chapotraphouse

I’m going to quibble with your claim that Israel is a safe haven for Jews. This attack should have ended this claim forever. There is no way Jewish people are safer in Israel than they would be in the us, Canada, the uk, France, Germany, etc.

Secondly, why do Jews need a homeland to be safe? No other group that has been attacked through history ever has been supported in creating an ethnostate in order to protect them. Where is the demand for Roma to have a state to protect that from racism in Europe? Where are the calls to give the descendants of enslaved Africans to be given a state they can control in order to be protected?

Antisemitism is a real problem, and as leftists we must always call it out just as we do for any other form of oppression. I will continue to my best at this as well, and pretty much agree with the specific arguments you make in the rest of your post

I've seen a lot of posts on this site that are leaning into anti semitic tropes while criticizing Israel.

This is a pretty strong claim to make without presenting any evidence. In fact, is an extremely common thing reactionaries will say, and if any evidence is eventually presented, 99% it's something inanely unoffensive like a lot of words for "free parking" or "plz no murder".

For anyone who choose to read my comment but not the rest of OP's post, the rest of OP's post does have good points about not using terms that can be interpreted as antisemitic dog-whistles.

IMO rephrasing this as an educational PSA instead an accusation would be better.

Israel is also a safe haven for Jews

Maybe some specific strands of Jewish people. As long as they are white or European or American or however you wanna categorise them. Ethiopian jews are ghettoised and forcibly sterilised.

Recognize the role of the US empire in Palestinian oppression. Recognize that jews are in an ambivalent racial category and are an oppressed people. Be specific when criticizing Israeli colonialism. Name who you're criticizing, is it the settlements? The IDF? Likud? The US military Industrial Complex? Stop calling for ethnic cleansing of jews if you've been doing that. Don't equate jewishness with whiteness / the Nazis. White people are white people, the US is the Nazis.

Why isn't "Israel" on your list of OK to criticize groups? The colonialist state of Israel needs to be destroyed and wiped off the face of the earth, and this is not anti-semitic to say. I've not seen one person on this site blaming all jews for anything. Can you provide even a single example of this that wasn't quickly removed by mods? Stop vague posting and concern trolling if you don't have an explicit example, now is not the time to center the attention on yourself.

Many Israelis are liberals, hoping to vote out Likud, stop supporting settlements, and negotiate palestinian statehood. These people are advocating half measures, sure, but they are not our enemies.

Maybe they aren't your enemies, but they're mine. Fuck off with this lib bullshit. It's not only rge recent settlements in, eg the West Bank, that are settlements, ALL Zionists in Palestine are settlers, even those who are heckin wholesome liberals who think Palestinians can have a little of their stolen land back. Your post is soft Zionist apologia, and I think it's gross

how the fuck is Israel "a save place for jews" ... what .. did i miss the bronx calling a intifada or London needing a Iron Dome .... ?


I've seen a lot of posts on this site that are leaning into anti semetic tropes while criticizing Israel. I want to point it out so that folks can recognize it.

You should take the opportunity to give examples of those posts and call them out directly by name and date of registration. Because I can't imagine anyone leaning into anti-semitic tropes is anything but a reactionary wrecker. I don't think you would accuse anyone of being anti-semitic in bad faith but it's important to remember that this is the number one technique of the ultranationalist lobbyists of Israel when it comes to silencing or slandering pro-palestinian voices. And it's a very good technique on their part because of the very grim and important history of antisemitism, mostly coming from the very nations funding Israeli settler-colonialism in Palestine.

Israel is a colonial outpost of the United States. It was created by Britain and inherited by the US. The US gives Israel ~3,000,000,000 USD in aid every year. As a colony, it should be the goal of every socialist to destroy it, just as we seek the destruction of the US, Northern Ireland, South Korea, Canada, the Phillipine state, etc.

And those same lobbyists would call you anti-semitic for proposing the destruction of the Israeli settler-colony. So it's important to remember that the word "anti-semitic" is currently undergoing a semantic decomposition, a "Boy Who Cried Wolf" effect, where the neolib and neocon reactionaries of the imperial core are rendering the word utterly meaningless through their deceptive rhetoric. one of the unfortunate side effects of this, is that actual antisemitic nazis are going to see an opportunity to take advantage of the outpouring of support for Palestinians, and use it to worm their way into mainstream political discourse. This is why we should name these posts and quote them directly, rather than vaguely gesturing that they exist, so that these accounts can get take care and removed from our platform which has never in any way supported anti-semitism.

in fact, annexing Florida to create a new state of Israel is what I mean when i refer to "the one state solution"

Give Florida back to the Seminoles and Miccosukee and other remaining First Nations. 

Conflating Jews in Israel with Zionists.

Jewish control of America / protocols of the elders of zion

Please call out and report these posts. These should be grounds for automatic bans.

Ethnostates are always bad, Israel would still be bad if it were in Florida.

This is concern trolling. The State of Israel cynically uses allegations of antisemitism against organizations that are critical of it, and buying into the premise that the leftist opposition to Israel is rooted in anything but anti-colonialism and that the scant examples of antisemitism you might see from self-proclaimed leftists are not aberrations that are almost always swiftly dealt with by the orgs in question is a form of punching left.

The Zionist entity is run by genocidal monsters and must be destroyed

But! Israel is also a safe haven for Jews. This is seperable from the colonial nature of the state.

It absolutely is not. As an explicit settler-colonial project with racial supremacist justifications everywhere, you cannot distinguish some kind of "pure" Zionist just looking for safety (who? Be specific) from those who vote for the ethnic cleansing fascists and live on recently stolen land. The people who can be separated are children, those working against the Zionist entity, and possibly those who are simply propagandized and are on their way there.

I will also point out that there are other countries that are just as safe for Jewish people. This is not because those countries lack antisemitism (such as the US), but because the ethnostate in which Israeli occupiers live is not a safe place because the people they displaced and are displacing still live and still resist. You cannot be a safe occupier. Occupation is war.

Many of us had ancestors in Germany or Poland during the holocaust who did not stick around after the war. They saw Israel as their best shot at safety in the wake of the holocaust.

The implicit line here is always that this explains, even justifies occupation, disposession, genocide. Fleeing fascist genocide by settler-colonists does not mean you get to do your own. It was not acceptable then and it is not acceptable now. "Never again" includes everyone.

I know that you don't mean it like this. But what I say is still true because the ideas are incoherent. Not because you explicitly want to justify the Nakba.

Many Israelis are liberals, hoping to vote out Likud, stop supporting settlements, and negotiate palestinian statehood. These people are advocating half measures, sure, but they are not our enemies.

Yes they are, just like liberals here in the US are our enemy. Liberals are constantly our enemies, they make themselves that by supporting fascism so long as it doesn't have the name. They can be used by us, but they are the people who call the cops on their black neighbor and putting in a tip that their neighbor was at the protest last night. Liberals will sell you out and people will die by their hand if you're not more cautious than this.

The question is not whether those settlers are the enemy, it is in how they should be approached.

Conflating Jews in Israel with Zionists.

I agree that nobody should do this. I haven't seen it but it's a common enough thing that I wouldn't be surprised to see some examples.

As an aside, I've seen this conflation done by anti-Zionist Jewish liberals many times.

erasing the ambivalent position of jews within colonialism / conflating jewishness with whiteness

Eurocentrism does actually exist in the Zionist entity and Europeans invented the project and largely populated it. They have brought their biases with them and are the dominant culture there. This is the context in which I tend to see Jewish people brought up as being white - when people are talking about Israelis. That's just an instance of conflating being Jewish and being Israeli.

Blood Libel

I simply have not seen this on hexbear dot net. I would hope that it's because if it has happened, they were wreckers that are quickly banned.

calling for ethnic cleansing

This one requires citations. Show receipts.

Jewish control of America / protocols of the elders of zion

Same as above.

this isn't a real problem. left anti-zionists are not antisemites. right antisemites who use anti-zionism as a shield are quite easy to spot.

death to israel.

A lot of these claims are very specious.

The idea that Zionism is principally an Anglo project is a misrepresentation of history. It isn't especially important which ethnicity the main theorists and advocates of Zionism were, but the idea that it was principally a British project as opposed to one signed off on by British imperial rulers is misleading, and for no good reason because again the ethnicity doesn't matter. Zionism is bad no matter who started thinking about it first.

The idea that the US controls Israel and not the other way around is also not an easy claim to defend. I don't need to explain the effect of AIPAC on Congress to comrades here, but equating saying Israel influences or even dictates US policy on Israel is equivalent in no way to saying "Jews control the US". Equating Israel with jews is in itself antisemitic, you should be careful with this sort of language.

Also I would appreciate some citations of the claim that comrades on Hexbear are calling for ethnic cleansing of jews from the region, or that jews are uniquely bloodthirsty.

Actually sweaty, the USSR did create a Jewish state in Siberia, as a true alternative to Zionism and took in Jews during WW2, which still exists today as the only autonomous state in Russia. So Zionists who moved back to Israel did in fact have an alternative. Mizrahi are cool. Zionists are not cool.

When Zionist movement was founded circa 1897, Russia was host to the world's largest Jewish population. In fact, during the Russian civil war, the white army (Russian nationalists) led pograms against Jews, and killed up to 125k, mostly in UKRAINE, which surprise, surprise, is ran by Nazis today. It was the Red Bolshevik Army which had a policy of taking in or allying with the Jews, and many Jews embraced Soviet communism because of that. Moscow even hosts the world's largest Jewish museum today, the Jewish museum of tolerance.

Russia is just as much of a home to the Jews as Israel in the 20th century. No one forced the Zionists to leave for Israel and commit genocide against the Palestinians.

I'm just here to say the Romanov children deserved it

Have there been any actual calls for ethnic cleansing or assertions of blood libel by Hexbears????? I want to say the most egregious thing I've seen posted by Hexbears is 'Isreal' instead of 'Israel'. Not saying it couldn't or didn't happen - just curious because I'd expect better from the average poster on here.

Just to preface, I do think that we can benefit from being more aware of anti-semetic tropes. Many fascist dogwhistles do disguise themselves in language and symbolism that appears harmless or even resembles valid critique, such that even well-meaning people can reference them by mistake. I think of Corbyn for instance, nobody ought to doubt his sincerity but clearly he made a few unforced errors here or there that helped feed Labour antisemitism hysteria.

So I'm all for, here's some common anti-Semitic tropes, now you know so you can avoid them. And in particular, I would say "Be specific... Name who you're criticizing" is pretty solid advice. With that said: I do think there's some here that's a little problematic, and nobody else has quite articulated what I'm feeling so let me put this out here:

First, many have mentioned the timing of this post at a moment of serious crisis as not feeling right. I want to emphasize the issue isn't so much that it's "tone-policing," but rather, that it plays into colonialist narratives. Personally I'm fine with having to tread carefully around sensitive topics, but I'm decidedly not fine with the pervasiveness of the right-wing narrative that the Palestine liberation movement and even the Left as a whole is somehow intrinsically antisemitic. And when you point vaguely to "a lot of posts ... leaning into anti-Semitic tropes" without contextualizing who or what posts or how they were received by the community, that does sound a bit like a repackaging of this "left/Palestine/BDS antisemitic" narrative, which has been used as a major political cudgel to resist change to the status quo.

Now, in another moment, some self-crit in how we approach dismantling this narrative might be warranted, even if outsiders were to take it as a tacit admission of a problem. But at the moment of truth where you've got 500 dead in a hospital airstrike and troops lining up for a ground invasion, the "Left antisemitism issue" is really not the discussion we want to be having. (It is worth noting, to OP's credit, discussions of issues internal to the Left are, regardless of situation, much, much more appropriate on a platform like Hexbear where those discussions will mostly remain internal to the Left, than they would be on a platform where we're engaging with a broader public to be swayed such as :reddit-logo: .)

That's really the main issue here, but as to a couple of the more specific gripes:

~"Conflating Jews in Israel..." - More or less agree with OP's points here, but I do think it is worth recognizing that this is, in a real sense, a religious sectarian conflict. I suppose you could say it's superstructural, but when Israel legally defines itself as a state for Jews and only Jews, that's where they (the Israeli state) are looking to draw the lines, and that's what we have to combat. In other words, no, this is not a problem with Jews or Judaism, but also: Israel cannot be a Jewish state.

~"calling for ethnic cleansing" - OP says "Jews have always lived [there]," but this is imho minimizing just how much of the population is part of or descended from the colonial project. Wikipedia is telling me the Israeli Jewish population went from <100k in 1915, to over a million by 1949, to nearly 5 million at the turn of the century, and over 6.5 million today. That's not organic population growth, that's a massive influx of people who came in and took land where there were already other people.

Now, I agree that full-out sending away all the Israeli Jews is not and should not be on the table. Not only do some have claims predating the settler influx, but I imagine even many of the settlers and their descendants don't have much place else they can go and still ought to be treated humanely. That said, I think we ought to be realistic and recognize that the Palestinians have been forced from their homes, in some cases quite recently, and in the case of Gaza forced into a tiny little area, very densely populated and lacking basic infrastructure. If we're going to have justice, it's not going to come without a lot of reparations and frankly probably some degree of land back and right to return. The more recent and more wealthy of the settlers probably should leave.

~"Jewish control of America" - OP says "America controls Israel and not vice-versa"... it's really more of a two-way street. Israel and AIPAC/Israel lobby just very much do have serious sway over American politicians and honestly Western politicians more generally. Israel is an independent state and functions as one, at times annoying people in Washington who want them to do their ethnic cleansing a little more quietly. That said, it also goes without saying that Israel's prosperity is dependent on some measure of servitude to American geopolitical interests, and that framing Israeli influence as "Jewish control" is very much :haram: .

That's all I got. Hadn't planned for this to be such an effortpost but :shrug-outta-hecks:

That's... not what blood libel is?

After reading this whole thread, I am pretty confident I am not

"Antisemite" is basically another word for "whataboutism". Also actual anti-semites get the  too

And since the Apartheid in South Africa ended 30 years ago, accusing anyone critical of apartheid rule of being a communist sympathizer grew out of fashion, so there was an "urgent" need to find a new label

say the line, bart

Semi-joking aside, I know where to not point the finger at. On the contrary also, it's the people who make this accusation who themselves let it slip. The irony isn't lost when the likes of Miko Peled and Ronnie Kasrils, along with groups such as SAJFP, JVP and B'tselem consistently get pelted with the "antisemite" accusations on the regular.

theres no way you saw someone calling for ethnic cleansing of jewish people in israel on hexbear, and if you did they were banned an instant later?!

Are you being a concern troll?

The zionist entity is not a Jewish colonial project, but an Anglo colonial project.

Isn't this flat out false? My understanding of Zionism is based on the ideas of Theodore Herzl; that Israel was always meant to be a national, secular homeland for Jewish people. Fyi, this is the guy who is regarded as the 'Father of Zionism' by every Israeli leader ever and who organized the world's first Zionist Congress. Yes Herzl, as a Jew living in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, was inspired by and wanted to employ Anglo/ European colonial methods to achieve this goal (Badempanada did a wonderful video on this btw), but to claim that Zionism was created solely by the British and was never spearheaded by Ashkenazi Jews trying to escape persecution in Europe is ignoring the historical materialist basis of Zionism and frankly strips Jewish people of having any agency over their actions or fate.

P.S: I am not trying to say Jewish people collectively support Zionism, there were/ are many Jews in the past and today who oppose Zionism on the basis of being anti-colonialist, anti-nationalist, or on a religious basis. However, I felt OP was portraying Zionism as something completely separate from the Jewish identity and history, and instead as something invented by Western Empires to divide and conquer the Middle East using guilt over historical anti-semitism as a justification, which is flat out false.

APEC is not a cabal brainwashing otherwise Nobel Christian politicians. US politicians support Israel because they're colonial politicians and Israel is our colony. APEC exists because lobbying is how power is exercised in the US, but if we had patronage instead, APEC' functions would be carried our by a governor or an ambassador or whatever.

i'm surprised no one is mentioning the weird "APEC" mention....

friend, with respect, you are struggling to be persuasive on this point. it's AIPAC, not APEC. it's a bummer you don't understand this and leads me to believe you don't really understand how powerful and psychotic AIPAC actually is.

AIPAC is, easily, the most powerful lobby in the USA. It's paired with an Israeli spy/plant network that literally litters the entire government apparatus in the USA. It is the primary reason why America is so betrothed to Israel. All of your points about state planning, ally in the middle east, destabilization, securities corporate interests, etc. all have serious persuasive effect, but we can seriously almost just start and stop at AIPAC to understand the US's relationship with Israel

Great book by Mearsheimer called Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy written 2008. I imagine it needs to be updated heavily given Citizens United, others. You can probably poke around on YT a bit too I'm sure people have covered the power of AIPAC.

i appreciated this post though. all of the other points you made are good to be reminded about / reinforced to not equate jews/judaism with the psychotic israeli government's foreign policy / us alliance with same.