Letโs say that Iโm a From the River to the Sea person. Letโs say that I think the only way to free Palestine is to erase Israel and send its populace back where they โcame from.โ Letโs say we reject genetic research about where the Jews โcame fromโ and assume that Jewish history magically started in 1000 CE and now everyone has to โgo home.โ What would this require? At its most basic level?
-mass buy in from the SE Asian subcontinent to the British Isles. Iโm talking government, populace, infrastructure, the whole nine yards. Every government from Bangladesh to Morocco to Scotland will have to issue immigration papers, determine sources of income, and set up social safety nets. Etc etc etc.
That in turn will require:
-populations the world over to commit themselves to never creating an environment so hostile to Jews that Jews come to feel that a nation state in the Southern Levant is the only option.
Now letโs go full idealistic. Letโs say that the world decides to free Palestine and send the Jews โhome.โ Letโs say all the people and governments are committed to making that happen humanely and equitably. What would that look like?
-trillions of dollars in reparations for murder, property theft, bank accounts, businesses, etc compounded over minimum 80 years
-full buy in from all levels of society to educating themselves about anti-Semitism, and eradicating it. Iโm talking from executive branch to the working poor.
If you want Palestine to be free from the river to the sea, you really need to sit down and actually think about where you will send those Israeli Jews and descendants who only ended up there in the first place after they were violently expelled from somewhere else. Iโm not talking about the Yishuv. Iโm talking about the world after 1945. Are they supposed to go back to Poland? Or Yemen? Or France? Or Syria? What would that look like? Genuinely, how do we administrate and create the infrastructure for that?
Itโs a hard, shitty question which flies in the face of blind optimism and overly simple narratives of the Israeli-Palestinian situation. But from where Iโm sitting as a non-Zionist (I donโt do nationalism point blank; this is not a value judgement or a smug assertion of diasporic Jewish moral superiority) Holocaust scholar, it seems like those Jews are supposed to disappear or like, painlessly immigrate somewhere?
This is another iteration of The Jewish Problem, and if weโre going to seriously say that Israel should cease to exist and be replaced by a Palestinian nation state, we have to answer these questions.
Because in the current global climate? The โsolutionโ to the โJewish Problemโ in the Southern Levant looks like mass murder. And thatโs half the Jews in the world right there.
That bothers me. Does it bother you? Or is it the price youโre willing to pay? You donโt have to answer that. Deep in your heart you already know exactly what your answer is.
Itโs ok if this post makes you angry, and triggers intense cognitive dissonance that make me you want to yell. But I will not be engaging with abusive and/or anti-Semitic responses, and whoever replies with that material will be blocked.
I have yet to meet a gentile Anti-zionist who is normal about Jews. They already have their answer.
Every actual Palestinian I have encountered and talked with has been way less anti-Semitic than the vast majority of the gentile anti-Zionists I've had the misfortune to deal with. In most cases we've sat together, held hands, and mourned.
And those Palestinian individuals, to be clear, don't owe me a damn thing.
Yet they look me in the face and say "I have no problem with Jews. I love the Jewish people." While these white ethnically Christian leftists see a hint that I'm Jewish, glare at me, and demand that I declare my moral and ethical allegiance. And then continue to monitor me like I'm a damn fifth columnist poisoning their wells with plague.
It only makes sense if we incorporate anti-Semitism as one of the pillars of Western civilization, exported to the rest of the world via colonialism, into the conversation, and hold these self-righteous descendants and heirs of Nazis, Cossacks, and xenophobes accountable for their appropriation of Palestinian oppression in the name of perpetual anti-Semitism.
Palestinians deserve better. Jews deserve better. I'm having big feelings.





















