Mike Huckabee (!) has joined the chorus condemning the settlers.
God willing and the creek don’t rise, Netenyahu will no longer be PM after the elections, and whoever winds up in charge afterward will be willing to put the screws to the settlers.
Good piece on what it means to be Indigenous from a Jewish Quechua writer:
New interview from the great Isaac Chotiner with an American journalist who is on the ground in the a West Bank. He’s been beaten by settler thugs, and reports on IDF involvement and support for repeated settler pogroms against Palestinian civilians:
The Israeli government and military are supporting and aiding ethnic pogroms. They are literally as bad as Hamas, Iran, and the other worst of the worst parties in the region. I don’t see how this can possibly be denied at this point.
That was a good piece. For those who don’t like to follow links to long articles, a summary is:
No. Small “i” indigenous is used to describe where things are from. “Cactuses are indigenous to Arizona”. But capital “I” Indigenous is used to describe people. And the term was invented in a response to modern (post 1492) colonialism, to unite the colonized. (Who were variously called Indians, natives, savages, etc.) It’s never had a non-political meaning, and only Nazis assert that “Germans are indigenous to Germany”. Jews have occasionally been grouped with the colonized in a few fringe cases, but generally get grouped with the colonizers, and get colonizer privileges, such as in the US.
In Israel, the only thing going on that looks like modern colonialism is what’s happening to the Palestinians.
You know, when I criticized the term “indigenous” as being meaningless because it doesn’t actually refer to any real property of the people or their history but just to the arbitrary question of who happened to be there when white people showed up, I never thought that someone supposedly on the far Left would just come out and ADMIT that this is EXACTLY how they use the term “indigenous”.
Sorry, but if the term just means “whoever was there when white people showed up” it is completely meaningless and worthless.
I have to say that I do appreciate the author’s honesty, though. They aren’t trying to pretend that there’s a self consistent definition that actually makes sense; he admits the term is purely a political one. I strongly disagree with the author, but at least they aren’t shitting in my coffee and telling me it’s nutmeg.
This, I’ll agree with; it reveals exactly what the author means without the usual doublespeak.
Interesting book review by the Guardian:
Will wait for it to come to my local library. But even just from that article, it’s clear there’s quite a lot of pushback on Zionism “coming from inside the house” as it were.
Lots of nominative determinism going on nowadays…
For all the non-Hebrew speakers wondering what on Earth Babale is talking about (my bolding):
By the turn of the 21st century, the slur of “moser” served primarily as a rallying cry and justification for those who intend extrajudicial violence and seek to silence legitimate opposition. When Yigal Amir, for example, gunned down Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin in 1995, he called Rabin a moser for his peace efforts with the Palestinians. It’s used as a tool of intimidation against victims of sexual abuse who may be tempted to report their abusers to the authorities.
Branding a Jew as a moser is, historically speaking, a dangerous charge with horrific, real-world implications. A crowd recklessly chanting “moser, moser, moser” is terrifying, especially in our era of cell phones, social media and WhatsApp.
Naaah, I was referencing the Yiddish term for a person who collaborates with their oppressors. Which is why it’s quite strange that his grandpa changed his name from Moses to Moser when he emigrated to the United States.
Same basic word in Yiddish and Hebrew (one is the root of the other), same ugly context. One minor spelling difference doesn’t make a lot of difference. Not a lot of daylight between “a person who collaborates with their oppressors” and “one who informs or turns over a Jew to the secular authorities”. Especially not to those Jews who believe they’re oppressed everywhere outside israel.
Clearly he planned a life of antisemitism for his descendants \s
Incidentally, I love seeing an Anarchist call out a term used by a minority group to denounce members of said group who reported on other members to the oppressive authorities as problematic. The pursuit of justification of Anti-Zionism sure makes people take some creative positions.
I agree, there’s not a lot of daylight between those two things in the context of Jews living in ghettos across Europe. Sort of like there isn’t a lot of daylight between “one who informs or turns over a black man to the white authorities in the American South or South Africa” and “one who collaborates with their oppressors”, as I’m sure you’d be pointing out in quite literally any other context.
Obviously not; but clearly he didn’t mind taking on a name that would be derogatory in his native language in order to become slightly more accepted in his new society. Moser is a common German name, and the Jewish connotation clearly didn’t bother him enough to stop him from adopting it.
Now I’m curious about the landscaper whose business was right behind my childhood home. His name was “Moser”. I didn’t think he was Jewish, though.
It’s a common German last name with an unrelated etymology (I think it means “one who lives by a peat bog” or something). Moser’s grandpa was a German Jew fleeing the Holocaust who, when entering America, adopted a name that was derogatory in his native language but common in the tongue of his attempted murderers. I don’t think all that many Jews did that, so most Mosers are not going to be Jewish.
Thanks. Vague German roots that had little relevance to his daily life was a common “ethnicity” where i grew up.
I’m just going to point out to everyone else that you were not so subtly alluding to it in the context of a modern-day American Jewish writer, not some informant in a medieval ghetto, and leave it at that.
To be clear, I don’t think the term is actually applicable to him, or that it even can be apllicable to any Jews on the planet outside the few thousand living in Iran or something; the overwhelming majority of Jews simply don’t live in a context where that term remotely computes.
You don’t think that my reference to nominative determinism was serious, do you? You know what the term refers to, right? It’s the idea that someone’s name can somehow determine the future? It’s obviously a joke. Here’s the last time I used it, literally yesterday:
On the off chance that anyone actually needs this spelled out, I don’t think that nominative determinism is a real thing 
I am just pointing out the irony of a prominent Jewish Anti-Zionist having that name.
“I was only kidding” defense noted.
No, you’re correct, you caught me. I literally believe that poor Benjamin had no choice but to write the book; he was literally compelled by his last name to do it. He was a victim of his grandfather’s naming decision 
You think the fact that nominative determinism isn’t real[1] is the bit that matters here , and not your using your - let’s be charitable - joke about it to call Benjamin Moser a race traitor? That’s the bit I was pointing out to everyone who doesn’t speak Hebrew or Yiddish with that Jerusalem Post article link.
which is absolutely the case ↩︎
Is there a point to all of this detective work then? If you just wanted to prove that I think that anti-Zionism is anti-Semitic, you could have just quoted any of the quite literally dozens of posts I’ve made saying exactly that over the last few years.