Opinion | How Israelās War Became Unjust - The New York Times
Israelās war in Gaza is not a genocide. It is a war for a just cause, the elimination of a cruel, fanatical, itself potentially genocidal terrorist organization that oppresses its own people, holds innocent hostages and will pose a severe danger to the state of Israel so long as it holds power.
The warās heartbreaking civilian toll is inextricably linked to that terrorist governmentās refusal to obey the laws of war, its unwillingness to surrender no matter how much its own people suffer, its willingness to accept famine rather than give up control of humanitarian aid, its inclination to let cease-fire negotiations spin endlessly in the apparent hope that international pressure will save it from defeat.
But despite all these realities, despite the fundamental responsibility that Hamas bears for all the horrors of the conflict it initiated on Oct. 7, 2023, Israelās warmaking at this moment is unjust.
One can have a righteous cause, oneās foe can be wicked and brutal and primarily responsible for the conflictās toll, and still ā under any coherent theory of just war ā there is an obligation to refrain from certain tactics if they create too much collateral damage, to mitigate certain predictable forms of civilian suffering and to have a strategy that makes the warās outcome worth the cost.
These are tests that Israel is failing. The first one is the hardest to assess, because every protracted war yields inevitable civilian suffering, and an urban war against an entrenched enemy especially will have cruelties that canāt be refined away. Such a war cannot be fought exclusively with precision strikes, the soldiers fighting it cannot be prevented from making terrible mistakes, and war crimes are inevitably committed even in righteous conflicts. So there is no way to look at the rubble in Gaza and the death-toll estimates and offer a mathematical proof that Israel is failing to exercise adequate restraint. I just think itās true.
Deaths from famine are a clearer matter, which is why the threat of starvation is leading even some of Israelās strongest supporters to warn its government that something must be changed. Here, Israel has made a strategic choice, trying to separate food distribution from a system that it argues Hamas was exploiting for its own purposes. But if your strategic choice leads to children dying of starvation when the food is available to feed them, then a civilized nation has to make a different choice ā even if that makes things easier for its enemies to some degree.
Itās true that this kind of argument assumes the importance of moral limits that the United States, in its wars with barbarous enemies, has not always observed. I recommend my recent podcast conversation with my colleague Bret Stephens for a longer discussion on these points, but suffice it to say I do think that certain things America did in World War II were intrinsically immoral, including the firebombing of Dresden and the use of the atomic bomb against Japanese population centers. And obviously not everyone agrees with this perspective. The idea that a civilized nation must set aside a weapon that might help to end a war, especially against a fanatical enemy that shows few signs of moving toward a normal sort of surrender, is one that most Americans fighting World War II would have understandably rejected.
But this brings around the third way that Israelās warmaking seems currently unjust. It wasnāt certain that Americaās total-war strategy against Nazi Germany and imperial Japan would bring that conflict to a stable, peaceful ending, but the fact that it did so helped vindicate American policymakers ā because part of the justice of a war depends on whether you have a reasonable plan for peace.
That kind of plan still seems absent nearly two years into the Gaza war. I am respectful of the fog of war and open to the possibility that a decent outcome will emerge. Perhaps there really is a tipping point in Hamasās degradation beyond which it will be unable to reconstitute itself, at which point a multilateral, Arab-led approach to rebuilding Gaza will become a realistic option. Perhaps the second-order effects of Israelās blows against Hezbollah and Iran are opening up diplomatic options that have not yet been fully exploited.
But right now, if I were predicting an endgame for the struggle, it would involve Israel finally stepping back in exhaustion, cordoning off the Gaza Strip again, watching bloody power struggles play out in an isolated Gaza and accepting that some kind of terrorist threat will be harbored there for years to come.
If thatās the outcome, then fighting on for another year to end up there is an unjust waste of life. Alternatively, if there is a path from todayās death toll to tomorrowās lasting peace, then Israel needs its friends to see it and believe in it ā and soon.
Finally, criticism of Israel that isn't antisemitic! See, it's not hard! You don't have to use centuries-old antisemitic canards with massive body counts to say what's happening is wrong. So why do antizionists keep failing to avoid those antisemitic tropes?
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My personal white whale in the "it would be good if it was good" category has got to be the Atelier Iris trilogy and follow-up Mana Khemia duology. In order, we've got a game that changed its core gameplay loop in the last leg of development and broke half of its subsystems in the process, an obvious rush job, a game that can't even decide what kind of game it wants to be, a game whose protagonist is so boring it's actually kind of inexplicable given how fascinating his whole deal is, and a game that actively punishes you for picking the female protagonist by giving her a party that doesn't meaningfully engage with half of its mechanics and a post-game that's functionally unplayable because it was never playtested with her in the lead. If you add up the good bits of all five games you'll have a collection of genuinely fantastic ideas on your hands, but every individual entry is irritatingly half-baked.
(To add insult to injury, the PC remasters just skip right past this entire segment of the franchise, so we've got updated versions of Atelier games from both before and after this era, but nothing within it, and none of the stuff that's interesting about them has ever been revisited in later entries in the series. Fun!)
#video games #atelier #it is an eternal mystery to me why atelier knockoffs aren't an entire genre #because it's SO easy to imagine a Good Atelier Game and then almost all of them have some giant weird thing wrong with them instead (via @downtroddendeity)
This is kind of one of those Monkey's Paw scenarios: there is, in fact, a fairly robust ecosystem of Atelier clones, but they're almost all shitty mobile games that spin the Atelier-style time management mechanics into a pay-to-win grind. The only one I can think off of the top of my head that's available in English and isn't either a pay-to-win mobile game or a PC port of one that yanks out the pay-to-win mechanics and ends up being kind of nothing gameplay-wise is Little Witch in the Woods.
(It also doesn't help that a lot of Western developers fundamentally do not grasp the difference between an Atelier clone and a Harvest Moon clone, so you get a fair bit of the latter being marketed as the former.)
Question: Do Ar Tonelico 1 and 2 suck in the same way, or did Gust mess up in a different way? I truly enjoy those two games quite a lot despite the... everything, so if whatever is fascinatingly wrong with them and actually pretty fun is also what's wrong with Atelier games, I need to get into Atelier.
I cannot put into words how utterly repulsive it is to have seen headline after headline after headline on articles shared on social media about the attack on Temple Israel synagogue centring the fact that the attacker had lost family members in an Israeli airstrike, as if that somehow justified targeting Jews on the other side of the world who have nothing to do with the Israeli government.
He targeted a Jewish preschool while children were inside, for fuck sake.
The lengths to which people will go to shrug their shoulders and excuse and justify violent antisemitism and attacks on innocent people is reprehensible.
By their logic, it means that everyone who lost family in the 7/10 attacks are even MORE justified in directly killing Gazan children (which, we are assured, is both happening and is genocidal).
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You donāt get to wriggle out of defending a genocide by crying āit happened to us first! This is an antisemitic conspiracy theory! Itās Holocaust inversion!ā
Using the Shoah to justify Israelās genocidal campaign is utterly morally repugnant. Consensus reality exists, international law exists, documented evidence exists, no matter how you continue to cudgel detractors by branding them as antisemites.
"If you gather enough antisemites together, antisemitism becomes reality" is a hell of a take, especially given that there are a little less than 16 million Jewish people in the world. We'll never be able to define the consensus under those rules; it'll always be a tyranny of the majority defining what's true about us. Less than half of the world's adults believe the Holocaust happened; a "consensus reality" view means that it didn't.
The Blitz wasn't a genocide. The bombing of Dresden wasn't a genocide. The 2003 invasion of Iraq wasn't a genocide. War is horrible, and can result in truly horrific civilian casualty figures. That doesn't make it a genocide.
Stop using language you don't understand because targeted propaganda has made you feel sad about something.
Actually it makes your allyship for everyone else BE completely performative, too.
If you're fine with rape or with denying sight-unseen the claim that rape took place, because the victims are Jewish - you're not feminist.
If you're fine with othering and oppression of an ethnic minority because that minority is Jews - you're not anti-racist.
If you hate the one country in the Middle East where queer people have full rights and you talk about how Real Queers stand with the folks who would gladly murder us - you're not a queer activist.
Babylon Berlin really said āfascists can easily infiltrate leftist spaces just by learning the right vocabularyā and I feel like thatās...a pretty important overall message that the fandom is mostly sleeping on.
Given that the post is from 2020 before I was de facto ejected from the left as a movement for the crime of being born the wrong ethnicity I'm just gonna mark this one down as "post-apocalyptic ironic world-building graffiti that explains how it all fell apart".
#here's the rundown...#ācultural appropriationā = getting leftists to support racial segregation#āgirlbossā = getting leftists to reject feminism#ārainbow capitalismā = getting leftists to reject lgbt rights#āanti-zionismā = getting leftists to hate jews more than fascists#slap ābecause of capitalismā at the end of every regressive and fascistic idea and some people will lap it up without question
You know, for all the talk of how left wing antisemitism is or isn't like right wing antisemitism and some interesting points about how left wing antisemitism is more like right wing racism I just realized something: left wing antisemitism is a lot like right wing anti-leftism
They take words they don't know the meaning of (woke or socialism / zionism) and just use them to describe things they think are bad no matter if they apply
They pretend words minorities use to refer to majorities are slurs (cis / goy)
They claim (Soros / Hasbara) is paying people to post/protest
They are obsessed with the flag of the losing side of a war.
They take something everyone does (use a teleprompter / kill civilians) and pretend like it's something new and terrible that they would never do even though they do.
Refugees should go back where they came from
Denying history (The civil war wasn't about slavery / Jews lived in peace under Muslim rule)
I've noticed the same thing, and been accumulating a lot of other parallels in my notes.
Black slavery was good, actually (Neo-Confederates and MAGA types / Houthi supporters and Hamasniks)
The majority is actually threatened by the minority, so they're "justified" in their actions, which are actually "self-defense".
Democracy is only acceptable and legitimate when their side wins (Trump / University Hamasniks screaming when they lose a vote)
Sexual violence and rape are acceptable, even laudatory, when committed by the prized in-group, even when done against children (Trump and white men / Sinwar and Hamas)
Only Perfect Moral Victims can be true victims, otherwise they're to blame. ("What was she wearing?" / "Were they a Zionist?")
"They're baby murderers!"
Everyone is suddenly an expert, except for the people who are actually experts (Every right-winger was suddenly a constitutional law and/or infectious disease expert / every Leftist Hamasnik is suddenly an expert on Middle East politics and history)
Engaging in random acts of stupid terrorism because someone online told them to (Right-wingers attacking FBI offices / Hamasniks randomly attacking Navy ships because they thought there were weapons on board)
Loves to appropriate soundbites from dead members of the group they hate. ("I have a dream!" / "I believe that people are fundamentally good at heart.")
Token members are held up as proof that they're not bigots. (Neturi Karta and JVP / Black Republicans)
Discussions of systemic bigotry get deflected ("Whatabout Black on Black crime?" / "Whatabout Israel?"
Advocacy groups are demonized ("BLM is full of rioters!" / "The ADL is a White Supremacist counterinsurgency organization!")
"[They] have an unfair advantage in the racial hierarchy, so [they] don't actually face real bigotry!" (Compare right-wingers complaining about Affirmative Action and Leftists saying that since "Jews are White, they can't face real discrimination!")
"All POC are thieves and criminals, so it's not discrimination to treat them like potential criminals." / "All Jews are Zionists, so it's not discrimination to interrogate them on sight!"
Rewriting history is fun for everyone! Slavery wasn't Slavery, it was Guest Workers Learning Valuable Skills! / Jews Don't Come From The Levant and were Well Treated By Muslims!
"Blacks Always Play the Racism Card" / "Jews Always Play the Antisemitism Card"
Educators about bigotry need to pander and placate the bigots, who are immensely fragile when confronted about their bigotry, because remember, it's worse to be accused of racism than it is to be racist!
Not just the flag on the losing side of the war, but also Lost Cause ideologies run rampant; "Lost Cause of the South"/the "Nakba" (meaning "Catastrophe") didn't mean the displacement of the Palestinians until 1967; before that, it was used for how the combined Arab armies lost to the Jews!... and now both groups want a do-over/return to the Good Old Days.
An explicit desire to have legal disenfranchisement of the minority within their control
Supportive of totalitarian ethnostates where women and queer people have minimal to no rights--Putin's Russia, Trump's intended end for the US/Iran, Gaza, the Houthi's Yemen
Fetishizes violence and actively hopes for a day where all of the people they hate will be murdered en masse--"The Day of the Rope" / "The Revolution" (as shown by Oct 7th)
Demands respect for themselves while actively engaged in bigoted speech and plays the victim when pushed back against.
And the biggest one...
Associated with a distinctive headwear that was probably Made In China?
Someone on Reddit made the mistake of saying, "Teach me how this conflict came about" where I could see it.
Let me teach you too.
The common perception is that Jews came out of nowhere, stole Palestinian homes and kicked Palestinians out of them, and then bombed them for 75 years, until they finally rebelled in the form of Hamas invading Israel and massacring 22 towns in one day.
The historical reality is that Jews have lived there continuously for at least 3500 years.
There are areas, like Meggido iirc, with archeological evidence of continuous habitation for 7,000 years, but Jewish culture as we recognize it today didn't develop until probably halfway through that.
Ethnic Jews are the indigenous people of this area.
Indigeneity means a group was originally there, before any colonization happened, and that it has retained a cultural connection to the land. History plus culture.
That's what Jews have: even when the diaspora became larger than the number of Jews in Israel, the yearning to return to that homeland was a daily part of Jewish prayer and ritual.
The Jewish community in Israel was crushed pretty violently by the Roman Empire in 135 CE, but it was still substantial, sometimes even the majority population there, for almost a thousand years.
The 600s CE brought the advent of Islam and the Arab Empire, expanding out from Saudi Arabia into Israel and beyond. It was largely a region where Jews were second-class citizens. But it was still WAY better than the way Christian Europe treated Jews.
From the 700s-900s, the area saw repeated civil wars, plagues, and earthquakes.
Then the Crusades came, with waves of Christians making "pilgrimages to the Holy Land" and trying to conquer it from Muslims and Jews, who they slaughtered and enslaved.
Israel became pretty well depopulated after all that. It was a very rough time to live there. (And for the curious, I'm calling it Israel because that's what it had been for centuries, until the Romans erased the name and the country.)
By the 1800s, the TOTAL population of what's now Israel and Palestine had varied from 150,000 - 275,000 for centuries. It was very rural, very sparsely populated, on top of being mostly desert.
In the 1880s, Jews started buying land and moving back to their indigenous homeland. As tends to happen, immigration brought new projects and opportunities, which led to more immigration - not only from Jews, but from the Arab world as well.
Unfortunately, there was an antisemitic minority spearheaded by Amin al-Husseini. Who was very well-connected, rich, and from a politically powerful family.
Al-Husseini had enthusiastically participated in the Armenian Genocide under the Ottoman Empire. Then the Empire fell in World War One, and the League of Nations had to figure out what to do with its land.
Mostly, if an area was essentially operating as a country (e.g. Turkey), the League of Nations let it be one. In areas that weren't ready for self-rule, it appointed France or Britain to help them get there.
In recognition of the increased Jewish population in their traditional, indigenous homeland, it declared that that homeland would again become Israel.
As in, the region was casually called Palestine because that was the lay term for "the Holy Land." It had not been a country since Israel was stamped out; only a region of a series of different empires. And the Mandate For Palestine said it was establishing "a national home of the Jewish people" there, in recognition of "the historical connection of the Jewish people with Palestine and to the grounds for reconstituting their national home in that country."
Britain was appointed to help the Arab and Jewish communities there develop systems of self-government, and then to work together to govern the region overall.
At least, that was the plan.
Al-Husseini, who was deeply antisemitic, did not like this plan.
And, extra-unfortunately, the British response to al-Husseini inciting violent anti-Jewish riots was to put him in a leadership role over Arab Palestine.
They thought it would calm him down and perhaps satisfy him.
They were very wrong.
The second week of November 1942 has much to tell us about the regionās geopolitical centrality, its enduring political currents, and its ro
He went on to become a huge Hitler fanboy, and then a Nazi war criminal. He co-created the Muslim Brotherhood - which Hamas is part of - with fellow fascist fanboy Hassan al-Banna.
After years of causing disruption on the streets of Egypt, on 30 June 2012, the Muslim Brotherhood’s leader Mohammed Morsi was sworn i
He got Nazi Party funding for armed Muslim Brotherhood militias to attack Jews and the Brits in the late 30s, convincing Britain to agree to limit Jewish immigration at the time when it was most desperately needed.
He started using the militias again in 1947, when the United Nations voted to divide the mandated land into a Jewish homeland and a Palestinian one.
Al-Husseini wouldn't stand for a two-state solution. He was determined to tolerate no more than the subdued, small Jewish minority of second-class citizens that he remembered from his childhood.
As armed militias increasingly ran riot, the Arab middle and upper classes increasingly left. About 100,000 left the country before May 1948, when Britain was to pull out, leaving Israel and Palestine to declare their independence.
The surrounding nations didn't want war. They largely accepted the two-state solution.
But al-Husseini lobbied HARD. And by mobilizing the Muslim Brotherhood to provide "destabilizing mass demonstrations and a murderous campaign of intimidation," he got the Arab League nations to agree to invade, en masse, as soon as Britain left.
This article deals with the after-effects of Nazi anti-Zionist propaganda in the Arab world and the antisemitic campaign of the Mufti of Jer
ACTS OF AGGRESSION PROVOKED, COMMITTED AND PREPARED BY ARAB STATES
Ā IN CONCERT WITH THE PALESTINE ARAB HIGHER COMMITTEE
AGAINST T
About 600,000 Arabs fled to those countries during the ensuing war.
Jews couldn't seek refuge there; in fact, most of those countries either exiled their Jews directly, confiscating their property first, or else made Jewish life unlivable and exploited them for underpaid or slave labor for years first.
The expulsion of Jews from Arab countries,Ā one of the biggestĀ humanitarian crisesĀ of the 20th century, is all the more tragicĀ for how little
By the time the smoke cleared and a peace treaty was signed, most of the Arab Palestinian community had fled; there was no Arab Palestinian leadership; many of the refugees' homes and businesses had left had been destroyed in the war; and Israel had been flooded with nearly a million refugees from the Arab League countries and the Holocaust - even more people than had fled the war.
That was the Nakba. The one that gets portrayed as "750,000 Palestinians fled or were expelled!" in the hope that you'll assume they were expelled en masse, their beautiful intact homes all stolen.
Egypt had taken what's now the Gaza Strip in that war, and Jordan took what's now the West Bank - expelling or killing all the Jews in it first.
(Ironically, Jordan was originally supposed to be part of Israel. Britain, inexplicably, cut off what would have been 75% of its land to create Jordan.
Even more inexplicably, nobody ever talks about it. I've never seen anyone complain that Jordan was stolen from Palestinians. Possibly because Jordan is also the only country that gave Palestinian refugees full citizenship, and it's about half Palestinian now.
Israel is nearly 25% Arab Palestinians with full citizenship and equal rights, so it's not all that different -- but the fundamental difference of living in a country where the majority is Jewish, not Muslim, probably runs pretty deep.)
Anyway: that's why Palestine is Gaza and the West Bank, rather than being some contiguous chunk of land. Or being the land set aside by the U.N. in 1947.
Because Arab countries took that land in 1948, and treated them as essentially separate for 20 years.
Israel got them back, along with the Golan Heights and the Sinai Peninsula, in the next war: 1967, when Egypt committed an act of war by taking control of the waterways and barring Israel from them. It gave the Sinai back to Egypt as part of the 1979 peace accords between Egypt and Israel.
Israel tried to give back the Gaza Strip at the same time. Egypt refused.
Palestine finally declared independence in 1988.
But Hamas formed at about the same time. Probably in response, in fact. Hamas is fundamentally opposed to peace negotiations with Israel.
Again: Hamas is part of a group founded by Nazis.
Hamas has its own charter. It explains that Jews are "the enemy," because they control the drug trade, have been behind every major war, control the media, control the United Nations, etc. Basic Nazi rhetoric.
It has gotten adept at masking that rhetoric for the West. But to friendlier audiences, its leaders have consistently said things like, "People of Jerusalem, we want you to cut off the heads of the Jews with knives. With your hand, cut their artery from here. A knife costs five shekels.Ā Buy a knife, sharpen it, put it there, and just cut off [their heads]. It costs just five shekels."
Hamas Political Bureau Member and former Minister of the Interior Fathi Hammad urged the people of Jerusalem to "cut off...
(Palestinians were outraged by this speech. Palestinians, by and large, absolutely loathe Hamas.
I thought I'd left Gaza behind, yet all this time, Hamas was planning to expand its extremism and intimidation.
It's just that it's not the same to say that to locals, as it is to say it where major global powers who oppose this crap can hear you.)
Hamas has stated from the beginning that its mission is to violently destroy Israel and take over the land.
It has received $100M in military funding annually, from Iran, for several years. Because Iran has been building a network of fascist, antisemitic groups across the Middle East, in a blatant attempt to control more and more of it: Hezbollah in Lebanon. The Houthis in Yemen.
Iran has been run by a very far-right, deeply antisemitic dictatorship for decades now, which pretty openly wants to take down both Israel and the U.S.
Last year, Iran increased Hamas's funding to $350M.
The "proof of concept" invasion of Israel that Hamas pulled off on October 7th more than justifies a much bigger investment.
Hamas has publicly stated its intention to attack "again and again and again," until Israel has been violently destroyed.
That is how this conflict came about.
A Nazi group seized power in Gaza in 2007 by violently kicking the Palestinian government out, and began running it as a dictatorship, using it to build money and power in preparations for exactly this.
And people find it shockingly easy to believe its own hype about being "the Palestinian resistance."
As well as its propaganda that Israel is not actually targeting Hamas: it's just using a literal Nazi invasion and massacre as an excuse to randomly commit genocide of the fraction of Palestine it physically left 20 years ago.
Despite the fact that Palestinians in Gaza have been protesting HAMAS throughout the war.
This is such a good summary! I didn't know why it was called British Mandate Palestine (I just thought the British had mandated it, not that it was supposed to be returned).
It blatantly denies Palestinian indignity to the land, denies and distorts the Nakba, and denies and distorts the colonialism of Zionism."
(but blocked me, so I'm doing this by hand for anyone else who wants to know)
Blatantly denies Palestinian indigeneity to the land:
Palestinians are not indigenous to the land.
Palestinians are Arabs, and are indigenous to the Saudi Arabian peninsula southeast of Israel.
You don't need to be indigenous to have human rights.
I encourage people to think about why they think Palestinians are indigenous to the land. I.e., does this come from your knowledge of Palestinian history? Is this the Palestinians-are-the-original-Canaanites myth that arose in the 1960s? Is it because they're called Palestinians?
If anyone finds themselves recoiling from this statement because they've been going on the premise that Oct 7 was indigenous resistance against colonialism -- that being indigenous justifies the horrors perpetrated on civilians that day -- and they think I'm therefore saying Israel can do whatever violence it wants, then... I encourage you to not.
As indigenous people who reclaimed our ancestral homeland, we must be sensitive to others undergoing that same process.
If we're going with the "indigeneity has a time limit, if you've been there for a thousand years you're indigenous now" argument that's used only for Israel/Palestine, then it also has to apply to the Jews who were still there through those thousand years.
(Also, I don't think Westerners should be making that argument in the first place. Because it lays the groundwork for white people to just drag out the battle over indigenous land rights for a few hundred years until it becomes commonly accepted that oops, now white people are indigenous to the Americas too?)
If we're going with the additional "people who immigrated back from your diaspora can't be indigenous" argument, then we need to look at the fact that the population increase consisted of massive amount of Arab immigration alongside Jewish immigration.
During the mandate period, Arabs from many lands flowed freely into Palestine while Jewish immigration was severely limited. The truth remai
In deep antiquity, particularly in Egypt, the early civilization where the arts were most strongly developed, the visualization was aspectiv
Denies and distorts the colonialism of Zionism:
I've seen dozens of people claim that Zionism-is-a-settler-colonialist-movement, especially over the past ten months.
The basic argument is that (1) early Zionist writers used the word colonialism, and (2) Britain was a colonial power and was in charge of the Mandate.
The first part is a common but very bad-faith argument. We're talking about writings from 100-150 years ago, decades before it became common to think of the words "colony" and "colonialism" -- and "settlement" and "settlers" -- as meaning, "tools for subjugating indigenous people and stealing their land and resources."
This 1828 dictionary, for example, is just like, "A colony is when a bunch of people live in one country, but are citizens of a different one." That usage still lives on on the concept of art/artist colonies. Because they became A Thing in 1860-1900, when the word "colony" was still being used to mean "a bunch of ex-pats."
More importantly: You cannot DIY settler-colonialism.
In settler-colonialism, a country sends settlers "to completely destroy and replace indigenous people and their cultures in order to establish themselves as the rightful inhabitants. Therefore, settlers do not only exploit indigenous peopleās lands and resources, but they displace them, modify the names of the cities and places they colonize in order to completely erase the indigenousā tracks."
A lot of you have probably seen memes like this one, that aim to show exactly that. The original Palestinian names of Palestinian cities, before Israel colonized them.
Let's just fact-check these real quick, because it's a really good illustration of what's going on here.
The first two, Jerusalem/Al-Quds and Israel/Palestine, really say it all. The rest, you can skip unless you really want to know.
Jerusalem Al-Quds Jerusalem: 4,000 years it's been Jerusalem. "The modern Arabic name of Jerusalem is Ų§ŁŁŁŁŁŁŁŲÆŁŲ³ al-Quds, and its first recorded use can be traced to the 9th century CE, two hundred years after the Muslim conquest of the city."
Israel Palestine Israel: The first written reference to "Israel" appears on the 3,300-year-old Memphis Stele. Israel and Judea were either adjoining Jewish kingdoms, or two parts of the United Kingdom of Israel, depending on which historian you ask. Judea is where the term "Jew" originated, but Israel is the umbrella term for the Jewish people. (Which is why you might hear people saying "am Yisrael chai," "the people of Israel live." It means all Jews, not the country.)
The region was renamed Palestine by the Romans about 1,900 years ago, after the SECOND Jewish Revolt against colonialist Roman occupation. This time, they revolted because Emperor Hadrian banned circumcision and "decided to build a Roman colony, Aelia Capitolina, on the site of Jerusalem."
(Fun fact: During the revolt they minted their own coins, many of which said, "For the freedom of Jerusalem" in paleo-Hebrew. This paralleled coins from the first revolt, which said, "For the freedom/redemption of Zion.")
The Romans brutally crushed the revolt, destroying almost 1,000 Jewish villages and killing more than half a million Jews over the course of a few years.
THEN they exiled all remaining Jews around Jerusalem, and banned any Jews from visiting it.
And THEN they downgraded Judea from basically a state to just a district, and renamed it "Syria Palaestina," after the now-gone Philistines, to really rub it in that Jews had no self-determination.
That's why it's named Palestine today. That's where the name came from. The region has been named Palestine for almost two thousand years because of Roman colonialism.
The Arab-Islamic Empire that conquered so many of the Holy Roman Empire's lands, and the Crusaders who conquered the area for a while in the middle of that, just had no reason to change the name again.
This post is way too long. Continuing in a reblog!
Acre Akko Akka: Acre is jut the English name for it. The Crusaders named it St. Jean d'Acre a thousand years ago, when they were invading and ethnically cleansing the Holy Land by murdering and enslaving the Jews and Muslims. This city has been called Akka for 5,000 years, all the way back to when it was Phoenician. Akko is just Arabic for Akka.
Kiryat Shmona Al-Khalisa Al-Khalisa: This one is tough because it doesn't look like there's been any archaeology done there yet. There were lots of Jewish towns in that region 3,000 years ago, but I don't know if one became itty-bitty Al-Khalisa 1,500 years later, or what. The oldest historical record I have is that it was a Bedouin village starting in the 1500s. Bedouins are indigenous to the Negev Desert (#NotAllBedouins, but I'm assuming these Bedouins) and still live there today, so, like, ok, I guess?
Netanya/Umm Khalid: These aren't the same town. Netanya was founded in 1928. Umm Khalid was one of four villages founded in the 18th century, during the Ottoman Empire.
Ahilud Al-Birwa Beri and then Ahilud: The Arabic name Al-Birwa was first recorded in 1047, in the book Sifr Nameh by the famous Persian author Naser Khasro. It may be the later Arabic version of Beri, which was burnt to the ground during the Roman occupation.
Tel Aviv Yaffa Tel Aviv-Yafo: That's the city's official name. Yafo is the original Hebrew name going way the hell back. Yafa is just the Arabic for Yafo. (It's Jaffa or Joppa in English.) Tel Aviv was founded in 1909 by 60 Jewish families who raised the money for the land so they could get out of crowded Jaffa. It got big and the cities merged together.
Beer-Sheba/Beer-Sabe: This is just the Arabic name for a 4,000-year-old city that at one point marked the southern boundary of Israel.
Lod/Al-Lydd: Lod was the center of Jewish scholarship and trade 2,500 years ago, although it's much older than that. Al-Lydd is just Lod in Arabic.
Ashkelon/Ashkalan, Zekharia/Zakaria, Ashdod/Isdud: these are so fucking obviously the same name in two different languages I'm not even doing them
Hebron al-KhalÄ«l Hebron: Archaeologists have found a 2,700-year-old Jewish home in Hebron, and seals that say "LeMelech Hebron" ("the king of Hebron") in paleo-Hebrew. The name was changed under Arab colonization: "TheĀ ArabicĀ name for Hebron,Ā al-KhalÄ«l, emerged as the city's actual name in the 13th century. Earlier Muslim sources refer to the city as įø¤abra or įø¤abrÅ«n."
I've seen many people wholeheartedly believe there was this massive pagan/non-hebrew canaanite population that coexisted with the jews for centuries and lived there between roman expulsion and arab conquest (don't call it conquest, that makes them upset) where they totally peacefully converted.
And I'm so confused how and why people believe this.
Mostly because it fits with their narrative, and the facts don't. It's the same sort of historical revisionism that underlies those passages in Texas textbooks that refer to slaves as "guest workers" and frames the Native American expulsions as them "peacefully giving their land up to White settlers".
There's a particular brainbug in Western/leftist/academia circles where "colonialism is when boats" everything else is just sparkling cultural exchange because you see trade routes or something. What are seas if not roads for also trade but you know if you take an army and stick it in a boat and take over where you were trading it can be characterized differently than if you just march an army in.
So magically, roman conquest of Britain is of course imperialist conquest and colonization Boudicca and the Noble Druids etc etc... Roman conquest of Judea? Well maybe it's imperialism but they had trade ties and the Jews were really uppity (Ditto for any subsequent conquests)
Boat (And only certain kinds of boat) seems to ascribe more intentionality than boot/Caligae.
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I know I was mocking this earlier--and it is still something I find hilarious--but there's something more here that's worth pointing out in a coherent fashion.
Back in 2021, this post made the prediction that "Gen Z is gonna have a big cult boom the way that boomers did in the 70s," and breaking down the risk factors on why Gen Z is primed to fall into cults.
Thing is, though, the cults are already here. QAnon, Wellness cults...
And "Antizionism".
If you look at the Antizionists--like the one above--their behavior makes so much more sense when viewed through the structure of a high-control decentralized cult than from the perspective of a political movement. As a political movement, the "Antizionist" movement is not only useless, it is actively counterproductive to their stated goals of helping Palestinians, and continues to grow worse in that regard.
But as a cult?
As a cult, it is excellent.
It gives people a sense of control, an antagonist to blame for everything bad in their lives and the world, an easy narrative to believe, and a promise of a paradise once the evil is defeated. It appeals to pre-rendered (antisemitic) narratives that were already omnipresent in social and political spaces, there's a massive amount of effort, financial backing, and political pressure being used to promote it--and yet, thanks to those narratives, specifically the ones about "excessive (((Zionist))) control of political, economic, and social institutions", they can feel like the underdogs punching up at the ones in power, which gives them the feeling of being persecuted while in the midst of doing the persecution.
And to quote John Rogers for this beautiful bit:
one of the great secrets of human nature is that the one thing people want more than love, security, sex, chocolate or big-screen TV's isĀ to feel hard done by.
Why? Because being hard done by is theĀ shit. Feeling hard done by is the sweetest of drugs. If you're being persecuted -- it must mean you're doing the right thing, right? You get the mellow buzz of the moral high ground, but without arrogantly claiming it as your own. You get an instant, supportive community in a big dark scary world of such scope it may well literally be beyond rational human processing. When you are hard done by, you get purpose in a life where otherwise, you'd have to find your own. And when you ride that high, then no amount of logic, no pointing out that in actuality you and your beliefs are at a high point of popularity and influence for the last hundred years -- is going to pry that sweet crack-pipe of moral indignation from your hands.
And when you look at the actual behaviors and claims of the Antizionist movement in the context of cults...
Well, it's terrifying. They score high on each of the four areas of the BITE model (that's probably a whole post on that later), with the above screenshot being a prime example from the Thought Control area of the model.
Add to the fact that they're backpacking onto and loudly supporting an armed militant terrorist group with an explicitly religious and genocidal ideology, and you've got a recipe for radicalization.
Antizionism is not a disagreement with Israel's policies or actions. If it were, there would be 0 protests with swastikas present, or keffiyehs, or bloody hands. There would be zero people killing Jews. My synagogue would not have been defaced. My friends and I would never have received asks on here calling us slurs or threatening us. It would have simply been a conversation of understanding policies, rather than the rabid feral animals that have stunk up our feeds leading with bare teeth and an empty hole where their brain and heart should be.
Let's be very clear: antizionism is a denial of Judaism.
It's a denial of Jewish practice, Jewish history, Jewish safety, Jewish sovereignty, Jewish suffering, Jewish morality, Jewish humanity, and Jewish life.
It is, simply, the latest format of Jew-hate.
So yeah, punch nazis. Make nazis afraid again. And be willing to admit when you are one of them, even if you're not a skinhead. Because you still wish harm on Jews for the way Jews live Jewishly, and that is the core of nazism.
I watched a very, well racist, and antisemitic video posted into "jews" and "Judaism" tag.
Video here. (The comments are just unreal)
I swear catholics better back the fuck off in canada, like stfu and knock it off.
You came to America and christians took land, killing my ancestors, destroying cultures. But you get mad when your CHURCH RUN RESIDENTIAL SCHOOLS KILLED TENS OF THOUSANDS (if not hundreds of thousands) OF CHILDREN! Then your own people burned down the churches to hide the evidence of the extreme abuse. These were burned to destroy evidence. Also no those specific churches were not important to your religion. More lie spread by catholics to rid themselves of guilt and responsibilities. Yes there is actually proof of all these claims of dead children, and its not hard to find. Just because they have not been identified (prior to actual records???) actually makes this case stronger since you stole children from their homes and erased them from the world unless they lived to be 18. I am so tired "whao is me they burned down important churches before Canada was even independent". You came onto someone else's property and built something and are mad they destroyed it. That's your fucking history of "persecution". In reality you have stolen more from the world than you've ever would/could, and ever will give back. The catholic church owes natives world wide apologies, reparations for the lives you stole in the name of "kill the savage, save the child". So fuck you. Look what your people have done to the world, to world history, to other peoples. You are by far not the victim here. Not even in canada like so many comments complain.
Then you say Christians are the most persecuted group in all of history?! What in the actual FUCK are you talking about?
Hinduism you did you did you best to destroy. Judaism you just stole our history and texts. Translating them to meet your own needs. While killing and converting as many other people as the European countries wanted. The amount you stole from the world in terms of land, history, Lives... you need to shut up.
I want to talk to the creator of that video because guess what. There is still a massive presence of Christianity, a massive population. Meaning no, you were not the most persecuted people's in history. Hell your history is only just over 2000 years, while other groups have been around (with proof thousands of years prior) and you started things called libels to have us killed. He himself mentioned that Jews were responsible for killing Jesus when Jews had no ability to practice openly, they were not involved in the roman judicial system, Jesus was killed by Romans, by a roman method of execution. If jews were responsible in any form, the punishment at the time, for blasphemy was stoning to death. So, no Jews had nothing to do with it. It was the paranoia of Emperor Tiberius who also killed over 100 other claimed prophets or anyone with a following. Thats actual written and recorded history.
You killed jews, you killed Hindus, you killed Romani people, you killed Romans, you killed Greeks, you killed over 95% of native people in the americas.
Stop preaching your antisemitic and anti-indigenous agenda. This agenda is the same as it was in 1500s. Same blood libels, same antisemitic and anti-indigenous rethoric as when you first stepped foot onto stolen land. Land your people (catholics mainly) soaked the soil in native childrens blood.
Get off your high horse, when you literally have the Vatican, a country just for the pope and the pedophiles he helped keep out of prison.
Lets go to his point of "genocide of christians in Nigeria", okay what about the genocide of Jews you washed over to say "more christians died in the holocaust than jews, jews are just wanting sympathy", well guess what ww2 and the holocaust are not the same. Christians died as soldiers, not in concentration camps. Also labor camps in soviet union were prior to ww2.
Fuck you Brian holdsworth from Edmonton Alberta Canada. You are a racist, bigoted, antisemitic, anti-indigenous piece of human trash.
I left Twitter cause I got tired of receiving death and rape threats for being a trans woman by fascists on the platform after Musk took over only to wind up on tumblr with a bunch of trans women insisting we do the EXACT same thing to trans men that LGB without the T did to all of us trans people.
They want to dump trans men on their own the same way cis gays did to all trans people.
I refuse to have it. I refuse to turn on my trans brothers. I will shout it over and over from the roof tops that we need to stick together now more than ever. The discourse between fems and mascs is just about the most stupid shit you can possibly do under a fascist regime THAT WANTS YOU FUCKING DEAD.
Don't be a fucking idiot. Touch some grass. Testosterone is not some magical poison that turns you into an evil misogynist. Trans men have experiences with misogyny before they transition. Teansandrophobia is real. Trans men are real men. Testosterone should be free and handed out at your local pharmacy like napkins at McDonald's.
And the best part is that you too can believe all this and still be completely valid as a woman. Recognizing the rights of trans men to exist and be happy and support them in doing so does not invalidate my feminism nor my own identity.
Look. I know a lot of people bring up the fact that leftists in America hate Jews bcs they hate America and they hate their colonial past so they project their guilt on the jews and so on. And there is some truth in that, but the more I see leftist american antisemitism the more I start to suspect it almost comes from people that deep down want to believe America is innocent?
Like the whole rhetoric abt how ICE or police violence happen bcs of IDF training. The whole rhetoric abt how the only reason why America bombed Iraq and the Middle East and is turning a blind eye to civilian death in Gaza is bcs AIPAC controls America. The whole rhetoric abt how the parties are bad bcs they are ''controllled by elites''.
I feel like there is a secretly patriotic part of them that wants to believe that the true America is somehow pure and untainted and everything evil abt America they constantly critisize is bcs of the jews. Which of course is straight up nazi shit.
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For decades, critics have argued that when it comes to Jews, the New York Times hasnāt just reported history ā it has shaped it.
From downplaying Nazi persecution while it was happeningā¦
to allowing correspondents with Nazi sympathies to soften the regimeās imageā¦
to burying Holocaust coverage deep inside the paperā¦
to framing violence against Jews and Israelis within ācomplex conflictā narratives that blur moral clarity.
Words matter.
When Jewish suffering is minimized, contextualized away, or treated as secondary, it doesnāt just affect headlines. It shapes public understanding ā and public understanding shapes policy.
Media institutions wield enormous power. With that power comes responsibility.
Truth matters.
Context matters.
And when it comes to antisemitic violence, clarity matters most.
Holllyyyy crap the new paid leave law in MN is AMAZING.
I was happy it was there but not frankly paying much attention because I am self employed. So, like, I figured it wouldn't apply to me.
NOT SO! For $300 a YEAR I can buy in to the scheme that will give me 66% of my average weekly income if I get hurt, or if I have to take care of someone. Like for Pookie's top surgery. Or if one of the many aging boomers in my life need help. (People with actual employers have this all paid for by their employer. Like it's mandatory. But I am my employer, so I get to choose. And I am choosing to pay in because this is amazing.)
BUT WAIT!
It can also be for taking care of people I'm not related to, as long as I'm not charging them for care. A law that supports found family! Amazing! Anybody can take care of anybody they care about enough to do this for!!!
It also covers bonding time for new adoptions, bonding time for non-carrying parents, and, not helpful for me but amazing. you can also use it to safely get out of a domestic violence situation!
They did a good job on this one.
Voting does matter.
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