"Ask A Jew" Wednesday

[u/AutoModerator]

It's everyone's favorite day of the week, "Ask A (Anti-Zionist) Jew" Wednesday! Ask whatever you want to know, within the sub rules, notably that this is not a debate sub and do not import drama from other subreddits. That aside, have fun! We love to dialogue with our non-Jewish siblings.

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[u/Artistic-Vanilla-899]

I've always wanted to ask this, so this seems like the opportunity...what are some aspects of the anti-Zionist movement among non-Jews make you kind of uneasy or that go too far? I mean, fundamentally, we're against the occupation and the human rights abuses and mass atrocities committed by officials of the State of Israel and pro-self-determination for Palestinians, not against the idea of a Jewish state, which i think is more of an issue that concerns Jews more so than us non-Jews should be concerned about

[u/loselyconscious → u/Artistic-Vanilla-899]

I want to push back on the idea that only Jews should engage with questions of a "Jewish state", sure the question "Is it good for the Jews" could probably be left for us, but Israel is not a Jewish state that happens to be implementing apartheid and colonialism, it is that because at its foundations it was created to serve one group of people over another group, that is everyone's concern.

To answer the question the pro-Palestine movement suffers from all the problems of any semi-popular left-wing movement, one thing I have particularly noticed is the romanticization/aestheticization of violence. There is a minority of people who treat it like a video game battle, make memes and jokes about "Chad Hamas, Virgin Israel, and cutesie cartoons of Hamas fighters, Even if you think 10/7 was justified (I do not), violence is still a grave and serious thing, that should be treated as tragedy in all cases.

There is also just the general simplification of valid arguments to the point they become problematic or just not true. For instance, very valid discourse about the Ashkenazi Jewish Israeli attempt to self-orientalize, and appropriate culture from Mizrachim and Arabs, gets turned into "Jews stole hummus from the Palestinians," Information about the existence of Palestinian Jews, i.e Jews whose families have been in Palestine since at least before the New Yishuv (prior to 1880), get turned into the claim I've seen lots of places that there "Indigenous" Jews who identify as, and politically with, Palestinians n the West Bank and Gaza right now,

[u/Saul_al-Rakoun → u/loselyconscious]

I was, in fact, banned from r/Palestine for saying that Khazar theory is an antisemitic conspiracy theory and that its proponents (Sand, Koestler, and Elhaik) are not the final word on it.

If you follow the line of reasoning implied by them wanting to get into this -- the way to delegitimize Israeli colonization and crimes against humanity is to deny any line of descent of Ashkenazic Jewry as a whole to the Levant -- it seems to be that the reason Israel is criminal is that Ashkenazic Jewry doesn't have a blood-and-soil connection to the land. The Palestinian case, likewise, then derives its justice because of their blood-and-soil connection to the land. This has immediate implications: the extermination of both the Ulster Scots and the Anglo-Normans, and retroactively the massacre of European Jewry by the Third Reich, are not just justifiable but desirable because they're not native to the land. We then find it hard to disprove ridiculous notions because Curtis LeMay's Firebombing of Tokyo becomes anti-colonial praxis as the Ainu were indigenous to Tokyo Bay.

I have been reading J.M.N. Jeffries' Palestine: The Reality (written in 1938) and I have come across something quite interesting: the Balfour Declaration of November 1917 was the third revision. Both previous revisions of the document (circa August and October 1917) specified Palestine was to be the homeland of the Jewish race, not of the Jewish people. Further, the two previous revisions specified that Palestine was to be transferred to control of the Zionist Organization immediately (by 1916 the ZO was an informal bureau of the Foreign Office of the British Empire; the Foreign Office, US State Department, and Zionist Organization collectively wrote the text of the Balfour Declaration).