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phoenixyfriend · 3 months

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Why I think it's important to understand the geopolitical anxieties of Israelis

Oftentimes, it feels like even recognizing that those anxieties exist is viewed as siding with Israel in the current conflict.

And I think that it's... weird, to do that. Dismissing the anxieties wholesale makes it harder to resolve the situation. Addressing them directly is possibly the only way to resolve the situation, because America.

Let me explain.

This will have three parts:

Why the propaganda works

How it affects current policy

How we can pressure the (mostly US) government about Israel using what we know about propaganda

Why the propaganda works

A lot of it is just propaganda, yes, but a lot of it is based in history, and a lot is also sort of self-fulfilling at this point. They have had reason to believe that some of their neighbors want all Jews dead or gone for a long time (see: Syria, Lebanon, Yemen), so it's not that it comes from nowhere. When over half the population is either Mizrahi Jews who fled from nearby countries that were happy to have a place to kick their Jewish populations out to, or their descendants, it's not hard to see that 'if someone else is in charge, we'll have to flee again.'

You could tell the French in Algeria to go back to France, but are you going to tell Mizrahi Jews to go back to the ME countries that they left? Sure, some left willingly, but that kind of wholesale eradication doesn't happen unless there's some degree of systemic discrimination or threat of violence. You cannot send Yemeni Jews back to Yemen.

The threat is real. It is not as large as the propaganda claims. It does not in any way justify nearly 30,000 deaths, half of them children. But the threat is not just imagined.

The fact of the matter is this: the propaganda is fueled by actual violence and legitimate fears.

And unless those fears are recognized and accounted for, Israel cannot be talked down.

Being told that a threat does not exist when recent history clearly shows otherwise is not going to convince anyone. I cannot emphasize this enough: even if the far-right government is replaced tomorrow, those fears will persist.

Israel's current government is violently and militarily opposed to restructuring itself in a way that allows for either a secular democratic single state, or a truly free and independent Palestine in a two-state solution. Due to mandatory army service and large scale propaganda, many have been taught since early childhood that the only way for Jews to be safe is for Israel to exist and to be so incredibly overpowered for their size that other nations won't invade them. The fact that both distant history and more recent, across the world, is filled with antisemitic discrimination, feeds this paranoia. A lot of people are out to get them, and have been since well before Israel was established. The destruction of Judea, the Edict of Expulsion, the expulsion of Jews from Spain, pogroms, the Holocaust, the near-total eradication in Yemen, Jordan, and Syria, and so on... this shit keeps happening. Some of it long ago, some if it very recent.

But it does keep happening, and that is why the propaganda works. That is why the fearmongering has teeth. It has happened before, over and over and over again, and it is being loudly threatened again. The propaganda works in Israel, and it also works in Jewish communities, and non-Jewish people who just happen to hear it, based elsewhere in the world. Like America. (This is important.)

Before moving forward, I need to make this clear: There are Jewish Israeli activists, both within Israel and without, that are vocally against Israel's actions against Palestine. Some are organized, and some are individuals. Some stories even go viral: Israeli-born Natalie Portman's been criticizing Netanyahu for years and politicians have called for her citizenship to be stripped for it. Tumblr loves the story of the Swiftie Twitter that went to jail for refusing to join the IDF, and that's very common; plenty of young people get months-long prison sentences, sometimes multiple times. Right-wing mobs go after Jewish Israelis who speak in support of Palestine in any way, and these things get violent.

(In that same article, it also talks about how Israeli Palestinians are suffering much, much worse under the government's crackdown on free speech.)

How it affects current policy

The thing is, there are only really four ways for this to resolve:

Israel wins. They succeed in pushing Palestinians out of Gaza by killing anyone who doesn't comply, and take it over for themselves. (This is bad.)

Israel is cut off from any and all support from abroad, both 'here, you can help yourself with these guns' and 'here, we will fight your enemies for you,' and is very suddenly at risk of invasion, mass murder, and removal from the Palestinian Mandate by those groups they fearmonger about, the ones that include slogans like "death to Israel, a curse upon the Jews." (This is also bad.)

Israel is convinced to stop attacking Gaza, possibly through the threat of no more support, and settles in to figure out a solution with Palestine, whether two-state or secular single state or whatever, and normalizes relations with neighbors enough that they can start cutting back on their military. (This is the best option.)

A foreign power or coalition of powers invades and forces Israel to stop, and oversees a transition from military state to peaceful state while protecting from outside attack, like was done to Japan and Germany following WWII. (This one is... interventionism is bad, but also almost 30k people have died with no end in sight, so it's starting to look like a real possibility.)

We can all agree, I hope, that the first option is not an option. That is Bad.

I also hope we can agree that the second option is not an option. A number of Israelis may be settlers in the traditional sense of the word, but a lot of them are refugees from neighboring countries, survivors of the Holocaust, or descendants of such. "Just go back where you came from" doesn't work when many of them came from places that were also saying 'go back where you came from' because Israel now existed to expel them to. It's also been around for 75 years now, and some three-quarters of the population were born in Israel. Expelling them all, even the ones that were there before the early statehood aliyah? It's... I don't know. I understand in theory why some activists push for it, but I do think it is fundamentally different from any comparative colonization or settlement.

(Note: I do not include Israeli colonies in the Palestinian West Bank. Those do need to be returned to their owners. Give people their houses and land back.)

The third option is the one that most people, I think, would like to see happen. However, the Israeli government is clinging to the propaganda that they will be eradicated as a Jewish people if they do not forcibly take power where they can, and they are spreading it out among Israelis. Dissent by Israeli Jews may not be criminalized, but the society around them sure isn't receptive to it. The recent invasion of Gaza has also inflamed tensions across the region, which means that even countries which were slowly normalizing relations, or at least.

Netanyahu has not been convinced, and by all appearances cannot be convinced. The only thing that may force his hand is the threat of no more military aid, so he suddenly has to start conserving what missiles he does have in order to fend off a possible attack instead of continuing to hammer on Gaza.

Sounds great, right? This is why we are all (I hope) calling our senators or representatives or whatever your country has to tell them to stop supporting Israel monetarily or with military aid. This is why I keep giving suggested topics for Americans to call their senators about, even if I'm just one voice, and there are much louder ones saying the same thing, but better.

And yet, the Senate passed the aid bill. They snuck it into a Veteran Affairs thing as a last-minute amendment, but they passed it, and any failure in the House will have little to do with sympathy for Palestine and a lot to do with domestic border policy.

So... Americans are also pretty convinced of the whole 'if we stop supporting Israel, they will be invaded and killed off by the Iran-backed militias' thing. Many do feel sympathy for Palestinians, hence the 'Israel, you need to knock that shit off' comments, but they also are genuinely of a belief that the Israeli propaganda of 'we will be overrun by antisemitic Muslim extremist militias and exterminated like in the Holocaust' is true.

Like. Either they fear for Israelis due to the antagonistic forces in the region, or they belong to Christofascist ideologies about how supporting Israel is the way to avoid suffering in Armageddon.

You can't get to the latter on ethics or morality or whatever. You can only rely on ulterior motives (the border things) or telling them 'your reelection is in jeopardy, change your mind or you're going to be voted out.'

The former, though... you can. They believe the things that Israel claims and has been claiming since 1948, with regards to threats.

And if you acknowledge why the propaganda works, you can address it.

How we can pressure the government about Israel using what we know about propaganda

If you say that there is no threat to Israel from Yemen, Lebanon, Syria, Iran, or so on, you will be dismissed as an idealist who hasn't done any research. If you say that Israelis should be left to their own devices, you will be viewed as cruel, and if you say they should be removed and the land given back to Palestinians, you will be laughed away (silently, but it'll happen). You cannot convince the American government with these tactics.

What can you say?

Israel is making things worse for itself in regards to these exact threats. Pushing on Gaza is making neutral and nearly-normalized countries like Egypt and Saudi Arabia less inclined to get in the way of the 'death to Israel' militias. The campaign is creating a whole new generation of extremists who will join the militias out of a desire to prevent more of these deaths by Israeli hands, and that will only increase the threat to Israel.

Destroying Hamas isn't going to do shit if Hezbollah, Iraq, Iran, the Houthis, and so on, invade. Especially if twenty years down the line, all those orphans that Israel just created these past few months start a new Hamas for revenge because, hi, look how many orphans you just created.

Netanyahu is working against the interests of the Israeli people. He is trying to remain in power, and the Gaza war is a distraction from the charges being levied against him.

Netanyahu has a vested interest in seeing that Donald Trump is elected, as they are much closer than the at best strained relationship with Biden. This is very complicated but if your senator or rep is a Democrat, it is relevant.

Israel's continued offensive is leading to the risk of millions of Palestinian refugees entering Egypt and destabilizing them, which, in an already unstable country in an already wobbling region, is going to risk another war across the Middle East. The US still has not pulled out all troops from the last one.

The US cannot afford, monetarily or in terms of foreign relations, to aid in causing a new regional war.

If Israel slows, halts, and withdraws peacefully from Gaza, tensions will settle enough to avoid possible invasion by those hostile forces they're so worried about. The UN can, if necessary, deploy forces to maintain relative stability until peace treaties are worked out. We'd like to avoid option 4 if possible.

The only way I can see to convince the US government to stop supplying weapons to Israel is to push on the fact that continuing to do so will, due to Netanyahu and his party's actions, put Israel in more danger rather than less.

There are other things to say to your senators, and I'll be making a post about that soon (not today, but probably this weekend; stuff like Michigan, UNRWA, international reputation), but in regards to just the geopolitics surrounding the propaganda, this is it. This is why we have to understand it. Because the way we get the United States government to stop giving aid to Israel to defend itself is by telling them 'this is putting them in more danger due to their head of state's aggression.'

This was very long, but I've seen a lot of misinformation and a lot of generalization, and a lot of it is... not great. Well-meant, sometimes, but not great. I felt it necessary to be very clear and very specific. I'm anticipating a lot of comments to the effect of "you forgot about this" and "but that doesn't excuse their actions" and "well, not all activists believe--" and I know.

I know.

But I've had people say "Nobody is advocating for the removal of all Jewish Israelis" to my ask box hours after I was talking about Yemen, a country that enacted a removal of all Jews and largely under the control of a group that has a slogan about doing just that to the Jewish Israelis.

So let me be very clear that I have seen a lot on tumblr recently, a lot of it extremist, and I'm not pulling any of this out of my ass or making up a guy to be mad at. I may not know everything on this topic--I may not even know much at all, given that it covers centuries of conflict due to the Ottomans--but I've been listening to hours upon hours of news from a variety of sources (Al Jazeera, BBC, NPR, and more) every day just to make sure I understand.

Please trust that, even if I get some things wrong, even if I don't cite every detail or generalize just a bit here and there, that I mean well. Please trust that I am making this in good faith and am trusting you to respond to it in kind.

Call your reps. Write them an email. Donate to a Palestinian charity.

It's a slog, but we can make a difference.

#current events #palestine #israel #gaza #death tw #activism #united states #free palestine #politics #benjamin netanyahu #pro palestine #israeli propaganda #propaganda #phoenix politics #Not gonna include my ko-fi this time seems in bad taste

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perfectlyvalid49 · 11 days

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Today is Yom HaShoah, which is Israel’s (and by extension large portions of the Jewish diaspora’s) Holocaust Remembrance Day. Back in January, I wrote this post for International Holocaust Remembrance Day, in which I basically said that I thought that International Holocaust Remembrance Day really should line up with Yom HaShoah, but that I choose to take the “Holy shit! Two cakes!” attitude towards it, because the Holocaust is certainly a large enough tragedy to support two remembrance days.

The one in January’s date was selected to be in remembrance of the day Auschwitz was liberated. Because that date was selected to celebrate a non-Jewish achievement, I think it should be a day for the goyim to focus on how they can do better. If it is in remembrance of what good allies they were, then it should be used as a day to do some learning and reflection in order to be better allies to us now, in the present.

But the one today is timed to commemorate the Warsaw Ghetto uprising. Yom HaShoah is the day we picked not just to remember the 6 million who died, but also the ones who decided to die fighting. It is a day to remember that we must stand up for ourselves, even if the price is high, because the price for not standing up for ourselves is higher.

In January I gave some topics for goyim to think about in remembrance of the day. Because today is the Jewish remembrance day, I will share what I am thinking about today as a Jew, and invite others to think about it too.

I saw a post a few days ago where someone commented on a different post about why Jews didn’t leave Germany after Kristallnacht, and how moving to another country because some people broke your window feels like an overreaction. And that you will always be overreacting until it’s too late. How do we know the difference between “just” broken windows and a sign to flee? Knowing antisemitism is on the rise globally, where would we even flee to? How do I help my children avoid the fate of their great-grandfather (who survived) or their great-great-grandfather (who did not)?

We picked this day to commemorate the Jewish victims of the Holocaust, but also to remember that even in the middle of one of the worst attacks on our people (and that’s fucking saying something) there were Jews who stood up and refused to accept their fate. I have seen many Jews say that they’re getting “1930s Germany” vibes from current events. If things are headed in the same direction, what can we do to fight our fate? Ideally with words now, so that we don’t have to fight with pistols and homemade explosives like they did in Warsaw.

The reason for a remembrance day like today is to acknowledge the past, but also to learn from it. What can we learn so that when we say, “We will outlive them” we can mean all of us, not just the ones who are lucky enough to be geographically removed from the worst of it, or to survive despite the odds?

This is a little more downbeat than I had hoped, which is unsurprising given the nature of the day. I like to try to stay positive though, so I’ll say this: Six million people were murdered. The Warsaw Ghetto uprising did not succeed in its goal of liberation. But the Nazis did not succeed in their goal of eliminating the Jews either. We did outlive them. We are still here to remember.

Am Yisrael Chai

#yom hashoah #never again

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lost-and-created · 2 months

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Consider the following:

The treatment of the unhoused/poor, including making being unhoused a crime.

The rising inability to afford housing, groceries, and utilities, even with full-time jobs that pay more than the minimum wage.

The genocide occuring in Palestine and the use of US funded weapons to commit it.

Rising rates of Neo-Nazis, antisemitism, and islamophobia.

The beating of a trans, Native American child at a public school, which resulted in death, being praised by an active senator who called trans people filth, when addressing the issue (Rest in Peace, Nex).

Trans people increasingly having their rights, especially to healthcare, taken.

Women increasingly having their rights to healthcare taken.

The migrants who are fleeing their home countries, leading them to the US-Mexico border, are being met with police violence, razor wire, and detention centers that have been reported to separate and "lose" children, as well as treat those within its walls with cruel amounts of negligence.

The subways of New York becoming flooded with cops and National Guard, making it a police state checkpoint for anyone that enters.

Police being able to justify the murder of a Black, autistic teenager, in front of his family.

However, the US government has deemed TikTok to be the largest threat to the nation and is the issue that they can all, collectively, agree on. Certainly can't be because it's been the main place for younger people to find current news that isn't gripped by corporate media. Can't be because it's a place for people to find information on the continued boycotts, divestments, and protests that are currently occurring and costing corporations millions of dollars, effecting how much those corporations can lobby their representatives. Can't be because it is the place people often go to when mainstream media refuses to cover the big stories that would otherwise be pushed under the rug. Can't be because our representatives, the people that we put in charge of making our voices heard, are sick of hearing what we have to say about their actions within and outside of their offices. Must just be because TikTok has a parent company in China (while the US servers and data are run through US based company, Oracle) and that it's a dangerous threat.

#tiktok #tiktok ban #us government #free palestine #trans rights #women's rights

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veryintricaterituals · 7 months

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I am Jewish, what does that mean?

I was born in Colombia on the 49th anniversary of Hitler's suicide, I was raised here but I lived in Israel for about four years. I am not white, I don't look white, and my first language is Spanish. I came back to Colombia three years ago because of the pandemic.

I grew up Jewish and swallowed all the pro-Israel propaganda, I moved there looking for better opportunities and somewhere safe where I could come out of the closet. It took me less than a month to understand where I really had ended up in. It wasn't so different from my own colonized third world country filled with violence.

I did my best, I voted against the current Israeli government four separate times, I worked with and was great friends with many Palestinians and Arab Israelis (there unfortunately is a difference), I went to protests, I donated blood, I donated food and money. I fucking hate Netanyahu with all my heart.

For two years I taught English at a low income school in Jerusalem where all my students were mizrahi jews (from Arab countries) whose families had been kicked out of various surrounding countries in the 20th century. When I spoke to their parents and grandparents they talked about Iran, Morroco, Egypt, Yemen, with such longing and they brought me the most delicious foods. (Two of my students were killed two weeks ago, kids, barely 18 now, much younger when I taught them, I remember them).

My great grandmother on my mom's side was born in Jerusalem and raised in Egypt until all Jews were expelled and she had to flee with my newborn grandfather. They ended up in Colombia because she spoke ladino (Jewish dialect that is close to Spanish) they were undocumented, without a nationality because Egypt had rejected them, they had to lie and pay for falsified documents in order to get a passport, I still have a Red Cross passport in my house with my grandfather's name that determines he has no home country.

My great grandparents on my dad's side were born and raised in Bielorrusia and had to escape with my newborn paternal grandfather from the progroms after they destroyed their shtetl, they tried to make it to the US but they wouldn't take any more Jews so they ended up in Colombia.

My great grandmother on my paternal side was born in Romania, at the age of 12 she got on a boat with her 15 year old cousin, not knowing where it would take them. Her parents had both died and antisemitism was on the rise. She was so afraid that they were going to send her back that she threw her passport (that said JEW in capital letters) into the sea when they arrived at the port of a country she had never heard of, to this day we don't know when her birthday was.

My maternal grandmother is Colombian, she was born and raised here, Catholic until she converted to marry my grandfather, and yet when I went looking up our family tree I found we came from Sephardic Jews that had been expelled from Spain almost 500 years ago by the inquisition.

There are less than 400 Jews in my city that homes over 4 million people. My synagogue has been closed since October 12th, our president has equated all of Israel with Nazism on multiple occasions in the last few weeks. The kids that go to our tiny Jewish school have stopped wearing the uniform so that they cannot be identified. Ours is one of the countries with the least amount of antisemitism in the world. Someone in my university saw my Magen David necklace and screamed at me to go back where I came from. I went online and saw countless posts telling Israelis to do the same.

I am Jewish, I am latina, I am gay. My story is complicated, my relationship with my community is complicated, my relationship with my country is complicated. My relationship with G-d is complicated, my relationship with Israel is incredibly complicated. My history is complicated.

I am Jewish. What does that mean?

#this is my story #jewish people are complicated #our stories are complicated #please reblog #judaism #jumblr #jewish #israel

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errorid-mt7lt7k7unfr9ttfua5 · 4 months

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shabbat shalom, jumblr, i have a heavy question:

due to many factors, i have decided to leave the United States once it becomes feasible, and i want some suggestions on safe places. ultimately, nowhere will be completely safe, but ideally somewhere with either low*er* rates of antisemitic violence, robust legal protection of jews specifically, low rates of violence in general, and ease of migration. (also, preferably a decently sized jewish population)

i am going into cybersecurity and speak english, spanish, french, ASL, and japanese; and am currently learning german, hebrew, and mandarin

my research is going fairly poorly due to a lack of recent (post-october 7th) studies beyond anecdotes.

my thoughts and research so far:

germany

*more* robust legal protections against antisemitism than other countries

excellent quality of life and cost of living

potential mobility to other European Union countries in the event i must flee again

i speak several European languages, which will make travel (which i want to do extensively) easier

japan

difficult to migrate to

excellent quality of life and cost of living

extensive overworking

i speak japanese

very low rates of violence, and while there are definitely antisemitic sentiments and a history of such; there are Very few jews anywhere in japan, they are primarily located in tōkyo and ōsaka, and the worst incident i have found to have happened recently was vandalisation of several copies of the diary of anne frank in a public library, and that was prior to october 7th

rampant discrimination against non-japanese individuals, especially in employment and housing

Canada

america lite™ my beloathed

proximity to where i live now, which would allow me to see my partner more frequently

i speak english, french, and ASL

lower potentiality for culture shock

i want to do more research, but I want advice from jumblr, especially from Jews who live outside the united states.

i specifically want to avoid the levant given how unsafe it is at the moment

if there are any jews who live in latin america, please let me know if there are safe places, as spanish is the language i am most fluent in besides english

#jumblr #antisemitism #jewish

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uboat53 · 7 months

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All right guys, in light of the current situation in Israel and the discourse around it in the US, we need to have a talk about Evangelical Christians. Consider this a SHORT RANT (TM).

EVANGELICALS AND ISRAEL

Christian support for Israel in the United States actually didn't start from a bad place. Initially it was the position of mainline and liberal Protestants that Jews needed a safe place to flee from intensifying persecution in Europe and that this would be a part of a broader rapprochement between Jews and non-Jews.

Since the establishment of the State of Israel, however, and particularly since the Six-Day War in 1967, American Evangelicals have become the primary supporters the Zionist conception of Israel. In particular, they view the Jewish dominion over the historical Israel as a necessary step to the rapture and the end of days.

PROPHECIES

Long story short, the Evangelical interpretation of the prophecies of Revelations and those surrounding them is that the Jews need to take control of the holy land and then be destroyed in order to bring about the end times. The problem with this, though, is that the people who destroy the Jews will, themselves, be destroyed, so they can't do it directly.

Hence, the current plan. Israel is to be encouraged to expand, making about as many enemies as is possible, then, at some point in the future, any military aid would be pulled, allowing the prophecy to be fulfilled without Evangelical Christians themselves being the "bad guys" of Revelations.

ACTUAL JEWS

You can see that this plan isn't great for actual Jews or for Israel itself. In fact, it's even worse than it sounds. According to the prophecy, all Jews in Israel will either convert or be destroyed, a cultural and religious genocide by any definition.

You'll also notice that this doesn't do much for Jews outside of Israel. In fact, the Evangelical interpretation of the prophecy seems to be that all Jews need to go to Israel in order for this to work, so their support of Israel goes alongside efforts to push Jews in other countries out.

RAMPANT ANTISEMITISM

All of this leads up to the fact that many so-called "Christian Zionists" are also raging anti-Semites. John Hagee, the founder and chairman of Christians United for Israel, believes such anti-Semitic nonsense as that Adolf Hitler was born from a lineage of "accursed, genocidally murderous half-breed Jews", that the persecution of Jews throughout history is justified by Jews' refusal to embrace Christianity, that the Holocaust was good because it pushed Jews to Israel, and that the anti-Christ will be "partially Jewish".

Other prominent and popular Christian Zionists such as Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson are likewise on record as holding abhorrently anti-Semitic beliefs such as the belief in a worldwide Jewish conspiracy that is cited by any number of those who commit atrocities against Jews in this country.

CONCLUSION OR TL;DR

Evangelical Christians can speak all they want about their "unswerving support of Israel", this support does not in any way change the fact that a huge amount of them are virulent anti-Semites. They do not support Israel as a refuge for Jewish people or Jewish people in general, they support Israel as a trap into which Jews must be forced so they can be destroyed as part of their apocalyptic vision and, meanwhile, their zeal for all Jews to go to Israel leads them to embrace and encourage violence against us elsewhere in the world.

These people are not friends of Jews, they are as much enemies as those who wield rocket launchers and automatic weapons against us. Remember that the next time you hear them speak of their support for Israel.

#israel #evangelical christians #judaism

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eretzyisrael · 5 months

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By BEATRICE SAYERS

An event in London last week to mark the exodus and expulsion of Jews from Arab countries became an opportunity to counter the current far-left narrative that paints Israel as a country of white settlers.

Organiser Lyn Julius, who runs Harif, the association of Jews from the Middle East and North Africa, told the audience at JW3 that 50 percent of Jews in Israel have roots in Arab and Muslim countries. They had not left those countries willingly, she added, and many left as a result of massacres.

“Families butchered like sheep, bodies buried in the debris of homes in which pogromists had locked the families before setting them on fire. Jewish girls raped, their breasts cut off. No, I am not describing 7 October 2023,” Julius said. “We have been here before. It’s an anti-Jewish atrocity which occurred in Constantine, Algeria, in 1934. But I could have cited any number of similarly barbaric atrocities: in Fez, Morocco, in 1912, in Tripoli, Libya, in 1945, in Iraq in 1941 the Farhud, which claimed the lives of at least 179 Jews.”

She pointed out that Israel was “the solution to pre-existing antisemitism” that had led to pogroms across the region. “In a generation and a half almost all the ancient, pre-Islamic Jewish communities of the Middle East and North Africa have been ethnically cleansed. Hamas simply wants to finish the job. From almost a million Jews in 1948, only about 4,000 remain, and that number dwindles year by year.”

Julius herself is the child of parents who came to Britain from the Iraqi capital Baghdad in 1950. A film shown at the event presented testimony from Jews who had been forced out of their native counties in the Middle East and North Africa.

Jocelyne Shrago is one of the four people interviewed in the film, commissioned from Daisy Abboudi, deputy director of the oral history archive Sephardi Voices UK.

Shrago, who was born in Algeria, told how during the Constantine pogrom her parents and sister went over the wall to the Arab family who lived next door, who saved them. She recalls the bombing campaign during the Algerian war of independence in the 1950s, when she covered her baby niece with her body to protect her. “People had to leave in ‘62 because on the walls there was graffiti that said ‘La valise ou le cercueil’, ‘the suitcase or the coffin’.” Some went to Israel. Her family on both sides went to France, where she lived until 1968, when she moved to the UK.

Other speakers at the event last Thursday, the ninth that Harif has organised, included Baroness (Ruth) Deech, Joseph Dweck, senior rabbi of the S&P Sephardi Community, Marie van der Zyl, president of the Board of Deputies, Claudia Mendoza, chief executive of the Jewish Leadership Council, and the Israeli ambassador Tzipi Hotovely. The ambassador said Mizrachi Jews were not just 50 percent of Israel’s population but had shaped her history. “Israel today is a very healthy mix between west and east.”

Mendoza spoke movingly about her mother’s family, who are from Aden. They were forced to flee and her grandfather was murdered. “The clarity with which my family speak when they talk about threats to your life because you’re a Jew resonate more than ever today. They have seen it before and they do not have the luxury of denalism.”

But she also had a powerful and uplifting message to the Jewish community, and warned it not catastrophise or retreat into itself.

“The polling that we’ve done at the JLC [Jewish Leadership Council] after the October 7 attack shows that while there may be a small number of extremists in the UK who support Hamas, and they must be called out, the vast majority of British people recognise them for the murderous terrorists that they are and they reject those that wish to target jews here in the UK.

“If we fight as if we are surrounded exclusively by enemies, we risk by that very attitude making enemies we didn’t previously have, and losing friends whose sympathies we fail to notice. We have so many friends, I promise you that.”

#harif #jews from the middle east #lyn julius

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date-a-jew-suggestions · 2 years

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One thing I see a lot in political discourse is using the Holocaust death toll as a comparison point for other tragedies or perceived tragedies. I think that is almost always inexcusable. Reducing the Holocaust to a numbers game is fucking disgusting and it’s one of the things I resent most about how it is often discussed in politics.

The holocaust’s brutality and violence is by no means encapsulated in the number 11 million (6 million of which were Jewish.) Even aside from that incomprehensible number of victims, there are far greater long lasting impacts. The fact that roughly a third of the Jewish population globally was slaughtered in an attempt to quite literally eliminate us from this planet is a tragedy not just because of the lives lost, but because of the impact it had and still has on those living. The Holocaust was not a switch flipped that caused 11 million spontaneous deaths. It was the calculated mass murder of a handful of already stigmatized minority groups, particularly Jewish and Romani people. Beyond those killed were millions who were tortured in the camps. And beyond those even there were the people in hiding who subjected themselves to sub human living conditions and a life of constant fear because the alternative was the camps. And people who were lucky enough to flee their home countries that abandoned everything and everyone they knew, often suddenly forced into extreme poverty.

And even aside from those who lived through it, the Holocaust has ramifications for Jews today. The Holocaust didn’t just spring up from the ground, it was built on years of antisemitic propaganda and conditioning that was built on hundreds of years of animosity towards Jews. That hatred did not just go away when the camps were closed. Jewish people are one of the most likely minorities to be a hate crime victim in America. Every far right conspiracy theory thats currently gaining traction has deeply antisemitic undertones, often accompanied by Holocaust denial. The January 6th riots were full of proud boys sporting t shirts and flags that read some variation of “6 million wasn’t enough.” These people quite literally do not want the Holocaust to be a one time thing. The Holocaust was not just a mass murder, it was a fear campaign meant to strip an ethnic minority of humanity in the eyes of the rest of the population. And it worked better than you fucking think it did.

#Holocaust tw #jumblr #judaism #nazis tw #nazism tw #antisemitism tw #death tw

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the-light-of-stars · 6 months

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President of Israel announces "strong presence" Israel's in Gaza even after the end of the current attacks, likely involving the US, while Israel's military now also calls for evacuation of the south of Gaza and israeli Minister of Defence announces the ultimate expansion of ground operations into both north and south. Also: israeli Minister of Finance calls for "voluntary emigration" of all specifically 'arab' palestinians into other countries as "a humanitarian solution to end arab and jewish suffering"

"Herzog: Must not accept a vacuum in the Gaza strip. According to President Isaac Herzog's assessment Israel has to show a strong presence in the Gaza strip for the time being, even after the war, to prevent a renewed strenghthening of the radical islamist Hamas. "If we draw back then who is going to take over? We can't leave a vacuum behind. We have to think about what the mechanism is going to look like." said Herzog in an interview by the "Financial Times". Currently many ideas for this are going around.

"But no one is going to want to turn this place, Gaza, into a terror base again." The Israeli Government is currently discussing many ideas about how a post-war order is going to look like. But it can be assumed that the USA and Israel's "neighbors in the region" are going to be involved in some way."

"Israel's military calls on people in the south of Gaza to flee as well. The israeli military has called on palestinian civilians in some regions of the southern Gaza strip to flee as well. To the east of the city Chan Junis fliers with the order to vacate the region have been spread. Everyone who lingers near militant palestinians or their bases "risks their life" so it says.

Observers consider the newest flier actions a hint for a possible expansion of the israeli military operations into the south of the territory, where hundreds of thousands of people already fled after the last evacuation order. Just on Wednesday israeli Minister of Defence Joav Galant noted, that the ground operations will ultimately "include both the North and the South.""

Additionally to this according to the UN Emergency Relief Office (OCHA) the last remaining functioning flour mill has been destroyed by an israeli attack now.

And the far right israeli Minister of Finance has been calling for a "voluntary emigration" of all specifivally "arab" palestinians, which according to him is "a humanitarian solution to end both arab and jewish suffering"

And yet the German Government still calls definitions of this as ethnic cleansing, genocide, apartheid or colonialist occupation "absurd accusations" and considers them antisemitic hate speech.

#current events #palestine #free palestine #israel #gaza #jerusalem #(<since it's on trending rn)#german stuff #(< since it's sourced from Tagesschau (german govt news channel) and discusses the german stance on this

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firespirited · 7 months

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There's a barrage of takes today and some of them are well informed and knowledgeable about that area. There's a lot of junk but there are people who can enlighten you on the history of both sets of refugees, the ancient feuds, the recent agressions, the horrific end games of the political parties currently in power...

I'd like to offer a take I haven't seen at all today:

What if this wasn't about jews and muslims at all? Not to those affected of course (there's so much going on it'd take hours to unpack!), but to the ones who've made and will be making decisions about how to proceed. What if religious and racial differences were just a pretext for other countries to test tactics, weapons, surveillance, propaganda in a handy dandy sandbox? What if it was about warmongers playing with an ancestral blood feud for money and power?

This summer many folks discovered that the atomic bomb wasn't about Japan or American troops at all. Maybe it's time to look at our own arms manufacturers and policy makers: did any of them want peace in the middle east or just temporary peace to observe and test "peacekeeping"?

What if taking sides was obscuring the other players? Israël and Palestine: not even the main characters, both dependent on their usefulness to other countries.

I'm not saying that what people are pointing out has happened since the 1940s aren't very important issues.

I will say that all *you*, random person on the internet, can do is teach the people around you to recognise antisemitism and islamophobia and build longterm protection under the law for them, if only so that both Palestinians and Israelis have safe countries to immigrate to and rebuild community in if they want to flee being players in extremist and meddler wargames.

Protesting will probably get us about as far as we did protesting the war in Iraq. We the people don't get a say, the arms dealers and DoD will go ahead with whatever they find most lucrative from a business sense and a political one. The best thing we can do is make sure laws are passed locally that protect the jews and muslims of our communities or incoming immigrants/refugees in the longterm.

#saf #Politics #palestine #Israel #I'm not clarifying my positions on unnuanced issues. This isn't as simple as post y2k events and messaging #My position is human rights for all humans. End of.

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clarabosswald · 3 months

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86 year old Shlomo Manzur is the oldest hostage currently held in Hamas captivity.

He was born in 1938 in Iraq, and as a young child he survived the Farhood pogrom.

The Farhood took place during the Jewish Shavu'ot holiday. Between 180 to over 1000 of the Jews of Baghdad were murdered in the pogrom. A Jewish intelligence report had stated that about 120 Jewish patients were murdered in hospitals via toxic injections. Mass robberies took place, which targeted some 50 thousand Jews. Jewish businesses were marked in red beforehand, as targets. Homes were robbed and then flooded by turning on all the water taps inside. People were raped and butchered in broad daylight, including children and the elderly. The events, which went on for two days, were later nicknamed "The Kristallnacht of Iraqi Jews". Some see it as a turning point and a key event in the chain of antisemitic events which eventually motivated Iraqi Jews to flee the country. Many of the Farhood victims were buried in a mass grave in the Jewish Cemetery in Baghdad - a cemetery which was later relocated with the intention to build a skyscraper on its grounds.

Hadassah, Shlomo Manzur's sister, said last month: "He was kidnapped weighing 58 kg. We hope that he is not starving, and that he receives the conditions to live. Precisely on the day when the International Holocaust Day is celebrated, I want to ask: how is he going through such a tragedy again - and the world is silent? They murdered, raped, abused babies, kidnapped, beheaded, looted and burned stores marked with red paint ahead of time. It was the Kristallnacht for Iraqi Jews and the world was silent. Shlomo saw sights that accompanied him all his life. If we thought then 'never again' - we never imagined that such scenes would return when we have a sovereign state. My brother Shlomo was kidnapped from his home, his fortress, and these days he is going through another Holocaust in his old age. The heart aches with longing and thinking what goes through him in the dark. I talk about him, and my heart skips a beat."

#jumblr #ישראבלר #i read his sister's words last week and i keep thinking about them literally every single day #ashamed i didn't know much about the farhood especially since i live in an area with a large iraqi jewish population #reading the exact details on the farhood was. bad. very painful.#immediately brought back horrible memories from october

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justinspoliticalcorner · 8 days

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Nicole Narea at Vox:

A core demand at the heart of the protests over the war in Gaza currently roiling college campuses across the US and around the world: that universities divest from Israel. That means withdrawing funds their endowments have invested in companies that are linked to Israel. Their demands have revived a long-running debate about whether universities should even consider ethics in their investment decisions and whether there is an ethical approach to divestment from Israel, or if these institutions should simply maximize returns. There is also a question of whether these divestment demands, which have been criticized by some pundits as overly broad, are feasible to meet or will even be effective. Their demands come as the Palestinian death toll (now over 34,000 people) only keeps rising and as full-blown famine breaks out in northern Gaza, with the rest of the territory remaining at risk. The US Student Movement for Palestinian Liberation released a statement April 21 indicative of what the protests are broadly calling for; it asked universities to “completely divest our tuition dollars from — and to cut all institutional ties to — the zionist entity as well as all companies complicit in the colonization of Palestine.”

But students on some campuses have articulated more specific demands, seeking to focus their efforts on divesting from major weapons manufacturers that universities have invested in, ensuring that their universities no longer accept research funding from the Israeli military, or ending academic partnerships with Israeli institutions. Some universities, including Columbia University, have already rejected those calls and have swiftly called the police on protesters, prompting further escalation. Others — including Brown University, Northwestern University, and the University of Minnesota — have agreed to consider them. On Thursday, Evergreen State College became one of the first to approve an effort to divest. Divestment has been a tactic embraced by protesters in previous student movements opposing the South African apartheid regime and fossil fuel companies contributing to climate change. Those calls for divestment have had varying degrees of success — to what degree depends on how you define that success in terms of their financial or political impact. [...]

What is divestment?

Divestment is, essentially, reversing an investment. And the goal of divestment movements generally is “generating social and political pressure on the companies that are targets of divestment — stigmatizing behavior,” said Cutler Cleveland, a Boston University sustainability professor who was involved in the decade-long fossil fuel divestment campaign there.

Current calls for divestment from Israel are an outgrowth of the broader Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement, which originated in 2005 among Palestinian civil society groups after several failures in the two-state peace process and was inspired by the movement to divest from South African apartheid. The BDS movement’s website argues that, since Israel’s founding in 1948 when it forced 700,000 Palestinians to flee their homes, the country has “denied Palestinians their fundamental rights and has refused to comply with international law” while maintaining a “regime of settler colonialism, apartheid and occupation over the Palestinian people.” The BDS movement has therefore called on banks, local councils, churches, pension funds, and universities to “withdraw investments from the State of Israel and all Israeli and international companies that sustain Israeli apartheid.”

However, critics of BDS say that it is inherently antisemitic in that it “effectively reject[s] or ignore[s] the Jewish people’s right of self-determination” and that if implemented, it “would result in the eradication of the world’s only Jewish state,” according to the Anti-Defamation League. Student groups behind the recent protests on college campuses have denounced antisemitism, which they do not equate with opposing Israel. But there have been incidents of antisemitism, and some Jewish students say they feel unsafe on their own campuses as the target of threatening behavior and rhetoric.

[...]

What would make divestment successful?

Calls for divestment at universities have always been a means to a greater end, whether it be bringing down an apartheid regime or reversing climate change. In the current context, what student protesters really want is an end to the fighting in Gaza, which has killed more than 34,000 Palestinians, and the end of what they see as the injustices Israel, as the biggest cumulative beneficiary of US foreign aid, has exacted on Palestinians for decades. Whether universities ultimately divest and whether that has any material financial impact on Israel might be less important to the protesters than whether their calls for divestment alone can make the status quo politically untenable.

The question is whether the political impact of the protests is lining up with that goal. Republicans, including former President Donald Trump, have already latched on to the protests as an example of America’s need for their brand of “law and order.” “The movements themselves become a potent symbol for the other side,” said Matthew Nisbet, a professor of communication, public policy, and urban affairs at Northeastern University. Both US President Joe Biden and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu have publicly addressed the protests on US college campuses, suggesting that they are feeling at least some pressure to react — but are not bowing to it yet.

Vox explores the demand of divesting from the Israel Apartheid State, a goal of the student protesters at campuses across the nation.

#BDS Movement #Boycott Divestment and Sanctions #Israel #Israel Apartheid #Campus Protests #Israel/Hamas War #Two State Solution

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leviackermansjewishwife · 1 month

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✡︎ 𝐻𝑒𝓁𝓁𝑜 ✡︎

• Hi, I’m Zipporah, I’m a minor from NYC, and I’m a huge fandom nerd and Jewish.

• Get to know me better!

𝒲𝒽𝒶𝓉 𝓌𝒾𝓁𝓁 𝓉𝒽𝒾𝓈 𝒷𝓁𝑜𝑔 𝒷𝑒 𝒶𝒷𝑜𝓊𝓉?

• It will mostly be about all my fandoms and my Jewishness, and I might have some random reblogs.

• My main fandoms are, Attack On Titan, The Hunger Games, Grishaverse, and Avatar The Last Airbender.

𝒥𝑒𝓌𝒾𝓈𝒽𝓃𝑒𝓈𝓈, 𝐼𝓈𝓇𝒶𝑒𝓁, 𝒶𝓃𝒹 𝒶𝓃𝓉𝒾𝓈𝑒𝓂𝒾𝓉𝒾𝓈𝓂

• I am ethically Jewish tracing back multiple generations, along with Roma. (Though I don’t consider myself Roma, since I grew up outside the culture, I care incredibly much for the community.) and I am very proud of my blood.

• I was raised culturally Christian, but my family has also retained a lot of Jewish traditions, mostly a mix of orthodox and conservative, though I do plan to fully convert to Judaism when I’m and adult, so I might make errors. I don’t observe Shabbos well, so there might be some posts on Friday and Saturday.

• Since I’m Jewish on the internet, this current war is bound to come up, and I think I would make my place pretty clear.

• I am anti-Israeli government, pro-innocent Palestinian civilians, but definitely anti-hamas, and I don’t think this conflict would be solved with my people be slaughtered, and I really hope for a two-state solution.

EDIT: I want to make this very clear, if solution to this conflict is for Hamas to win and gain control, and then mass slaughter Israelis, DNI. If your solution includes shipping all Jewish Israelis back to the countries they had to flee, DNI. Both of those solutions sound genocide and ethic cleansing of my people, which I do not tolerate.

• I might make a few posts about antisemitism and the current conflict, but nothing beyond the release of the hostages, and a quick end to this war. If you can’t deal with that, please DNI.

• If I get anything I deem antisemitism, I will block, and report depending on the level. I decide what I consider antisemitic, even if you tell me it isn’t.

𝒮𝑜��𝑒 𝓇𝒶𝓃𝒹𝑜𝓂 𝓈𝓉𝓊𝒻𝒻

• This might update so be weary.

•I did not draw my header, I found it on Pinterest, so if it is your art, please show proof and claim it.

• I update blog look quite a bit so, it’s still me even if it looks different.

• Taylor Swift fan but not a swifte.

• I AM A MINOR! so please don’t bring in anything to inappropriate, don’t send me anything gory, and don’t demand any private information out of me.

• I struggle with mental health so I block easily.

• DNI: Hamas supporter, October 7th deniers or enjoyers, believe in destroying Israel, porn blog, rape fantasists, people who use gypsy knowing what it means, and really anything else you would gather I don’t like from the rest of this post.

#am yisrael chai #jewblr #jewish tumblr #attack on titan #aot #grishaverse #six of crows #the hunger games #thg series #avatar the last airbender #atla #pinned post #get to know me

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