Finkelstein says he would not tell someone who has experienced the Holocaust that they should not hate Germans. And that he would not argue with a Palestinian who feels the same way about Jews.

Norm cites that 95% of Israeli citizens agree with the force used against Gaza, and that its citizen army that represents its population carried out mass starvation as a method of war.

Aside from these, there's another argument I've heard Finkelstein make, equally valid. He's explained that anti-Semitism as exists in most places it's found, isn't the sort of bigotry that anti-black racism in the US and such are in its effect.

Even disregarding all the conflation of anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism, the vast majority of instances touted by Zionists are someone saying or implying something against Jewish people. The lists are full of microagressions, not people being discriminated against for having Jewish-sounding names in applications, not their communities being overpoliced and undervalued to keep them down, and certainly not people being rounded up on the thousands on suspicion of being Jewish, on the basis of some visual characteristic, to be assaulted, brutalised, mistreated, raped, deported, or even murdered.

I'm convinced, due to the actions of the Zionist entity, the rabid behaviour of its people and the inaction/support of the west, the lingering resentment in the populations is something Communists will have to deal with after the Zionist entity and its patron hegemon fall. Nevertheless, I cannot emphasise how minor this concern is today, considering an ongoing genocide against Palestinians and all other crimes imperialism commits every day. This issue deserves to be raised once every ten thousand times the question "What's to be done to stop this genocide?' and its ancillaries are asked.

I'm not reading all that. Free Palestine

Saw a bit of this interview and it was absolutely fuckawful for both of them. Two faces I tire of seeing held up as "based" on this fuckin website. Norman "what makes citing Palestinians a virtue" Finkelstein.

​"Jewish settlers stole my house. It's not my fault they're Jewish."

WHEN WE WERE GROWING UP in occupied Jerusalem, the people seeking to expel us from our neighborhood were Jewish, and their organizations often had “Jewish” in their name. So were the people who stole our home, scattered our furniture in the street and burned my baby sister’s crib. The judges banging their gavels in favor of our expulsion were also Jewish, and so were the lawmakers whose laws facilitated and systematized our dispossession. [...]
Not only do we live in fear of displacement at the hands of a colonialism that professes itself as Jewish, not only are our people bombarded by an army that marches under what it claims is the Jewish flag, and not only do Israeli politicians over enunciate the Jewishness of their operations, we are told to disregard the Star of David soaring on their flag—the Star of David they carve into our skin. [...]
The Palestinian people have consistently made it crystal clear that our enemy is the colonialist and racist ideology of Zionism, not Jews. Our capacity to produce such distinction is admirable and impressive, considering the heavy-handedness with which Zionism attempts to synonymize itself with Judaism. However, this distinction isn’t our responsibility, and personally, it isn’t my priority. A Palestinian’s perceived resentment doesn’t have the backing of a Knesset to codify it into law. Tropes aren’t drones, nor can one convert conspiracy theories into nuclear weapons. We are past the early 1900s. Things are different, power has shifted. Words are not murder.

Mohammed El-Kurd

from the log it sounds like they were talking past each other. Norm is absolutely right that I would not blame a Palestinian if they were anti-Semitic, but Hasan is right in that I would absolutely blame a westerner using anti-Israeli sentiment to foment antisemitism.

edit: okay I'm actually watching the clip now and Norm is coming off a lot worse. He doesn't sound like he's just talking about Palestinians, it really sounds like he's talking about everyone, and I would say that if you're not one of the groups being explicitly targeted by Israeli violence then you absolutely need to have a nuanced view here. Israelis are doing a genocide, Zionists abroad are arming it, and I find any conflation of those groups with "Jews" to be antisemitic.

He even talks about Israel's conflation of itself with Judaism in the clip, seemingly his argument is that because they are doing that then you are correct to conflate the two! I'm really not a fan of that.

I find Norm's example of his parents to be an example of the "talking past" I was mentioning before. Hasan is talking about antisemitism in general, and Norm is countering with a point about victims of violence. It makes it seem like he is saying that the grace that can be extended to a victim should be extended to everyone everywhere.

What's Norm trying to say here? That Palestinians are reasonable to hate all Jews?

I think they're reasonable to hate all Zionists, but I agree with Hasan that Jews are not a monolith. Israeli Jews almost are, given the 95% support number (and that they live in the Zionist state), but diaspora Jews are not the same.

I think the broader point of this and future shitshows of this type is that anti-Zionist Jews aren't meaningfully organized. Zionist Jews as a collective have a military, a global media apparatus, and nukes. Anti-Zionist Jews have nothing. Arguing about whether Jews are a monolith or not misses the point.

You could have a situation where 70% of Jews are against Zionism, but if the 30% are properly organized and the 70% are completely atomized individuals, the 30% will steamroll through the 70%. Reality is more like the reverse with at least 70% of Jews having global Zionist networks that have a ubiquitous presence in Jewish communal life and the sub-30% of Jews having nothing outside of a few select orgs that are utterly irrelevant in Jewish communal life. Zionists completely control synagogues and yeshivas. Think of something like Chabad and that's not even the full extent of Zionist presence within Jewish life.

Since al-Aqsa Flood, I haven't seen a case of a God-fearing rabbi expelling the Zionists from their synagogue lest their perverse desecration of Judaism further offends God. However, I've seen plenty of cases where rabbis who are otherwise sympathetic towards Palestinians are cowed towards silence or rabbis trying to push some bullshit radical centrism in order to not split the congregation. Instead of seizing Jewish communal life from the Zionists with the ultimate goal of expelling them from Jewish communities, I mostly see anti-Zionist Jews either practice their Judaism in silence or simply stop practicing Judaism altogether. Far from expelling Zionists from Jewish communities, it's the Zionists who are expelling anti-Zionist Jews from Jewish communities.

I turned off this interview, Norm was flinging awful opinions everywhere. Starting with talking about his good friend Noam Chomsky and i turned it off when he started blaming Arab racism on woke. He says some vile shit I don't agree with.

I think the best way to call this out is to demand Jewish people and their groups end all ties to Israel. Rather than labeling all Jewish people as [insert trope here] or giving a xenophobia pass bc of the ongoing genocide.

This type of discussion is really just a huge waste of time and only gives air to zionist hasbara. As long as zionists are able to weaponize this "discourse" surrounding an "antisemitic crisis" they can dilute discussion surrounding direct action against synagogues that sell Palestinian land or "Jewish heritage" groups that are just fronts to whitewash settler-colonialism and groom kids into white supremacy.

Someone I follow online made a video on this subject and raised the extremely good point that if neo-nazi rhetoric gets normalized that has horrifying implications for the power it gives those people, and the harm they might do to other vulnerable people whether theyre Jewish or not

Also saw someone say "you must love the oppressed more than you hate the oppressor" and that feels like a really helpful guide in sincere allyship rooted in a desire to see the liberation of people who are being harmed

I see that Norm's got a new book out (Gaza's Gravediggers: An Inquiry Into Corruption in High Places). Anyone read it yet?

(also, if you wanna hear Norm really spit on this issue, check out this lecture he gave recently)

I condemn antisemitism and the conflation of Jews with the crimes of Israel.