:3

- "It's not antisemitic to criticize Israel!" Yeah and the moon also isn't made of cheese, but the post didn't say it was, so there's no need to comment on either.

- "I'm a shitty antisemite, have you considered that setting Jews on fire is cool?" I hadn't. I hope you walk into a glass door.

- "I love Jewishpeople. I loooooove Judaism I love menorahs I love Jewishpeople soooo much I want to make out with Neturei Karta. I'm so normal and not antisemitic because I have to remind myself Jews are people every time I mention them. I just hate ZiOnIStS." You are lying. Maybe to yourself too? I don't care. I hope you walk into a glass door.

- "I'm Jewish too, and I bite my tongue whenever I hear people saying awful stuff because I don't want to distract from Gaza." At some point you'll have to grapple with the fact that what you're saying is "I accept that some Jews will get set on fire and I am okay with that." Your self-negation and self-minimization probably feels good and feels like penance for Zionism but that is not what teshuvah looks like, and you are affecting not only yourself, but also all other Jews. A community that rewards you for self-minimization and for your ability to silently swallow bigotry is not a community that loves or respects you.

- "I'm Jewish and I don't think any of the stuff you always say is awful is actually awful. I agree with all of it." Girl, at least the kapos did it under duress. You, though? What's your excuse? Glass door.

Your movement regularly engages in stochastic terrorism. You allow extremely dangerous, untrue, and antisemitic rhetoric to fly all the time. We can no longer pretend it has no real world effects.At some point people are going to start trying to hold you accountable for it.

Christmas is a Christian holiday. The fact that many celebrate it in an irreligious way (which is valid!) does not change its origins, connotations, symbolism, nor what it has historically meant for religious minorities.

The idea that Christmas is "secular" (read: neutral) is a product of Christian hegemony and the blindness of many in Christian countries to the permeation of Christianity as "default" culture.

When someone says they don't celebrate Christmas since it's a Christian holiday, it is not actually reassuring or helpful to say something along the lines of "oh well it's just a secular day of family & presents for everyone! So you can celebrate it too!"

The truth is that in order to move forward, both Palestinians and Israelis are going to have to forgive things no one should be asked to forgive. But the alternative is more unforgivable violence in a wheel of violence that turns for the powerful at the expense of the lives of all the citizens.

One side is expelled en masse by the other

One side is completely obliterated by the other in a true genocide

Both sides are obliterated in a war that leaves few survivors

Low-level war and terrorism by each side against the other remains ongoing with occasional flare-ups indefinitely until options #1 or #2 occur, or until both sides become so weak and exhausted from fighting each other that the area is conquered or colonized by an outside party and the survivors are oppressed, assimilated, expelled, and/or killed

The cycle of violence is broken and some meaningful peace is achieved by the parties where both sides stay in the land and build a future together with some measure of cooperation and mutual respect

Any of those options but the last one will result in more unforgivable violence. But to achieve that last option, both sides have to decide that the future is more important than the past, that healing is more important than retributive justice, that peace is more important than honor, and that living together is preferable to dying together.

And there's a serious emotional reality to that decision that is profound and beyond the scope of my own life experiences. How do you decide to let go of the anger and the fear and the desire for justice for historical wrongs when the people who need your forgiveness are still launching rockets and bombs at you and your family? When you can't ever be sure that today won't be the day someone stabs you or rams you with a car or explodes your bus or burns your house down possibly with you in it, simply because you are a Jew or because you are an Arab? How do you forgive the people who took your daughter from you? Your husband? Your grandmother? Your best friend?

How do you let go of the idea of full 100% control over your homeland? How can you ever feel safe when the rest of the world has repeatedly turned their backs to your suffering and closed their borders to you, or even actively persecuted you? How do you lay down your weapons when there is the constant threat of annihilation around the corner from outside parties?

There is so much pain and trauma and wrongs that cannot be righted, and any proposed solution must proactively address these safety concerns for both sides, along with the trauma and deep racial scars and open wounds of recent events. That is an inescapable emotional reality.

It is possible.

...can we mix in a bit of "this is an atrocious way to treat people, antisemitism is alive and well and ORGANIZED in Europe in 2024, this is our shame and our problem" with the "this is not how to help Palestinians", though?

Because on its own, "this won't help Palestinians" is... well, it's TRUE. This won't be productive at all. But it also does kind of unfortunately imply that if harassing, terrorizing, injuring and potentially killing random Israeli/Jews who just wanted to watch a fucking football game WOULD help Palestinians, it'd be fine.

I don’t feel that way anymore. I’ve spent the past year watching leftists and “progressives” cheer on Islamist groups who call for the death of my people. I’ve watched groups who focused on specific issues of domestic policy completely unrelated to foreign wars embrace Palestine as an omnicause, forcing antizionism into spaces that have nothing to do with Israel and making them progressively more hostile to Jews.

This time, I feel very, very alone. Jews are 2% of the American population, and we can’t trust our government, our neighbors, or progressive organizations and movements to keep us safe—or even just not advocate for our deaths. We only have each other, and with Hashem’s help, we will keep each other safe and keep our communities and institutions and traditions alive until better times come along. Kol Yisrael aravim zeh ba’zeh.

Anyway, if anything I’ve said resonates with you at all, please consider donating to The Red Tent Fund, a new Jewish abortion support organization founded by a Jewish woman who was pushed out of the abortion fund she previously worked for when the organization started pushing antisemitic propaganda and refused to acknowledge sexual violence against Israeli women.

So either we need to change the definition of genocide to simply mean lots of people being killed, regardless of intention or we need to acknowledge that Israel's actions do not rise to the current definition of genocide and we have very little evidence to suggest that they do.

Does this mean we will never find evidence of this? No, we could find it. Does this mean Israel will never cross the red line into genocide? No, they could. But they haven't, and we haven't found it. Does this mean Ben Gvir and Smotrich aren't spewing genocidal rhetoric? No, they are. But that isn't genocide. It's speech.

People are going around saying that the ICJ found proof of genocide. They haven't. The ICJ did not make any type of ruling whatsoever. If you read the actual court transcripts, you will see that the ICJ merely determined prime facie that South Africa has the right to accuse Israel of genocide and that the ICJ has jurisdiction to hear their case.

They also told Hamas to free the civilian hostages. So if we're going by the ICJ, Hamas has obviously completely disregarded this command. So you cannot tell me you support the ICJ proceedings without also agreeing with what the ICJ told Hamas to do. And they didn't do it, in fact they executed six of them just for pure sadistic glee.

Accusing Israel of genocide is a type of schadenfreude at being able to invert the Holocaust and be like, "those silly Jews! I can't believe they're now the Nazis!" as though they're comic-book villains with an origin arc. (By the way, as an X-Men connoisseur shall-we-say, this is an extremely common fandom interpretation of Magneto and people love making this comparison with him, a literal Jewish Holocaust survivor.)

Then she got mad because I said “it looks like genocide even if it’s not one” constitutes antisemitic blood libel.

She ALSO refused to say China, Russia, or Sudan are committing actual, well-documented genocides. Her response was “are they?” and blamed the fact that she only sees news from her dash, as if this is normal and not an absolute condemnation. When provided news articles disputing this she refused to read them because “it’s too complicated to understand.” And then cited the number of Jews she follows as proof she isn’t being antisemitic.

She literally decided you could diagnose genocide based on vibes and that only Israel—oh, sorry, only THE ISRAELI GOVERNMENT—is committing it.

And I just want to say. The intent *is* antisemitic. Zionism is a movement by Jews and for Jews and it should remain a discussion primarily had and led by Jews. This is an intracommunity issue and the attempt to isolate, cancel, destroy, remove, etc anything that could possibly be related to zionism is antisemitic to its core because it's saying "I get to decide what Jews have community. I get to decide what Jews have rights and safety." And that's fucking bullshit.

Goyim are not not understanding that their impact is larger than intended. Well, maybe they are. But the bigger issue is that they think they get to decide which Jews get to have community. Which Jews get to feel safe. Which Jews get to tentatively exist as Jews in public.

Another issue is that when we decide some category of Jew is okay to do that shit to, the goalposts will move. They always fucking move. Someone said the Shema is zionist! Hillel (the sometimes only Jewish resource on college and university campuses that students have) so that has to go. Jews speaking Hebrew are zionists so we need to stop speaking that, then Jews being visible in public are suspect like. It doesn't stop at the true definition of zionism.

i've literally had a non-jewish friend come to me and ask me to not refer to myself as a zionist because even though they know i mean it in the jewish self-determination sense, others don't and my friend doesn't want people coming after them for being friends with someone who might be a palestinian hater (which i am not). i understand their paranoia but at the same time that was so fucked and out of line. i'm really disgusted that we've had our own terminology weaponized against us in such a way.

They did it with the tanakh. They did it with kabbalah and lilith, they do it with zionism.

this is probably my favorite proposed i/p solution—a two-state confederation with freedom of movement (a palestinian citizen can live in israel and vice versa). i think this is more likely to work than a single binational state, given the history of binational states.

my opinions:

a permanent ceasefire that everyone involved will adhere to needs to happen, and this ceasefire needs to at the very least include bringing the hostages home and allowing distribution of aid to palestinians

on that note, aid needs to be given to palestinian civilians in a manner that ensures they will actually receive it

netanyahu needs to go (not controversial but it needs to be said)

hamas needs to go (somehow this is a controversial statement?????)

tokenizing jews who agree with you while demonizing the other 80+ percent of jews is bad

palestinians and israelis are both entitled to this region of land and ideally a 2-state solution should be the goal, but any solution that a) respects the humanity and safety of both jews and palestinians, and b) is based in reality, is acceptable

the land of israel is the homeland of both jews and palestinians and both deserve to live there in peace

jews and palestinians deserve to safely visit their holiest places

people in general deserve not to suffer through wars, and i’d personally love if the next ceasefire doesn’t get broken and if this cycle of violence could be broken

the antizionist movement has a problem with antisemitism

there is an extreme amount of misinformation surrounding this conflict that gets spread widely without any consideration or scrutiny

oct 7 was a heinous and disgusting act of evil, and anyone justifying it as an act of resistance needs to understand that most jews are terrified of you and rightly so

NOT my opinions:

palestinian children deserve to die

palestinians don’t deserve a state

islamophobia is okay

anti-arab sentiment is okay

anything that could be described as kahanism

antizionist jews deserve to be targets of antisemitism

anyways!! i am once again begging people to support solidarity organizations that promote peace between israelis and palestinians like: standing together, allmep, eco peace, etc

I'd love to be able to discuss all of that--but it's a non-starter when the "antizionists" go, "oh, you're criticizing Israel? So you must agree that Israel needs to be destroyed, uprooted, and scattered to the winds, that the Palestinians get to kill every single (((Zionist))) in the region slowly, painfully, and with hands dripping red with (((Zionist))) blood, and that (((Zionists))) control the economy, the government, and the media?"

"Uh... no? I want to criticize the Israeli government as a government, not as the source of all evil in the world."

I miss hearing “eat the rich” and not hearing it as a dog whistle for “kill the Jews.” I miss feeling inspired by phrases like “our struggles for liberation are all connected,” instead of hearing its real meaning, “the Jews are the evil puppet masters behind everything and the world must unite against them.” I miss believing that when leftists talked about punching up at their oppressors, it wasn’t just an excuse to punch down at more vulnerable minorities that they decided were their oppressors despite all evidence to the contrary.

I miss the days when the left poured into the streets to protest cops and corporations instead of protesting Jews. I miss updating myself on those protests so I could join them, instead of to know which areas to avoid because they’ll be Judenrein for the day.

I don’t wish my eyes hadn’t been opened. I’d much rather see the truth no matter how painful and disillusioning it is, because the alternative isn’t actually “bliss.” It’s having a perpetual nagging feeling that something’s off but I can’t put my finger on it, or if I can then I must be overreacting or imagining it’s worse than it is.

But that pain and disillusionment is very real. That loss is very real. It was a community I thought I belonged to, a community I put a lot of work and energy into for many years, and there is grief at the loss of it. Grief that it’s gone, grief that it never was what it claimed to be in the first place. I guess I’m grieving the loss of that part of my identity. And grieving the loss of how people I thought were my friends and allies perceive my identity. Grieving the illusion that they were ever my allies at all, that they ever would be my allies if I needed. Because I haven’t really changed, but the way my former circles look at me completely changed. People who thought I was a good person and a good ally on October 6 decided I was the devil incarnate very literally overnight.

The person who privately reached out to me a few years ago to thank me for a Facebook post I made defending sex workers, because as a former sex worker they appreciated it. Now they’ve been posting antisemitic blood libel, the kind of rhetoric that’s already gotten Jews killed, for six months straight. I tried to tell them how much pain it causes me as a Jew to see their posts, and they only doubled down. It truly is their loss. I was a good friend and a good ally, and they threw me away because I’m a Jew. But it’s totally not because I’m a Jew, it’s because I’m the evil kind of Jew, the kind that just so happens to be the profile of ninety percent of the Jewish population.

I’m grateful I have such a strong sense of Jewish identity, because otherwise the loss of identity in this other way would be far more destabilising. I get why so many people cling to their political identities no matter how much cognitive dissonance they have to wave away; why they insist their ideology is righteous no matter how much evidence to the contrary. Without any other solid identity they would feel too adrift. But that doesn’t excuse their behavior. It’s not ok to jump on a bandwagon to persecute and kill Jews because you want to belong to something that badly, because you can’t handle your sense of self evolving with all the growing pains that come with it.

(to be clear I'm not like... gonna become a conservative. like obviously I still believe in equality and dismantling systemic oppression and universal healthcare and I don't want horrible things to be happening to anyone around the globe, it's just hard to look at these movements of young people the same way again, knowing that they're only in it to fetishize the suffering of others, clear their guilt for living in a first-world country, and feel righteous and powerful and like the angels of God [not our gd] smiting the demons of hell)

you make a post in which you make it clear you support palestinians and oppose the ways israel has wronged them, explaining that the terrorist group is still not good. you know you will probably get some flacc from the pro-Hamas side, but naively underestimate how much.

you get thousands of notifications on that one post, the majority of them hateful comments.

some of the response is positive. multiple messages thank you for the post, expressing bafflement that it’s controversial.

a few Israelis are upset at the loaded language in your post, but explain their problems with it civilly. you called Israel “apartheid”. they ask you what apartheid laws Israel has. you admit you honestly don’t know.

your inbox is flooded with anonymous hate from anti-Israel leftists.

over the course of a few weeks you have received hundreds of death threats, a dozen rape threats. people accuse you of being pro-genocide. you’re a literal Nazi. you’re racist, you thirst for the blood of Palestinians. you’re brainwashed by propaganda, a shill for The Zionist Entity. a few of the hate messages are from literal Neo-Nazis; the overwhelming majority are from leftists, many of them queer.

you are considering suicide.

you see footage of the october 7th attacks. you see footage of the bombings in gaza. you see footage of a Jewish man being murdered at an anti-Israel rally.

a popular creator you follow posts in support of an antisemitic hate group that masquerades as a Jewish organization. this organization regularly posts blood libel and other antisemitic rhetoric, works with groups that are even more explicitly antisemitic, including celebrating October 7th, holocaust inversion, blood libel, “Khazar theory” and others. more than one of the orgs they work with is pro-Putin.

your former roommate liked the post.

graffiti appears on a street you frequent that says “#freepalestine” and “end settler colonialism”

the boyfriend of the friend you spent most of the summer with makes his first post about the war. it’s a reposted comic that mocks and downplays the october 7th attack.

you doubt he’ll be receptive to criticism. he’s shared leftist memes about “monied elites” pulling all the strings and evangelicals being modern day “pharisees” in the past, and getting him to understand why that was antisemitic was like herding cats. you try anyway.

another of his Jewish friends also pushes back. he smugly dismisses her, tells her she’s falling for Zionist propaganda and uses several antisemitic tropes. you go off on him. he just deletes your comment.

you give up. you’re done. you block him.

you see anti-Israel posters and billboards around town

you mention what happened with the guy you went off on to his girlfriend—the friend you’ve grown very close to, who you’ve been listening to as she unburdens her fears for the future and complains about her bf’s BS over the last year. she doesn’t respond to you.

a friend of a friend shares posts tokenizing fringe groups that spread blood libel and have collaborated with holocaust deniers. you know they don’t know what you know, so you explain what those groups are. they seem somewhat receptive, apologize, and take it down

the next day they share several more posts that dip into antisemitic tropes. you mention this to your mutual friend, that you’re worried about them being radicalized. you’re not sure how receptive they’ll be to continued criticism

you have a confrontation with the foaf. in the meantime they’ve shared even more antisemitic posts. they say they didn’t mean to cause you distress but instead of stopping they effectively block you.

the “end settler colonialism” vandalism has been counter-vandalized with the words “commie propaganda” in place of “settler colonialism”. you don’t know if this is an improvement.

a month passes. the friend whose bf you went off on still hasn’t spoken to you. you see she shared a post defending an SJP chapter that posted Nazi cartoon caricatures of Jews repurposed in “Anti-Zionist” memes. you unfriend her on all social media platforms but you can’t bring yourself to block her number.

you see a friend of someone whose couch you surfed when you were homeless harassing Jewish celebrities with “Free Palestine” comments. you block them.

you’ve lost count of how many people you’ve unfollowed or blocked, or who’ve blocked you. friends, content creators.

when a friend takes an unusually long time to respond you worry if it’s because of your posts about antisemitism.

most of the podcasts, youtube channels, and other content creators you regularly engaged with no longer feel safe. you wonder who will be next

a couple friends wish you a happy hanukkah. you don’t celebrate much aside from lighting the hanukkiah and making some latkes.

you see posts about a destroyed chabad menorah, antisemitic comments on Jewish celebrities’ Hanukkah posts.

your neighborhood is covered in pro-Palestine & anti-Israel posters. some are seemingly innocuous, some are JVP “not in our name” posters. some call for intifada. “globalize the intifada” “Zionists fuck off!” “solidarity means attack!”

a man kills himself shouting “free palestine”. you learn about his suicide by seeing posts from several popular accounts you followed glorifying it.

you follow a bunch of jewish accounts on social media and commiserate with them about everything happening

your jewish friends post screenshots of the dead man’s antisemitic, pro-Hamas views. you look at his reddit and find even more horrific shit: anti-Ukraine posts. mocking Zelensky. “elites” are “lizard people”; the only named individual he calls a lizard person is Jewish. you start to notice a pattern: a lot of the people he dislikes just so happen to be jews.

several people you know share a post glorifying this man’s suicide. most are acquaintances, one is someone incredibly important to you.

you wonder how they would respond to your suicide.

you tell the close friend that shared this post how it scares you. you show them the receipts of the man’s antisemitism. their response is a single sentence. they didn’t know about the antisemitism.

they don’t apologize.

you notice none of your irl friends, even your closest ones, interact with your posts about antisemitism. you are able to vent to a couple friends, but no one has reach out to you

you try not to read into it. you try not to take it personally.

you haven’t slept well in months. you’ve always been an insomniac but not like this. you’re not sleeping until 4am, 6am, even 9am. even when you get to bed at a decent hour and get a full night’s rest it takes you hours to get out of bed.

a few weeks go by. the friend with the single sentence response shares a post saying they’re excited and proud to join a group to help palestinians. you’re excited and proud for them.

a couple days later, they share a post about a fundraiser to help a palestinian family get out of gaza. you note to yourself this is a much more effective & less concerning form of activism than the pro-suicidal antisemite post.

your friend shares another post about the fundraiser. it’s a joint post between their group and another group.

you open the other group’s page

the page is just a wall of signs from rallies. you swipe through one after another: “from the river to the sea”, “by any means necessary”, justifying/denying the atrocities of october 7th, calling for violent revolution. anything done in the name of resistance can’t be terrorism, all Israelis are terrorists. Jews aren’t indigenous; they’re white colonizers. holocaust inversion. other vile, thinly veiled violent rhetoric

you feel sick to your stomach imagining talking to your friend about it.

you already feel like you’re burdening the few friends you can talk to about this. you already feel like you think about it too much, talk about it too much. but you can’t not think about it; it affects every aspect of your life.

you’ve filtered out relevant keywords on more than one social media site to avoid the worst of it. some still manages to leak through.

there isn’t a single friend you regularly interact with that you don’t fear the moment when they will switch from listening to your concerns to seeing you as the evil zionist or indoctrinated hasbaranik they’ve been warned about.

it’s not an irrational fear. it keeps happening. you knew it would then, and you were powerless to do anything about it before, and you continue to be as it happens again and again.