7 ms·

Its a bit easier for Israel - if you are an outsider (99.9% of mankind) and dare criticize it anyhow, you are quickly marked either a) antisemitic or b) support

Its a bit easier for Israel - if you are an outsider (99.9% of mankind) and dare criticize it anyhow, you are quickly marked either a) antisemitic or b) supporting islamic terrorism, or some mix of those. Nobody wants to touch that with 10 foot pole in woke era.

woodruffw 5y ago
It's a bad situation: we don't currently have a good litmus test for good-faith criticisms of Israel (of which there are an overwhelming number) versus treatments of Israel as coextensive with and the mouthpiece of the Jewish diaspora (which it certainly isn't). The former is righteous criticism; the latter is gussied up antisemitism. Edit: and, to be absolutely clear, it is in Israel's continued interest for us to not have a good litmus test for the two. I believe that most international messaging and the intentional obfuscation of Israeli foreign policy behind Jewish identity demonstrates that keeping the two murky is a continued policy goal of Israel's leadership.
- eli_gottlieb 5y ago
  IMHO, it's hard to come up with a litmus test because both sides of the debate kinda like the standard motte-and-bailey structure of "criticisms of Israel". In fact, not only are the arguments often motte-and-baileys, there's often a super-bailey, a bailey for the bailey that basically invokes some kind of "I win either way" gotcha. For example: Motte: Israel's use of Palestinian "guest workers" who have no opportunity to participate in either a robust Palestinian economy or a neighboring Arab economy, even when those workers receive the Israeli minimum wage or higher, does fit into an analogy to the treatment of black South Africans under apartheid as captive cheap labor. If Israel wants to avoid being subjected to this analogy, it should simply stop exploiting Palestinian labor this way. Bailey: Israel is an apartheid state, and not exploiting Palestinian labor would just be covering it up. The only way for Israel to stop being an apartheid state is to stop being Jewish-Israeli: dissolve itself into a single state of Palestine ruled by its natural Arab majority. Super-bailey: Israel is so apartheid, white-supremacist, and settler-colonial that not exploiting Palestinian labor, were it possible or even implemented at some point in existing history, would only make it more racist (see: https://www.jacobinmag.com/2016/10/kibbutz-labor-zionism-bernie-sanders-ben-gurion/ https://www.jacobinmag.com/2016/10/kibbutz-labor-zionism-ber...). Israel owes these jobs to the Palestinians, as a precursor to the genocide reparations it will pay when it dissolves itself into a single state of Palestine ruled by its natural Arab majority. So yeah. The people who could just lay down the motte as a serious moral charge don't want to. They want the bailey, or preferably the super-bailey. Likewise, the people who could just admit to the motte and fix the problem are assured that, were they to actually do so, the goalposts would only be moved to the bailey. Then the bailey will be moved to the super-bailey.
  - ars 5y ago
    Reminds me of when the IDF was criticized for not raping Palestinians: https://whyevolutionistrue.com/2017/02/17/israeli-army-veteran-criticized-for-not-wanting-to-rape-palestinian-women/ https://whyevolutionistrue.com/2017/02/17/israeli-army-veter...
  - woodruffw 5y ago
    Who could have guessed that one of the world's oldest ethnoreligious territorial debates could be so pernicious ;)? I agree with your analysis: it's very easy to play the trump card at the onset and rest safely knowing that your position is insurmountable. Argumentatively, it's the equivalent of two opposing armies refusing to leave their respective high grounds to get down to the dirty business of war (or peace, in this case). I am not an Israeli and I have never been to Israel, so I'll spare the world from another opinion on how to solve the problem. It is only my perspective, as a diaspora Jew, that many of Israel's actions qua sovereign state are not defensible on the basic plane of human rights.
  - WaxProlix 5y ago
    I think there's a bit of distance between that motte and the initial ("standard") bailey. It isn't just the status of 'guest worker's but also the ongoing asymmetric violence, theft & active bulldozing of homes, harassment/hacking of activists' phones, military checkpoints & other core indicators of an occupied land, etc. I heard someone point out that Israel can't help but kill children in Palestine because the median age there is 20. Like what do you even say to something like that? The conversation is just totally hosed at this point. I think you're right though in a lot of ways - critics of Israel tend to fall into a trap of over-exaggeration which does their arguments no favors in some highly educated circles. Subtlety doesn't spread fervor though, and I don't think it's ever toppled regimes.
    - eli_gottlieb 5y ago
      >I think there's a bit of distance between that motte and the initial ("standard") bailey. Isn't that the point of a motte and bailey? The motte is what you think you can defend to an outgroup member without prior convictions, or even an actively skeptical outgroup member. The bailey is what you and your ingroup believe and act upon when nobody's asking you to justify yourselves. They're very different.
p1necone 5y ago
Don't blame this on "wokeness", being pro Israel at least in the USA is a right wing thing, at least from my perspective as an outsider.
- rowathay 5y ago
  US citizen here, and you are correct. The farther left you go, the more anti-Israeli and anti-Semitic sentiment you’ll find.
  - woodruffw 5y ago
    Please do not conflate opposition to the Israeli state with anti-Jewishness. There are millions of diaspora Jews living in the US who do not accept that conflation and are not fans of Israel.
    - benja123 5y ago
      This is factually incorrect. Every poll of the US Jewish community has shown that between 80% to 90% are supporters of Israel. At most a few thousand US Jews are not fans of Israel, and they are very vocal about it.
      - woodruffw 5y ago
        Polls of the “US Jewish community” tend to really be polls of people who read Israeli newspapers that do US polling. There’s a manifest bias in that. Here’s the source I usually use[1]: 45% of American Jews consider Israel essential to them. Another disjoint minority consider it “important but not essential.” Neither of these imply support for the Israeli state, and neither separates the importance of Israel qua state or political institution from Israel qua the family our loved ones of the people being polled. [1]: https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2021/05/21/u-s-jews-have-widely-differing-views-on-israel/ https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2021/05/21/u-s-jews-ha...
        benja123 5y ago
maratc 5y ago
> dare criticize it anyhow, you are quickly marked either a) antisemitic I don't think this is a good representation of anti-anti-Israel debate. The opposite of antisemitism is equality, where there is no "special" treatment of either Jews or Israel. Anyone can criticize Israel for its policies, provided they also criticize other states that have similar policies and not "single out" Israel as such. If only Israel is criticized for certain policies and other states aren't, this brings up the question of inequality. This may be perceived a sort of thinly-veiled antisemitism.
- p1necone 5y ago
  Israel gets singled out because it's a (very) close US ally and therefore should be under more criticism than the average country.
  - maratc 5y ago
    Should Israel also be under more criticism than other (very) close US allies, e.g. Saudi Arabia?
- efdee 5y ago
  But isn't that just a roundabout way of describing whataboutism?
  - yonixw 5y ago
    Whataboutism has its limits. When the far left, specifically Tankies, and left communities online, are literally being China apologists while calling Israel a genocide-apartheid-colonial country... you kind of know the logic fallacies are the other way around.
    - tsimionescu 5y ago
      Can you point any fingers? I have not heard any of the positions you mention from any leftist place I frequent - not from Jacobin, not from leftist YouTube, not from any member of "the squad" or any other leftist member of Congress. Who exactly are you accusing of being anti-Israel but pro-China?
wolverine876 5y ago
> Its a bit easier for Israel - if you are an outsider (99.9% of mankind) and dare criticize it anyhow, you are quickly marked either a) antisemitic or b) supporting islamic terrorism, or some mix of those. Nobody wants to touch that with 10 foot pole in woke era. I don't know about that connection with 'wokeness'. Progressives are frequently tagged as anti-semitic for criticizing Israel.
yyyk 5y ago
Note how nobody at the OP made his comment has mentioned a) or b) except those 'critical' of Israel, and how 'nobody wants to touch that' accurately describes how every thread about NSO has the same Israel-Arab conflict comments. Furthermore, if we look at these past related threads, we can almost always find some person with the same opinions crying victim before anything has been said. This absurd victimhood - one that places some imaginary nonexistent hurt to some outsider before either side's actual hurt - describes very effectively the mentality and connection to reality of those 'critical' voices.
weatherlite 5y ago
Oh yeah its so hard to criticize Israel, never read something bad about Israel. It's all praise and compliments in the media. Did you know most religious Jews around the world are afraid to walk with religious clothes because they're afraid to get beat up? They don't wanna be called child killers or dirty jews or something of that sort. This is happening now even in very woke cities like NY or London.
- smolder 5y ago
  How does your (dubious) claim that most jews live in such fear have anything to do with how criticism of Israel is treated? You're not really contradicting GP's claim, and to back it up, I've encountered what seem to be bad faith arguments in defense of Israel (including flavors A and B) in probably every public-facing online discussion of it. I think the only way to be sure you're having an honest conversation about Israel is to have it in person where you can better tell biased rhetoric (either for or against) from honest analysis. Though, honest analysis is also undermined ahead of time by bias and dishonesty further "upstream".
  - weatherlite 5y ago
    > How does your (dubious) claim that most jews live in such fear There are many research groups that confirmed the feeling of fear by Jews in Europe and more recently in the U.S as well, there is nothing dubious about what I said. It's become very common for Jews to not leave the house with any Jewish identity (skullcaps for instance) in Germany, France, Netherlands and now in the U.S as well. This is also confirmed by a substantial increase in antisemitic incidents throughout the Western world. In fact only a few days ago there was one in Texas that luckily didn't end in deaths. https://www.jpost.com/diaspora/antisemitism/half-of-jewish-college-students-have-hidden-their-jewish-identity-survey-679895 https://www.jpost.com/diaspora/antisemitism/half-of-jewish-c... https://www.ajc.org/news/top-3-takeaways-from-ajcs-survey-on-antisemitism-in-france https://www.ajc.org/news/top-3-takeaways-from-ajcs-survey-on... https://fra.europa.eu/sites/default/files/fra_uploads/fra-2019-2nd-survey-on-discrimination-and-hate-crime-against-jews-in-eu-ms-country-sheet-belgium_en.pdf https://fra.europa.eu/sites/default/files/fra_uploads/fra-20... Honestly it feels ridiculous to keep adding links here, this is so well researched and written about I think it's beyond debate. Now does what I say here apply to all Jews equally? Obviously if you are non religious and wear no identifying clothes, and never mention your judaism, you will be exposed to less anti semitism (if any). But that's not saying there is no problem is it?

woodruffw 5y ago

It's a bad situation: we don't currently have a good litmus test for good-faith criticisms of Israel (of which there are an overwhelming number) versus treatments of Israel as coextensive with and the mouthpiece of the Jewish diaspora (which it certainly isn't). The former is righteous criticism; the latter is gussied up antisemitism. Edit: and, to be absolutely clear, it is in Israel's continued interest for us to not have a good litmus test for the two. I believe that most international messaging and the intentional obfuscation of Israeli foreign policy behind Jewish identity demonstrates that keeping the two murky is a continued policy goal of Israel's leadership.

eli_gottlieb 5y ago
IMHO, it's hard to come up with a litmus test because both sides of the debate kinda like the standard motte-and-bailey structure of "criticisms of Israel". In fact, not only are the arguments often motte-and-baileys, there's often a super-bailey, a bailey for the bailey that basically invokes some kind of "I win either way" gotcha. For example: Motte: Israel's use of Palestinian "guest workers" who have no opportunity to participate in either a robust Palestinian economy or a neighboring Arab economy, even when those workers receive the Israeli minimum wage or higher, does fit into an analogy to the treatment of black South Africans under apartheid as captive cheap labor. If Israel wants to avoid being subjected to this analogy, it should simply stop exploiting Palestinian labor this way. Bailey: Israel is an apartheid state, and not exploiting Palestinian labor would just be covering it up. The only way for Israel to stop being an apartheid state is to stop being Jewish-Israeli: dissolve itself into a single state of Palestine ruled by its natural Arab majority. Super-bailey: Israel is so apartheid, white-supremacist, and settler-colonial that not exploiting Palestinian labor, were it possible or even implemented at some point in existing history, would only make it more racist (see: https://www.jacobinmag.com/2016/10/kibbutz-labor-zionism-bernie-sanders-ben-gurion/ https://www.jacobinmag.com/2016/10/kibbutz-labor-zionism-ber...). Israel owes these jobs to the Palestinians, as a precursor to the genocide reparations it will pay when it dissolves itself into a single state of Palestine ruled by its natural Arab majority. So yeah. The people who could just lay down the motte as a serious moral charge don't want to. They want the bailey, or preferably the super-bailey. Likewise, the people who could just admit to the motte and fix the problem are assured that, were they to actually do so, the goalposts would only be moved to the bailey. Then the bailey will be moved to the super-bailey.
- ars 5y ago
  Reminds me of when the IDF was criticized for not raping Palestinians: https://whyevolutionistrue.com/2017/02/17/israeli-army-veteran-criticized-for-not-wanting-to-rape-palestinian-women/ https://whyevolutionistrue.com/2017/02/17/israeli-army-veter...
- woodruffw 5y ago
  Who could have guessed that one of the world's oldest ethnoreligious territorial debates could be so pernicious ;)? I agree with your analysis: it's very easy to play the trump card at the onset and rest safely knowing that your position is insurmountable. Argumentatively, it's the equivalent of two opposing armies refusing to leave their respective high grounds to get down to the dirty business of war (or peace, in this case). I am not an Israeli and I have never been to Israel, so I'll spare the world from another opinion on how to solve the problem. It is only my perspective, as a diaspora Jew, that many of Israel's actions qua sovereign state are not defensible on the basic plane of human rights.
- WaxProlix 5y ago
  I think there's a bit of distance between that motte and the initial ("standard") bailey. It isn't just the status of 'guest worker's but also the ongoing asymmetric violence, theft & active bulldozing of homes, harassment/hacking of activists' phones, military checkpoints & other core indicators of an occupied land, etc. I heard someone point out that Israel can't help but kill children in Palestine because the median age there is 20. Like what do you even say to something like that? The conversation is just totally hosed at this point. I think you're right though in a lot of ways - critics of Israel tend to fall into a trap of over-exaggeration which does their arguments no favors in some highly educated circles. Subtlety doesn't spread fervor though, and I don't think it's ever toppled regimes.
  - eli_gottlieb 5y ago
    >I think there's a bit of distance between that motte and the initial ("standard") bailey. Isn't that the point of a motte and bailey? The motte is what you think you can defend to an outgroup member without prior convictions, or even an actively skeptical outgroup member. The bailey is what you and your ingroup believe and act upon when nobody's asking you to justify yourselves. They're very different.

p1necone 5y ago

Don't blame this on "wokeness", being pro Israel at least in the USA is a right wing thing, at least from my perspective as an outsider.

rowathay 5y ago
US citizen here, and you are correct. The farther left you go, the more anti-Israeli and anti-Semitic sentiment you’ll find.
- woodruffw 5y ago
  Please do not conflate opposition to the Israeli state with anti-Jewishness. There are millions of diaspora Jews living in the US who do not accept that conflation and are not fans of Israel.
  - benja123 5y ago
    This is factually incorrect. Every poll of the US Jewish community has shown that between 80% to 90% are supporters of Israel. At most a few thousand US Jews are not fans of Israel, and they are very vocal about it.
    - woodruffw 5y ago
      Polls of the “US Jewish community” tend to really be polls of people who read Israeli newspapers that do US polling. There’s a manifest bias in that. Here’s the source I usually use[1]: 45% of American Jews consider Israel essential to them. Another disjoint minority consider it “important but not essential.” Neither of these imply support for the Israeli state, and neither separates the importance of Israel qua state or political institution from Israel qua the family our loved ones of the people being polled. [1]: https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2021/05/21/u-s-jews-have-widely-differing-views-on-israel/ https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2021/05/21/u-s-jews-ha...
      - benja123 5y ago

maratc 5y ago

> dare criticize it anyhow, you are quickly marked either a) antisemitic I don't think this is a good representation of anti-anti-Israel debate. The opposite of antisemitism is equality, where there is no "special" treatment of either Jews or Israel. Anyone can criticize Israel for its policies, provided they also criticize other states that have similar policies and not "single out" Israel as such. If only Israel is criticized for certain policies and other states aren't, this brings up the question of inequality. This may be perceived a sort of thinly-veiled antisemitism.

p1necone 5y ago
Israel gets singled out because it's a (very) close US ally and therefore should be under more criticism than the average country.
- maratc 5y ago
  Should Israel also be under more criticism than other (very) close US allies, e.g. Saudi Arabia?
efdee 5y ago
But isn't that just a roundabout way of describing whataboutism?
- yonixw 5y ago
  Whataboutism has its limits. When the far left, specifically Tankies, and left communities online, are literally being China apologists while calling Israel a genocide-apartheid-colonial country... you kind of know the logic fallacies are the other way around.
  - tsimionescu 5y ago
    Can you point any fingers? I have not heard any of the positions you mention from any leftist place I frequent - not from Jacobin, not from leftist YouTube, not from any member of "the squad" or any other leftist member of Congress. Who exactly are you accusing of being anti-Israel but pro-China?

wolverine876 5y ago

> Its a bit easier for Israel - if you are an outsider (99.9% of mankind) and dare criticize it anyhow, you are quickly marked either a) antisemitic or b) supporting islamic terrorism, or some mix of those. Nobody wants to touch that with 10 foot pole in woke era. I don't know about that connection with 'wokeness'. Progressives are frequently tagged as anti-semitic for criticizing Israel.

yyyk 5y ago

Note how nobody at the OP made his comment has mentioned a) or b) except those 'critical' of Israel, and how 'nobody wants to touch that' accurately describes how every thread about NSO has the same Israel-Arab conflict comments. Furthermore, if we look at these past related threads, we can almost always find some person with the same opinions crying victim before anything has been said. This absurd victimhood - one that places some imaginary nonexistent hurt to some outsider before either side's actual hurt - describes very effectively the mentality and connection to reality of those 'critical' voices.

weatherlite 5y ago

Oh yeah its so hard to criticize Israel, never read something bad about Israel. It's all praise and compliments in the media. Did you know most religious Jews around the world are afraid to walk with religious clothes because they're afraid to get beat up? They don't wanna be called child killers or dirty jews or something of that sort. This is happening now even in very woke cities like NY or London.

smolder 5y ago
How does your (dubious) claim that most jews live in such fear have anything to do with how criticism of Israel is treated? You're not really contradicting GP's claim, and to back it up, I've encountered what seem to be bad faith arguments in defense of Israel (including flavors A and B) in probably every public-facing online discussion of it. I think the only way to be sure you're having an honest conversation about Israel is to have it in person where you can better tell biased rhetoric (either for or against) from honest analysis. Though, honest analysis is also undermined ahead of time by bias and dishonesty further "upstream".
- weatherlite 5y ago
  > How does your (dubious) claim that most jews live in such fear There are many research groups that confirmed the feeling of fear by Jews in Europe and more recently in the U.S as well, there is nothing dubious about what I said. It's become very common for Jews to not leave the house with any Jewish identity (skullcaps for instance) in Germany, France, Netherlands and now in the U.S as well. This is also confirmed by a substantial increase in antisemitic incidents throughout the Western world. In fact only a few days ago there was one in Texas that luckily didn't end in deaths. https://www.jpost.com/diaspora/antisemitism/half-of-jewish-college-students-have-hidden-their-jewish-identity-survey-679895 https://www.jpost.com/diaspora/antisemitism/half-of-jewish-c... https://www.ajc.org/news/top-3-takeaways-from-ajcs-survey-on-antisemitism-in-france https://www.ajc.org/news/top-3-takeaways-from-ajcs-survey-on... https://fra.europa.eu/sites/default/files/fra_uploads/fra-2019-2nd-survey-on-discrimination-and-hate-crime-against-jews-in-eu-ms-country-sheet-belgium_en.pdf https://fra.europa.eu/sites/default/files/fra_uploads/fra-20... Honestly it feels ridiculous to keep adding links here, this is so well researched and written about I think it's beyond debate. Now does what I say here apply to all Jews equally? Obviously if you are non religious and wear no identifying clothes, and never mention your judaism, you will be exposed to less anti semitism (if any). But that's not saying there is no problem is it?