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In my view, someone boycotting Israel could, theoretically not be anti-Semitic, but I don't know of any organised movement that qualifies.
For such a movement to demonstrate not being anti-Semites, they would need to state conditions XYZ, such that:
However, doing this would lose the support of those who oppose Israel not out of sympathy for Palestinian children but anger that the Jews have somewhere where they can exist without the permission of the Nations.
If you think that people opposing the transfer of weapons and advanced military technology to a nation currently engaged in what is widely agreed to be ethnic cleansing and genocide is "anti-Semitic" you're degrading the term and thoroughly stripping it of any ability to reach people or convince them that what you're criticising is in any way bad. The majority of people, especially on the left, will regard providing material support for a genocide to be infinitely worse than being told they're being racist against a population that they largely consider white - you are welcome to try and convince people on the left that Jerry Seinfeld and Sheldon Adelson are people of colour and victims of discrimination, but I don't think you're going to have much luck.
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That is a very uncharitable way to say "The rules of war that you say we have to follow, you have to follow them too." How many people who were complaining about the "kids in cages" at the southern border are ardent Zionists and don't see any inconsistency in their beliefs about the morality of border enforcement? Chuck Schumer is one of these types of people, in 2007 he went to a fundraising gala for Efrat, an Israeli anti-abortion lobby group while being 100% pro choice when it comes to American fetuses.
How many Zionists would tolerate what's happening to Gaza if Gaza were located in South Africa?
Interesting how such "isolated demands for rigor" regarding how America is run never seem to apply to Israel.
I think if Gaza, South Africa we’re doing what Gaza, Israel is and has been doing, it might at least be seen as a low grade war. The Gaza situation arose because of a pretty serious terrorist attack. But even before that, the state had been lobbing missiles into the rest of Israel. And the history before the Hamas takeover of Gaza was one of repeated intifadas and terrorist attacks.
I’m not going to suggest that the Jews did nothing wrong, nor that they’re not doing anything wrong now. Obviously bombing hospitals and refugee encampments is a bad thing, to say the least. Flattening all of Gaza isn’t a good look here. But I think a lot of the over the top reactions are based on the Israeli fear that this might be the last time that they can do anything on Gaza because of world sentiment, and the frustration of thinking that these attacks will happen again as soon as the pressure is off.
If a war like that between two countries that hate each other, or even a civil war, I’m not sure how much anyone would care. Nobody cares about the Uyghur. Nobody is boycotting Saudi goods over Yemen. There’s been a low grade civil war between the Colombian government and FARC for decades. How many people care about the various other low grade wars going on? And how many would care if there weren’t sizeable Muslim and Jewish enclaves in major countries?
Obviously it's a bad thing, but it's not obvious that the bombers are to be considered the ones responsible for the bad thing. The Geneva Conventions authors weren't quite solid enough on game theory to write that attacks on human shields are always and entirely the responsibility of the defenders-cum-war-criminals who used human shields, but they did write that such attacks are permissible when the military gain is proportionate to the harm to civilians. Building military bunkers under a hospital is only a war crime, not a get-out-of-jail-free card.
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The South African government was widely condemned and sanctioned for its campaign against the ANC when the ANC was an actual literal terrorist group.
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I don't see any inconsistency between "when policing a border, a certain level of stringency and invasiveness is required when the people trying to enter the country include underage terrorists who have been groomed into committing suicide bombings; but that level of stringency and invasiveness is inappropriate when policing a border to prevent economic migrants from gaining illegitimate access to a country".
Frankly I think it’s a miracle that we haven’t seen any kind of massive cross-border terrorist attack like the one portrayed in Sicario: Day of the Soldado. And I think if the border isn’t secured it’s only a matter of time before that kind of thing happens. Especially given that the State Department keeps antagonizing multiple peer adversaries that could easily fund and coordinate that kind of attack. The security situations on the American border and the Israeli borders are very similar, but many people of various political and ethnic stripes engage in ridiculous casuistry to differentiate them.
It's less a miracle and more of a consequence of how the cross-border dynamic of human smuggling works. In short, the cartels have strong incentives to not only not go along with it, but to punish defectors (other cartels who might), and this lack of reliability and secrecy renders it not particularly feasible for state actors.
The cartels have been competing with the US government and mexican authorities for a long time, but part of that is also because they selective cooperate to take down rivals / settle feuds / use the MEX/US authorities to go after their business rivals rather than themselves. Since the drug business is profit-motivated, unnecessary conflict with the US authorities is generally avoided up to a point. This is one of the reasons that the Mexican drug wars, while bloody in absolute terms, have been relatively low-collateral damage to American citizens- if you do something high profile against the US, not only have you put a target on your back from increased US attention, but your competitors have a prime opportunity to bring you low. This is how you get Mexican cartels killing their own as a sort of apology for getting Americans killed. This is without going into how the drug cartels themselves are penetrated by Mexican / American law enforcement agencies.
Why this matters for the state-terrorism angle is that other countries know this, not least because back in 2011 an Iranian attempt to use Mexican cartel hitmen to assassinate the Saudi Ambassador to the US made the minor oops of hiring an FBI informant as the assassin.
Further, state terrorism is actually a pretty poor strategy for direct competition because if you were willing to launch the equivalent of a missile strike in the first place (several bombs on objectives), you'd just use missiles in the first place (which countries like Iran and Russia have). The advantage of terrorism isn't the damage, but the non-attribution... but if you're going to be attributed anyways (say because you take credit, or because you are compromised by untrustworthy Mexican cartels you relied upon to get across the border who are belatedly trying to cover their own ass), you're not any less vulnerable to a retaliatory missile strike than if you did something more overt.
Terrorism / bombings work in an insurgency context because of the ability to hide within the population which negates the ability / wisdom of retaliation. However, a cross-border migration attack wouldn't be able to hide amongst the American side or the Mexican cartels.
There are ways this could change- and it's a policy argument against trying to declare mexican cartels as terrorist organizations (as then they'd have less to lose from working with actual terrorists)- but without credible plausibility a terror-bombing is just a way to get into a direct military conflict with a country who the perpetrators primary national security strategies are about not coming into direct conflict with.
Agreed. The last thing that the cartels want is some 9/11 type attack which causes the US to ramp up their action against organized crime to GWB's war on terror level. That would be terrible for their profits and life expectancy.
I am not even sure that the Iranian government would want to sponsor large terror attacks on US soil. Sponsoring Hamas and Hezbollah is one thing, but poking the US in the eye would go badly for them. (Of course, a government administration is made out of people, whose goals are not always aligned with their country, but getting the US to bomb the shit out of them would likely not benefit anyone in power.)
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There are lots of people who claim to have run into Arabs- like actual from the Middle East Arabs- pretending to be Mexican or Guatemalan to get into the U.S. and behaving in ways that are more suspicious than usual for illegal immigrants(most of those who report it are illegals or adjacent to that community themselves). My guess is that most of these are just economic migrants whose odd behavior can be chocked up to cultural differences, but it’s certainly not implausible that there are eg Iranian assets hiding among the illegal immigrant population for whatever purpose. Obviously the lack of terrorism indicates that they’re not committing mass terror.
My understanding from stories ive heard is that those sorts seem to have a habit of coming to a bad end or otherwise just "disappearing" presumably for the very reasons @Dean describes.
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Hamas does not follow the rules of war. Furthermore, the rules of war do not say half the things Israel's opponents claim they say.
Does it matter? Anyway, how many Mexicans were launching rockets at El Paso and San Diego? Was there some operation where an organized group directed by the Mexican government (or whatever group controlled the territory) came in and killed and kidnapped a bunch of random Americans? The situations aren't all that similar.
Depends on who was doing it and who was getting it done to, naturally.
Not quite rockets, but the cartels are absolutely using drones to track the Border Patrol, and electronic warfare devices to disrupt our own, signalling quite sophisticated capabilities.
Of course, the reason they're not shooting rockets at us is because the cartels have no interest in trying to destroy the U.S., because we're the cash cow they milk their money out of, whether in the form of smuggling fees for migrants trying to gain access to our labor markets, or sales figures for drugs they supply to our hedonism markets. If October 7 had been a coordinated drug-smuggling operation instead of a violent attack, I somehow don't think the Israelis would have responded with bombs.
Yes. Pancho Villa's attack on the U.S. Army garrison and nearby town of Columbus, NM. Militarily, it was much less effective than 10/7 - the attackers suffered far more casualties (over 100) than they inflicted (17). It still provoked a months-long US invasion that reached hundreds of miles into northern Mexico by U.S. troops and several small pitched battles against both rebel and Mexican government forces that resulted in several hundred casualties. The only reason it wasn't bloodier was that the terrain of Northern Mexico was so inhospitable and so lightly-settled that all belligerents were limited to small cavalry (or automotive) patrols. So there's actually a parallel here.
There was an actual genocide perpetrated by U.S. backed "rebels" against arab religious minorities such as the Yezidi during the Obama administration, complete with the taking of women as sex slaves (at least one of whom "wound up" - three guesses as to how - in Gaza and was recently rescued by the IDF, actually). Barely anyone gave a shit.
The Arab world is currently engaging in a "near genocide" of Christians which is definitely an ethnic purge. I don't see any breathless news coverage of this.
During the recent civil war in Ethiopia a couple years ago, the Tigray people in the north of the country appear to have been subjected to an attempted genocide. Don't remember any huge news coverage about that - we were too busy freaking out about the end of the Trump Administration.
South Sudan appears to be undergoing yet more hideous racial violence between arabs and black african tribes which has displaced more people than the fighting in Gaza, and is being characterized as an attempted genocide. Don't see that leading headlines in U.S. papers, or causing protest movements on U.S. campuses.
There were plenty of war crimes committed in Myanmar's counterinsurgency/anti-drug fight in the Shan during the last decade or so - here's a few from an Amnesty International Report. This one made a bit of a splash because one of the groups being repressed were the muslim Rohingya group, which dovetailed well with reflexive American senses about who is oppressed and thus is an appropriate target for pity. But I don't recall it generating nearly as much vitriol as the Gaza war.
This was just 30 minutes of Googling by a semi-aware person. I'm sure I could find more...there's no shortage of suffering in the world.
Isis wasn't US backed. Do you mean some precursor groups? I thought Isis were mostly sunni militias led by ex-baathist officers.
That actually interests me, but it's not in the article. Some hamas fighter was in isis and brought her home as a souvenir ? That's my best guess, I give up. How?
Not directly, but we sure backed a lot of "moderate" Sunnis in Syria that turned out to be Al Qaida wannabees or even affiliates. To say nothing of what we did indirectly through NATO via the Turks (who, to be fair, were mainly focusing their special hatred on the Kurds)
It's actually worse than that, somehow. I'd post the substance of it here, but it's really quite NSFL; if you want the gory details, go to the link. TL;DR - she was captured by ISIL, had horrible shit happen to her, was sold at least five times as a child sex slave before finally being forcibly "married" at 15-ish to a Gazan fighter. He was captured by coalition forces, but then smuggled through Syria and Turkey to Egypt, from whence he took her back to his family in Gaza. There she was kept as a sex and domestic slave for the family - she was at one point married a second time to this guy's brother. The children of rape she bore them are still in Gaza, being raised as Arab muslims.
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Are you familiar with the story of Mexican separatist Pancho Villa and the Battle of Columbus, NM (1916)? That led to an uninvited US expeditionary force wandering around in Mexico looking for Villa, but only finding his subordinates.
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Alright, tell you what, when AIPAC gets disbanded and we get a formal apology for the Epstein-Island blackmail operation, I'll stop bringing up Israel's ongoing genocide every chance I get. Nobody American under 65 cares about Israel, the umbilical cord is getting cut sooner or later, and if they want someone to fight Iran, they need to do it themselves.
PS: Israel having free college and free healthcare while we don't is also a sore spot to your average Democrat voter, Israel should align their social spending to be more like ours if they don't want us to resent sending them money.
PS2: I could write a book pointing out specific hypocritical political arguments pushed by dual-citizenship types and you'll just say "That's not the Israeli government, you can't hold the actions of the diaspora against the state Israel, that's collective punishment and immoral." That would be a great argument if Israel hadn't been using indiscriminate bombing and food/water/electricity/medical aid denial as collective punishment this entire time.
As an aside, do you remember what happened to the activist Rachel Corrie back in 2003? The IDF crushed her with a bulldozer quite intentionally as dozens of people watched, and nothing ever came of it. I was pretty young when that happened and it made a lasting impact in how I view the Israeli government. Don't the US and Israel supposedly have a "special relationship" like we have with the UK? I don't think the British would discourage Americans activists from protesting in the UK by turning one into a soggy pizza using heavy machinery. Not very friendly at all.
PS3: Yes, I am Jewish, how can you tell? (half the people at the campus protests were too)
So are half the people here, including the person you’re replying to of course, and including me. That Jews would advocate against their own identity is unsurprising, gentile whites do it all the time. The question is what you hope to gain from it.
Not that it really matters (as you point out, the Jews on this board have opinions all over the political spectrum), but I thought @The_Nybbler was of Italian descent, not Jewish.
I'm of Italian and Ashkenazi Jewish descent; this is an ethnicity of its own arising after WWII; our native homeland includes much of Manhattan, Brooklyn, Staten Island, as well as large parts of Hudson, Bergen, Essex, and Union Counties in New Jersey. Naturally we also have an exclave in South Florida.
Interesting. Thanks! I had no idea there was significant intermarriage between those two groups.
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I'm not one of them, but there are a lot of young jews with left wing political views, and those views have a very clear and definite position on what's taking place in Gaza right now. The left wing generally views ethnic cleansing in defence of a blood-and-soil ethnostate to be one of the greatest possible crimes you can commit, the sort that would stain the history of a people forever (just look at Germany). You don't actually need to "gain" anything material from opposing something you consider deeply immoral(though I suppose this means that what they 'gain' is satisfaction of emotional needs), and the footage being posted to the internet by both Palestinians and Israelis is really impossible to ignore if you're young and on social media. If I knew that my country was taken over by ethnonationalists and was about to start burning jewish people alive in their hospital beds, I'd protest against it even if I wasn't gaining anything from it (especially so if my only relation to "my" country was that they have the same ethnicity as me and I lived somewhere completely different) and I don't think that's a particularly extreme or hard to understand position.
I suspect the majority of these people are only Jewish by parentage and don't actually live their lives in any way that's discernably Jewish (happy to be proven wrong on this), and therefore their being Jewish doesn't lend any particular credibility to their position on the issue. It's much the same as me saying "as a gay person I disagree with the democrats position on LGBT rights" when I've never actually had sex with men myself, but I happen to have a close relative who's gay.
That doesn't explain the pre-occupation with Israel. If what they're doing is ethnic cleansing, then it's the most ineffectual example I've ever heard of.
This is an old argument that we've seen a lot of times before. "I suspect the majority of these people are only Scottish by parentage, and don't actually live their lives in any way that's discernibly and truly Scottish". But either way there's a decently sized population of orthodox jews who reject Israel for scriptural reasons as well.
Your second point is being litigated in another post so I won't respond to it here.
That doesn't make it any less valid. Biden got a lot of flak for his whole "I'm Irish" shtick. But at least he invoked his heritage fairly frequently and in a variety of situations. It's clear it meant something to him. I strongly suspect that for the majority of these "I'm Jewish and I don't like Israel" types their Judaism means nothing to them in any other context.
Sure, but I don't know what relation that bears to non-orthodox Jews who are anti-Israel.
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Gaza is already ethnically spotless.
What @hydroacetylene said. Claiming Israel is ethnically cleansing Gaza is nonsense. The term seems to be used as some sort of odd compromise between "genocide" and "war", but it's not.
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I have no idea what you are trying to say - are you joking about the fact that the Israelis have already murdered huge swathes of the population?
"Huge swathes" of civilians die in any war, and there are plenty of recent conflicts were civilians were killed in much higher numbers, and much more deliberately, than in Gaza.
The huge focus of certain people on the nature of the purported "murder" that Israel is apparantly carrying out, that is completely at odds with the comparatively unremarkable scale of civilian suffering in Gaza, betrays the fact that it's not civilian casualties they're truly animated by, as much as it is a hatred of Israel (...or another group of people).
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Note that Gazans had done that to others (eg Palestinian Christians)
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Gaza is 99% Sunni Arab already, and was before the war.
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Israel is not committing a genocide in Gaza, they’re winning a war in an urban environment.
It’s really not that different than anything Russia did in Grozny or Aleppo. And it’s definitely more humane and circumspect than what America did in Dresden, or Hiroshima, or Pyongyang, or Hanoi, or Cambodia. Although many (though certainly not all) strong supporters of Israel will weep bitter soyjack tears when such tactics are used by any other party in any other situation.
It is more often the inverse in my experience.
Maybe it’s just the sites I go to but what I mostly see is:
Pro-Israel/Pro-Ukraine (“I am an Eglin Air Force Base shill-bot”)
Pro-Palestine/Pro-Ukraine (“I support the Current Thing at my Ivy League university”)
I think there is a faction of Pro-Russia/Pro-Palestine third-worldist tankies (“GLORY TO COMRADE DOLEZAL! GLORY TO R/STUPIDPOL!”), but those are considerable rarer.
I’ve literally never seen a Pro-Israel/Pro-Russia poster in the wild, probably because those people are all posting on Hebrew or Russian language websites.
I don't track individual poster opinion enough to say if any individual person fits this bill on the Motte, but that is close to the vibe of this place. The Motte is heavily Jewish and overwhelmingly pro-Israel outside of a few dedicated posters like SecureSignals that even the mods are palpably hostile to. The Motte isn't exactly pro-Russia but it is more willing to view the conflict with Mearsheimer-style nuance than normies, along with a dedicate subset of outright pro-Russia posters.
I take this as the Motte being largely composed of disaffected American blue-tribe contrarians. If the blue tribe/college standard is Palestine/Ukraine by virtue of being contrarians the Motte will naturally gravitate more towards Israel/Russia
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My impression is that being Pro-Palestine and Pro-Ukraine is the standard woke PMC intellectual (or as you put, it "current thing at ivy league") take while supporting Isreal while being somewhere between ambivalent towards and supportive of Ukraine is the default/normie position.
Meanwhile supporting Russia while hating on Isreal seems to be the majority opinion here because this space defines itself in large part through its opposition to/hatred of anything "woke" or "normie". We are very smart dont you know.
Supporters of both Russia and Isreal are what we call "principled libertarians" but there are maybe a dozen of them in the whole world and they are surrounded by witches.
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Normie cons are pro-Ukraine because they find their situation sympathetic, and pro-Israel out of some combination of Islamophobia and alignment with US foreign policy.
I’ve seen them before. They’re usually conspiracy theorists who don’t like Muslims.
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Common enough on the non-antisemitic far right, though maybe that's a bit of a niche...
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Your grab-bag of non sequiturs is not impressive at all.
Could you elaborate? Are you going to argue that Epstein wasn't Mossad-linked? Are you saying that AIPAC getting extreme deference from both parties isn't raising eyebrows amongst young people in the US? Are you saying that you think Israel taking American funds while having far more generous social services than the US doesn't embitter people saddled with student loans? Do you think Rachel Corrie's death didn't shock young people when it happened? Do you disagree that protesting the UK government probably wouldn't get an American citizen killed? What exactly are you objecting to? These aren't non-sequiturs, they are valid reasons that an American progressive of my generation would think poorly of the Israeli government without any need for "antisemitism".
Wasn't the topic we were discussing "Is criticizing Israel inherently antisemitic?" and "What conditions would need to be fulfilled in order to appease Israel critics?" I think I answered both those points, but I'll try to be more organized next time.
I am saying neither Epstein nor AIPAC is relevant to what's going in Gaza now.
I'm sure it shocked some people. It's also not relevant.
Also not relevant.
Epstein-Island and AIPAC were both created to increase support for the Israeli government among US leaders and both contributed to the decision to invade Iraq and waste trillions of dollars on middle-eastern forever-wars. They aren't irrelevant.
And how is anything irrelevant when it comes to the formation of opinions? I could be upset about the Israeli cultural appropriation of hummus and while stupid that still isn't antisemitic. Calling someone's emotional opinion irrational or antisemitic isn't going to make them like you more.
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What about the position that it’s perfectly fine and dandy for the Jews to have somewhere they can exist, but that it should be somewhere other than the Levant?
A great many peoples of the world currently reside somewhere other than where their primordial ancestors lived thousands of years ago. If every ethnic group on earth were welcome to pursue irredentist claims on territory that changed hands in the Iron Age, the planet would be consumed by wanton slaughter.
Let’s take, I don’t know, Poland. The current geographic boundaries of Poland are substantially different from the political boundaries of Polish-speaking people 300 years ago. The current borders were carved out of the former territory of states that were defeated in the World Wars, leading to the forced deportations of huge numbers of non-Poles from the newly-delineated territories. If I were to argue that this was a bad policy and that the Poles should have continued to occupy their previous borders, it would be risible to accuse me of hating Polish people, of not wanting Poles to exist, etc.
Similarly, Ashkenazi Jews have occupied several different territories throughout Europe since their ethnogenesis as a people. What if I say, “Why don’t you build your homeland in the old Pale Of Settlement instead? It’s more fertile, has more natural resources, more space, and is not in the middle a powder keg of religious hatred which will require you to be a nuclear-armed siege state for the rest of your national existence?” Is that anti-Semitic? Now, certainly there are plenty of totally valid rejoinders to such an argument - and to be clear, such an argument is not my position - but I don’t see how it’s questioning the Jewish people’s right to exist or to have their own territory. It’s a practical argument about what territory is realistically defensible for the Jews to carve out.
Saying "it would be great if the US decided to gift what is currently New Mexico to Israel, and Israel and all of its Jewish inhabitants would elect to move there and gift the territory previously claimed by Israel to the Palestinians" does not sound antisemitic to my ears.
It also is not a realistic proposal, however. Current borders are the results of random happenstances, but it is rare that they can be moved without bloodshed, which makes them practically sacrosanct. Thus, I oppose both new Jewish settlements in the West Bank and the Hamas slogan "from the river to the sea", because both would entail the forced displacement of the people presently living in these areas.
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That would not necessarily be anti-Semitic, if it were argued in good faith, and the proposal involved the alternate Jewish homeland being an independent state, with a Jewish majority, and whichever country it was carved out of renouncing all claim to the territory.
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I have some bad news for you about current events in Ukraine.
Right, yes, again, there are perfectly legitimate counterarguments. I’m just saying that this would not be an antisemitic argument.
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"Should be" or "should've been"? Because they're already there, and as the US immigration discussions tell us, deporting 10M people is pretty hard, particularly if there's currently not an existing country to deport them to.
Right, I agree that at this point Israel is where it is and needs to make the best of it. I guess I could imagine a potential future in which Israel in its current location becomes so untenable that the people there are forced to relocate to, I don’t know, the greater NYC metropolitan area. This seems unlikely, though, given the recent track record of Israeli foreign policy victories. All I’m saying is that it’s perfectly reasonable for someone to believe that the measures necessary for Israel to thrive in its current location are morally unacceptable, not worth the tradeoffs, etc., and for that to not be an anti-Semitic position.
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It's entirely possible to not be antisemitic and not want the State of Israel to exist.
There are some lefty Jewish organizations that boycott Israel and ask for one state solutions. I think it'll be difficult to argue that these in particular are antisemitic.
Moreover, you can't just argue that anarchists or people who boycott all operators of concentration camps on principle hate a particular ethnos.
Yes, it's possible. Some socialists are absolutely against strengthening ethnonationalist impulses. FdB wrote an insipid piece on it not too long ago.
You can say, as a matter of principle, that no ethnostate should exist.
The problem is that it practically seems to end up as "Israel in particular should dissolve itself first". People find that suspicious.
I believe that Israel might very well be the only justified ethno-state; every invocation of '109 countries' by certain political tendencies only serves to strengthen that conviction.
Ok, but the Jews aren’t the only ethnic group with a long history of persecution.
Now that I think of it, another ethnic group whose entire history consists of persecution is one of Israel’s immediate neighbors. Do the Maronites have the right to build an ethnostate and maintain it at whatever the cost?
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