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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.
Who cares? That doesn't change the fact that they're Jewish, any more than I would become black for not supporting white nationalists. Again, unless you're willing to endorse Rachel Dolezal transracialism this doesn't stop them from being Jewish, in many cases loudly and proudly so. They qualify for Aaliyah to Israel, they would be granted citizenship if they went - even the Israeli government considers these people jews. Alternatively, if you've got some kind of proof that you are an official arbiter of Judaism who can tell people whether or not they're authentically Jewish, you get to make this argument. Otherwise it's just another plate of warmed up haggis.
They're an example of jews for whom their Jewishness is a central element of their life and still oppose Israel. Some of them are left wing as well, some not.
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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).
Actually, I'm making that as a good faith argument - because it matches up with the reporting and figures that I've seen. Your comment doesn't match up with the sources I've read, but given the modern context I'm not terribly surprised that two people on opposite sides of a contentious issue have different ideas about the facts on the ground. If you have some really rigorous and verifiable data on casualty numbers in Gaza, please share it.
As for Hamas putting the civilians in harms way, I disagree with your framing - there are just too many instances of the Israelis murdering people who aren't anywhere near Hamas. Take all those x-rays of children's brains with bullets in them - in what possible world was it necessary to snipe those toddlers to go after Hamas? That surgeon who got raped to death in an Israeli prison was already in a prison, and that didn't stop Israel from doing what it did to him.
No one does, because the only sources are Hamas. We can be generous and take their figure, which seems to be about 40000 last time I checked. Assuming 15-20000 of those deaths are Hamas fighters, that leaves us with a civilian death toll that is really quite modest in scale in comparison with many recent conflicts that people get far less emotional about.
I think the chances that story is true are almost nil. The NYT was passed those "X-rays" by a bunch of local "reporters" (i.e. almost certainly Hamas militants) and just ran with the story they'd been told. IIRC there were all sorts of flaws with the claim, such as the fact that the X-rays showed the bullets still being in the children's skulls when a sniper bullet would have passed gone straight through and out the other end, the bullets in the image not resembling fired bullets, not matching those used by Israel etc.
I haven't heard this story, do you have a source? People getting abused in prison is something that happens with regrettable frequency all over the world. A single example - that I'm fairly certain wasn't sanctioned by the government/military - seems insufficient to help build a case that Israel is acting with unprecedented levels of brutality towards Palestinian civilians.
This is the number of dead that they're able to verify, which is extremely difficult for a variety of reasons. There's another 10000 that are missing and can safely be presumed dead as well, and I believe about 90000 with severe injuries. I don't think we're going to get true or accurate casualty numbers until after the war ends, and even then I have my doubts.
I have seen too many photos of dead Palestinian children to give the story that little credibility. On top of that, Israeli murder of children is common enough even outside the conflict that there are a lot of reports of it from the west bank as well. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/nov/19/west-bank-children-killed-unprecedented-rate
If you've got a comprehensive debunking of the x-ray claims I'd like to see it, but I've seen enough direct video footage of these kinds of attacks that I can't just brush the claim off wholesale, especially not on the basis of vibes rather than citations (admittedly a bit hypocritical of me given that I'm not posting the evidence I'm talking about either, but I'm sure you can understand why I don't save and archive all the videos of children being graphically murdered that I see).
https://x.com/FranceskAlbs/status/1858304872963010840 Franceska Albanese makes the claim here.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/israel-hamas-war-idf-palestinian-prisoner-alleged-rape-sde-teinman-abuse-protest/
There are countless claims from released Palestinian prisoners that rape and sexual abuse was endemic in Israeli prisons - and Israelis themselves (including high ranking government officials!) have protested any attempt to hold the perpetrators accountable.
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Note that Gazans had done that to others (eg Palestinian Christians)
To the best of my knowledge the Palestinian Christians largely blame Israel for their dispossession - that's what all the members of their diaspora I've spoken to have said and it seems to be backed up by the statistics, but I might be being fooled. If you've got some strong evidence that the Palestinian muslims are responsible for the Palestinian christians being kicked out I'd love to see it.
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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.
I see a fairly large amount of criticism of Israel here, but it seems like about a 70/30 ratio of Ukraine supporters vs Russia supporters. Sometimes even as high as 80/20.
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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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