perpetual disarray

I love storms

It smells stormy

Not my favourite smell

Photo of two Māori women standing outside shaking hands and pressing noses in a traditional greeting (hongi), Aotearoa (New Zealand), late 19th century.

I have a vulva. I prefer to wear simple colorfully patterned boxers as underwear. Any time I find a hole or truly-indelible stain in the crotch area - by which I mean, anywhere remotely near the undercarriage - I immediately throw it out.

However, today I have discovered a hole in my boxers. It is a gap where the elastic band normally connects with the fabric. The hole is horizontal, about 2 cm wide, and caused, I think, my where I hook my thumb when pulling up the underwear. It is in the back.

Are the boxers still kosher? Or is it time for them to go?

Okay, sure, let's have it out. I imagine I'll pretty much piss off everyone with this.

First: the only confidence I have in my understanding of the political situation of the Middle East is that I have no fucking understanding whatsoever of the political situation in the Middle East. Sure, I've read plenty. I have friends of many many stripes. But I'm not a victim of the Dunning-Kruger effect here, folks: I know enough to know how much I don't know, and how much I know is tons.

Second, you say that person is a "zionist." There are three things I find pretty annoying about this as a defense attorney. One is that the term is not defined, and the other is that there is a complete lack of evidence. The third is the implicit assumption that being a "zionist" is enough to wholeheartedly condemn anyone.

Let's tackle these one by one. And, once again, I am neither a scholar of Jewish history nor Middle Eastern history nor anything except American criminal law.

First: definition. There are many possible meanings of zionist that I see people use. One potential meaning of "zionist" seems to be "is Jewish, but fails to disavow Israel as fast and loud as I personally want them to." Sometimes the meaning of "zionist" is just "is Jewish." Sometimes it's "a Jewish person who wishes for a return to a very distant ancestral homeland." Sometimes it's "wholehearted supporter of Israel's war crimes." A lot of pointless arguing, it seems to me, is centered around someone saying they are zionist, i.e., they would like Jewish people to someday have a nice homeland where they don't feel like a strange political chunk in another country, and another person hears that they are zionist, i.e. they enjoy wholesale slaughter of civilians.

Second: No evidence. Self-explanatory. You are an anon. I don't know why I'm supposed to trust your word. I read police reports for a living and I am supposed to be able to trust them, and let me tell you how many lies they contain.

Third: the assumption of condemnation. I literally defend the human rights of sex criminals in court. I defend murderers. What we are talking about, right now, at best, is a human person expressing an opinion, however potentially damaging and offensive (depending on definition of zionism and truth of accusation). Do you think I'm gonna say that Jewish people who express an opinion are inhuman and deserve segregation from the rest of us?

Do you think I'm ever going to stop reaching out my hand to people who use violence? Do you think I'm ever going to lose the hope that someday they will lose the fear that makes them resort to violence?

Finally, now that I've spent some time listing my problems with your case, so what.

Let's use an example closer to home. I'm an American, and I do in fact believe that America is a nation and will continue to be so, and that tearing down all government to give it back to indigenous people (something that is, to be clear, to my understanding, not comparable with any kind of political situation in Israel) is not possible as things stand. And yet nobody's here interrogating me about Donald Trump and his bombing of Iran or whether I support ICE's jackbooted thuggery.

A little further from home? If I met a Russian person, my first ask would not be "Tell me in detail your thoughts on Ukraine and Putin."

And in those two examples, I myself and this hypothetical Russian person are actually members of the country in question that is doing the thing. A Jewish person who is not Israeli isn't even that.

Listen. I think there's a lot to be unpacked about how the insularity of Jewish culture and the separateness of it from the countries where it lives is both in the interest of continuing the Jewish ethnicity and in the interest of the people who want Jewish people exterminated, and how the double-pull of those two interests maintain a tension that otherwise might dissipate. I think there's something real to be analyzed about how modern anti-semitism isn't a recurrence of medieval anti-semitism but a different thing, a sign of fascist thinking.

I think there is a horrific tragedy for everyone involved that the group who was decimated beyond belief in the blackest events in human history now has a very loud and visible nation channeling their survival into rage and violence.

I think that there are lots of Arab nations around Israel that would gladly see every person in it subject to that same rage and violence, and I'm not down with that shit either.

I think the history of who colonized who and when and what pogroms did what and how violence and why are all too fucking complicated to untangle.

I think the only way truly forward for Israel and Palestine is some kind of truth and reconciliation type thing and that Israel as it stands is too scared to see all their atrocities come to light.

I was raised atheist with college professor parents, so you can bet Jewish people in academia were part of my life from an early age. I don't understand antisemitism literally at all. It's completely incomprehensible to me. I also think Arab culture is gorgeous and studied Arabic in college. I don't discount the idea that I have subconscious biases; I've done my best to unpick them, but it's lifelong work.

The whole goddamn clusterfuck is a great example of why violence begets violence begets violence. I reject the idea that One Final Ass-Kicking on anyone's part will solve any one of these problems. The only thing that ends violence is not choosing violence. And that can't happen until enough people in and out of power want the violence to stop. There. Not here. There. It can't be imposed from outside. It has to come from within.

And that's a decision -- I must add -- that I seriously could not have less to do with. White Americans should not be making any of the related decisions.

Here endeth the essay, with one final note.

I want to start by saying that I agree with your point that some random anon pointing a finger at someone and saying "zionist" is not, in of itself, a strong enough reason to condemn the person being pointed at. It is always good to do your own research as it were and make your own educated decisions on what behavior/actions/beliefs you are comfortable supporting or amplifying.

However, I want to push back on the idea that you have to be a Middle East scholar in order to fully understand what is going on right now between Israel and its neighbors. You do not. You simply have to open your eyes and see what is being done in Gaza. You don't have to crack a single history book to understand that the killing and injuring of more than 50,000 children in the Gaza Strip is wrong (x). You don't have to take a class to understand that genocide, which is what even the UN has said that Israel is doing in Gaza (x), is wrong. There is no amount of "well they started it" that will ever make me believe that what is happening in Gaza is morally correct. Now, they (the Palestinians) didn't start it, but I don't feel that I have to prove that to still be in the right here. Genocide is wrong. It doesn't matter who is committing it or why. It just is.

There is no way to make the Gaza Strip and the West Bank Israeli territory without state violence, just as Israel's current territory was only obtained through state violence. That is why I find your framing of these two definitions of Zionism as mutually exclusive as fundamentally incorrect. "They would like Jewish people to someday have a nice homeland where they don't feel like a strange political chunk in another country" versus "they enjoy wholesale slaughter of civilians", when they are in fact, the same idea. What you seem to be missing is that in order to have a Jewish state of Israel, the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people is a requirement. And let me tell you, if you have missed this fact, the Israeli government and early Zionists did not.

Last year, Israel's finance minister declared that "Gaza will be entirely destroyed" by Israel, and that its Palestinian inhabitants will "leave in great numbers to third countries" as a result of this destruction (x). Ethnic cleansing is "the attempt to create ethnically homogeneous geographic areas through the deportation or forcible displacement of persons belonging to particular ethnic groups" (x). That is what Israel is doing in Gaza to the Palestinians.

Ze'ev Jabotinsky, an early Zionist thinker and leader, said himself in his essay 'The Iron Wall' (x),

"There can be no voluntary agreement between ourselves and the Palestine Arabs. Not now, nor in the prospective future. I say this with such conviction, not because I want to hurt the moderate Zionists. I do not believe that they will be hurt. Except for those who were born blind, they realised long ago that it is utterly impossible to obtain the voluntary consent of the Palestine Arabs for converting "Palestine" from an Arab country into a country with a Jewish majority. My readers have a general idea of the history of colonisation in other countries. I suggest that they consider all the precedents with which they are acquainted, and see whether there is one solitary instance of any colonisation being carried on with the consent of the native population. There is no such precedent. The native populations, civilised or uncivilised, have always stubbornly resisted the colonists, irrespective of whether they were civilised or savage."

This is the problem with saying that Zionism is "they would like Jewish people to someday have a nice homeland where they don't feel like a strange political chunk in another country". This cannot be achieved without violence against the Palestinian people. Early Zionists were very aware of this. It is only now, that colonialism is viewed in a negative light, that Zionists are trying to pretend that their vision of a Jewish homeland can be achieved without violence against the Palestinian people.

To make myself clear, if you were to ask me if I think Israel 'has the right to exist', I would say that a) it doesn't matter. As it has been pointed out by people smarter than me, it does exist. There is no use arguing over a country's 'right to exist'. I would also say, b) no country has the right to exist as an unequal theocracy. If Israel tomorrow said "Alright, Palestinians (including those in Gaza and the West Bank) can be equal citizens. They can vote, run for office, own property, and receive governmental protections and benefits in the same way a Jewish citizen of Israel does, and we will not police the number of Palestinians in Israel nor those in political office in Israel, and formerly displaced Palestinians can return to their homes" then I would say great! But that is not the situation we are in right now. And I cannot and will not support an apartheid state currently committing a genocide.

I want to state that I agree that conflating Judaism with Zionism is both wrong and dangerous. Not only are not all Jewish people Zionists, not all Zionists are Jewish! Christian Zionism is a large movement among American Christian Protestants who believe we are living in the end times and as a part of that, the Jewish people will reclaim Jerusalem (x). I think anyone who uses the term "Zionist" to condemn all Jewish people is wrong and antisemitic. But I think ignoring what it really means to support a Jewish state of Israel is equally wrong and harmful.

I also want to look at out your last statement, that both Jewish people and Arab people are safe on your blog. Going through the replies and reblogs last night, I saw a lot of Jewish people and pro-Zionist people agreeing with you and thanking you. I did not see any Arab people doing the same. I wonder if your post really made them feel safe, when your statements were trying to disguise the fact (on purpose or on accident) that Israel is currently trying to ethnically cleanse the region to make a "Greater Israel" (x). I find that when you are tolerant of both the oppressed and the oppressor, you will find yourself only in the company of the latter.

I will admit: I expected Jewish folks to be a little more mad at me because I perceived what I was saying as being quite critical of Israel. I basically called it cowardly, called its actions war crimes, and said it was choosing violence and horror, and I have absolutely no disagreement with any of what you've summarized above. I didn't see that as silence at all, nor as statements trying to disguise the ethnic cleansing taking place. I also did not call Hamas a terrorist organization or do any nod to the anti-Jewish violence that's been taking place here in America, because I didn't want to get into cross-accusations or make any Arabic people feel I blamed them, because I don't. So I'm very surprised that you saw the post that way, and I'm surprised that they did.

And honestly, I'm surprised that I posted probably one of the most "cancel me, mommy" posts I've ever posted and I've gained followers. WTF?

Anyway, what I focused on was the fact that Jewish people here in America near me are not responsible for Israel any more than I'm responsible for Trump or a Russian person is responsible for Putin. That is a different thing than "remaining silent."

In retrospect, I think probably there are a lot of American Jewish people on this post because they've been interrogated about zionism nonstop for months and they've been made afraid through acts of terror on American soil. I don't think Arabic people are necessarily attracted to this when they can enjoy much less nuanced support in other spaces. But I'm probably gonna ask my best friend (Egyptian) about it and get her take. It's also a mistake, I think, to regard Arab people as anything like a monolith on this or any other issue.

I don't think this matches other colonialist movements. Those were all, at heart, one state forcibly extracting the resources and wealth of another geographic area for their own enrichment, and that's not what's happening here. But that's a legalistic quibble about labeling, not a quibble about what is happening.

I think your post was so well received, at least in part, because you separated Zionism from the violence being perpetrated by the state of Israel. In your post, you repeatedly define Zionism in a way that allows it it to not be defined as an ideology of colonialism and ethnic cleansing, which I hope I demonstrated in my original response is impossible to do. You hand wave away the necessity of loudly and vocally rejecting this inherently violent ideology by saying this condemnation of it is saying that the person holding this ideology is "inhuman and deserve segregation from the rest of us".

I can't speak for the original anon who messaged you, but I am not saying that. I am saying that what Israel is doing should be called what it is: an ethnic cleansing and a genocide. How any person reacts to that statement says a lot more about them than it does about me. Again, I don't think it is right to go around just calling people Zionists willy nilly because of what it really means. But equally, I don't think it is okay to be accepting of those who are accepting of Israel's actions towards Palestine and its other neighbors without strongly pushing back on those beliefs.

I also think that your post was well received because you do a lot of "both sides"ing the problem. I read your post, and it seems like maybe these people agreeing with your post did the same, as equating the violence done by the Palestinian people to defend themselves against a colonialist, ethno-nationalist regime to the violence done against them for the purpose of ethnic cleansing. Do I condemn the attack by Hamas on Oct. 7th. Of course. Am I surprised that Israel's actions have only created a stronger opposing force against them? No, of course not. Do I think Palestine has the right to defend itself against Israel? Again, like I said in my original response, what any state has a 'right' to do is basically meaningless. If some foreign state came into the US, bombed our cities, drove us from our homes, moved us into designated areas with limited resources, would we fight back? Yes, obviously. Anyone would fight back in those conditions. As Jabotinsky said in his essay that I quoted, no native peoples have ever peacefully relinquished their lands to an occupying colonialist force.

Saying that what is happening between Israel and Palestine doesn't match previous colonialist movements is, in my opinion, extremely incorrect. I think you are right in saying that it is just a legalistic quibble. I think the most obvious comparison to draw to what is happening between Israel and Palestine is the US. Many of the early colonists came to the American colonies to establish communities based around their religion, where they could practice their religion without persecution from other governments. To that end, they lied, killed, and exploited the indigenous peoples at every turn, and drove them from their lands in order to claim them for their own. They believed, especially during the western expansion, that they had a religious mandate to do so, and used their religion to justify their treatment of the Native Americans. The difference is that when the US was formed, the founders did not make the US a Christian theocracy (despite current conservatives trying to turn us into one).

You also say that as Americans we can have and are having no effect on the conflict in the Middle East. This could not be further from the truth. The United States has given more aid to Israel than it has given any other foreign nation (x). It has given Israel over $300 billion dollars in aid, both economic and military. This includes over $500 million dollars a year for missile defense. Israel also buys much of its weapons from the US (x).

This is aid we could end. If our Congresspeople wanted, they could vote to end this aid and the selling of weapons to Israel. But they are not, currently, because a large part of the population is, if not in support of this aid, then not being vocally against it. I live in Michigan, where Haley Stevens is currently running a campaign backed by AIPAC. If elected, she would vote to continue to support and fund Israel's military actions against Palestine and its other neighbors. She is running against Abdul El-Sayed, who supports ending financial aid and the selling of weapons to Israel (x). There are races like this all across the country. You can support these candidates by donating your money, your time, or your voice. We as Americans must be as vocally anti- the support of financial and military aide to Israel as possible, as this is the only thing that will ever change Congressional voting patterns. Vote out Congresspeople who refuse to stand against this support of Israel. This is something we can all do. Maybe it doesn't seem as active or real as other kinds of political action, but it is a real effect that we can have on the Israel- Palestine conflict. Just in the last few years, the opinion of the American people towards Israel and Palestine has shifted significantly (x), and we have seen this result in more and more candidates making this issue a cornerstone of their campaigns.

As I said in my original response, Israel benefits from any sort of silence or obfuscation on our parts. Any attempt to make what they are doing as less than what it is is a barrier to ending the support to their genocidal regime.

Of course, the immediate response was everyone falling over themselves to say that anyone who defines zionism differently than they, themselves, is supporting genocide. This is obviously untrue. No one in this discussion here has come out in favor of dead children and horrific, endless bombing.

What I see here is a demand that zionism be defined the way you want it to be defined, or otherwise that person is a morally bankrupt collaborator with slaughter.

Listen, my brother is a linguist and I'm a lawyer, and so we get a lot of mileage in my family by talking about language as something that is used vs. something that is locked in a dictionary. This is a stupid argument. The words you use do not show whether or not you are in favor of horrendous violence. Whether or not you are in favor of horrendous violence shows whether or not you are in favor of horrendous violence. You see zionism as a term for a violent ideology; it is probably quite uncomfortable for you to know that the excuse the Nazis used to slaughter hundreds of thousands of Jewish people started with the word zionist. Do I think you're a Nazi because you're engaging in the same division of good vs. bad Jews? Absolutely not! I think you are well-intentioned and that you have blinders on about the very real imperfect human people on all sides of this conflict who have imperfect human thoughts and feelings and griefs and traumas and hopes.

In the meantime, this war is far too big for a single American to make a difference. Americans en masse? Obviously. I'm not blind to the political reality of the situation. The power I have to change that right now is nil because there's no current election. But I vote in every single one and this is, in fact, one of my relevant issues. I also lobby in my state government directly to legislators, in an organization that has me as one of its heavy-hitting lobbyists that they deploy against hostile senators.

Israel is not my main issue, though. The issue I've devoted many years of my life to learning inside and out and fighting for is not this one. And it took me more than five years of concentrated lawyering in the criminal justice system to even start to perceive how all of the systems in it interacted. The world is not simple. The world is large. The world contains everything.

I don't think Israel is benefiting from my post at all. I think realistically if people were a little less weird about Jewish people at home, Jewish people would feel less driven to defensively oppose condemnations of Israel. Because that's how humans work.

What happens when people feel less attacked and hounded? They start listening.

I will note, on claims that Israel is, current tense, commiting ethnic cleansing genocide: something approximating 1000 civilians have been murdered in Gaza by the IDF since the ceasefire began. That is about 0.05% of the population in about seven months. Horrible, yes; war crimes, sure; but calling it a "genocide" is at this point blood libel.