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geneva_convenience banned me from their comm (inventing_reality) after simply asking if they demand we hold all Jews accountable for Israel. (thelemmy.club)
submitted 3 days ago by to c/chapotraphouse@hexbear.net
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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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[–] 10 points 3 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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