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Comment by AdamH12113

1 year ago

> ... the Jewish state... its people experienced...

This is your error. States and peoples are not unitary entities with a single coherent outlook and will. The vast majority of the Israeli population is far too young to have directly experienced the Holocaust, which ended 80 years ago. There are plenty of people in Israel who do not want to commit atrocities against Palestinians. There are also people who feel that they have a (literally) god-given right to occupy the territories where Palestinians currently live. If you think of Benjamin Netanyahu's cabinet as being basically the same people who survived Nazi concentration camps in World War 2, then nothing Israel is doing in 2024 will make much sense.

To my mind, Israel's actions toward Palestinians (both in Gaza and the West Bank) are powerful evidence that nationalism inherently leads to atrocity no matter who's involved. If the cultural memory of being targeted by the Holocaust won't stop an ethno-state from setting up an apartheid regime, what will?

It's under-remarked on, but for a majority of Israeli Jewish people, the nakba era might have more immediate salience than the Holocaust. That's because they're not, as the popular imagination has it, all colonists from Europe; they're the Jewish people of the Middle East and North Africa, all of whom were forcefully expelled from their own homes after 1948.

There's no question that the Holocaust has enormous salience to Israeli Jewish people. But if you trace your roots to rural Arab Jewish families from Yemen or Iraq, your more immediate concern would be your own family's immediate viability in a world without Israel. A new rise of European fascism wouldn't be your problem; the fact that you'd have literally no place to go would be. You're sure as shit not moving back to Yemen.

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    • I feel like I haven't written anything that would give the impression that I'm unaware of the crimes Israel inflicted on Arabs during the capital-n Nakba.

      The problem is: it doesn't matter. The point is that Arab Jewish people are in Israel now, by the millions. The issue isn't that they've won some kind of trauma competition; it's the simple practical fact of their presence and the history that brought them there.

      Your second point, about MENA "nations" expelling Jewish people "in a vacuum", is deeply concerning. No matter what Israel did in Palestine, Arab Jewish people had no culpability. Arguments like this are why the distinction between criticism of Israel and outright antisemitism are so slippery. I too think that distinction is weaponized, but it's hard to press the point when you're making facially antisemitic arguments.

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    • > That the MENA nations who expelled their minority Jewish populations did so in a vacuum

      How does something occurring in Palestine justify this? Tying the actions of Jewish militias to your local Jewish population is antisemitic… if they expelled them to protest the creation of Israel, then that isn’t anti-Zionist. That they mostly all ended up going to Israel is ironically supporting the Zionist cause

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  • Zionists worked to recruit Jewish people from Arab nations to populate Israel. It wasn't until Zionist intervention that hostilities ramped up.

    Zionists even false flag attacked Iraqi Jews to help spur immigration to Israel:

    https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/iraq-jews-attacks-zionist...

    • This is both false and irrelevant. Anti-Jewish pograms in MENA following the Arab-Israeli war are well documented. Israel had a variety of motivations for ensuring they could comfortably resettle in Israeli territory, but that doesn't change the crisis Arab Jewish people faced in their home countries: they were forcibly expelled.

      Further, it doesn't matter. Most stats I've seen suggest that the Mizrahim are at least a plurality of Israelis, and none of those people can return to their "colonialist home countries". By way of example, long before the current Gaza war, the literal first "official" action Ansar Allah took when it established control of territory in Yemen was to expel the very few remaining Jewish families.

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It's not self-evident that "the cultural memory of being targeted by the Holocaust [should] stop an ethno-state from setting up an apartheid regime". In Liberia, where the freed American slaves were sent to, they essentially enslaved the native population.