I'm actually curious what the end goal of an anti zionism position is and how it would never be antisemitic?
I fully get that proeminent Jewish scholars and others viewed Zionism as an antisemitic project in the early days. But, well, things happened, and here we are. It just seems tricky that now that we are after the fact and Israel exists, the idea that millions of Jewish people do identify with that community and what they share does remove a lot of the early misgivings. I am absolutely not talking about the growing settlements, displacement of locals and the destruction of their basic rights in face of a more and more brutal form of colonialism, but purely about the place of the current Jewish community living there, and what an anti-zionism position would entail for them.
i want to emphasize first that i dont think "well what if xyz hypothetical decolonization context and how exactly will x people be protected then" is an appropriate thing to bring up in response to an 75-year ongoing genocide since the nak'ba, or an escalation of that genocide including the zionist-State's explicit current campaign to annihilate Gaza and the 2.3 million Palestinians who live there. a friend suggested describing this sort of 'what if' line of questioning as a 'what-aboutism of palestinian genocide', in counterpoint to your claim that artificialdeath's grouping the palestinian genocide together with other genocides such as amerikkkan settler colonial genocide and mentioning similarities in their propaganda apparatuses is supposedly sho'ah what-aboutism, and i agree with their characterization (regardless of anyone's intentions ofc). the only function of bringing up a hypothetical future threat to (jewish people? some section of jewish people? it wasnt really stated so idk) in response to current genocide, and to imply that to oppose the palestinian genocide somehow would create this hypothetical future threat, is to minimize the value of the victims/survivors of the actually occurring genocide and to portray these theoretical future victims as of "greater value" in some way.
however, since the moderators have made pretty clear where they stand in attacking anti-zionists for being "heated" promoting the white supremacist 'civilized' ideal of emotionally-neutral debate, whitewashing a literal call for genocide against muslims as a "display of ignorance"; repressing artificialdeath's post while preserving the apparently acceptable portion of the post calling for muslim genocide, etc -- tldr clearly the moderators do not have any intent to take any action regarding evigaro's posts and even if moderators were to do so in the future theyve been sitting here for a week+ so i think it is important to respond to these posts. particularly since they are pretty boilerplate zionist-State propaganda so we are all likely to encounter these claims many times in the future and it would be dangerous to allow them to remain here uncontested.
the fundamental premise of these posts is that the zionist-State provides protection for Jewish people around the world, which is just not true.
~ in the short term, the zionist-State does not care about Jewish people one way or another except insofar as "we" relate to its political, economic, etc interests. Some Jewish people may be seen as beneficial to the zionist-State's interests, maybe for ideological reasons due to their promoting zionist propaganda, or for material reasons such as being targets for the zionist-State's continuous recruitment of new settlers; Jewish people within these groups may receive some sort of "benefit" from apparatuses of the zionist-State, such as zionist organizations being given $$$ or prospective settlers being invited to all-expenses-paid Birthright trips, though i would emphasize that this benefit is very manipulative and impermanent, its sort of like saying that someone "benefits" from being recruited by the US imperialist army by receiving say a college scholarship but we know that once one has finished with their service they will be discarded etc. On the other hand some Jewish people may be seen as antagonistic to the zionist-States interests, maybe for ideological reasons eg those of us who are outspoken anti-zionists might be targeted by its repressive State apparatuses (eg i have been previously doxxed by "Canary Mission", one of the zionist-State's many apparatuses for targeting people they perceive as pro-palestinian activists), or perhaps for material reasons eg South-american Jews who suffered from the zionist-State mass supplying of weapons to the Pinochet miltary dictatorship in Chile and the resulting terrorism of Operation Condor throughout the continent, African Jewish migrants whose Jewish ancestry is not recognized by the zionist-State who continually face the threat of deportation/expulsion, Black Jewish people living in the so-called US who are targeted by one of the many Amerikkkan settler-colonial police departments trained by zionist-State security forces are harmed by the zionist-State similarly to their non-Jewish counterparts, etc. Also some Jewish people may fall under multiple of these categories simultaneously, eg i have been targeted by the zionist-State's repressive apparatuses for ideological reasons but at the same time as a white person living within the so-called US i inherently benefit from the spoils of both US imperialism and US settler-colonialism, and therefore from the zionist-State's constant complicity in those forms of violence.
but in the abstraction of "me as a jewish person living in the diaspora in a vacuum", the zionist-State is essentially indifferent to me. barring the occasional spectacle-event like an airlift rescue, there is nothing the zionist State does that somehow makes it safer for jewish people in the diaspora, nor does it intend to do any such thing. if anything, the opposite is true because:
~ in the long term, the zionist State is
dependent on anti-semitism, both to maintain itself and to reproduce the conditions for its existence. ideologically, the zionist State obviously justifies its existence on the false premise that it exists to protect Jewish people from anti-semitic violence, and for this premise to have any plausible relevance there needs to be the perception that anti-semitic violence is a significant threat; & while there is no shortage of examples of zionist-State apparatuses propogating false instances of anti-semitism (typically characterizing criticism of the zionist-State as anti-semitic, such as in the IHRA definition of antisemitism which has been adopted so widely due to zionist-State propoganda), this whole propoganda system is more effective if there is at least some real anti-semitism included within these statistics and catalogues of anti-semitic or allegedly anti-semitic violence. and materially, heightening fear of anti-semitic violence is an important tactic in the zionist-State's (manipulative) recruitment efforts.
Historically, [European] zionists often viewed anti-semitic movements as their allies due to a 'shared interest' in incentivizing Jewish people to leave their home countries and become settlers in the zionist-State, and leading members of the zionist fascist-terror organization Irgun such as Yair Stern and the future PM Yitzhak Shamir tried to collaborate with Hitler and Mussolini's regimes. These tendencies have continued to this day with the majority of the Likud party promoting collaboration with fascist and openly-antisemitic governments in Hungary, Poland and Italy, and they are often very direct and open about their position: why should [the zionist State] avoid alliances with such countries that are in its national interests, on the basis of "domestic politics" (ie these regime's violence against Jewish people living within their respective countries)?
https://foreignpolicy.com/2019/02/1...tanyahu-orban-fidesz-fpo-le-pen-antisemitism/ i see myzozoa's post a few minutes ago also briefly touched on this aspect.
(there is also a conversation to be had here about the ways judaism itself has changed at the level of religious and cultural practices, how in many ways zionism intends to actually replace judaism not just co-opt it. for example, the zionist shift in the concept of exile (
galut) from being marked by the destruction of the second temple, which has always been the central event around which so many jewish traditions revolve, to exile being based on the start of Muslim rule over historic-Palestine a few centuries later. i doubt such a conversation is of any interest to non-jewish readers and im not the most knowledgeable person about this aspect anyway but see eg,
https://levantine-journal.org/produ...-on-the-zionist-notion-of-history-and-return/)
and 'on the flip side' there is the hopefully obvious aspect that, every time the apparatuses of the zionist-State equate anti-zionism with anti-semitism, also every time a diaspora Jewish institution is deceived into adopting an alliance (material and/or ideological) with the zionist-State, reproduces the conditions necessary for rising anti-semitism. every time that the 'overrepresentation' (to use the language of Sylvia Wynter) of Zionism = Judaism is propogated, every time that the Jewish star is used to represent the Zionist-state instead of being a symbol of Judaism, every time that a diaspora synagogue puts up a zionist-State flag or sings the Hatikvah or celebrates Yom Ha'Atzmaut (erasing the nak'ba) -- all of these actions communicate to the world that if they want to care about the conditions of Jewish people they must support the zionist-State, which for many colonized populations would mean directly supporting the conditions of their own oppression. thus, pushing colonized people to react negatively to the Jewish star or other symbols coopted by the zionist State, which in turn obv creates optimal conditions for the propogation of anti-semitic ideologies.
ofc and to be clear, for Jewish people who live within the zionist-State [or at least European Jews, im not really the best person to speak to this aspect] the State 'cares about them' and 'protects' them, prob largely similar to how any settler State may orient toward its (settler) 'citizens'. but for diaspora Jews, ie most Jews, the zionist State basically does not care about us, and its existence is and will always be tied to protecting and enabling anti-semitism worldwide. while ABR (above) may claim to represent the entire Jewish population living within the US and insist that "we" fear "what may happen to the Jewish people without the insurance of Israel's existence", in fact it is Israel's existence that ensures the continued existence of anti-semitism and the threat it poses to Jewish people. while Evigaro's comment that millions of Jewish people "identify with" the zionist-State may be accurate, the existence of diaspora Jews who believe in the mythology that their/our safety is tied to the continued existence of the zionist-State, or believe that the zionist State has our interests in mind, etc - i do not think ABR or Evigaro are being insincere, rather these comments indicate just how much influence zionist-State propaganda has and how dominant the overrepresentation of zionism is.
"Zionists invoke white Jewish fear of anti-zionism as proof that anti-zionism is antisemitism. The JewishOnCampus stories and the ADL incidents are rendered coherent through this rationale. According to their logic, because Jewish students are scared of anti-zionism, it is antisemitism. However, this backwards premise must be rejected.
"For decades, Jewish institutions and leaders have raised young Jews to hear calls for freedom and liberation as calls for mass Jewish death. They have used the painful history of antisemitism to justify colonization and make Jewish children terrified. As young Jews grow up and are faced with those righteous calls for freedom, they cower and adopt racist reactionary zionist positions. The right response is not to dismiss their fear, but to point out that their fear response to anti-zionism, and broader anti-colonialism, is built on a lie.
"In upholding the colonial world, the zionist unreality both fosters real antisemitism and makes fighting it impossible. It is the same colonial systems that produce fascism, white supremacy, anti-Blackness, Islamophobia, and xenophobia that also produce antisemitism. Consequently, there is no way to uphold colonialism without producing antisemitism.
"The zionist unreality harms the struggle against antisemitism because it abandons the Jews who are victimized by the white euro-american colonial project and strengthens the systems that produce antisemitism."
https://emcohen.medium.com/jewish-fear-in-a-zionist-unreality-16ff43d8543d
~ ~ ~
once again, i do not think fears about future xyz if palestine is free, and especially not white jewish fears (idk any of these users so no idea if they fall under that, i just mean in general), are really appropriate to a discussion about the palestinian genocide in the first place. so if people do wish to discuss these questions of the relationship between the zionist-State and anti-semitism further, i would encourage such discussion to be moved elsewhere whether that is private messages or a separate thread in cong forums or wherever else im not the most knowledgeable on how smogon forums are organized.
as for the original topic of discussion before the redirection to "what if"s, i fully support the above statements from eg sabelette, sage, myzozoa in support of palestinian liberation (from the river to the sea), and as a general principle the right to resist by whatever means necessary. i dont have anything particularly to add to their comments. and it seems with the three comments above this that ppl are moving the convo back on topic although tbh i dont really have any idea what the second-most recent post is talking about (an international collapse of the far-right???).
one point from it that i do agree with (i think, but i could be misreading since idk what half of it is talking about) is that for those of us who are white euro-amerikans, our 'personal stances' or whatever dont rly matter here, we are not the ones impacted and the white humanist values such as "human rights" have 0 moral authority, as sage discussed in their post earlier. beyond opposing all US/NATO aid to the zionist-State and tactics such as BDS that aim to ease the conditions under which palestinians struggle for self determination (since these are aspect we actually have at least some level of influence over), our "opinions" etc rly dont matter.
~ in particular, i think the course of action that it seems smogon moderators/staff have taken so far of believing that they have the perfect set of [white humanist] values and principles, and that they should exercise their power as mods to #civilize the discourse in their forums/servers, including to come after indigenous people speaking to their own oppressive conditions and desire for liberation whose comments do not 100% align with the mods' supposedly perfect white-humanist values, is extremely dangerous. tbc im not advocating for an idpol position of whatever any palestinian person says is automatically correct, but smogon mods actually repressing the speech of palestinians about the material conditions relating to their own genocide, bc of "not agreeing" [on the basis of white humanism and its monopoly of ethics] with xyz that they said, is an unambiguous act of colonial violence.
as a bit of a side note and/or reminder, this is obv not a secure server, and dozens of palestinian organizations including several that i saw mentioned above are designated terrorist organizations by the US government (i dont rly about know the laws elsewhere), which means that action construed as material support is criminalized, so u know keep that in mind if it applies to where you live. and perhaps suggest to the forum moderators to delete or infract posts such as mr.hands' post on the prior page, regardless of their intentions, due to being written in a way that any direct response could potentially put someone in such locations at risk of State violence, as well as the manipulative aspect of a post that threatens potential State violence against someone who wants to voice disagreement. [probably was not just that one post its j the one i remember rn]