I am Jewish. My mom is Israeli. I have friends and family living in Israel right now. I lived in Israel for a year a few decades ago. I was there when Rabin was assassinated and things went from “peace in the middle east at last!” to “Bibi committing war crimes for a few decades.” I am so critical of the Israeli government’s actions toward Palestinians that I have had to mute all my family group chats since October.
But I have to agree that anti-Zionism feels like antisemitism. You can be critical of the Israeli government without the belief that Israel shouldn’t exist. You can want the Palestinians to have their own state without the belief that Israel shouldn’t exist. I’m not sure what anti-Zionists think would happen to all the Jews living in Israel if it were just magically given to the Palestinians overnight, but here’s a hint: Hamas, the people running Palestine, literally, factually want to kill them all.
No, I don’t think what Israel has done to the Palestinians for decades is in any way acceptable or moral. But any solution at this point will have to involve safety for everyone not just one side or the other.
That’s my $0.02. I expect to get a lot of flack for being so open about myself and my beliefs. I probably should have made a throwaway account but whatever. Hopefully this doesn’t bite me in the ass.
EDIT - Just to also add that I don’t think it’s black and white that all anti-Zionist are antisemites. But it FEELS that way. And I think part of the issue is that antisemites are using anti-Zionism to spread antisemitism.
I’m not sure what anti-Zionists think would happen to all the Jews living in Israel if it were just magically given to the Palestinians overnight, but here’s a hint: Hamas, the people running Palestine, literally, factually want to kill them all.
I don’t understand why you default to conflating the denial of a theocratic Jewish state to “hand over all the controls to Palestine.”
What part of opposing Israel as a state excludes current Israeli people from participating and organizing in a hypothetical one state solution?
Obviously, none of this is simple, and violence is not the answer, but I’m not sure why your idea of anti-Zionism focuses only on the most reactionary (and most likely to actually be anti-semitic) voices of anti-Zionism. This kind of language only drives polarization.
I think that there’s still a lot of conflation happening here.
I am anti-Zionist, insomuch as current-day Zionist adherents almost universally support Israel as having religious justification, which, given that Israel conducts colonialism, apartheid, and murder, means that they are tying their own religious beliefs to the aforementioned settlement, apartheid, and murder.
Nothing in Jewish scripture says that this state at this time will be the end-times land for the Jewish people. I would have no issue with Zionists who just believe that they have to actively work towards a Jewish state rather than expecting it to simply come into being, but tying that belief to a specific state as a movement opens it up to criticism based on that relationship.
If I meet a Zionist who says, “yeah, this is not a religiously-ordained state by any means we can tell. The actual land for Jews spoken of in scripture could happen 10,000 years from now. We don’t know.”, I’d have no problem with that viewpoint.
I’m anti-Israel (i.e. the specific, currently-extant state) for being a settler-colonial project that actively enshrines apartheid in its laws, and dehumanizes and subjugates and murders people. I’m also anti-Evangelical Christianity, in part because it also as a movement/ group of beliefs, supports Israel.
But any solution at this point will have to involve safety for everyone not just one side or the other.
The problem I have with this is that it frames the situation as though it’s 2 sides struggling against each other, when in reality it’s one side being oppressed by the other.
In order for them to be in a state of peace and mutual safety, Israel has to give up control that it currently has. It has to remove the violent programs it currently operates (like settlements and “trimming the grass”). It has to LOSE something (control, ground, capacity for violence) in order to reach a neutral state. And by neutral state, I don’t mean “equal power with the Palestinians”, I mean a state of not actively making Palestinians unsafe.
But most people making your argument are not open to admitting this; it is almost always based on the assumption that making the current state static would equate to mutual safety, which is false.
I think there is a communication breakdown that almost always happens when people talk about “Zionism” because I know for me, “Zionism” and a person “being a Zionist” goes far beyond simply supporting the continual existence of the state of Israel (which I do wholeheartedly). To me the word “Zionism” and supporting it is inexplicably tied to the actual original colonial project and its implementation which led to the formation of the state of Israel in the first place, uncritically so.
Please keep comments relevant to the news in this piece and remember to bee nice.
ADL is including pro-Palestine protests in count of “antisemitic” incidents
I can’t find that anywhere in the article. Why use that for a title? The article states ADL is including ‘rallies that feature “anti-Zionist chants and slogans",’. Which is understandable; That’s their job. But pro-Palestinian isn’t inherently anti-Zionist and conflating the two is disingenuous.
They’re talking about “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.” They routinely malign this call for freedom as “antisemitic,” and I haven’t been to one where this hasn’t been said. It’s part of their effort to conflate these things, not me being disingenuous.
So, uh, if you have a Palestinian state “from the river to the sea” where do the Jews (who were born and raised in Israel, and who have no other homes) go? It’s not a call for freedom, it’s not a call for a ceasefire, it’s not a call for Israel to withdraw its settlers from the West Bank, it’s not a call for a two-state solution, it’s a call for a repeat Holocaust.
I don’t understand your point. You’re right with the “where do the Jews go,” but you’re failing to ask the same question about Palestinians who only have (or had) their homes and livelihoods in Palestine. Where do they go, in this current climate of decimation by the IDF?
No, it is not. You can look up the one state solution. At this point it’s inevitable, just a matter of how much grief we put ourselves through to get there.
Israel exists to create a safe place for Jews. In a democratic one state solution jews would be in the minority in Israel so it would no longer be a safe haven for them, Israel would effectively no longer exist.
Israeli settlement has destroyed the viability of a two state solution. They have two choices left. Find a way to integrate Palestinians and Jews in a single democratic state or maintain a racist system of ethnic hierarchy where they violently oppress Palestinians. I for one don’t like ethno states regardless of which ethnicity the ethno state prefers.
I can’t see there being any way one state would work, any sane jew would leave as soon as it looked like they were losing control of the government, more likely they’d never allow it to come to that. I’m interested in thoughts on the settlements making two states non-viable. I assumed removing some of the Jewish settlements would have to be a part of the two-state solution. Do you think it’s too late for that?
I hear you on the ethnostate issue, ideally Israel would have never been created and never have been needed, Jewish people could have lived safely in developed non-secular countries. But it was and it is, so we have to deal with the reality as it stands now.
I’m not in favor of forcible displacement in general. If people voluntarily bail as a result of losing their privileged position within an ethno state then I’d say that’s a much better situation than forcing anyone from their homes. Anyone who’s willing to stick around in a state where equality is the goal deserves a chance at peace and reconciliation. Although I’m sure a faction would stick around intending to use terrorism to regain their privilege. That’s typically what happens in these situations. Look at the KKK in it’s various incarnations
And this is what is meant by apartheid. It was never a land without a people for a people without a land. There were always people there. This “safety” is predicated upon ethnic cleansing, and Zionism is now inseparable from that. The implicit suggestion is that Jewish safety requires Palestinian oppression. That is not going to work in the long term. And it’s not worked so far.
In a democratic one state solution jews would be in the minority in Israel so it would no longer be a safe haven for them, Israel would effectively no longer exist.
Jews lived peacefully in Palestine alongside everyone else prior to 1948 for centuries.
Does any nation have the right to exist when its creation was based on ethnically cleansing those who lived there?
Also, the sheer amount of hatred between the two groups means that a one-state solution (even if it could be willed into existence without violence) would be, at best, highly volatile.
Are we to pretend things are not “highly volatile?”
No. But that does not make a one-state solution feasible. Neither side would be willing to agree to it, and even if you could force it, the new state would violently implode the second you remove that external force.
You could summit Everest in a matter of minutes with the leaps youre making there.
Where did the whites go when the Apartheid government fell in South Africa? Most of them stayed, and despite truly believing they would all be murdered if non-whites were given equal right,s they shockingly weren’t. I’m from the American South. The end of slavery was not the end of “Southern Culture,” the end of segregation was not the end of Southern culture, and even the popular distaste for KKK violence didn’t end anything that shouldn’t have ended. Palestinians aren’t monsters, and have more to fear in an equal state that current Israelis would.
