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Norm Finkelstein argues back that anti-Semitism is defined as an “irrational” hatred of Jews, but that the resentment is rational.
Hasan argues that no people are monolithic, and the scapegoating of Jews is a common tactic. That people understand that when Tucker Carlson says America has “demographic concerns”, that is white supremacy.
He says that if Jews were monolithic there would not be such a generational divide on Zionism and billions spent to maintain its indoctrination.
Finkelstein says he would not tell someone who has experienced the Holocaust that they should not hate Germans. And that he would not argue with a Palestinian who feels the same way about Jews.
Norm cites that 95% of Israeli citizens agree with the force used against Gaza, and that its citizen army that represents its population carried out mass starvation as a method of war.
Hasan Piker says he agrees with the facts, but he has a more optimistic perspective in terms of changing people’s minds on conflating Judaism with Zionism.
What’s Norm trying to say here? That Palestinians are reasonable to hate all Jews?
I think they’re reasonable to hate all Zionists, but I agree with Hasan that Jews are not a monolith. Israeli Jews almost are, given the 95% support number (and that they live in the Zionist state), but diaspora Jews are not the same.
I think it’s changing (thanks to the internet).
My parents are Palestinian diaspora, but older arab media (from the late 90s, even) rarely ever made the distinction between zionism and judaism.
My mom used to say “kos im al yahud” or “fuck the mother of the jews” whenever something bad happened, she doesn’t anymore, obviously.
For them, the only jewish people they interacted with or saw in the media were rabid genocidal zionist freaks. If we asked an indigenous person during the peak of settler-colonialism what their thoughts on white people were, I’m sure it’d be similar. There were very few white people who gave them a reason to make the distinction.
Even moreso that the closest jews to SWANA other than the “israeli” zionists would be european zionists, so even if they traveled abroad they would only be interacting with jews who were zionists.
There’s this funny movie I watched many times as a kid Hamam Fi Amstirdam in the timestamp I linked, he moves to Amsterdam from Egypt, meets a guy who knows Arabic, finds out he has ties to “israel” and tried to claim that the pyramids were his.
It was, and still is, to a lesser degree, extremely rare to interact with a jewish non-zionist, especially from within SWANA.
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
Sure, but (and I think this is Norm’s point) are you gonna try and tell a Palestinian that? Like if some Palestianian woman who watched her entire family get liquidated by the IDF in the most horrific way possible is spouting some anti-Semetic conspiracy theory nonsense, are you really gonna be like “no, not all Jews!”?
No. I get your point, but that’s a trauma response, right? It’s not necessarily going to be rational, and we shouldn’t expect it to be. You can’t “correct” someone’s response to trauma.
And I think that goes back to Hasan’s point that Israel trying to tie Jewishness to Israel (or support for Israel) makes that response more likely, and Israel doing it is worthy of condemnation because of the blowback that will be felt by anti-Zionist Jews.
Whilst that may be happening, a lot of what is being said and done by Palestinians that is called antisemitism is just honestly stating what is happening. Jews took their lands, jews are killing them, jews are oppressing them, jews overseas send money to jews in Israel citing judaism who kill Palestinians while waving the star of david.
And Palestinians can’t say that without it being deemed antisemitic, and that isn’t fair.
that’s not a case for “not all jews”, those are just factually incorrect. obviously we’re not going to browbeat someone but there’s jbs dinosaurs and klan offshoots around here so i’d broach the topic on the basis of not helping those groups out by saying certain things in public when they’d just as soon kill her too.
Palestinians have no responsibility to love their oppressors or pray for their persecutors. It is not Palestinian responsibility to make sure they frame their, correct, observations in a way that is palatable to feelings of their oppressors or those that share an ethnic or cultural designator with them.
Palestinians have done so, so, so much to clarify that their opposition is to israel, and at this point they bear no responsibility for our refusal to listen to their words or see what is happening to them.