Edgar The pooh

but we also want our people back in the their homes, wherever their home was. we want our hostages back, they are all of us and we want all of them. we have not only weekly but daily protest, and have been doing so for two years now.

Of course the issue is more complicated than one run-on sentence. The world always is. This post was me expressing the feeling that at the core of it - the government is not acting out genuine care for anyone not somewhere in the circle of favores. I am anxious. I am tired. I am watching some of my friends losing their future dreams to financial ruin while others are losing their soul piece by piece serving in a war they are less and less convinced is a means and not an end every day. I feel like im running out of air to breath, and even though Ill keep on protesting I cant help but feel helpless and that my crying out is futile.

I see what the government has been and is still doing, every day, and it seems clear that I and everyone like me is at best a resource and at worst an obsticle for the people on power as they try to create a violent, racist, corrupt theocracy in which they will be accountable to nobody.

How can they claim hamas is evil for giving out candy after sucsessful killings, than turn around and give candy in schools for Nasrallah's death? בנפול אויבך אל תשמח

How can they start talking about satteling lebanon and gaza as if none of the people there matter the least bit and they can come dance on the ashes? מעשה ידי טובעים בים ואתם אומרים שירה

How fucking dare they shake accountability, make false promises and paint all critics as traitors? Reaching this situation in the country is this governments fault, and this government is the resault of Bibi making worse and worse friends in his effort to hold his position. Hes used every known tactic to keep his power by pointing fingers and spreading heateful fear. Even if we pretend he somehow has good intentions, were far past the point where honest mistakes become criminal negligence.

if herzel was into ethnic cleansing he can go fuck himself even further for all i care but he is not the spokesperson of zionism- he is, in the most literal sense, just some guy.

oh btw, one last thing-

“Just some guy.” Look even if you disagree with the common consensus that Herzl was the father of Zionism, it’s downright laughable to pretend he wasn’t, at bare minimum, a really fucking influential figure, regardless of your opinion on him. Sure he might not be THE spokeperson for Zionism in the modern age, but his writings were definitely influential in its founding, which that founding included the displacement and attempted ethnic cleansing of the .

my header, which you screenshotted,: I am a Marxist Feminist.

You, the good reader: Seeing as you are a Radical Feminist…

i also disagree with your claim that conversations about zionism inherently relate to palestine. the reason is that the word zionism is taken out of its original context and is now being used as a way to vilify israelis and diaspora jews. some may think this is pedantic, but words do matter, and at the current climate, it holds weight when it is being conflated with colonialism and genocide. i do know not all people think this way, but enough are for it to be an issue for me to open a blog about it.

i might need to clarify that my “just a guy” comment is essentially me saying that although he was influential at the time, the idea of zionism is one that antecedently him. i think we’re basically heading toward the same place from different directions. i must say that after reading his writing, my biggest issue with herzel’s ideology is some of his core beliefs were of apartheid thinking so i agree with many of your points.

This would mean you could be a Zionist while still calling for the destruction of (the modern state of) Israel, so long as you advocated for a safe homeland elsewhere. Which would technically make me a Zionist, since I support the Jewish autonomous oblast. Do you think most self proclaimed Zionists would agree if I claimed to be one? Answer honestly.

i think what you are doing, and it relates to a larger problem, is interchanging zionism with israel’s government actions. there’s no hypothetical “actual zionism”, zionism is a movement, a belief. there are people in charge that may use zionism as a mean, or rather an excuse, but zionism is not the force that drives israel forwards.

i think youre confusing your own interpretation of how people responded to you as a personal attack against you, which is not.

tell me about that white entitlement—what makes you think israel is a country of white settlers when it was said to you over and over again that the great majority is mixed or not from european countries. you are advocating for giving a free pass to certin citizens while expelling the others. this is eugenics. the “white” immigrants came because they were persecuted in their own prospective country (for not being white, mind you). you are literally advocating for the displacement of part of the population to the places they escaped from, and the solution doesn’t even cover the fact that the remaining israeli citizens in your hypothesis will still face violence from the arab population.

“you all aren’t guaranteed to die” are we guaranteed a life where we don’t have to fear death? it already is a looming threat in israel, but it seems like for you us being displaced and dead is not that of a big deal.

btw if you think the middle east didn’t play a role during the holocaust i’m sorry to inform you but arab countries are known to be (and have been so during ww2) antisemitic. maybe you should simply not speak on things you don’t know about. i told you this before and i say this to you again but you speak as though (and i suspect i am being correct here) you have no knowledge of the history of israel if you think life was relatively peaceful until the balfour declaration.

I don’t think it’s a personal attack, I think it’s screaming “you hate uss!” And “but Arabs bad!” When someone pokes holes in their arguements.

A decent amount is indeed white and it is white interests that allow it’s continued existence. And why is “white” in quotes lol? The fact that Europeans persecuted white Jews does not mean they have the right to go and colonize Arabs. This is the exact same logic that was used to justify early settlers of American’s colonization and attempted extermination of native Americans. “We are oppressed so we need this land.” Groups considered “Lesser white” do not have the right to use actual nonwhite people as meat shields against other whites. For another example, this time with a group that ACTUALLY isn’t white, the romani face a significant amount of persecution from Europeans and the Romani, are a collection of multiple distinct peoples with a common heritage, similar to Jewish people. They still cannot settle and ethnically cleans a section of Northern India, populated by the ancestors of those who stayed in the region instead of fleeing, based on vague millennia-old claims despite the development of immense cultural and linguistic divergence between those who left the region and those who stay. Also, nice try, but the idea I am advocating for anti white eugenics is absurd.

So by your own admission, you don’t have a life where you don’t have to fear death in Israel? Then you might as well go back to the exact same thing, except your not colonizing people in Europe. Maybe you could do what you did in Palestine, except to people who actually shoulder the majority of the blame for European anti-Semitism.

I am aware of Arab support of Hitler during the period. I said “responsible for” not “complicit”. Regardless, the Arabs weren’t the ones who built the concentration camps, weren’t the ones that gleefully herded their Jewish neighbors into them, weren’t the ones leading the pograms. That was the euros, and you seem deathly allergic to admitting that. Also “you have no knowledge if you think” without any further elaboration is just the debate equivalent of going “nuh-uh”.

Most Jewish people in Palestine are mixed or non-European? Not only are most Jewish people living in Palestine only second and third generation immigrants themselves, Ashkenazi Jews are the largest single ethnoreligious demographic in the region.

starting with you, i don’t know how to tell you this but identifying as a certain race in israel means you are part of it but it does not mean you are solely that gender. not to mention that a survey from 13 years ago is not going to hold after the current Israeli demographic.

i also find it funny you had to wikipedia source me on that when that’s a reality i live every day. furthermore, come to israel and tell ashkenazi jews they are white, and see how they react to you calling them that.

btw i love that the link for “ashkenazi” is purple, really drives home your understanding of judaism and israeli culture. you really are every step of the way with her in this fight yet you only come out now to try and discredit me. good job babes.

now @brand-new-uterus,

admittingly, i did not read everything said but i can also see you are being way too aggressive for it to be “just something they said”. at the end of it, you come off as defensive and, yes, very hateful towards us.

the white is in quotes because israel idea of whiteness is not a european or americanized one, though it has been tried to be used as a way to paint us as “white oppressors”. again, i urge you to read about the history of israel before it’s declaration because a lot of what you say is straight up bullshit.

who are you to say who’s “ACTUALLY” isn’t white? weren’t both the romani and jews persecuted for the same thing? hell, we don’t even look that much apart. and what your claim is? that if they have yet to settle then so shouldn’t we? i have a hard time trying to decipher what you advocate for here. btw idk why you think displacing part of the population is not eugenics but kk.

yeah, by my very own admission, israel, being the safest place in the world for jews, still has death looming in shapes of terrorism and war. i think you are comparing two widely different forms of safety here, one is not equal to the other.

but wait, would we not also be occupiers in Europe? it is hard for me to imagine they’d just hand us and for free that could accommodate millions. you think they’ll accept us w open arms? or will the first thing they do is try to get rid of us? my bet is on the latter.

“i am aware of arab support of hitler during the period. i said “responsible for” not “complicit”“ i don’t know how to break this out to you but arabs collaborated with the axis powers, another thing you might want to read about. but you’re right, regardless, they did not built the concentration camps. but they did persecute jews, hanged them, converted them to Islam (or killed them if not) or straight up expelled them to places such as (you guessed it) Israel. you really think antisemitism is a purely european concept? ma'am hating the jews was a thing thousands of years ago, not something hitler invented while incarcareted.

Israel is not the determiner as to who is white and who is not. The conception of Ashkenazi Jews as nonwhite makes even less sense in the framework of Israel, since they hold massive amounts of privelege and oppress their ACTUALLY not white counterparts. It’s also not just Europe or America that would consider them white.

I’m brand-new-uterus that’s who. And you could turn around and say the same thing about Slavs (though their relations with nazisim is more complicated). Both slavs and askenzazi are still white. Also

Right no way I could one was white and the other isn’t. Also

Definition of eugenics.

My friend Blake who lives in Brooklyn isn’t worried about being hit by a hamas rocket, so from where I’m standing he’s coming out on top. I’ll give you it’s safer than some parts of Europe and some parts of the us but again, not their job to be meat shields.

I don’t care about the Euros, they’re colonizers anyway and group most responsible for European Jews suffering, so I am a-ok with them paying the price. Well according to you, the Palestineans are doing that already and you all seem willing and able to fight them. Why don’t you fight Europe instead?

The vast majority of Europe collaborated with Hitler in some capacity during WW2, and the collaboration was what I was referencing. Yet somehow none of them have to be colonized or you all will die. Why is that? I also never said it was, Arab antisemism did in fact exist and that was admitted several times.

^ Another “white” Ashkenazi Jew.

^ “Brown” Palestinian girl.

^ Look at the whiteness of this “white” Ashkenazi Jew!

^ Nothing like the brownness of this “brown” Palestinian kid.

^ Even more “white” Ashkenazi Jews.

^ Palestinian athlete, clearly SO “brown.”

^ You can tell this girl is Palestinian right away from how brown she is.

^ And here’s the Palestinian Rania, Queen of Jordan, with her kids. Brownest of the brown!

But hey, you wanted to compare Jews to the Roma, claiming the latter are darker skinned? OK, let’s!

Oh, and if you’re gonna drag the Roma into this, you may wanna know that they actually would very much like recognition that would enable their return to India:

My point is that all of these populations, Jews, Roma, Palestinians/Arabs, they all have a wide variety of appearances and skin tones. Calling any of them European or pretending that they’re not seen as “other” and “undesirable” by Europeans based on skin color alone is distortion of both ancestry and historical attitudes towards them.

But this isn’t new information, Jews have never been perceived as white in Europe, they have always been perceived as physically darker and deformed in contrast with the Europeans they were forced to live amongst due to expulsion from their ancestral land and enslavement.

Here’s just two examples. Ashkenazi Jews being presented as physically darker and deformed, Nazi Germany, 20th century:

Jews presented with a “demonic” Jewish nose, England (Exchequer Receipt Roll), 1233:

We know the Jewish man in this drawing is Moshe Mokke. You can also tell this is a Jew because he’s wearing the spiked hat Jewish men were forced to wear back then.

And look at how European this group of Ashkenazi men appear!

Or how about the following Ashkenazi Jewish family from Jerusalem in 1900?

You’re talking about expelling Jews “back” to Europe as if the persecution of Jews started and ended with the Nazis. It did not. There were repeated murders, massacres, pogroms, forced conversions, expulsions, discrimination, abuse and humiliation for over 2000 years in Europe. The Nazis were not the source of Europe’s antisemitism, and the end of that political party and regime is not the end of Jew-hatred among Europeans. And that’s what you want to send Ashkenazi Jews “back” to in your great “benevolence”!?

But you’re apparently kind enough to let non-Ashkenazi Jews off the hook of displacement and expulsion. Do you think an ethnic cleansing is less of a crime if you only target Ashkenazi Jews? Again, how very kind of you! So what is your plan exactly, since the different Jewish communities have been intermarrying to a greater and greater degree in Israel, as has been pointed out to you, to force one Ashkenazi parent “back” to Europe, while tearing that parent apart from their non-Ashkenazi spouse and their mixed kids, who have to stay in Israel, since they’re not “European”? Is that your great, humanitarian vision?

(This is for @motherrr​ too. I don’t think you understand the - as pointed out to you, outdated - statistics in your own screenshot)

But let me address the insanity of referring to Ashkenazi Jews as Europeans, when clearly neither they, nor the non-Jewish Europeans believed this. All Jews are originally from Israel. All Jews are originally Middle Eastern. There is more than enough historical, archeological and genetic evidence showing this. Here, for the latter, look at this genetic population map showing that Ashkenazi Jews (AsJ) group together with Sephardi Jews (SeJ) and Lebanese Christians and Druze (LC & LD) as being from the Levant:

The main difference between Ashkenazi, Sephardi, Mizrahi, Berber and Yemenite Jews is where we happened to end up during our long exile from Israel. You’re basically saying that you want to discriminate against the Jews who by chance ended up exiled in Europe rather than, for example, in northern Africa. How is thinking it’s the right thing to punish Jews whose exile happened to be in Europe justifiable? Do you think they chose exile there? As what, as a life of luxury in Europe, when they could have chosen to be exiled elsewhere? Is that your logic? But I already pointed out that Jews had suffered among the Europeans. And, of course, they didn’t choose to be displaced to Europe, they were expelled and sold into slavery there by the Roman colonialists occupying the Land of Israel. So, what exactly is your justification for punishing them, uniquely, out of all exiled Jewish communities? Especially since you seem well aware that the European abuse of Jews was worse than that suffered at the hands of the Arabs. You said so yourself when you tried defending the Arab collusion with the Nazis! (Though personally, I would not erase or belittle that persecution and abuse either. We can go into the long list of massacres, forced conversions, expulsions and blood libels Jews suffered in Arab-Muslim countries as well, if you want to)

I don’t feel like getting into the issue of Herzl, but it seems I would be neglectful if I didn’t, since your idea on why it’s “correct” to re-traumatize Ashkenazi Jews by ethnically cleansing them relates to him and early Zionism. 

He’s definitely an influential figure in the Zionist movement, but he’s hardly its founder. The longing to return to Israel has been embedded in Jewish thought and scripture (for example, in the context of the Jewish exile in Babylon) for thousands of years, this Zionist desire to return to Israel is inherent to Judaism as a religion and a culture since before there was a modern term for it. But even if we narrow ‘Zionism’ down to the modern, political movement, Herzl was not the one who launched it. He only became convinced that the Jews need a state of their own after the Dreyfus affair (the antisemitic false conviction twice of a French Jewish officer for an act of treason committed by a non-Jewish French officer), that started with Alfred Dreyfus’ arrest in 1894. But by then, the modern movement of Zionism was already happening, for example it was already responsible for the establishment of the moshava of Petah Tikvah in 1878, for the Jewish agricultural youth village and boarding school of Mikveh Israel in 1870, and the first correspondence setting the foundation for political Zionism takes place between Sir Moshe Montefiore, the president of the Board of Deputies of British Jews (biggest and second oldest British Jewish organization) and Cahrles Henry Churchill, the British consul in Damascus, starts in 1841. So I’m reinforcing what’s been said to you already: Herzl alone does not shape all of Zionism. Not even close.

In fact, you should be aware of it already as you mentioned the Uganda plan. In 1903, when the British suggested Uganda (which was under their colonialist rule at the time as “East Africa”), he was okay with it temporarily due to the danger for Russian Jews (this is shortly after the horrific pogrom in Kishinev in April 1903, and during a time when the second wave of pogroms was taking place). 

In 1905, the participants of the seventh Zionist congress voted against this plan. The danger to Jews was real, a Jewish state in Israel was not a solution for this immediate danger, the Uganda plan was not meant to replace Israel as the ultimate goal for Jewish rebirth, and it still ended up being rejected. If Herzl were the sole shaper of Zionism, his acceptance of the plan should have been enough. But the Jewish people rejected it. The Uganda plan, had it happened, would have been actual colonialism, Jews occupying a land they had no ancestral connection to under the patronage of a European power. The Uganda plan didn’t happen because that’s not what Jews wanted. They wanted to return to the place they came from, to the place they dreamt of and read about and prayed towards, the place they felt connected to. The rejection of the Uganda plan proves the focus of Zionism was an indigenous return to the Jewish ancestral homeland.

Which is also why we won’t be colonizing Europe and fighting Europeans. Jews are not your dogs to sic on the Europeans just because you dislike Europeans more than Arabs. We deserve a return to our ancestral homeland, and we deserve to have our indigenous rights there recognized, and we deserve to have peace there, instead of this horror vision you have in your mind of Ashkenazi Jews trapped in a perpetual war with Europeans until they’re all killed off (because that’s the only way that sort of a war can end).

TBH, your response isn’t actually worth replying to, re-stating your opinion as if it was fact in the face of so much evidence to the contrary is childish at best. 

Historical Fiction

“All Other Nights” by Dara Horn - Jewish spy for the union in the civil war

“Shylock’s Daughter” by Marjam Pressler - retelling of the Merchant of Venice with a sympathetic Shylock and a historically accurate look at the Ashkenazi AND Sephardic Jewish community in 16th century Italy

“The Chosen” by Chaim Potok - Hassidic + Modern Orthodox Jewish boys ‘friendship’ (lbr we all ship it) in 1945-1948 NYC

“My Name is Asher Lev” by Chaim Potok - ultra-orthodox Jewish boy takes up art, paints a crucifixion scene, and sh*t hits the fan

“The Museum of Extraordinary Things” - Jewish photographer + (non-Jewish) daughter of a sideshow owner meet and fall in love in turn of the century Brooklyn, and also a subplot about the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire

“Escape from Egypt” by Sonia Levitin - retelling of the Passover story

“Daniel Deronda” by George Eliot - it’s like Jane Austen. With Jews! (And while everything is not all hunky-dory, it’s also not the antisemitic travesty I’ve come to expect from 19th century gentile writers).

Contemporary

“Hacking Harvard” by Robin Wasserman - 3 nerds take on a bet to get a slacker/stoner into Harvard (also a really nice critique of the college admissions process tbh)

“The Pact” by Jodi Picoult - (suicide tw) A tragedy hits 2 families. The novel centers on a trial and flashbacks to the event in question. 

“Someone to Run With” by David Grossman - set on the streets of Jerusalem, a boy tries to return a lost dog to its owner, a girl who has run away from home in search of her brother (this is the English translation, obviously, but if you can read novels in Hebrew I highly recommend reading the original, משהו לרוץ איתו)

Urban Fantasy/Fantasy/SciFi

“The Mediator” series by Meg Cabot - teenaged girl starts seeing ghosts / YA romance (although the fact that the MC is Jewish is not even remotely relevant to the plot, it is mentioned outright several times which is more than most books)

“The Cure” by Sonia Levitin - futuristic dystopian society tries to cure one young man’s appreciation of music by sending him to a Jewish shtetl in 13th century Poland (fair warning for dystopian fans, though, the middle 2/3rds reads like historical fiction, so.)

Children’s (Middle Grade) Books

“All of a Kind Family” by Sydney Taylor - the classic “1920s NYC Jewish family”

“Dave at Night” by Gail Carson Levine - boy sneaks out of an orphanage in early 20th century NYC

“Witness” by Karen Taylor Hesse - told in free verse, the KKK visits a small town  (I’m including it because it’s not a Holocaust book, and it’s really good, but it still might  will set off your antisemitism sensors so fair warning)

“Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret.” by Judy Blume - Classic. (Also, takes on an interfaith family in a really interesting and nuanced way!)

“Samir and Yonatan” by Daniella Carmi - two boys (one Israeli, one Palestinian) end up in the same hospital and learn that they have more in common than they thought

Plays

“Angels in America” by Harold Kushner - I can’t even begin to describe this one just google it. (or: Jewish and Mormon gay people in NYC during the AIDS epidemic, and also angels)

Miss Jacobson’s Journey by Carola Dunn (review) - Regency-era spy romance about escaping from France and getting back to England. Hero and heroine are both Jewish and although they’re Ashkies, it has Sephardic rep as well

The Golem and the Jinni by Helene Wecker (review) - 1900′s fantasy set in the immigrant communities of NYC. Beautiful epic drama about friendship.

…and wonderful graphic novels like The Rabbi’s Cat, the Rabbi Harvey books (our legends told as if they were set in the American Wild West), and the Mirka books (fantasy starring an Orthodox pre-teen girl.)

The YA LGBT contemporaries Gone Gone Gone by Hannah Moskowitz and My Year Zero by Rachel Gold have Jewish MC’s. And non-LGBT but YA about Orthodox teenager is Playing with Matches by Suri Rosen.

(Moriarty also has an adult sci-fi series featuring a Jewish AI character who did something mysterious in Tel Aviv back in the day–adult sci-fi is not my thing so I only read the first book but it’s worth mentioning!)

There is also a prominent Jewish character in Sarah Zettel’s American Fairy Trilogy (1930s historical fiction, but with fairies!)

I always have to mention that I Am J, a trans YA that people talk about fairly often, has a patrilineal protagonist–his mother is catholic and he’s baptized, but he actually has a complicated relationship with his Jewishness and says a shechehiyanu for his first hormone shot, and people don’t usually mention that as a draw to the book. The author credits Joy Ladin in her acknowledgments so you know she learned a thing or two about trans Jews probably. I like this book, it’s not super revolutionary but it has its charms.

The Red Tent by Anita Diamant - Torah fanfic focusing on women’s lives , relationships, and spirituality and filling in the story of Dinah.

Light Years by Tammar Stein - After her boyfriend is killed in a terrorist attack, a young Israeli woman tries to get away by going to America for college, but she can’t forget what happened.

The Seven Good Years by Etgar Keret - A funny, wistful, silly, reflective collection of stories/essays/anecdotes about the author’s life as a secular Israeli. (nonfiction, but flows like fiction)

The Yiddish Policemen’s Union by Michael Chabon - Alternative history noir detective story where our hard boiled gumshoe is Yiddish-speaking slivovitz-drinking Meyer Landsman, living in Sitka, Alaska, which is where European Jews went after the Holocaust instead of Israel.

I’ll warn that it does have a pogrom in it, and the beginning deals with the trials of living as a Jew in the early 1900s in Russia I believe, but it’s mostly about poetry and love and immigration and translation, and parts of the book take place in modern day massachussetts where a young man is trying to translate this old poet’s story from Yiddish to English. I love this book.

Yesterday, Israeli social media was focused on the rampant fire that was spreading and decimating houses after houses in Northern Israel. Also, there was rage regarding the announcement of the death of 4 hostages:  Chaim Peri, Yoram Metzger, Amiram Cooper, and Nadav Popplewell. Hamas kidnapped them, and the hostages were most likely killed by IDF strikes in December. People were mad at the government that keeps not giving a shit about our lives. We have to go to the streets to beg them to agree to a deal that would save the hostages lives and would end this multi-lateral war. All people, Palestinians, Israeli, and Lebanese deserve peace and quiet, and free democratic sovereign countries. But did any popular anti-Zionist accounts address our pain? I am not talking about half-assed condemnations that usually gaslight and puts the blame onto us, Israelis, I am talking about just acknowledging and actually showing empathy to our pain. Again, I don't want half-assed statements of: "I don't want anyone to suffer". No, I want to see true empathy. Like acknowledging how Ayala Metzger has been fighting on the streets for 8 months! She has been arrested and hurt by police countless of times, just because she wanted her husband's dad back home. She fought every single day to bring back her husband's dad, who is now declared dead.

Or will you acknowledge that the deceased Chaim Peri, who is in your eyes a vicious colonizer living on sToLeN lANd (no he wasn't), as someone who advocated for peace and took Palestinians children from Gaza to treatments in hospitals?

I have not seen a single ounce of sympathy towards people whose property and houses were set on fire. I have never supported the mass destruction of houses in Gaza Strip and protested countless of times against this horrendous war. I expect people to extend this sympathy to us as well. Here is a tweet about people trying to fight against the fire that's burning Kfar Giladi down (Kfar Giladi was established prior 1948 and even prior Balfour Declaration in 1917, so spare me the "but it was built on stolen land").

I read tweets of Israelis stating things like: "For 8 months I have been homeless, and now my memories are gone". Surprise, did you know that there were internal displaced refugee Israelis as well? "But it's your gover-" Spare me the criticism, we already have internal criticism directed at different populations here and the government. You don't care, so spare me the BS. Here are examples of our criticism towards the government:

Citizens were the ones trying to put the fire down, not the government:

If you truly advocated for coexistence, you'd understand that coexistence means listening to the pain of the ones you claim to want to live here as well. "But you're not oppressed" - and will our memories be gone, once we live in this utopic binational Palestine that you dream of? Will we forget the terror attacks and acres of land being burnt for decades? No, right? You don't want coexistence, you want us to admit we were the ultimate evil all these years, without an ounce of sympathy to our concerns. You want justice, not peace. Anti-Zionists truly care about Palestinians, and I appreciate that. Some truly simply want peace, I also believe that. But I have no seen a single anti-Zionist (perhaps besides Israelis who self-identify as anti-Zionists) who shows ANY sympathy towards Israeli nor the Israeli perspective. I am not talking about stating stuff like: "Oh it's horrible but.." or "Well, but that was caused because of you", or "I obviously am against any suffering". No, I don't want this half-assed detached BS. I've cried constantly since Oct. 7th. Memorial Day this year has been painful (oh, did you know we commemorate our dead on memorial days and it's a very strong national ethos here, something you'd probably want to erase from your perspective). No, I want true empathy. You want one (socialist and secular) civic state that'd include both Palestinians and Israelis? Start by actually listening to those who'd live in that utopic state you dream of.

paladin: but if it's not black or white, what is it?

witch: gray, idiot!

paladin: but what does that mean?

witch: it means it's not black or white!

rogue: it means that someone is in conflict.

paladin: but i'm in conflict!

rogue: then you're gray!

Goyim straight down fetishize the jewish diasporic experience, highlighting the good times of acceptance and tolerance and/or whitewash the ugly side, while refusing to listen to actual jewish voices that used to live or are currently living in those communities, who would tell them a very different story, of systemic oppression, intolerance and blood liable.

For the people who engage in that harmful rhetoric, its more about wanting to *feel* tolerant and inclusive towards jewish people than actually do the work and face the the antisemitism thriving in their community.

Other motivations would include:

antizionism and a wish to dismiss the case for a jewish state. Because you see, jews in Yemen/Iran/Syria were actually doing great, it is just those evil Zionists that had brainwashed them into thinking they need the protection of the state of Israel.

Holocaust denial: in the case of European communities, it is a way to wash the dark side of history of multiple European countries, whether it denying the Holocaust or "just" denying on progroms.