Comment by beltsazar
2 years ago
It depends on "Israeli what".
Anti Israeli government: It's not antisemitic.
Anti Israeli people: It's antisemitic.
2 years ago
It depends on "Israeli what".
Anti Israeli government: It's not antisemitic.
Anti Israeli people: It's antisemitic.
It’s more complicated than that.
Criticizing Israeli settlements in the West Bank is not antisemitic. But suggesting that Israel has no right to exist as a Jewish state is antisemitic as it implies ethnic cleansing.
Both are arguably criticisms of the Israeli government.
It is interesting that the widespread view of isreali people that Palestinians doesn't have right to have a state is not viewed as bad as the other way around. Ironically it can be called antisemitism too. Because they are Semitic too [1].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semitic_people
That's a classic etymological fallacy.
Antisemitism is a word that was coined in the 19th century specifically as anti-Jew.
The fact that Semite today can now refer to non-Jews doesn't mean Antisemitism refers to non-Jews as well.
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Why should we in the West support a religious ethnostate? No government has the divine right to exist. Governments succeed or fail by the will of those who live there.
Please go and look at the ethnic makeup of Israel. It’s not an ethnostate. And even if it were there’s many that are supported by the west that are ethnostates. That’s not a reason to not support someone.
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Israel has a population of around 2 million Arab Muslims. They have full citizenship, serve in the police and army, are represented in the Knesset, serve as judges and one of them sits on the Supreme Court. One of them won the Miss Israel competition a while back. Does that sound much like a Jewish ethnostate?
Do you know what the Jewish populations were in Arab states back in the 1940s? It was about 800,000. It’s only the fact that the state of Israel existed, and gave them somewhere to flee to, that so many managed to escape with their lives.
It is true there were expulsions of palestinians during the 1948 invasion by the Arab armies, which is abhorrent, but this was in the context of a concerted, explicitly declared attempt at mass ethnic cleansing of the Jews. They were literally fighting to exist. Then-Secretary-General of the Arab League Abdul Rahman Azzam, said, "This will be a war of destruction and a great massacre." Other Arab leaders made it clear they intended to kill or expel the entire Jewish population, a policy which they actually carried out in their own countries. So we know this wasn’t just rhetoric, where they could do it, they did.
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> Criticizing Israeli settlements in the West Bank is not antisemitic. But suggesting that Israel has no right to exist as a Jewish state is antisemitic as it implies ethnic cleansing.
This is precisely an example of the conflation of "anti-Israel" with "anti-semitic." It is entirely possibly for a person to disagree with the geopolitical decisions and military actions that led to the formation of Israel, without harboring ill will against anyone for being Jewish.
Why is saying Israeli should not be a Jewish state any different than saying the US should not be a Christian state?
Well Jews are a cultural and ethnic group as well; so saying Israel shouldn’t be a Jewish state is similar to saying Japan shouldn’t be a Japanese state. It was explicitly established to create (or some would say reclaimed) a Jewish homeland. It’s Jewishness is central to it’s raison d'être.
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Genuinely curious, why does it imply ethnic cleansing? Why does it need to be a binary choice between ethnostate and complete ethnic cleansing?
We have seen that in the western world that we do not abide the idea of ethnostates, e.g. it is considered bigoted to oppose unlimited migration from refugee countries into Europe or North America. Likewise it is not okay to say "only X race or Y religion can be in government". Why is it okay in the case of Israel?
Jews lived and existed before Israel was established and they were not ethnically cleansed.
I don't really have a dog in this fight and I'm not trying to controversial, I'm genuinely curious because the choice you offer seems like a false dichotomy.
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> But suggesting that Israel has no right to exist as a Jewish state is antisemitic as it implies ethnic cleansing.
As opposed to what's happening right now - which is ethnic cleansing in both Gaza and the West Bank. Netanyahu wants to "thin out the Gaza population" and is asking for the US and other countries to accept refugees after Israel destroys the place.
One is speech, and the other is action - one is being argued about, while the other is actively happening with 20k+ deaths.
Is saying that "no state has a right to exist, that they exist with the permission of the governed" antisemitic too?
> But suggesting that Israel has no right to exist as a Jewish state is antisemitic as it implies ethnic cleansing.
Does it really implies it, or just the end of apartheid?
I actually wonder how to navigate this actually. Like, I have seen criticism of things Israel has enacted in order to ensure that the population is a majority-Jewish, Jewish-own-all-the-political-power. Is that antisemetic to argue against anti-arab laws, if those laws are in place to ensure that Israel is a jewish state first and foremost, as opposed to Israel being a jewish state, if that makes sense?
What anti-Arab laws?
> But suggesting that Israel has no right to exist as a Jewish state is antisemitic as it implies ethnic cleansing.
You've got it backwards. The only way for Israel to exist as an ethnostate is through an ethnic cleansing. That's not specific to Israel; that's inherent to the concept of an ethnostate.
The assumption that Israel can only exist as an ethnostate is itself a political assertion - it's the hallmark of right-wing Zionism.
> The only way for Israel to exist as an ethnostate is through an ethnic cleansing.
I don't understand that logic. Would you mind explaining?
Do you live in North America? I identify this perspective with Americans and Canadians and not, say, Norwegians.
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> The assumption that Israel can only exist as an ethnostate is itself a political assertion - it's the hallmark of right-wing Zionism.
I had a discussion at length on this with some very historically learned people (far more than me) shortly after the attack, with the context of Biden's response.
The underlying cultural memory is that of the Holocaust, and of thousands of years of oppression and pogroms before, where nobody would ever help the Jewish people if they were in danger. Thus the belief that the second the Jewish people became a political minority in Israel, they would be immediately and inevitably subject to ethnic cleansing and persecution by the government. Jewish supremacy is viewed as the only way for Jews to be safe in a world full of people who either hate them or don't care enough to help.
This explains Biden's "bear hug" diplomatic approach as well, which as much as it was directed to Netanyahu, was actually directed at the Israeli population (and he is now much more popular than Netanyahu is, from approval polling). The only way to defuse the situation long-term is to convince the Jewish people that if they accept peaceful co-existence without enforced ethnic supremacy and apartheid; and the only way to do that is to convince them that if they are threatened, that they will not be left to die alone as they feel they have been so many times before.
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> But suggesting that Israel has no right to exist as a Jewish state is antisemitic as it implies ethnic cleansing.
I've seen very few serious declarations that Israel has no right to exist. I have seen even fewer genuine existential threats to it in the past 2 or 3 decades, and that's not to discount how big of a deal or how sad an event Hamas's attack was.
But I have seen a lot of pro-Israel voices, e.g. at recent Congressional PR-stunt hearings, aggressively question anyone who doesn't bow in deference to their narrative whether they agree Israel has a right to exist. That whole line of tactic is a massive distraction from the question those voices don't want asked, either of themselves or anyone else, which is "do you think Israel has the right to do what it is currently doing to the Palestinians?"
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