^ Another âwhiteâ Ashkenazi Jew.
^Â âBrownâ Palestinian girl.
^ Look at the whiteness of this âwhiteâ Ashkenazi Jew!
^ Nothing like the brownness of this âbrownâ Palestinian kid.
^ Even more âwhiteâ Ashkenazi Jews.
^ Palestinian athlete, clearly SOÂ âbrown.â
^ You can tell this girl is Palestinian right away from how brown she is.
^ And hereâs 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, letâs!
Oh, and if youâre 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 theyâre not seen as âotherâ and âundesirableâ by Europeans based on skin color alone is distortion of both ancestry and historical attitudes towards them.
But this isnât 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.
Hereâs just two examples. Ashkenazi Jews being presented as physically darker and deformed, Nazi Germany, 20th century:
Jews presented with a âdemonicâ 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 heâs 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?
Youâre talking about expelling Jews âbackâ 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 Europeâs antisemitism, and the end of that political party and regime is not the end of Jew-hatred among Europeans. And thatâs what you want to send Ashkenazi Jews âbackâ to in your great âbenevolenceâ!?
But youâre 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 âbackâ to Europe, while tearing that parent apart from their non-Ashkenazi spouse and their mixed kids, who have to stay in Israel, since theyâre not âEuropeanâ? Is that your great, humanitarian vision?
(This is for @motherrrâ too. I donât 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. Youâre 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 itâs 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 didnât 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 donât feel like getting into the issue of Herzl, but it seems I would be neglectful if I didnât, since your idea on why itâs âcorrectâ to re-traumatize Ashkenazi Jews by ethnically cleansing them relates to him and early Zionism.Â
Heâs definitely an influential figure in the Zionist movement, but heâs 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 âZionismâ 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 Dreyfusâ 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 Iâm reinforcing whatâs 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 âEast Africaâ), 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).Â
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 didnât happen because thatâs 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 wonât 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 theyâre all killed off (because thatâs the only way that sort of a war can end).
Lastly, regarding Herzl, like many of the other (many) founding fathers of Zionism, he wasnât as racist as people like to depict him. He started writing Altneuland in 1898 and published it in 1902. The novel barely has a plot, itâs intended mostly to present a vision of the future Jewish state. What little plot it does have focuses on showing that this state would not be a Jew-only state. Thereâs a villain (whoâs the fictional counterpart of a real-life antisemitic Vienna politician who called for the expulsion of Jews) advocating for a Jew-only state, and heâs defeated in a democratic election, which makes him leave the Jewish state as envisioned in the novel, where Arabs are presented as being a part of every walk of life, including of the government. Herzl was not perfect, he was a creature of his time and place of birth, where European culture and technology were seen as more advanced and developed. He clearly knew Jews were Middle Eastern in origin, having come from Israel, and his idea of âbestowingâ European culture upon the natives was his idea of benefitting Jews and non-Jews alike. In his way, he meant well for everyone living in Israel. So both the attempt to depict Zionism as being carved in his image specifically and overlooking his ideas promoting tolerance in the future Jewish state, are incorrect at best.