Zzzz

This beautiful outdoor choir performance is an act of rebellion, and efforts are underway to make it illegal to do this.

The choir is part of the larger organization Women of the Wall, a multidenominational, international group of women who are campaigning for the right of women to pray at the Kotel in Jerusalem in an egalitarian way -- to sing, read Torah, and to pray out loud, taking up space, as women.

The Kotel is currently administered by a highly Orthodox rabbinate, which I suspect would prefer it if women just . . . didn't pray there at all. Grudgingly, they allow a teeny tiny official prayer space for women, who are expected to be very quiet and Orthodox about their prayer. The Orthodox men who take up most of the space at the Kotel haaaaaaaaaaate when people pray in non-Orthodox styles there, and they especially loathe it when women do that, to the point where they will physically attack people like the Women of the Wall, by throwing things like chairs and hot coffee at them while they're having services.

A lot of people seem to not grasp that just because things are “different” or conceptually distinct doesn’t mean they’re entirely separate or inherently unrelated, where any relation between them is entirely arbitrary & artificial.

Are there distinctions between Jews, the state of Israel, and the land of Israel? Yes. But the relationship between these things has so much overlap that you cannot honestly fully separate them.

If I had to visualize it as a Venn diagram, it might look something like this.

Eretz Yisrael is incredibly important to Jewish history & Jewish religion, and half of all Jews reside there, as citizens of Medinat Yisrael (where most of its population is Jews, and the makeup of its government reflects that), which represents the most substantial embodiment of Am Yisrael’s political autonomy at present or in the last two millennia—which is very clearly necessary with the amount of violence Jews face—and whose borders encompass most of Eretz Yisrael.

The historical boundaries of the land of Israel are not 1-for-1 with the modern state of Israel’s borders; there are plenty of Israelis who aren’t Jews, including in the government; there are Jews living in the diaspora; some of them do not care for the state of Israel at all. So yes, these three things are different ideas. But that doesn’t change the fact that they are still tightly related in every direction, and the exceptions are statistical outliers, not normative.

(2/2) when they hear those Jews saying "of course I'm pro-Israel," they hear "I'm in support of everything Israel does in the name of keeping its status as a Jewish state." Which makes the hardcore antizionist fling accusations of genocide apologism, which in turn makes the Jew double down on their belief that the antizionist wants their family expelled and support Israel even harder."

There also is no misunderstanding of what Zionism actually is. The way "antizionists" use the term Zionism relies on it having two very different definitions, a broad definition, when deciding who is a Zionist, and a narrow, deeply vile one, when deciding what zionists deserve. I have taken to calling this technique a pump label, because the two definitions are designed to suck people into the broad definition and pump them out into the narrow definition. This is not a technique of misunderstanding, it's bad faith.

The use of "zionist" in this way is designed to sort people, to move them from the unsorted mass of humanity into the category of "bad person" or "enemy". And once a person has been judged an evil enemy, they are presumed to be seeking to decieve, justifying the Kafka trap @unsolicited-opinions points to.

But of course for the people who use "Zionist" this way, it's almost always a way to justify their own Jew-hate to themselves, as evinced by just what can get you sucked into the label "Zionist", including "pointing out antisemitism unrelated to Israel" or "participating in Jewish observance" or even, for the particularly transparent, "being a Jew."

I developed the idea of pump labels here:

synagogue: what if cats were here