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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 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