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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.
I think the broader point of this and future shitshows of this type is that anti-Zionist Jews aren’t meaningfully organized. Zionist Jews as a collective have a military, a global media apparatus, and nukes. Anti-Zionist Jews have nothing. Arguing about whether Jews are a monolith or not misses the point.
You could have a situation where 70% of Jews are against Zionism, but if the 30% are properly organized and the 70% are completely atomized individuals, the 30% will steamroll through the 70%. Reality is more like the reverse with at least 70% of Jews having global Zionist networks that have a ubiquitous presence in Jewish communal life and the sub-30% of Jews having nothing outside of a few select orgs that are utterly irrelevant in Jewish communal life. Zionists completely control synagogues and yeshivas. Think of something like Chabad and that’s not even the full extent of Zionist presence within Jewish life.
Since al-Aqsa Flood, I haven’t seen a case of a God-fearing rabbi expelling the Zionists from their synagogue lest their perverse desecration of Judaism further offends God. However, I’ve seen plenty of cases where rabbis who are otherwise sympathetic towards Palestinians are cowed towards silence or rabbis trying to push some bullshit radical centrism in order to not split the congregation. Instead of seizing Jewish communal life from the Zionists with the ultimate goal of expelling them from Jewish communities, I mostly see anti-Zionist Jews either practice their Judaism in silence or simply stop practicing Judaism altogether. Far from expelling Zionists from Jewish communities, it’s the Zionists who are expelling anti-Zionist Jews from Jewish communities.
I mostly see a third option: form explicitly anti-zionist Jewish organizations that oppose but are much too weak to do anything about the massive Jewish institutions that are zionist to their core. There’s a tiny number of cool af rabbis running radical collectives. But their position in Judaism mirrors any small, marginalized would-be revolutionary movement: aspirational
Schisms don’t happen in a day. Hard to organize when your entire cultural identity is weaponized against you by both your own community AND opportunistic reactionary outsiders. Jews have a long spiritual tradition of sticking together in order to survive, too, so it’s doubly harsh to try and organize what is essentially a schism within the faith, and it’s not even just a faith but an ethnicity/culture. How the fuck are secular Jews supposed to kick people out of a congregation? It’s incoherent to suggest it.