uber that only hosts licensed taxi drivers. This probably didn’t exist when you were in Israel, but today it would allow someone to make a food run. (Gett operates on Saturday).
In general though, even on weeknights, Israel doesn’t have the 24/7 convenience attitude that America has.
No worries. I was like damn, I really don’t understand Judaism.
Except that it is your problem now that the actions of the Israeli government have become so odious to millions of people around the world, that it has turned many people who were either pro-Israel, or at least neutral, into anti-Israeli/pro-Palestinian activists. In the same way that odious US actions turn millions of people around the world into anti-Americans.
As the parent of two “dumbass college kids” (and by the way, I’ll send them your regards - way to try to win over the other side) I have definitely seen this change in both their own and their friends’ social media posts. Mostly garden variety cease fire now posts, but they are certainly paying more attention to the region than they were before, and they are picking a side, and it isn’t your side.
Now of course many of these college students don’t have a deep understanding of the conflicts of the region, but they have never seen this before at an age where they could comprehend it. For example, my kids were 9 and 11 for the 2014 version of this. What today’s college students are seeing is the nation of Israel killing over 30,000 people in Gaza and they don’t like it, and they don’t like the people doing the killing.
That may not be fair, it certainly doesn’t show an understanding of the greater generations’ old issues, and it is without question leading to an increase in antisemitism whether or not that is the intent of those who are protesting against the war. However, it is a reality. And if the current American college generation grows up to be pro-Palestinian it will increasingly be your problem.
Most non-Orthodox Israelis know never to go to Jerusalem on a weekend. I live in the Tel Aviv area and there are plenty of restaurants, cafes and convenience stores open here right now on the holiday. Jerusalem vs. the coastal region is very much a red state/blue state thing - Israel, in its own way, is as divided a country as the U.S. is, just miniaturized.
And for the record, I grew up in Conservative synagogues in Israel, and we never experienced any harassment, nor have most of the many Reform shuls in the country. I’m not saying there isn’t any religious coercion here - there certainly is - but we’re holding it back, for now.
To add to what WreckingCrew said:
You can’t say “If that boggles the minds of some dumbass college kids who couldn’t find the Middle East on a map, that’s their problem, not ours” when those “dumbass kids” are potentially influencing policy in ways that will be very detrimental to Israel in the future. Whether these kids are ignorant or not, they will be future politicians, policy-makers, journalists, etc. who will someday in the future potentially pressure or influence the U.S. to cut back materiel support for Israel or other forms of aid or otherwise scale back or cancel the US-Israel ally partnership, and also reduce support for Israel elsewhere around the world through various means. In other words, it’s not “their” problem, it will very well become Israel’s problem.
Uh, certainly not. Did you not read the part in my post #300 where I explicitly said that excluding students (whether Jewish or not) from a sexual-assault survivors’ support services program, specifically for refusing to condemn Israel’s actions, has “no valid purpose whatsoever”? Of course such exclusion is inappropriate and wrong.
Like I said, I’m willing to take the blame for the obvious miscommunications here being due to some inadvertent failure on my part that my subsequent clarification attempts somehow never seem to fix. And I’m okay with resolving the problem by just ceasing to pile up additional misunderstandable responses to you (at least on this subject), as I have done with Babale. Sometimes a problem that apparently can’t be fixed can at least be stopped.
But what I will say, for my last word to you on the topic, is that it’s going to make it harder for you to know what I meant if you won’t even read what I wrote.