audreyweasley - Tumblr blog

audreyweasley · 7 months

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well if bitches want to act cute this morning i'm gonna be fucking adorable. you want to talk about zionism? let's talk about what zionism is at its core bc i'm sick of people arguing there are versions of it that are justified and i'm fucking pissed off

zionism is a movement that advocates for the existence of a jewish state for the jewish people. currently the jewish state is in palestine, which was where we lived before our expulsion almost 2000 years ago, but other propositions for the location of a jewish state have included uganda, madagascar, and mussolini's "italian east africa" (esp. ethiopia.) there were biblical and historical reasons palestine was a candidate, of course, but the primary reason it "won" was it suited british colonial interests. it could, to quote the first british governor of jerusalem, "[form] for England 'a little loyal Jewish Ulster' in a sea of potentially hostile Arabism." as the british empire fell, what became the state of israel was picked up by the united states as a similarly loyal buffer against communism in the middle east

but those are ugly little ulterior motives, aren't they? and as loathsome as the zionist project is to me as a jew myself, i'm not going to pretend i don't understand that escape from antisemitism—particularly in the wake of the shoah—was a bigger motivation for a lot of zionist jews than furthering british and american imperialism. so, let's take jewish zionists at their word and go through why their most common arguments still fucking suck. i'm going to read the arguments in good faith, but that doesn't mean i'm going to mince words or coddle anyone's deeply-held beliefs in the face of an active, ongoing genocide. the only reason i'm even talking about the zionist perspective is y'all keep trying to pick fights and i want you to know how empty, callous, and self-absorbed your ideology is

i'm also not going to argue outside of what i've written below. if you comment i'll just block you, and if you make another post i'm not gonna read it. i don't care. you don't get the benefit of the doubt when your beliefs have led to a genocide

this post is excessively long because i'm angry as fuck and this is more of a vent than a persuasive essay. i'll be pleasantly surprised if it does any good, but i doubt it and i just need to scream so meh. now, click that read more and let's get this over with

the jewish people have a right to self-determination and a national homeland

oh my god woodrow wilson is that you?? shouldn't you be at the big birth of a nation screening in the sky?

i see a bizarre number of people citing this argument and it takes everything in me not to ask if i can see the cool steampunk time machine they must have just stepped out of. have 200 years of big world wars and small, horrible civil wars taught us nothing about nationalism? you can't build an ethnostate without kicking off a cycle of violence that ends in somebody's genocide. palestine wasn't a "land without a people" before the british colonized it, it was a colony of the ottoman empire that as a matter of fact had a delegation present at the treaty of versailles where wilson presented his famous fourteen points

see the thing about national self-determination is it sounds nice in theory, but human migration is a complicated thing and we tend to imagine borders being more solid than they actually are. you only have to look at violent processes like the partition of india or the places where america's southern border divided pre-existing mexican communities. prioritizing the sovereignty of people who belong to/are represented by nation states also inherently subjugates nomadic peoples and peoples whose self-government is more decentralized than the west is used to

if people are coming to israel to flee antisemitism, shouldn't we act in solidarity with people who don't have colonial interests propping up a state for them? do we not owe solidarity to our romani brethren who suffered nazi atrocities with us, or the first peoples of north america who were forced onto reservations that went on to inspire hitler's camps? does our suffering make it okay to do the same thing to palestinians now? or ugandans? ethiopians? malagasy? how would you have justified a jewish homeland if it hadn't ended up being palestine? borders and nations are concepts we made up that are maintained through violence. nobody has a right to one, especially at the expense of other people

jews need a homeland because we aren't safe anywhere else

how convenient for the antisemites! did you know that the government of arthur balfour of balfour declaration fame limited jewish immigration to great britain in the 1905 aliens act in response to us fleeing pogroms in the russian empire? it was the nazis who considered madagascar and they literally visited palestine to weigh whether expelling jews to the holy land was an adequate final solution to the jewish problem. hell, there were zionist fascists willing to work with the nazis and mussolini because they felt they had interests in common. (that link goes to a haaretz article, btw. i've even linked an unpaywalled version so you can all see a mainstream israeli source talk about this)

furthermore, we've made the world just as unsafe for palestinians by taking land they occupied for thousands of years while we were gone. zionists can argue all they like that muslims have ~plenty of countries for palestinians to go to~ but muslims aren't a monolith anymore than jews are. although y'all desperately want every jew to fall in line with zionism so idk why i'm bothering to argue that

either way, that argument ignores that occupying palestinian land for jews to settle pushes palestinians by the millions into countries that aren't prepared to host a refugee population or who simply don't feel obligated to treat them with any respect or humanity. that includes neighboring countries like jordan, lebanon, and syria as well as the very european countries jews have fled in the first place. ESPECIALLY when you take the syrian refugee crisis into account. how many of those people were only in syria because their parents and grandparents were pushed there by the nakba?

but what happens to the jews of israel if we give palestinians autonomy?

look, i understand that a lot of us freeze up at the thought of jewish expulsion or a potential genocide of jews. antisemitism is real and dangerous, and like most jews i've seen plenty of it in leftist and anti-zionist spaces. while "what if the people we're oppressing retaliate" is a tired old white supremacist talking point, jews have historically gotten retaliation for shit we literally didn't even do. europe has exported its particular brand of antisemitism to the middle east, and while i don't believe the majority of palestinians would seek revenge against people just for being jewish, i also know that antisemites don't need majority support to pull off pogroms

but that doesn't justify israel staying its current course. zionist violence against palestinians is already fueling retaliation against jews in the diaspora whether we support what's happening or not. it's to the point now that every time israel starts bombing gaza again, i start to fear for my own safety here in the united states. furthermore, palestinians living in diaspora share the same fear and experience the same level of retaliatory violence because they've been forced to be strangers in strange lands too. what about them? what about us?

and most importantly, what about the people in palestine trying to cling to what's left of their homeland? why, because we've suffered at the hands of imperial powers, do we get to use today's empires to do the same thing to palestinians that the romans did to us? if israel stays on its current path, the only place this can end is in genocide. do we as a people really want that on our hands? do we want to see what happens when the west turns on us again and has our self-designated leaders' hypocrisy to wield against us?

i don't doubt that there are antisemites among the ranks of the palestinian people; just look how many racist islamophobes we jews have in our own communities. i've also seen plenty of palestinians and other anti-zionists acknowledge that jews had completely non-colonial reasons to flee to palestine, that mizrahi jews have existed in palestine forever, that we're being used by forces of white supremacy that don't actually give a shit about us as people

because that's the thing—they don't. we can't colonize our way into unconditional whiteness, and considering the dominance of white ashkenazim in israel i don't think it's a stretch to argue that that's what the zionist national project ultimately is. the west will abandon israel the second it's convenient, and all the jews living there will have left to rely on is the mercy of people who were forced out of their homes on their behalf. israel can bomb gaza until it's flattened like the warsaw ghetto before it, but we've seen what happens when you try to eradicate an entire people to create living space for a Folk who feel entitled to it. is that seriously the future you want for the jewish people? i leave the logistics of decolonization to the colonized, but as a jew i feel confident saying i don't want that done in my name

and it doesn't have to come to that. jews all over the world, both across the diaspora and within israel itself, are waking up to the hypocrisy and cruelty of the zionist project. jews are building community and solidarity with palestinian people, calling out our parents and grandparents who've looked the other way for too damn long, and reconnecting with the thousands of years of language and culture built in diaspora that the zionist movement saw fit to discard as a relic of jewish oppression in order to rebuild a rich, healthy, and just judaism that doesn't define itself by the conquest of others

solidarity with the palestinian people. from the river to the sea, if there's any justice in this world, one day soon you'll all be free

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