Zionist moves to progressive neighborhood, is surprised when people are progressive ( hexbear.net )

Their classmates had left them alone with teachers, who they suspected would think less of them for having stayed put. At every stop in their education in this progressive community, they had learned about a world divided between oppressors and the oppressed—and now they felt that they were being accused of being the bad guys, despite having nothing to do with events on the other side of the world, and despite the fact that Hamas had initiated the current war by invading Israeli communities and murdering an estimated 1,200 people.

It is bad to drag random people into your vitriol just because they share the same xyz as oppressors, but the author frames the article in a way that suggests the students are Zionists and support Israel. If that is the case, then yes, you literally are the bad guys. The image of the teacher just standing there and asking “so… why aren’t you ditching class with everyone else? It’s not because you support Israel… right?” is very funny. Isn’t it odd that other progressive students managed to conclude that Israel is a genocidal apartheid state while this author still insists it’s not?

American Jews leveled against Israel, the anger was born of love. Eight in 10 described Israel as either “essential” or “important” to their Jewish identity.

…. That’s the problem. Zionist “criticism” of Israel is no different than a a white supremacist critique against Nazi Germany or South Africa. It’s out of love. Zionists want to invoke anti semitism but consider non Zionist Jews as subhumans who hate themselves.

Among the brutal epiphanies of October 7 was this: A disconcertingly large number of Israel’s critics on the left did not share that vision of peaceful coexistence, or believe Jews had a right to a nation of their own.

It’s almost as if we have nearly 100 years of history showing us that Israel doesn’t want peaceful coexistence. It’s almost as if this fake country was imposed onto a population by a colonial government in aid of a colonial movement. It doesn’t matter how noble or progressive the goal is. Communists have been criticizing other communists forever now for imposing communism in countries without considering the local conditions, and rightfully so.

In Philadelphia, a mob descended on a falafel restaurant, chanting about the Israeli American co-owner’s complicity in genocide

Yes. Where are they wrong? Was Henry Ford not complicit in genocide and imperialism?

Liberal Jews once celebrated Israel as the lone democracy in a distinctly undemocratic region. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s coalition of theocrats and messianists seems bent on shredding the basis for that claim. But many governments in the world share these undesirable traits. Still, no one calls for the eradication of Hungary or El Salvador or India. No one defaces Chinese restaurants in San Francisco because Beijing imprisons Uyghurs in concentration camps and occupies Tibet.

1. The Soviets attempted to crush the fascist Hungarian movements taking over the state
2. Various communist guerrilla groups attempted to eradicate the fascist Salvadoran state
3. Various Indian Maoists are attempting (and failing lol) to eradicate the fascist Indian state
4. Asian people were literally beaten, harassed, and killed in the early years of the COVID pandemic. And Chinese students and professors are routinely harassed and were arrested on trumped up espionage charges. If the owners of these restaurants were publicly proud CPC members - which is no different than being an Israeli-American citizen who lives in both countries and owns a business - I imagine their shops would be firebombed.

On December 4, the Berkeley Rent Stabilization Board voted to endorse a cease-fire.

I don’t know why he included this as some sort of “Look at how whacky and kooky this city is! Even the rent stabilization board condemns Israel!” BDS is illegal in the US, and there are landlords who demand you swear that you do not support BDS. Hell, you even receive aid in Texas without pledging to be against BDS.

The genius of America was that it didn’t coerce any minority group into abandoning its marks of difference.

I know he’s analyzing a different person’s thoughts here, but he no doubt believes this nonsense lol.

In the Golden Age, Jews in America embraced Israel. Enjoying their political and cultural ascendance, they looked to the new Jewish state not as a necessary refuge—they were more than comfortable on the Upper West Side and in Squirrel Hill and Brentwood—but as a powerful rebuttal to the old stereotypes about Jewish weakness, especially after the Israeli military’s victory in the Six-Day War of 1967. As The New York Times’ Thomas Friedman has put it, American Jews “said to themselves, ‘My God, look who we are! We have power! We do not fit the Shylock image, we are ace pilots; we are not the cowering timid Jews who get sand kicked in their faces, we are tank commanders.’ ”

This guy is going to mention a bunch of post war dates and figures and events, and the Six Day War and, but he won’t mention how Israel came to be or why this six day war even occurred. Also, joyfully quoting Thomas Friedman? You can basically discard the author of this article as a fascist just from that alone. The Zionists replaced the image of a weak Jew with the insistence that they should be genocidal. Incredible thing to be proud of.

the jewish vacation from history ended on September 11, 2001. It didn’t seem that way at the time. But the terror attacks opened an era of perpetual crisis, which became fertile soil where the hatred of Jews took root. Though Osama bin Laden claimed credit for the plot, that didn’t stop some people from trying to shift the blame. One theory explained in exquisitely absurd detail how Mossad, the Israeli intelligence service, had toppled the Twin Towers.

But there was also a more sophisticated version of this conspiracy theory, one that had a patina of academic respectability. On the left, it became commonplace to fulminate against the neoconservatives, warmongering intellectuals said to be whispering in the ear of the American establishment, urging the invasion of Iraq and war against Iran.

This wasn’t fully untethered from reality: The neocons were a group of largely Jewish think-tank denizens and policy operatives, some of whom held top posts in President George W. Bush’s administration. But the angry talk about neocons also trafficked in dangerous old tropes. It inflated their role in world events and ascribed the worst motives to them. Men like Paul Wolfowitz, the second-highest-ranking official in Bush’s Pentagon, and William Kristol, the editor of The Weekly Standard, were portrayed by critics on the left as bamboozlers undermining the national interest in service of their stealth loyalty to Israel.

I don’t even know what to say about this. I was in my dad’s balls when 9/11 happened. Did this “theory” of the WOT being a secret allegiance to Israel become an actual talking point in leftist circles, or is this “progressive” bastard just defending Bush era neocons just because they happen to be Jewish?

In 2007, Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer, professors at Harvard and the University of Chicago, respectively, spelled out what others implied in The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy, a book published by a venerable house, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, that soon arrived on the New York Times best-seller list. This was the opposite of the schmaltzy Streisand tribute—the Jewish state as not a friend but a villain surreptitiously manipulating American power to further its own ends.

It’s wrong to portray Israel as some puppeteer, but only because it’s a lapdog for the US. But lapdogs are still dogs. You don’t want it to bite you, which is why so many politicians and businesses are go out of their way to explicitly support Israel because American support for Israel means weapons, and Israeli support for America comes in lobbying. They were never a friend, and it didn’t need some Ivy League lanyards to spell that out.

After Israel captured the Gaza Strip and the West Bank in 1967, many came to view the Jewish state as a vile oppressor. (This was well before right-wing Israeli governments saturated the occupied territories with Jewish settlers.)

This guy keeps saying “Jewish” state as if that’s the universal primary issue with critics of Israel. This was the fucking 60s no less. Surely they were other parallel events going on that made people think, “huh, these guys are also occupying a foreign nation and oppressing its people” instead of “WOW A BUNCH OF JEWS RUN A COUNTRY???”

Even as Israel’s shocking victory in the Six-Day War, 22 years after the liberation of Auschwitz, filled American Jews with pride and confidence, a meaningful portion of America’s left turned on Israel.

Lol. This is just a vintage version of the events with his kids’ school. Zionists are surprised that progressive people who learn about and see oppression are opposed to… oppression.

The turmoil of the late ’60s presaged the rupture that has occurred over the past decade or so. A new ideology has taken hold on the left, with a reordered hierarchy of concerns and an even greater skepticism of the old liberal ideals.

It’s almost as if liberalism is a sham and they saw liberal “peaceful” foreign policies with their own eyes. Through the latter half of the article, this guy gushes about Jewish figures embracing America and liberalism and how much the country values liberties and individualism. Even if one wants to excuse the people back then for whatever reason, how can anyone living in 2024 accept these ideas as valid when they can flip through hundreds of years of Jews being persecuted in this country and be proud to be an American liberal? This country places the same importance and protections on Nazi speech and Jewish prayers. Fuck off with your liberalism.

Even before Trump took office, the Resistance announced a mass protest set to defiantly descend on the capital, what organizers called the Women’s March on Washington. In an early planning meeting, at a New York restaurant, an activist named Vanessa Wruble explained that her Judaism was the motivating force in her political engagement. But Wruble’s autobiographical statement of intent earned her a rebuke. According to Wruble, two members of the inner circle planning the march told her that Jews needed to confront their own history of exploiting Black and brown people.

This author laments the days of good ol’ days of liberalism even as he stares into the byproducts of said liberalism. And the people who participated in this “resistance?” I promise at least 90% of them are cheering on the IDF and Biden. You’re not alone you fucking loser.

The intersectional left self-consciously rebelled against the liberalism that had animated so much of institutional Judaism, which fought to install civil liberties and civil rights enforced by a disinterested state that would protect every minority equally

Holy shit. Not only does the author conflate Zionism with Judaism, but he conflates fucking American liberalism with Judaism lmao

This new iteration of the left considered the idea of neutrality—whether objectivity in journalism or color blindness in the courts—as a guise for white supremacy. Tolerance, the old keyword of cultural pluralism, was a form of complicity. What the world actually needed was intolerance, a more active confrontation with hatred. In the historian Ibram X. Kendi’s formulation, an individual could choose to be anti-racist or racist, an activist or a collaborator. Or as Linda Sarsour, an activist of Palestinian descent and a co-chair of the Women’s March, put it, “We are not here to be bystanders.” To be a member of this new left in good moral standing, it was necessary to challenge oppression in all its incarnations. And Israel was now definitively an oppressor.

chickpea now you’re getting it! (Minus the “women’s march” because that was liberal nonsense that was nothing more than bystanders)

The American left hadn’t always imposed such a litmus test. During the years of the Oslo peace process, groups such as Students for Justice in Palestine had no problem attending events with liberal Zionists. Back then, the debate was over the borders of Israel, not over the fact of its existence. But that peace process collapsed during the last days of the Clinton administration, and whatever good faith had existed in that brief era of summits and handshakes dissipated. Hamas unleashed a wave of suicide bombings in the Second Intifada. And in the aftermath of those deadly attacks, successive right-wing Israeli governments presided over repressive policies in the West Bank and an inhumane blockade of Gaza.

It’s almost as if colonialism cannot be addressed with debates and handshakes. It’s almost as if colonialism breeds violence from the colonized and the colonizer. Crazy!!

Palestinian activists and their allies began the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions movement, pushing universities to divest from Israel. The new goal was no longer coexistence between Arabs and Jews. It was to turn Israel into an international pariah, to stop working with all Israeli institutions—not just the military, but also symphonies, theater groups, and universities. In that spirit, it became fashionable for critics of Israel to identify as “anti-Zionist.”

Buddy. Calling for fucking Israeli theaters and symphonies to be boycotted has nothing to do with the coexistence of Arabs and Jews lol

At the University of Vermont and SUNY New Paltz, groups that helped sexual-assault survivors were accused of purging pro-Israel students from their ranks. “If you don’t support Palestinian liberation you don’t support survivors,” the Vermont group exclaimed. Years before October 7, students at Tufts University, outside Boston, and the University of Southern California moved to impeach elected Jews in student government over their support for Israel’s existence.

1. Good
2. Did they impeach Jews, or did they impeach Zionists? Something tells me if their names were Richard Hamilton IV with blue eyes and were pro Israel, they would’ve been impeached as well

Among the primary targets of the activists were the Hillel centers present on most college campuses. These centers occasionally coordinate trips to Israel and, on some campuses, sponsor student groups supportive of Israel. Those facts led pro-Palestinian activists to describe Hillel as an arm of the “Israeli war machine.” At SUNY Stony Brook, activists sought to expel Hillel from campus, arguing, “If there were Nazis, white nationalists, and KKK members on campus, would their identity have to be accepted and respected?” At Rice University, in Texas, an LGBTQ group severed ties with Hillel because it allegedly made students feel unsafe. What made this incident darkly comic is that Hillel couldn’t be more progressive on issues of sexual freedom. What made it so worrying is that Hillel’s practical purpose is not to defend Israel, but to provide Shabbat dinners and a space for ritual and prayer. To condemn Hillel is to condemn Jewish religious life on campus.

Good. It’s pretty fucking clear that the students had problems with the centers providing trips to Israel, not because it was observing Judaism. Simply apologize for the trips and promise to never offer them again and you’ll be left alone the problem is with the support of the genocidal state of Israel.

Alright I’m getting tired of reading this drivel. I’m skimming the endings now.

Perhaps even more ominously, Massel uncovered incidents in which teachers expressed hostility toward Jewish students. One Israeli student told Massel that a professor had once said to him, “It’s such a shame that your people survived just in order to perpetuate another genocide.”

I can see how “your people” can be interpreted as blaming Jews altogether. It’s unlikely there were no other Jewish student in the class, so why did he say it to an Israeli student specifically, and not any of the other Jews in his class or elsewhere? If a professor is so brazen to say this shit, surely more Jewish colleagues or students would’ve said something to you???

When I made my own calls to students and faculty, I heard similar stories, especially instances of teaching assistants seizing their bully pulpit to sermonize. One TA wrote to their students, “We are watching genocide unfold in real time, after a systematic 75+ years of oppression of the Palestinian people … It feels ridiculous to hold section today, but I’ll see you all on Zoom in a bit.”

Ok that’s a little funny

One student left class in the middle of a professor’s broadside against Israel in a required course in the Middle East–studies department. Afterward, he sent an email to the professor explaining his departure, to which the professor wrote back, saying they could discuss it in class later. When the student returned, the professor read his email aloud to the whole class, and invited everyone to discuss the exchange. It felt like an act of deliberate humiliation.

point-and-laugh-2

There’s a number that haunts me. In 2022, the Tufts political scientist Eitan Hersh conducted a comprehensive study of Jewish life on American college campuses, which surveyed both Jews and Gentiles. Hersh found that on campuses with a relatively high proportion of Jewish students, nearly one in five non-Jewish students said they “wouldn’t want to be friends with someone who supports the existence of Israel as a Jewish state.” They were saying, in essence, that they couldn’t be friends with the majority of Jews.

Bro I promise 99% of people don’t know what the fuck the demographics of their school is aside from “mostly white” or “not too white.” Most fucking Americans and westerners support Israel. In fact, there are more Christian Zionists than Jewish Zionists. Would they suddenly be friends with them just because they’re not Jewish even though they support Israel nonetheless?