I loathe Israel for a lot of things, but my most personal reason is that they've absolutely trivialized the term 'antisemitism'
I loathe Israel for a lot of things, but my most personal reason is that they've absolutely trivialized the term 'antisemitism'
I was at a pro-Palestine campus protest and there were times where I was instinctively uncomfortable because they were really hammering in the whole bit about reported 'antisemitic action on campus' being a non-issue and I had to remind myself that they aren't talking about people acting against Jews, they're talking about people acting against Israel.
It's my most personal and privileged grievance against Israel. I no longer know if a supposed threat to my safety is a bullshit bludgeon to silence pro-Palestine voices or if the yank reich is actually in town and I need to commute for the rest of the week.
I'll never forgive them for it. I'll never forgive them for a lot of things, but this is the most personal grievance I have, and since I'm born and raised a cracker suburbanite, it's the only one I truly, directly feel in my personal life.
I don't want this to override, you know, the actually important grievances that are at stake for Palestine here, and I don't want to make myself the center of this issue when I'm very much not at all, but I guess I've just been stewing in this for a bit, and I want to uncap it before it somehow causes me to become a weird crank through lack of addressing the root of the issue and it festering into my belief system
I have spent my whole fucking life punching Nazis, sometimes literally (do you know how hard nazis are on your nail polish? It's a real sacrifice.) And every time, there's some dumbass undergrad in the org who conflates support of Palestine with anti-semitism and has to be gently given a visit from cadre.
Israel's continuing fall into mask off Fascism is amazing.
Even 15 years ago you could find many leftists who were, despite many reservations, willing to support a two-state solution with a right of return, and who acknowledged that Israel at least started with some utopian socialist ideals mixed in with the horrifying settler colonialism and ethnic cleansing of local inhabitants. Like, they had the fucking holocaust as a line of moral credit and successive Israeli governments have done everything they possibly can to burn through that goodwill.
I remember when BDS happened I was against it, not because I thought it was anti-semitic but because I thought it was counter-productive (it wasn't, I was wrong). And the sheer volume of rhetoric against anyone who so much as didn't immediately change their entire diet to Max Brenner hot chocolates was horrific. And it just keeps escalating as support for Israel crumbles among ordinary people.