עם ישראל חי

Something I want you all to know about me, is that I was an antizionist.

I once vehemently hated Israel and demonized its very existence. I am intimately aware of how those who feel this way think, why they believe what they do.

Here is what scares me.

There is an absolute certainty and self-righteousness, a confidence in so many who hold these beliefs. I have felt it. I know beyond a doubt I would still be steadfast in my hatred if not for one thing.

I lived in an ideological bubble with primarily non-Jewish radicalized self-identified activists with far-left political beliefs. I had always recognized many self-contradictory and authoritarian sentiments among my peers, but being a survivor of psychological abuse conditioned me to be vulnerable to taking on the beliefs of others as a tactic of survival, even when something feels wrong inside. However, I felt so deeply certain and right about my hatred of Israel in the name of support for Palestinians.

What made me reconsider my beliefs was a close and safe relationship with another Jewish person who disagreed with me. I was rightfully questioned for having biased and unreliable sources of information that did not provide appropriate references or historical context and used antisemitic tropes in how they framed the conflict. I was challenged on the antisemitic beliefs I had internalized and my universalization of our peoples’ specific traumas an pain, my unwillingness to humanize us and examine how incompatible my beliefs were particularly with my beliefs in the area of Indigenous issues.

Many, if not most, antizionists will never do this. They have dehumanized any Jew who does not agree with them so thoroughly that their words, their pain, their knowledge, is completely null and void.

That’s not me.

I hurt the person who changed me. It hurt me to hurt him. It changed me to realize I could believe something so wholeheartedly, and not only be wrong but be so hurtful. And the more I learned, researched, and connected and spoke with people who have lived experience, the more I realized that for having such strong and incorrect opinions… I knew so little.

I would say that now, I know more on the history of Israel and more broadly the Middle East than a lot of other Jewish people I know. I am more deeply connected with Jewish history and culture, and with myself as a Jewish person because of it. I am not Jewish as a performance of morality, I am Jewish as a continuity of thousands of years of history that my ancestors fought to preserve.

When someone accuses me of having been brainwashed by some zionist industrial complex, I just laugh. I had no Jewish education growing up. I had no connection to my Jewishness at all. Jewishness was a family story and a menorah put out in December. A longing for something lost, that I fought to get back. No. I was brainwashed by people who I trusted, who I risked my life for, who I spent countless hours talking about life with and who knew me better than my own family. And once I became proud and secure in my Jewish identity, unwilling to compromise on it, they all left. Every single one. Some hurt me badly on the way out.

Sometimes I feel afraid or embarrassed to share that this was my past, but it was. Sometimes I feel crazy. But I know in my heart I am not.

If even acknowledging antisemitism within your community spaces is going to "distract from the cause," maybe that's because the foundation of your beliefs comes down to antisemitism. What you're doing is telling on yourself.

well, the king and queen of spain would never hire a jew, so jot that one down.

They did work with Jews and conversos who gave them money, right up to the expulsion. And Columbus was promising something that would gain Spain money and prestige. You know, your average, Jews are the scum of the earth, but they’re useful scum. What I find more convincing in debunking the claim that Columbus was Jewish are these articles that show that:

1. No scientific study of these results has been published, so no peer-review. They just went straight to TV drama.

2. They are working from 150 grams of bones that might be Columbus. Or might not.

3. The bones were in such a bad state that no DNA could be extracted from them in the early 2000s and two scientists left the project at that point.

4. Since then, the institution that holds the bones has published no findings in peer-reviewed journals. And then after 20 years, a straight-to-tv documentary-drama.

5. There’s genealogical, documentary linking Columbus’ family to Genoa, not Spain.

I’m not saying the claim is bunk, except….yeah, I am.

Credit to @tikkunolamorgtfo for finding the articles

FWIW the Associate Director of the Sephardic Research Division at Jewish Genealogy is also saying it's bunk:

When people in Queers for Palestine say things like "I know I wouldn't have rights in Palestine but my activism is not transactional" I lose it because nobody is bringing up the fact gay men get thrown of roofs because of "transactionality", we are saying it because you are actively harming the LGBT community. You actively go against your gay brothers and sisters in the Middle East when you cheer on Hamas or want to see the only gay-friendly country there abolished. You are hurting your own community because you love your community less than you hate (((Israel))). Get your head out of your asses and realize people telling you about the LGBT killings in Palestine is so you can stop hurting the Palestinians you "care so much about".

"Activism isn't transactional" means "People with shitty politics still deserve basic human rights."

It doesn't mean fighting for an organization that would literally kill you if you had the chance.

^ Nontransactional activism is when you support indivindually homophobic palestinians because even homophobes deserve rights, not when you leave your queer brethren stranded by supporting the organization that is opressing them

-Dara Horn, People Love Dead Jews (2021)

Reminder that this was sent to me on Oct 8, claiming I'm not a human anymore before the intense fighting in Gaza started, before any Palestinian civilians were killed, before I even got to say anything really, beyond just share some of what was happening here on Oct 7.

It was never about the Palestinians or the conflict, it was always just an excuse to dehumanize Jews.

Saudi Arabia saw their first ever snowfall the other day. Meanwhile Mt Fuji just had its first ever year without snow in October. A few weeks ago there was a devastating hurricane in the Appalachian mountains, 600 miles inland. And a few years ago, the Texas desert was hit by a snowstorm that resulted in hundreds of deaths.

If you have any administrative power over any business, community or organization, anywhere in the world, please make contingency plans for every kind of natural disaster. Yes, even the ones that “don’t happen around here.” Having a plan you never need is far better than needing a plan you never made.

Please do plan for both asteroids and volcanoes. Meteor impacts occur globally, and while the impacts are usually extremely small, they can cause significant structural damage.

Volcanic eruptions are very important to plan for. If you don’t live near a volcano, you might not have to plan for the immediate impact of the eruption, but volcanos can send debris flying hundreds of miles, and the ash clouds can lower global temperatures.

Destructive meteor impacts and massive volcanic eruptions are both extremely rare. But last year, I would have brushed off the idea of a hurricane destroying towns in the Tennessee mountains. Plan for every natural disaster. Even the ones you don’t think could ever happen to you.

If you have a problem with Jews using the word "diaspora," you're the one who needs to go and find a new word, because you're using a Jewish one.

The word "diaspora" was originally coined for the Jewish Diaspora. It has other meanings only by extension.

Oh god, do I even want to know...

image id: a tweet with the original creator’s identification cropped out that says “when jewish ppl talk abouy being diaspora it reaffirms that they believe in israel as the home land for jews.” in this tweet the a in israel is swapped out for an at symbol

Well 1) Israel IS the homeland of the Jews? This is not a matter of belief, this is a matter of historical record. The Jewish ethnoreligion first arose within the area of land that is now Israel.

2) Believing, or rather, knowing, that Israel is the ancestral homeland of Jews does NOT mean you necessarily believe that, in the modern day, Israel should belong solely to Jews. It definitely doesn’t indicate support for atrocities against Palestinians.

3) Can we just not nag the Jews about “BUT ISRAEL!” any more?

A lot of people on the political Left get around that pesky bit of historical record by claiming that Jews (who they reduce to solely Ashkenazi) all died out in Roman captivity (or are some other minority group), and that the modern Jews are all descended from converts, with the Khazers being particularly popular to point to as the source. That way, they rationalize, since "Jews" are not actually descended from the ancient Hebrews, there is no way for them to claim that the Levant is our homeland.

Still others engage in even more wholesale historical revisionism by claiming that the Jews never lived there and that it was always the Palestinians going back to prehistory; my "favorites" in that regard are the people who claim that Jesus or Moses or King David were Palestinians.

In fact, BDS and several of its associated groups have openly called genetic studies on Jews and archeology in the Levant "racist science" because, to their mindset, giving the slightest support for the historical record that the Jewish homeland is in the Levant is tantamount to legitimizing Israel entirely. According to their narrative, Israelis are just White Colonizers from Europe, and they can't handle anything that contradicts that simplistic narrative.

So I've been hearing that there shouldn't be a country for the jews, that it should be like "other countries" and "be for everyone".

Ok, so your country that has separation of church and state, which days are the work week?

Mon-Fri? Huh? Why is that? Maybe to make it so people won't work on Sundays, and then, go to church?

In Israel, the work week is Sun-Thu. I don't know if Americans even know that.

Friday night to Saturday night is the Sabbath, so having these days off make it easier to observe.

Muslim countries, usually, have the workweek be Sat-Wed for similar reasons.

People are so stuck on their American Defaultism that they forget that so many things are structured on purpose to benefit different people.

So when people say that Israel should be abolished and there should be a "neutral secular state", what they mean is that it should be more like what they consider the "normal" and "default".

They act like there is a "one size fits all" culture, that anything else is some perversion for the ideal of what a country should be.

That's just one of many many things, cultural and religious, that makes Israel the only place in the world where jews can live without being an afterthought.

I have a lot of problems with Israel.

So many, many problems, especially with the government, and with what's to come with Trump's victory.

I genuinely hope for a change, for the end of suffering, for lasting peace and justice.

But I'm so done with people that have their country built to suit them telling me mine shouldn't exist.

i live in diaspora and i haven't spent the high holy days with my family in four years but nobody questions the way things are and we are routinely told that we are "too much" to accommodate so idk sue us if we want to have self determination in our ancestral homeland of all places

reminder that your "normal" is 98.9% likely due to either christian or muslim colonization

In Pennsylvania in the late 1950s, there was a law that prohibited certain kinds of retail stores from being open on Sundays. For observant Jewish business owners in the state, that meant they couldn’t be open on the weekends at all, and they had to compete with Christian business owners who could make a profit on Fridays and Saturdays.

Jews expected that the US federal government, which ostensibly valued things like separation of church and state and religious freedoms, would have their backs. They sued Pennsylvania on the grounds of religious discrimination, but the Supreme Court ruled against them. According to the SCOTUS, laws that have the effect of religious discrimination are totally fine, as long as they don’t have the explicit intent of religious discrimination.

That ruling was never overturned, and it’s still the law of the land in the US. Institutional and systemic disenfranchisement of Jews is completely legal in this country, as long as nobody explicitly says that their intent is to disenfranchise Jews.

The US has a one-size-fits-all culture in the same way that shitty clothes from Shien are one-size-fits-all. That one size will fit a lot of similar kinds of people, but don’t think for a second that it would ever fit someone who deviates from expected norms.

PSA to goyim: have a Jew in your life that you care about? Ask them how they're doing as a Jew. Please, I am begging, recognize that we are Jews and have had to shoulder so much grief this year and this week especially.

i love u tzatziki i love u pita i love u olive oil i love u foccacia i love u hummus i love u flat bread

people who reblog this just to put in the tags that they don’t like hummus, i cannot emphasise enough that this post isn’t for u. actually if u don’t like hummus, don’t even talk to me. literally i love u hummus, i love u baba ganoush, i love u muhammara

I wanna be real clear: i absolutely believe people can learn and unlearn and grow and change and become better humans.

But I will fucking remember who said shit like "Hamas has good reason to exist" and "Israelais are Nazis" and "It's not antisemitism, it's just antizionism" and "it was just a soccer riot" and even worse shit, and if there is not a public apology as loud as the proven antisemitism, you are not fucking welcome in my house.

Honestly, as someone asexual and probably some flavor of aro goy myself, im so sorry to all the asexual and aromantic jewish folks who has to deal with the biggest ace and aro blogs not shutting up about palestine and everything, especially fuckyeahasexual, who has taken ZERO steps in caring for jewish aces and has been INCREDIBLY antisemetic going as far as to yell at people who so much as donate to ao3 instead of gaza, accuse israel of being the main perpetrator of october seventh, spreading intense amounts of blood libel, and more.

It is utterly heartbreaking to see a blog that was once a safe spot for rallying around a shared identity turn so bitter and cruel and actively damaging. You all deserved a safer place to celebrate your asexual and aromantic orientations, and to not be shamed for simply existing, you arent a traitor, or a monster, or anything like that.

Jewish aces and aros are as valid in your identities as any other ace or aro, and im so sorry that so few aces and aros seemed to have learned from the coordinated attacks on our identity/right to exist, and proceed to do the same bullshit to you. I'm sorry for the utter failure of the queer community for jewish queers just in general. It's disgusting, its horrific, and you deserve so much more then just this one ace's apologies

The Tumblr funnyman to repugnant little antisemitic bastard pipeline is real and I still struggle with how common and accepted this shit is.

I've blocked people I considered friends, people who prided themselves on being informed and open-minded, for uncritically and eagerly sharing conspiracy theories and outright lies.

People I met and chatted with over our dumb fanfiction, people who were happy to gush about stupid anime with me suddenly became completely incapable of critical thought, excitedly, eagerly posting about how people I love are all fucking liars and deserve to be raped and murdered and taken hostage, but also that didn't happen and it's all a false flag, but also they DO totally deserve it, but also...

I don't know. I don't know sometimes how to go forward in the world when I see how quickly so many people I thought were decent enough flipped to absolute gleeful, breathless cruelty in a heartbeat.

What do you fucking do with that?

Jewish wedding ceremony, Tehran, 1948