this sea is killing me

Admittedly it does kind of sting getting called antisemitic sometimes but I think that's more down to how this particular guy argues - like he just doesn't engage with the idea that we have fundamentally incompatible ideas of antisemitism, he skips directly to calling me a blood libellous jew-hater, just outright calling me stupid as well, which is how you win an argument. And that's like...okay, whatever, what do I expect, a Zionist to actually engage with an argument in good faith? Do I expect a Zionist to even briefly attempt to understand the fundamentals of what the other person is saying? No, obviously not, Zionism is a very difficult position to defend in good faith and a very difficult position to have if you know so much as the very basics of the arguments against it (and aren't a self-admitted racial supremacist), but he does seem to at least on some level understand that I simply have fundamentally incompatible values when it comes to other topics like the value of human labor, yet the idea that the rest of my values follow accordingly is seemingly incomprehensible. Somehow the fact that my general stance is, and this is not a secret to him, that ethnostates are bad doesn't translate to an understanding that maybe my anti-Zionism isn't motivated by rabid jew-hatred but by...you know, some sort of ideological consistency. I don't like ethnostates and I don't like people being starved and I am actively opposed to systems that privilege me over others. (As to 'singling Israel out', if I'm being told that atrocities are being done for my sake I have more reason to denounce that. Israel has made it personal.

The worst-feeling aspect of it though is that he insists I've been brainwashed and putting aside the fact that brainwashing as our culture understands it was made up by a CIA asset to explain why some POWs, shockingly, came around to Communism, it's just such a nasty paternalistic way of thinking of it. To begin with it's obviously untrue because I haven't been coerced into anything, unless you're using 'brainwash' as a synonym for 'convince' (I mean, you're using 'blood libel' as a synonym for 'pointing out Haredim are both very insular and socially conservative' or 'saying the Israeli song that won Eurovision was really bad, like, as a song', no the second one is not a joke, I didn't make this up, this happened. If I made it up it would be oppa homeless style-level unbelievable.) I'd even accept 'indoctrination'. 'Brainwashing', no. Anyway though if I am full of hatred for the Jewish people (I don't think I am) then these are ideas I came to of my own accord after weighing the facts and arguments before me and I find it pretty disrespectful to act like I'm not an autonomous human being who of my own free will chose to be antisemitic instead of an innocent little victim who got Ludovico Techniqued the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. (Anyway if you want to see indoctrination look at the way strict party-line Zionism is taught and enforced for US Ashkenazi communities, it's genuinely terrifying.)

Of course he simply goes 'nah' whenever any critique of Zionism the ideology (outside of Israel as an entity - which would be indefensible even if Zionism weren't, although it literally is just Zionism doing the thing it always set out to do) is brought up, despite being himself raised a Yiddish speaker. The idea that a Jewish ethnostate is undesirable simply does not compute, not just as a thing he could potentially be convinced of but just the idea that there is anyone in the world who doesn't want an ethnostate for their own people, who thinks that their culture can continue to exist without it. (I mean, not like he supports sovereignty for indigenous people either, in fact he hates them because it would be inconvenient if he didn't since Israel's behavior and rhetoric closely parallels settlers' treatment of indigenous North Americans, he's literally just a fascist.)

And it's obviously not a new observation that Zionists actively join forces with antisemites, but it's one hell of an experience watching someone call you an antisemite moments after getting angry because you criticized the Christian nationalist right. Someone who thinks that the existence of Palestine is a bigger threat to Jewish existence than Messianic Jewish movements or Christian nationalists, and that the primary oppressors of Jewish people for over a thousand years have been Christians. If Apartheid were still the law in South Africa he'd be defending it. Yet even briefly suggest perhaps that Muslims are people and suddenly it's all decapitated babies (lol) and language so blatantly and aggressively and cartoonishly on-the-nose racist you'd think at some point he'd realize 'oh I'm kind of the baddies' and he never does. You've been the baddies for like a century and a half now and it hasn't sunk in yet. Zionists are genuinely so out of time. Like they're mad they didn't get to do settler colonialism while it was broadly considered acceptable or at least regular. The Christians and Muslims and Hindus et cetera got their ethnostates, the Christians in particular got to roll up to other continents and exterminate, enslave, and displace the existing populations. But us poor Jews went through all those pogroms and expulsions and they won't even let us do a single nakba without getting on our case about it :(

(The majority of persecuted ethnic and religious minorities, particularly those like Jews which are heavily dispersed and frequently relocate, don't and have never at least in recent memory had anything resembling a formal state, yet I never see Zionists campaigning for the establishment of a Romani state in Punjab for some reason.)

Ultimately the pithiest I can put it is Jewish people existed and even thrived before Israel existed and I deeply hope that there will be a time after it exists for us to continue to thrive in.

(A hundred years from now, will Zionism have been a good thing for Jewish history, identity, art, culture? I don't think so. I think it will have been potentially the worst thing to ever happen to it. Including the expulsions and pogroms, etc, yes.)

I am veering so hard off topic and for a bit of context I could presently afford to be more sober (not unrelated to having been forced into proximity with this man for an entire conversation's worth of time yesterday). The idea that Jewish people need an ethnostate to exist, that we cannot meaningfully be Jewish without its existence, is antisemitic. The willingness to ally with open Christian supremacists is antisemitic. Zionism as an ideology, with its goals including the destruction of diaspora Jewish culture, is and always has been fundamentally antisemitic. Zionist rhetoric is fundamentally that it would be worth the deaths of every single Jew in the diaspora if it kept the Israel intact as an explicitly Jewish nation-state. The state wouldn't even exist if not for the fact that six million Jews were slaughtered, how about we #neverforget the best thing to ever happen to Zionism was the genocide of our people. The existence of Israel created massive waves of antisemitic violence in places where it didn't exist before. Israel existing has lead to the displacement and killing of Jewish people who committed the terrible crime of not being from Europe. I have never felt unsafe in anti-Zionist spaces but I feel deeply unsafe in Zionist ones. I also feel really really unsafe around Christian missionaries but the Zionist in my life defends those. The only two arguments in favor of Zionism are Jewish ethnonationalism and the Christian fundamentalist desire to not have Jewish people live in the same country as them anymore.

Nothing here is really particularly high on the list of arguments against Israel as a state, obviously the ongoing and brutal displacement and extermination of the people who already lived there reduces more or less any other argument to the status of a quibble, but it truly is incredible how little of a case there is for Zionism outside of wanting a Jewish ethnostate and wanting there to be no Jewish people outside of said ethnostate. Just, down to brass tacks, the concept of it as anything other than a settler colony and proxy for Western European power is ridiculous. We tried this whole 'a minority needs a country in order to ever not be oppressed by racism but can also never integrate here' thing before, it was called Liberia and it didn't go fantastic.

The idea we're actually indigenous to the land in question is beyond laughable, building Israel required the deliberate construction of a 'true' Jewish culture to replace the degenerate Yiddish-speakers. Jewish people are indigenous to nowhere. I'm 3/8 Mizrahi by blood, spent 15 or so years practicing in Ashkenazi congregations, and that makes me approximately as indigenous to Palestine as I am to fucking Kenya, in the sense that I am aware that at some point my ancestors did live there and this was historically important. (I'm Russian, I'm a Russian Jew, I don't care what haplogroup I'm from, my culture is the culture that exists now, and I don't want to point at some genetic origin in a place none of my family has been able to remember for hundreds and hundreds of years in an attempt to erase that. Hell, I'm only like fourth-generation Russian and the physical origin of my great-great-grandparents doesn't change the fact that I'm a Russian Jew and that's all I want to be.) It's framed as revanchism for a territory you vacated a full millennium and a half ago and that is prima facie absurd, which is why classical Zionism openly referred to it as a deliberate settler colony back before it would be uncouth to admit you think you're just entitled to displace other people because you want to.

Jewish and Democratic State, good hell, how do we go so long being persecuted for our religion and then turn around and create a Jewish State, would you be okay with living in the United Anglo-Saxon Christian Anti-Papist States of America? I mean I guess this guy would be, right. He'd be fine with that. Unlike "Islamists" Christians are very nice and upstanding people who have never slaughtered or even discriminated against Jews. (We used to regularly see Muslims at celebrations for our major holidays but for some reason they seem to feel less comfortable in these spaces now. How odd.) None of these problems would exist if Jewish people just settled in Mandatory Palestine in large numbers and a Jewish culture developed in the region, it's the refusal to accept anything short of a Jewish State for Jews, which required a blank slate on which to 'rebuild' a society that can feel powerful by sneering at the Jews who were murdered in Europe. We're just as strong as Christians because we have shiny new planes for bombing with and now we can get just as good at killing large numbers of Muslims minding their own business as they were during the Crusades. (I feel like Zionists heard the thing about 'the enemy is both weak and powerful' and said yes that's us thank you! 'They want to kill all Jews' or 'we could just wipe them out if we really wanted' for today?) Zionists saw the most evil shit in the world and felt like they were missing out. A very 'we need more female drone pilots' sentiment.

But the suffering and oppression of any other group is always, always second to ours. At this point it feels like the religion worships the idea of being Jewish more than it does any sort of higher power. Every single Jewish person gets their own personal Kevin Youkilis bit whenever their background is mentioned and then any criticism of them as an individual becomes taboo. Jewish people are funnier and smarter and better at music, et cetera. I had always assumed those sorts of jokes were tongue-in-cheek but it does feel like Zionists unironically believe Jewish people are a superior type of human. Like that antisemitic canard about how "they believe they're God's chosen people", but because of our legitimate history of persecution there's no self-awareness whatsoever, when they look at other racial supremacist groups, that they are exactly the same as them, but it's different when Jewish people do it. (Double standard. Poisoning wells is actually different when Jewish people do it. Shooting random people while they're praying is different when Jewish people do it. It feels like to an extent the victims of the Shoah become the equivalent of, like, Jesus. They died to absolve us of our sins and that means we get to chase Muslims out of Jerusalem. We're Jewish by the way. It's cool when we do all of that because we're Jewish. We gave you Barbara Streisand and Einstein. Now listen to a guy who leads a country that claims to be the Jewish Country say some shit about Arabs that would get you banned from most websites and probably fired from nearly any job. Before you get mad remember that he's Jewish. Before you get mad about us shooting your uncle while he was trying to pick up the tiny amount of food we allowed in so that he could feed his starving family remember that ummmm. The guy who shot him was Jewish. Please think about these things before you criticize people. Thanks.)

Something I think about a lot, more and more frequently as time goes on, is the fact that Palestinian children, and their children, and their children's children, are all going to grow up with the trauma of surviving a genocide. My grandparents witnessed the Shoah and I've got some conspicuous gaps in my family tree and I grew up hearing stories about awful awful awful things happening to Jewish people because they were Jewish. It felt really stifling and inescapable and what felt even worse was thinking about what could have been. What people could have been alive today and what they could have been doing if they hadn't been murdered. And we turn around and make sure that Palestinians and their descendants will have that same experience. They'll have to live in a world that justified and enabled and carried out a genocide against their families. We should have known better. We survived a genocide and what did we do about it? We made sure to create a new one. Instead of preventing atrocities that leave entire generations traumatized we've learned to inflict it so it's happening to somebody else. Children are going to grow up associating Jewish symbolism with the violent persecution and murder of their families and people and they will be factually correct to do so. That sickens me beyond belief. I know the Zionist goal is ultimately that there will be no future generations of Palestinians to be traumatized, but I also know that this goal won't be fulfilled. There will be people who remember this happening to their families and friends. Those people will have children who will know this happened to their people. Multiple generations will live with the knowledge that we slaughtered their people. We lived through this suffering and then chose to reproduce it. Even if by some miracle as soon as I hit the post button the world magically rearranges itself in a way where not one more Palestinian dies...I mean obviously this would be the best case scenario but even still the damage done is enormous and will last for such a long time. The immeasurable suffering that these people whose only crime was not wanting to be displaced from their home and their descendants will go through. I get stuck in a sort of loop thinking about this a lot of the time. The suffering that's happened and the suffering that will continue to happen even after the main event is over.

I spent a lot of my life being really proud of being Jewish. I think it would have been less significant to me if I weren't a minority. An Israeli identity and a Jewish one aren't the same thing. I don't know what it feels like to be a Jewish Israeli the same way I don't know what it feels like to be an Italian Catholic. It's obviously an important part of their self-concept but it's something that the entire country around them affirms instead of something they have to repeatedly specify - I had to spend my life being assumed Christian and actively remembering that I'm different, and that actually made it feel a lot more meaningful. I like coexisting with people who aren't like me, and being aware of the ways in which they're not like me, and everyone inviting everyone to each other's family holiday dinners. Multiple types of people coexisting and being proud of their own background is fantastic and I was blessed enough to get to live that way for a while and by comparison Ivy League-country sameness is depressing as hell. Most of my friends are from dramatically different cultural backgrounds to me and that makes me happy.

And I'm not sure if ashamed is the right word but there's a weight to being Jewish now. Every time I reference the culture and identity I used to be so proud of I almost feel Israel tapping me on the shoulder, like by not renouncing my identity I'm letting it claim me. (It wouldn't matter if I stopped identifying as Jewish myself, though, it's just kicking the can down the road, it's still 'for me', they'd still let me 'return' while they force out more and more Palestinians.) I don't think I'm responsible for all of Jewry. Jews are a type of human, we have extremists and weird insular fundie cults and sections of our scripture that have aged extremely poorly just like every other old as fuck religion. And in my brain an 'ex-Jew' (not a Messianic Jew, those are Christians - someone who has left Judaism for the sake of no longer being Jewish rather than to become something else) is still fundamentally a type of Jew.

The fact that they called it Israel really is just the icing. The Land of Israel was no more literal than us having been slaves in Egypt a year ago. But it takes the language and tradition that we've had for centuries and perverts it and turns it into something inextricable from racial supremacism and genocide. Often I use a Hebrew term and I feel a twinge of something, almost panicky, is that really innocuous or was that word created by Zionists, or was it once innocuous and only took on a violent context later? Is the Magen David a Zionist symbol? Is any part of my religion and culture not a hate symbol? Whenever I think about a Jewish person who I've been proud to share an identity with I now have to question if they're a Zionist, knowing that they usually are. Thinking about famous and significant Jewish people feels kind of like reading about figures significant to the history of science where inevitably 80% of the people in this story have a section on their Wikipedia page with the subheading 'eugenics'.