Jews are not systemically oppressed anymore but clearly certain reactionaries sure do want them to be.

Collective punishment is always wrong. You can't just make your whole ideology out of fuckinslammer memes or you turn into this person.

Parenti fucking rolling in his grave rn. You do not get to invoke a foundational modern marxist while doing the opposite of material analysis.

Would you apply the same logic to Christians? Arguably Christians have done far more harm. Or are you defining Jews as an ethnicity? How is that better? Is there something genetic or is it religious?

These may seem like silly semantic differences but they are actually important and the people that make either argument are wrong for the same reason: Collective punishment and collective guilt is always reactionary.

Ironically some of these same people would say I am doing Jewish exceptionalism but are they not doing the same thing claiming this is an exceptionally Jewish form of fascism.

I do not believe such distinctions are productive but rather only serve to excuse one's own participation in similar relations. By invoking some sort of Jewish exceptionalism you are only absolving yourself of guilt and complicity. By definition when you claim there is some sort of Jewish exceptionalism at play you are implying they are a special uniquely bad group apart from the international white supremacist project that enables and requires the existence of Israel.

You claim to be denouncing special treatment of Jewish persecution and overcorrect into actual Nazism. Or to be more accurate I guess Strasserism.

I no longer care if people want to call me a zionist for pointing this out. You are just embarassed white supremacists trying to offload your crimes onto Israel, there is nothing Israel has done that the rest of the west has not done tenfold, all are complicit and blaming it on Jews is just Nazi shit. I will fight to the death for the Palestinian people but I will not tolerate any single person implying collective guilt. This goes for everyone, white, black arab, persian, etc.

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[–] 21 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (5 children)

The whole argument about whether or not the Zionist entity is white supremacist or jewish supremacist seems pointless to me. Neither ideology is the cause of the genocide, which is caused by material relationships and conditions. What material condition? European settler-colonialism. So in one way I strongly agree that crying about "jewish supremacy" and focusing on the jewish character of Israel is stupid because it accomplishes nothing but signaling to antisemites that we share common ground, which we do not. But in another way, whining that Judaism is separate and distinct from Zionism, and most Zionists aren't jewish and so on, is centering jewish feelings and crybully behavior that protects Zionist jewish institutions and people from anti-Zionism. There are many jewish institutions in the US and more in the UK that are linked to and materially support the Zionist entity and we can't be whining about needing to protect them from anti-Zionism.

The synthesis is probably to not worry about whether streamers or youtubers (the source of the argument was Hasan slop) are conflating Zionism with Judaism or centering jewish feelings and to organize with anti-Zionist jews against Zionist institutions, but I know it's annoying to yell "stop listening to streamers and do materialist analysis"

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  • [–] 15 points 2 days ago* (1 child)

    The whole argument about whether or not the Zionist entity is white supremacist or jewish supremacist seems pointless to me. Neither ideology is the cause of the genocide, which is caused by material relationships and conditions. What material condition? European settler-colonialism.

    I feel the need to make a pedantic but necessary correction. Ideology is an objective force, is itself a material condition to the extent that it influences human activity. White supremacy and Jewish supremacy are not only ideology. In the apartheid, they are the social reality. Constructing a Jewish apartheid state creates Jewish supremacist ideology which then reproduces itself through further material and ideological development. It cannot be reduced merely to European settler-colonialism because it is not an abstract European settler-colonial state, but a specifically Zionist one. In my opinion we must take care to understand Ideology, not simply reduce it to material conditions or to class.

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  • [–] 9 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

    This is a good point to think about. You're right that it has its own particular character as the Zionist instance of European settler-colonialism and isn't simply settler-colonialism in the abstract. And you're right that in the apartheid, supremacy ideology is a social force that impacts the oppressed and not a mere belief. Hrm.

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  • [–] 9 points 2 days ago

    I agree, the whole argument between the two of them only made me lose braincells. Of course a streamer like Hasan isn't going to aim for semantic correctness when he's pushing for an election win for a Muslim candidate. So dont put that much weight on what he says.

    The thing is, you do eventually have no choice but to interface with the cultural side along with the material side. Religion and culture are powerful things, and just by taking a side in this conflict for the longest time it meant seeming anti-jew to most of the Jewish and Christian population. This sucked because you then had to answer for bigots and the some of the most bigoted opinions in history. So the recent effort to decouple Judaism from Zionism in the media has been useful for getting around this bs.

    I think the bitterness coming from the geneva_convention and fuknslammer types comes from the electoral candidates piggybacking on this success. They are vindicated by the failure of campaigns like Platner and betrayals of AOC and so making the Palestinian cause less appealing to western leftists is seen to them as "helping".

    They also may be too bitter now from viewing too many settlers videos and when you see that kind of violence perpetrated by mostly one religious group, the conclusion is you become bigoted towards that group. Combating that should be a main priority for Jewish activists. They should be involved in their synagogue and advocate for canceling Zionist activities like going on birthright. If they aren't currently the face of Jewishness, they should start becoming the face of Jewishness. It isn't all on us to forgive and forget.

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  • [–] 6 points 2 days ago (1 child)

    whining that Judaism is separate and distinct from Zionism, and most Zionists aren't jewish and so on, is centering jewish feelings and crybully behavior that protects Zionist jewish institutions and people from anti-Zionism. There are many jewish institutions in the US and more in the UK that are linked to and materially support the Zionist entity and we can't be whining about needing to protect them from anti-Zionism.

    What are you saying? Obviously Zionist institutions, Jewish and gentile, all need to be crushed. If a synagogue is holding auctions for Palestinian land, everyone and thing involved in that needs to be mercilessly torn down. Same with those Zionist Jewish summer camps and all the other ways Zionism has sought to hijack all Jewish culture and pervert it into something strictly oriented toward supporting Israel.

    There's nothing "crybully" about observing this hijacking and not doing actual antisemitism by treating the religion of observing Jewish people as synonymous with a genocidal colonial project, because the logic of that would be fundamentally that we need to ban Judaism and put every Rabbi in prison, which we both understand is absurd. A meaningful number of Jewish people are antizionists -- personally, the most dedicated antizionist activists I've known are Jewish -- and that number is only growing. Conflating their religion or ethnicity with the project of Zionism like AIPAC and the ADL are literally working every day to encourage people to do is ideologically extremely backwards, whether you think any kind of victimhood of Jews is currently meaningful or meaningless (a point that I am not arguing).

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  • [–] 9 points 2 days ago* (1 child)

    Comrade I'm saying that if someone replied to your first paragraph by saying "How DARE purpleworm say they want to crush synagogues? What an antisemite!", that would be crybully behavior.

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  • [–] 7 points 2 days ago (1 child)

    I see, perhaps I misunderstood and conflated your position with those of a few others in this thread. Are you saying that we therefore should distinguish Judaism from Zionism? If so, I apologize, though I can't tell if it was written unclearly or my reading comprehension failed me.

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  • [–] 10 points 2 days ago*

    Judaism and Zionism are separate, and not all Jews are Zionists. There's a great anti-Zionist community of Jews on reddit that I remember from before I left.

    But in the media and the wider internet, I usually see "we have got to separate Judaism from Zionism and stop making all Jews responsible for Israel" deployed to disguise the nature of lone-wolf destructive acts of resistance against Zionist institutions that are synagogues. When a Zionist synagogue is graffiti'd or even attacked, separating Judaism from Zionism is the immediate brainless media reply and no one bothers to investigate whether the synagogue was sending money to the IDF or hosting West Bank land sales. In the media and parroted by the general discourse, the Zionist synagogue becomes just a synagogue free of all context, and therefore the graffiti or attack can only be an antisemitic hate crime. This comes even from nominally leftist libs like Hasan when he goes to the wider media to try to prove he isn't an antisemite, which is what prompted the original discussion.

    So I could definitely have been more specific about what I meant to avoid confusion, that's on me. I meant that it's not useful to belabor the separation between Judaism and Zionism when discussing about anti-Zionist actions and we should not use it to police anti-Zionism. However unfortunately that also means we need to critically scrutinize media reports of antisemitic hate crimes at Jewish institutions that may actually be anti-Zionist actions. I definitely didn't mean to say that we should be conflating Judaism and Zionism, or that we shouldn't be on the watch for genuine antisemitism to fester out of hatred of Israel's actions.

    I realize now in saying this that this is tough because I'm grappling with a contradiction: we shouldn't be policing anti-Zionism and feeding the conflation of anti-Zionism with antisemitism, and yet we can't let antisemitism fester in our spaces so language and attitudes need to be scrutinized. I don't know what a synthesis looks like yet.

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