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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.
from the log it sounds like they were talking past each other. Norm is absolutely right that I would not blame a Palestinian if they were anti-Semitic, but Hasan is right in that I would absolutely blame a westerner using anti-Israeli sentiment to foment antisemitism.
edit: okay I’m actually watching the clip now and Norm is coming off a lot worse. He doesn’t sound like he’s just talking about Palestinians, it really sounds like he’s talking about everyone, and I would say that if you’re not one of the groups being explicitly targeted by Israeli violence then you absolutely need to have a nuanced view here. Israelis are doing a genocide, Zionists abroad are arming it, and I find any conflation of those groups with “Jews” to be antisemitic.
He even talks about Israel’s conflation of itself with Judaism in the clip, seemingly his argument is that because they are doing that then you are correct to conflate the two! I’m really not a fan of that.
I find Norm’s example of his parents to be an example of the “talking past” I was mentioning before. Hasan is talking about antisemitism in general, and Norm is countering with a point about victims of violence. It makes it seem like he is saying that the grace that can be extended to a victim should be extended to everyone everywhere.
there are parts of the Osama bin Laden manifesto where he also conflates Judaism as a whole with Israel, for the same reason as Finkelstein.
i guess I find the whole debate fruitless and divorced from the point. If anything the largest antisemitic group on Earth would be the state of Israel. They’re the only country I know who has, since WWII, had a policy of sterilizing Jews (in the case of Ethiopian immigrants).
How do you square allowing Palestinians to have a less nuanced view (implied by you directly) on the situation? It seems you’re sneaking in some infantilizing view of Palestinians here. I think that Palestinians can completely understand the system which oppresses them, which includes the direct support of the vast majority of Jewish institutions, organizations, and cultural identity across the world. Westerners aren’t capable of understanding this better because of distance or such.
I don’t think I can really find the perfect answer here, but I’m skeptical whenever someone makes it seem like westerners should just be better at understanding it holistically or something. That’s ridiculous. If the split you insinuate does exist, then either we westerners know better and should inform the Palestinians (big doubts), or we should learn that they are correct and figure out how to act with thay knowledge, while protecting any and all supporting their liberation regardless of religion or race. I clearly lean towards the latter, and am sensitive to how dangerous that rhetoric can sound (is close to conflating Judaism with all individual jews and with zionisn). But I think there is some sublation possible here, and I am not the expert to find it, unfortunately.
I don’t view it as infantilizing, I view it as having grace for a victim. I would not hold it against a Palestinian if their lived experience had led them to certain reactionary views in the same way that I would hold it against somebody in the imperial core who holds those same views. And bear in mind that I would only have this grace for somebody who is in the direct line of fire, I wouldn’t feel this way if you just had Palestinian heritage but you had grown up somewhere else.
Then no, I think you’re just wrong. A victim who misunderstands their oppression should be critiqued for such for both moral and strategic reasons. They should be helped to understand it better to better resist and overthrow their oppressors. The only exception is when their misunderstanding presents no contradiction with the strategy of liberation. But I think here it is reasonable to think thats not the case. Either their oppression is supported by structure of the vast majority of Jewish institutions and thus their liberation requires a significant change in that structure, or it doesn’t and they can win by focusing only on Israeli zionists. And I think the latter is a much worse analysis.
then I guess we’ve come back to the Norm Finkelstein question. if a Palestinian who has personally been brutalized by the Israeli state said some anti-semitic shit and you were in the room with them, would you say “no actually”? I wouldn’t.
I guess it’s for similar reasons as to why I think we should have critical support for Hamas even though they are a deeply imperfect organization. We shouldn’t demand perfect victims or perfect resistance to colonialism.
Im not demanding perfect victims, I’m demanding revolutionaries. If you’ve been talking about random Palestinians as individuals, I couldn’t care less about that. Sure, they can be whatever. I’m talking about victims as organized resistance, that should be correct or corrected. The individuals should be then corrected by those structures where possible and necessary