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#I got the 'cargo cult activism' from another Jumblr member
the-library-alcove · 4 months
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In the midst of the current Hamas/Israel conflict, the Antizionist movement has gone from being generally ineffectual to a state of being actively harmful in regards to their stated cause of Palestinian liberation.
And from what I've seen there are three primary issues with the Antizionist movement, as it currently stands, that contribute to that harmfulness and also actively inhibit their ability to achieve any of their stated goals regarding Palestinian liberation.
1. Maximalist Stance Focused on Ideological Purity
To the apparent mainstream of the Antizionist movement, there is no other acceptable position than the destruction or dissolution of Israel, possibly featuring a replay/do-over of the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, and anyone who disagrees is treated as a heretic. Diplomacy? Mutual peace processes? Two state solutions? All of these are not only Wrong, but a cause for shunning the disbeliever.
And, as part of this, people who are actually affected by the issue are spoken over and ignored, if not actively ostracized and attacked. This goes for both Israelis and Palestinians; in particular, Palestinians who are not onboard with this stance are treated as sellouts and traitors deserving of punishment and death, which goes to show how little concern there is in the movement for actual Palestinians, as opposed to the idealized concept of "Free Palestine".
Also affected are Jews living in the Diaspora, who are harm indirectly by the threats to their fellow Jews in Israel, but also directly from the rampant antisemitism in a movement that demands complete ideological conformity in order not to be shunned and demonized. Since 90%+ of them do not conform with that ideological stance, they are essentially freely targeted by the movement.
2. Cargo Cult Activism
This is a problem across the board of the antizionist movement. On one end we have BDS, which is predicated on using the same tactics as worked on Apartheid South Africa against a target, Israel, which has a completely different economy, history, and ethnic structure. And on the other end, we have random protestors trying to "raise awareness" by engaging in truly random acts of protest, sabotage, and arguably terrorism. As part of that, there is a noted tendency of such activists inserting the I/P issue into every other activism issue out there and treating those other issues as subservient and secondary to the I/P issue, if not outright "distractions".
The problem is that these movements and individuals are imitating the feel of effective activism without first identifying why those pieces of activism were effective in the first place. As part of this, there is also an intense willingness to ignore reality that doesn't conform with the narrative they've adopted as part of their activism, because they tell themselves that they are right, and if they try hard enough, reality will conform with what they want it to be... and the planes with cargo will arrive.
3. Rampant Conspiratorial Antisemitism
For a variety of reasons, including the above two, the Antizionist movement is rapidly turning into a Leftist version of QAnon, full of recycled Jew-hating conspiracy theories from the last two thousand years. Blood libel, "Jewish control of the government/economy/media", "Jews killed Jesus" deicide, and more, are not only commonplace, but egregiously popular in ways that make it actively hostile for any but the most compliant or ignorant Jew to be a part of the movement.
This accomplishes nothing in terms of gaining sympathy (as per point 1), but feels good (point 2) and just makes the general Jewish population fearful, and shows that the movement is full of hypocrisy when it comes to anti-bigotry principles, and is thus untrustworthy to the vast majority of Jews in regards to their safety.
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