Zionists benefit from antisemitism. It furthers the idea that Jews are only safe in Israel. It’s part of the reason they call everything antisemitism, it scares the diaspora and justifies the existence of Israel.
They also call a lot of things antisemitic because they are antisemitic. The notion that Israel is an ethnically Euro-American colony is antisemitic (and racist), erasing the MENA origins of a plurality of its citizens. The notion that Jewish Americans are untrustworthy interlocutors because they have duel loyalties is antisemitic. Calls to "decolonize" Israel and to "globalize the Intifadah" are straightforward appeals to ethnic violence on civilians, just as "Palestinians had a right to self-defense against colonizers" is a straightforward excusal of an atrocity. This stuff is all over the place. Just today, the Harvard Faculty SJP chapter posted an old racist SNCC poster depicting a hand with a Star of David puppeteering two Black men.
Nobody can deny that the concept of "antisemitism" is weaponized against critics of Israel. But at the same time, nobody can deny that many critics of Israel, or out ignorance or animus, weaponize antisemitism against Israel.
You're now at the point of sticking up for something even SJP has disavowed. And this isn't like my best example, it's just one fresh in my mind because it happened 2 days ago. Further, the idea that any symbol of Judaism is properly understood as support for Israel is itself prima facie antisemitic!
Posting context isn’t “sticking up” for it, unless you decide to interpret it less than charitably.
The Star of David is on Israel’s flag and the official adopted symbol of Zionism.. The entire article was about Israel and Zionists. That you claim it is antisemitic is just another example of what I mentioned.
many many people can and do and correctly deny that "many critics of Israel" "weaponize antisemitism against Israel". Lots of weasel words on that post! Which just so happen to themselves de-legitimize very necessary criticism of both Zionism writ large and Israel itself! And calls to "globalize the Intifadah" are overwhelming about a popular revolution you know nothing about but love to post about with some very racist certainty. The intifadah was a popular revolution that caught much of the self anointed Palestinian leadership by surprise, and has been consistently criticized for selling it (the popular organizing committees) out for Oslo. This isn't particularly hidden and isn't some kind of wild take but in fact quite well understood outside of a media landscape that endlessly portrays all attempts at Palestinian self-determination as necessarily violent. I suggest maybe taking a step back from these threads, you are very clearly speaking about a thing you don't understand while and ongoing campaign of mass murder is being conducted and you are defending the murdering. That isn't a value statement, whatever downvoters may feel, its a fact.
Well, they have a losing argument, because it's easy to present clear evidence of antisemitism delivered by Palestinian advocates (just like it's easy to present Kahanist rhetoric from Israeli advocates). I gave an undeniable specific example from Harvard's faculty SJP. There is stuff being said that is indefensible, and angrily denying it isn't going to get you anywhere; it just discredits your cause.
I would suggest maybe not lecturing others on how to "help the cause" from a ycombinator thread in which you described the Intifada, a popular uprising that was nonviolent for years, including tax resistance and boycotts, as a dyed-in-the-wool-this-is-what-it-is "call to murder civilians". I think you either don't care or don't realize how much you don't know and are absolutely trotting out wide generalizations yourself that are the mirror image of antisemitism, directed at Palestinians. The Kahanist comparison is also an incredibly poor one given that a literal Kahanist (Ben-Gvir), who is on video waving the stolen hood ornament of Rabin's car, saying "we can get to Rabin", is now the minister in charge of national security and has handed out thousands of rifles to settlers, independent of the militia he was given by Netanyahu to not bring down the far right coalition. Seems a bit more important to me than clucking about a harvard faculty advisor to a student group, and especially wrapping that in "well it only hurts your side" message board rhetoric! Israeli soldiers fired on crowds queuing for food from aid trucks yesterday, again. Every single hospital in Gaza has been bombed with some utterly destroyed. You are welcome to snipe in these threads as much as you want but this is a thing you are pretty clearly out of your depth on and should devote some time, which I know you are able to do, to following up. That is simply the most charitable way I can put it.
I agree that Ben-Gvir is a Kahanist (and a monster) and have said as much on HN. I don't know who you're arguing with here, but I get the sense that it probably isn't me. If you are, it appears to be your claim that any critique of Palestinian activism, in any form that it or the criticism takes, equates to support for Israel. No.
No, I am speaking directly to your castigation of "calls to globalize the Intifada". So, don't do that Tom. Its right there in my thread, in both of my comments. I could go back and find other examples from other threads in the last couple of months, but I'm pretty clearly talking about this thread, right here.
Edit:
Can't reply to you for some reason, and no, you don't know me, though we have met, and corresponded via email a few times, but attempting to make my reply about "being angry" is really gross dude. I responded substantively to both of your comments and your reply appears to be to simply ignore that; so be it!
Like every other Masha Gessen piece, this is an engrossing read, and the Jerusalem Declaration is helpful: what I mean to say is that it's easy to come up with examples of Palestinian advocacy that are, according not just to the IHDRA definition but the Jerusalem Declaration, antisemitic.
Things like calling the Palestinians “amalek”, carving the Star of David into a playground with bulldozers, IDF soldiers taking about fulfilling prophecy…
If the claim is that militant Israelis are using religious rhetoric to justify their actions, that seems uncontroversial (though the "Amalek" thing is a misquote, and refers not to Palestinians but to Hamas itself). If instead the idea is that the "rhetoric" of "rabbis" is somehow automatically dehumanizing to Palestinians, that seems like a problematic claim.
For my part I find the implication that the rhetoric of rabbis is homogenous and aligned to be most problematic.
There are those that appear to fully back Netanyahu and his longstanding views on treatment of the Palestinian state, there are others who are loudly against the actions of the Israeli state in recent years.
( I'd remark that there are more than two extremes but feel this is not the right thread to comment about rabbis on a spectrum )
Yes, that's what snagged me here too. If the idea is just that IDF soldiers are brutalizing Palestinians while shouting religious slogans, maybe "religious language" is the better term to use. It's a common phenomenon on war and doesn't have any connotations of Jewish people being somehow exceptional about this.
You might want to let the IDF know then, cause they have taken the Amalek quote quite literally.
“‘I will punish the Amalekites for what they did to Israel when they waylaid them as they came up from Egypt. 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.’”
Once again: that quote refers to Hamas, not the Palestinian people.
I am not disputing that it represents religious rhetoric used to justify IDF actions. I'm only pushing back on the notion that it refers broadly to Palestinians.
Kahanist extremists have used the term to refer broadly to Palestinians in the same way Christian extremists have deployed Christian tropes to dehumanize, well, everybody in the world at one time or another. But the "Amalek" quote is famous because Netanyahu said it, and we have the context for the speech in which he did: he was referring specifically to Hamas.
That's the spin that the PM's office came up in an attempt to cover its tracks after the massive stink cloud that was raised once the quote became known outside Israel.
But for naught. Because it's manifestly clear from the language of the quote (and its historical context) that it refers to the entire population, not just Hamas. And unfortunately backed now by the IDF's actions on the ground, the zillions of TikTok videos gleefully posted by its soldiers, the rantings and ravings of countless government officials and other public figures, etc.
The analysis is flawed, in that it intentionally omits the fact that among the extremists (who have come to dominate the decision-making process about what happens on the ground in Gaza), the "broader" references to Amalek have been commonly applied all Palestinians (not just Hamas or its "evil").
That's why the quote is basically a dog whistle -- intended to be heard loud and clear by one's core constituency, while seeming more innocuous to others.
BTW you'll note that Rosenberg goes on to call accusations of the current genocide "cavalier", which says a lot about where he's coming from.
This seems irrelevant at this point. Failure to prevent genocide is also a crime (of which Milošević was convicted). He did use that phrase, it has been repeated by actual perpetrators of (potential) genocide, and he has not withdrawn, clarified nor condemned since.
Netanyahu’s speech leading up to the genocide is even more clear then Trumps speech leading up to the Jan. 6th insurrection. Trump at the very least called off the insurrectionists (albeit late and unconvincingly). Netanyahu on the other hand has doubled down.
See, you're implicitly asking me here to defend Netanyahu. I believe Netanyahu to be among the very worst leaders of the last 75 years, a world-historically bad prime minister who has done more than almost anybody to heighten the intractability and human tragedy of the Israel/Palestine conflict. If you think the "Amalek" speech is irrelevant to that analysis, I agree.
What I object to is the deployment of religious tropes that essentialize Netanyahu-ism or Kahanism into Israel, or, worse still, Judaism as a whole. If you're going to get into this "Amalek" stuff, get it right.
If not, it's not like you needed it to take shots at Netanyahu. There is a decent chance that when he is ultimately ousted, he's going to be imprisoned by the Israelis.
I just want to clarify that I didn’t mean the Amalek speech is irrelevant, but rather whether he originally meant Hamas or the Palestinian people in this speech. Whichever he was originally referring to is irrelevant, if he meant Hamas, the term has grown to mean the Palestinian People, and is being used to pump up the genocide.
Likewise Trump also claims his speech didn’t mean to start an insurrection, however, it did to so, and whatever he originally meant became irrelevant as soon as the insurrectionists started, and he didn’t order them to back down.
That you are attempting to wiggle away from the plainly obvious nature of the quote, for some reason.
Nobody denies that an enormous number of civilians have been killed in the IDF's Gaza operation.
Except of course numerous Israeli government officials. (They don't deny that many civilians have been killed -- but they have continually attempted to dial down the proportion of civilian casualties, along with all the rhetoric about there being "no innocents" or "no uninvolved civilians" in Gaza to begin with).
In what way? You get that the Gaza offensive can be a long series of war crimes and unjustifiable civilian casualties and the quote can not mean what the parent comment said it meant, right? If you think the quote is an unimportant side detail, I think we can agree on that generally.
This is a thread about rhetoric, not a judgement of the whole conflict.
In that it's plainly clear that the Amalek quote does mean what the parent commenter (and anyone else who understands the region) can easily see that it does. But you keep coming up with weird evasive arguments to claim that it doesn't. Like the above, for example.
If you think the quote is an unimportant side detail
Unfortunately and very tragically -- it is anything but.
You're not engaging with what I've said. You're looking at what's happening in Gaza and deriving axiomatically a new meaning for the quote. That's understandable, but it's not valid.
Or, at least, that's what I think. We're running towards the right margin of the site with this thread now, and we're not going to convince each other of anything, so we can also let it go.
To engage with what you said: I don't think you grasp the extent to which "extremist" thinking on the question of what to do with the Palestinians (backed by violent action) has now become quite normalized in Israel.
For example, it is odd that you attempted to claim, way up top, that it's just the "Kahanist extremists" who take the broader view of the Amalek reference, as this signifies some distance with what Netanyahu thinks. When what defines the current Netanyahu era is its willful alliance with Kahanist parties -- crowned by the appointment of two of its premier representatives to Minister positions.
Along with all the obscene horror of what's been happening on the ground.
I think we've established that I'm talking about what Netanyahu actually said, and that you're talking about a meaning and a context that you impute to what he said. Maybe you're right about that. Roll the thread back to where this started, and I think you'll see why I'm saying what I'm saying.
I draw the meaning and context from both the state of current discussion in Israel, and its evolution (especially in regard to what to do with the Palestinian population) since even before 1948.
Look more into what public figures there have been saying, not just in the past 4 months, but for several years now -- not just on the margins, but in the mainstream -- and you'll see why I'm saying what I'm saying.
I don’t think anyone forgot. A lot of people think Israel caused this with Nakba and their actions since then. I don’t want to start a flamewar, I just don’t think people forgot, they’re just not on Israel’s side.
I don’t believe there was any sexual assault. There’s precedent for this type of armed resistance. The Haitian Slave Revolt and the Pueblo Revolt are both very similar. I think Oct 7th was justified, I don’t want to litigate it here though. This will be my last comment, I just want to state what a lot of people are thinking so it’s not misrepresented. I know many people here won’t agree.
