15 ms·

It depends on "Israeli what". Anti Israeli government: It's not antisemitic. Anti Israeli people: It's antisemitic.

rushingcreek 3y ago
It’s more complicated than that. Criticizing Israeli settlements in the West Bank is not antisemitic. But suggesting that Israel has no right to exist as a Jewish state is antisemitic as it implies ethnic cleansing. Both are arguably criticisms of the Israeli government.
- chimeracoder 3y ago
  > But suggesting that Israel has no right to exist as a Jewish state is antisemitic as it implies ethnic cleansing. You've got it backwards. The only way for Israel to exist as an ethnostate is through an ethnic cleansing. That's not specific to Israel; that's inherent to the concept of an ethnostate. The assumption that Israel can only exist as an ethnostate is itself a political assertion - it's the hallmark of right-wing Zionism.
  - fnimick 3y ago
    > The assumption that Israel can only exist as an ethnostate is itself a political assertion - it's the hallmark of right-wing Zionism. I had a discussion at length on this with some very historically learned people (far more than me) shortly after the attack, with the context of Biden's response. The underlying cultural memory is that of the Holocaust, and of thousands of years of oppression and pogroms before, where nobody would ever help the Jewish people if they were in danger. Thus the belief that the second the Jewish people became a political minority in Israel, they would be immediately and inevitably subject to ethnic cleansing and persecution by the government. Jewish supremacy is viewed as the only way for Jews to be safe in a world full of people who either hate them or don't care enough to help. This explains Biden's "bear hug" diplomatic approach as well, which as much as it was directed to Netanyahu, was actually directed at the Israeli population (and he is now much more popular than Netanyahu is, from approval polling). The only way to defuse the situation long-term is to convince the Jewish people that if they accept peaceful co-existence without enforced ethnic supremacy and apartheid; and the only way to do that is to convince them that if they are threatened, that they will not be left to die alone as they feel they have been so many times before.
    - chimeracoder 3y ago
      > The underlying cultural memory is that of the Holocaust, and of thousands of years of oppression and pogroms before, where nobody would ever help the Jewish people if they were in danger. Thus the belief that the second the Jewish people became a political minority in Israel, they would be immediately and inevitably subject to ethnic cleansing and persecution by the government. Jewish supremacy is viewed as the only way for Jews to be safe in a world full of people who either hate them or don't care enough to help. You're describing the reason that some Jews say they support the creation of an ethnostate. That's still an ethnostate, and treating Israel as synonymous with a Jewish ethnostate is the defining right-wing characteristic of Zionism. It's important to note that what you're describing is not representative of the general opinion of Jews, either globally or in Israel. Many Jewish Holocaust survivors and their descendants oppose the creation of an ethnostate through ethnic cleansing.
      - deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]
      - Natsu 3y ago
        It's weird to describe Israel as an "ethnostate" when it has a large population of Israeli Arabs who live there peacefully that nobody is trying to get rid of. If Palestine wants to live in peace, they can just stop attacking, yet all we seem to hear are calls for Israel to stop resisting. And it's odd to worry about what's "right wing" while Hamas wants the creation of a new caliphate that constantly chants about how they'd like to remove all the Jews from the area between the Jordan river and the Mediterranean sea. mirroring the ethnic cleansing done by many nearby Islamic states in the recent past. But it is true that the average Israeli does not want to ethnically cleanse anyone, because if they did want that, Israel could have simply destroyed all of Palestine a long time ago.
        lazyasciiart 3y ago
        What attacks are coming from the West Bank that Israel is resisting?
  - rendall 3y ago
    > The only way for Israel to exist as an ethnostate is through an ethnic cleansing. I don't understand that logic. Would you mind explaining? Do you live in North America? I identify this perspective with Americans and Canadians and not, say, Norwegians.
    - lazyasciiart 3y ago
      This one seems very straightforward to me, so to make an explanation useful, perhaps we need some shared definitions 1. ethnostate: a country that values/prioritizes residents being of a particular ethnicity defined in law and either forbids people of other ethnicities from living there or discourages them by denying them equal rights 2. ethnic cleansing: (EU definition) Rendering an area ethnically homogeneous by using force or intimidation to remove from a given area persons of another ethnic or religious group Perhaps you are saying that legal discrimination doesn't count as intimidation and therefore denying rights based on ethnicity is not ethnic cleansing? (I would disagree). Or are you using different definitions altogether?
      - rendall 3y ago
        What makes discussion of this difficult is that whenever someone neutrally discusses this, someone invariably jumps in, angry, with an uncharitable whatabout. Please ignore it when it happens. When you dig into the history of the region, as an interesting topic in its own right, without reference to any current conflict, without motivation to prove any particular side right or wrong, just letting history tell its own story, some patterns emerge. I'll give you the Cliff Notes the way it seems to me, a non-Jew American, culturally leftists. If I'm wrong I'll hear a calm, considered, good-faith-well-sourced-not-weird fact I may not be aware of. To answer your question, when Israel started, the new state invited its Arab neighbors to participate and this invitation was sincere. This fact is elided quite a lot, but it's true and I can show you receipts. This directly relates to your point. As you might imagine, Zionist Jews were really not interested in fighting. Many Arabs agreed to participate in the new state, stayed, were peaceful and their descendents are full Israeli citizens today. There was no intention for an "ethno-state" by point 2 of your definition at this time, but there was a Zionist desire to defend themselves. The borders of the new democratic state did demographically put Jews in charge, but there wasn't a desire to expel Arabs. I know, hard to fathom, but it's true. Nevertheless, Arabs were expelled. From the Zionist perspective, they weren't expelled because they were Arabs, but because they participated in a genocidal war with the stated intention to expell and kill Jews. Where did that intention come from? Surely the Zionists did something to deserve that hate? Stole land? After really looking at it, from my Western, American perspective, they did no more than Jews did when they immigrated to my own country: start businesses, purchase land, prosper to the envy of some of their neighbors. If you can demonstrate that Zionists literally stole land, lmk. However, instead of emigrating to the Lower East Side, which was rough but still more or less had the rule of law, Zionists immigrated to a lawless backwater of the dying Ottoman Empire where they were were the target of explicitly genocidal attacks by Muslim Arabs. These attacks spilled over to historically Jewish villages, such as Hebron. So, when I hear "Zionists stole land" I hear "Micks stole our jobs" and not "Boers violently displaced native tribes from fertile farmland". It's a better analogy for what actually happened. Today, Israel controls lands, the West Bank and Gaza, populated by the descendents of the people who tried to ethnically cleanse them on first go. No one else wants that land and its people. Not Egypt, not Jordan, not Lebanon. Now it's on Israel to try to deal with this.
- KittenInABox 3y ago
  I actually wonder how to navigate this actually. Like, I have seen criticism of things Israel has enacted in order to ensure that the population is a majority-Jewish, Jewish-own-all-the-political-power. Is that antisemetic to argue against anti-arab laws, if those laws are in place to ensure that Israel is a jewish state first and foremost, as opposed to Israel being a jewish state, if that makes sense?
  - rendall 3y ago
    What anti-Arab laws?
- ok123456 3y ago
  Why should we in the West support a religious ethnostate? No government has the divine right to exist. Governments succeed or fail by the will of those who live there.
  - simonh 3y ago
    Israel has a population of around 2 million Arab Muslims. They have full citizenship, serve in the police and army, are represented in the Knesset, serve as judges and one of them sits on the Supreme Court. One of them won the Miss Israel competition a while back. Does that sound much like a Jewish ethnostate? Do you know what the Jewish populations were in Arab states back in the 1940s? It was about 800,000. It’s only the fact that the state of Israel existed, and gave them somewhere to flee to, that so many managed to escape with their lives. It is true there were expulsions of palestinians during the 1948 invasion by the Arab armies, which is abhorrent, but this was in the context of a concerted, explicitly declared attempt at mass ethnic cleansing of the Jews. They were literally fighting to exist. Then-Secretary-General of the Arab League Abdul Rahman Azzam, said, "This will be a war of destruction and a great massacre." Other Arab leaders made it clear they intended to kill or expel the entire Jewish population, a policy which they actually carried out in their own countries. So we know this wasn’t just rhetoric, where they could do it, they did.
    - ok123456 3y ago
      It's codified in law they're second-class citizens. See the "Nation State Law". The Nakba.
      - simonh 3y ago
        The legal code and constitution also guarantees equal rights under the law. Can you cite an example of an Israeli Arab being denied any legal right due to that law? Don’t get me wrong, I wish that law didn’t exist. It’s a mistake, but it’s mostly posturing by the Jewish nationalist faction. The nakba was an appalling catastrophe. It shouldn’t have happened. But then the Arab invasion with the explicit aim of killing and expelling the Jews shouldn’t have happened either. Nor should the expulsion of 800,000 Jews from Arab countries. They were all terrible disasters. The world would be a better place if they hadn’t happened, but they did. Now we live in the world of today. Are the Arab countries going to let the descendants of their Jewish populations back, and return the property and land confiscated from them? Are they going to grant them citizenship and let them serve in the police, army and judiciary with full democratic rights?
- bluish29 3y ago
  It is interesting that the widespread view of isreali people that Palestinians doesn't have right to have a state is not viewed as bad as the other way around. Ironically it can be called antisemitism too. Because they are Semitic too [1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semitic_people https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semitic_people
  - Aloisius 3y ago
    That's a classic etymological fallacy. Antisemitism is a word that was coined in the 19th century specifically as anti-Jew. The fact that Semite today can now refer to non-Jews doesn't mean Antisemitism refers to non-Jews as well.
    - bluish29 3y ago
      I understand that and that is why I said "ironically" and "it can" while technically not "antisemitism" as most people define it. It can be viewed as valid use of languages, because well for a fact jews are not the only semetic people. But anyway that wasn't my actual point anyway and you picked this over the main point. It is still valid, and you are free to pick a name specifically for it. Antiarab, antipalestanian or whatever you want.
- dml2135 3y ago
  Why is saying Israeli should not be a Jewish state any different than saying the US should not be a Christian state?
  - unholythree 3y ago
    Well Jews are a cultural and ethnic group as well; so saying Israel shouldn’t be a Jewish state is similar to saying Japan shouldn’t be a Japanese state. It was explicitly established to create (or some would say reclaimed) a Jewish homeland. It’s Jewishness is central to it’s raison d'être.
    - dml2135 3y ago
      I’m not completely bought into your comparison, but running with it for a second — If one were to challenge the notion that the Japanese state should privilege ethnic Japanese over other people living in its borders, no I would not consider that position to be “anti-Japanese”. Similarly, I don’t understand is how expressing the personal view that all of the people living in the territory of Israel — Jews and non-Jews alike — would be better off living in a secular state, is somehow akin to anti-semitism.
    - sterlind 3y ago
      Japan isn't an officially Shinto state, afaik. And it wouldn't be wrong to criticize its subjugation of the indigenous Ainu people. I think that calling for a multi-ethnic, secular Japanese state is fair.
      - dijit 3y ago
        Japan isn’t officially a Japanese country? Come on mate, thats possibly the most asinine and distasteful argument I have seen on this site.
        bluish29 3y ago
        The comment said > Japan isn't an officially Shinto state You are just misquoting the comment
- Dig1t 3y ago
  Genuinely curious, why does it imply ethnic cleansing? Why does it need to be a binary choice between ethnostate and complete ethnic cleansing? We have seen that in the western world that we do not abide the idea of ethnostates, e.g. it is considered bigoted to oppose unlimited migration from refugee countries into Europe or North America. Likewise it is not okay to say "only X race or Y religion can be in government". Why is it okay in the case of Israel? Jews lived and existed before Israel was established and they were not ethnically cleansed. I don't really have a dog in this fight and I'm not trying to controversial, I'm genuinely curious because the choice you offer seems like a false dichotomy.
  - orthecreedence 3y ago
    [flagged]
    - gr48thecat 3y ago
      [flagged]
- khazhoux 3y ago
  > Criticizing Israeli settlements in the West Bank is not antisemitic. But suggesting that Israel has no right to exist as a Jewish state is antisemitic as it implies ethnic cleansing. This is precisely an example of the conflation of "anti-Israel" with "anti-semitic." It is entirely possibly for a person to disagree with the geopolitical decisions and military actions that led to the formation of Israel, without harboring ill will against anyone for being Jewish.
- catlover76 3y ago
  > But suggesting that Israel has no right to exist as a Jewish state is antisemitic as it implies ethnic cleansing. I've seen very few serious declarations that Israel has no right to exist. I have seen even fewer genuine existential threats to it in the past 2 or 3 decades, and that's not to discount how big of a deal or how sad an event Hamas's attack was. But I have seen a lot of pro-Israel voices, e.g. at recent Congressional PR-stunt hearings, aggressively question anyone who doesn't bow in deference to their narrative whether they agree Israel has a right to exist. That whole line of tactic is a massive distraction from the question those voices don't want asked, either of themselves or anyone else, which is "do you think Israel has the right to do what it is currently doing to the Palestinians?"
- mkoubaa 3y ago
  Is saying that "no state has a right to exist, that they exist with the permission of the governed" antisemitic too?
- r00fus 3y ago
  > But suggesting that Israel has no right to exist as a Jewish state is antisemitic as it implies ethnic cleansing. As opposed to what's happening right now - which is ethnic cleansing in both Gaza and the West Bank. Netanyahu wants to "thin out the Gaza population" and is asking for the US and other countries to accept refugees after Israel destroys the place. One is speech, and the other is action - one is being argued about, while the other is actively happening with 20k+ deaths.
- Qem 3y ago
  > But suggesting that Israel has no right to exist as a Jewish state is antisemitic as it implies ethnic cleansing. Does it really implies it, or just the end of apartheid?
neoromantique 3y ago
[flagged]
- giraffe_lady 3y ago
  [flagged]
jesusofnazarath 3y ago
[dead]

It’s more complicated than that. Criticizing Israeli settlements in the West Bank is not antisemitic. But suggesting that Israel has no right to exist as a Jewish state is antisemitic as it implies ethnic cleansing. Both are arguably criticisms of the Israeli government.

chimeracoder 3y ago
> But suggesting that Israel has no right to exist as a Jewish state is antisemitic as it implies ethnic cleansing. You've got it backwards. The only way for Israel to exist as an ethnostate is through an ethnic cleansing. That's not specific to Israel; that's inherent to the concept of an ethnostate. The assumption that Israel can only exist as an ethnostate is itself a political assertion - it's the hallmark of right-wing Zionism.
- fnimick 3y ago
  > The assumption that Israel can only exist as an ethnostate is itself a political assertion - it's the hallmark of right-wing Zionism. I had a discussion at length on this with some very historically learned people (far more than me) shortly after the attack, with the context of Biden's response. The underlying cultural memory is that of the Holocaust, and of thousands of years of oppression and pogroms before, where nobody would ever help the Jewish people if they were in danger. Thus the belief that the second the Jewish people became a political minority in Israel, they would be immediately and inevitably subject to ethnic cleansing and persecution by the government. Jewish supremacy is viewed as the only way for Jews to be safe in a world full of people who either hate them or don't care enough to help. This explains Biden's "bear hug" diplomatic approach as well, which as much as it was directed to Netanyahu, was actually directed at the Israeli population (and he is now much more popular than Netanyahu is, from approval polling). The only way to defuse the situation long-term is to convince the Jewish people that if they accept peaceful co-existence without enforced ethnic supremacy and apartheid; and the only way to do that is to convince them that if they are threatened, that they will not be left to die alone as they feel they have been so many times before.
  - chimeracoder 3y ago
    > The underlying cultural memory is that of the Holocaust, and of thousands of years of oppression and pogroms before, where nobody would ever help the Jewish people if they were in danger. Thus the belief that the second the Jewish people became a political minority in Israel, they would be immediately and inevitably subject to ethnic cleansing and persecution by the government. Jewish supremacy is viewed as the only way for Jews to be safe in a world full of people who either hate them or don't care enough to help. You're describing the reason that some Jews say they support the creation of an ethnostate. That's still an ethnostate, and treating Israel as synonymous with a Jewish ethnostate is the defining right-wing characteristic of Zionism. It's important to note that what you're describing is not representative of the general opinion of Jews, either globally or in Israel. Many Jewish Holocaust survivors and their descendants oppose the creation of an ethnostate through ethnic cleansing.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    - Natsu 3y ago
      It's weird to describe Israel as an "ethnostate" when it has a large population of Israeli Arabs who live there peacefully that nobody is trying to get rid of. If Palestine wants to live in peace, they can just stop attacking, yet all we seem to hear are calls for Israel to stop resisting. And it's odd to worry about what's "right wing" while Hamas wants the creation of a new caliphate that constantly chants about how they'd like to remove all the Jews from the area between the Jordan river and the Mediterranean sea. mirroring the ethnic cleansing done by many nearby Islamic states in the recent past. But it is true that the average Israeli does not want to ethnically cleanse anyone, because if they did want that, Israel could have simply destroyed all of Palestine a long time ago.
      - lazyasciiart 3y ago
        What attacks are coming from the West Bank that Israel is resisting?
- rendall 3y ago
  > The only way for Israel to exist as an ethnostate is through an ethnic cleansing. I don't understand that logic. Would you mind explaining? Do you live in North America? I identify this perspective with Americans and Canadians and not, say, Norwegians.
  - lazyasciiart 3y ago
    This one seems very straightforward to me, so to make an explanation useful, perhaps we need some shared definitions 1. ethnostate: a country that values/prioritizes residents being of a particular ethnicity defined in law and either forbids people of other ethnicities from living there or discourages them by denying them equal rights 2. ethnic cleansing: (EU definition) Rendering an area ethnically homogeneous by using force or intimidation to remove from a given area persons of another ethnic or religious group Perhaps you are saying that legal discrimination doesn't count as intimidation and therefore denying rights based on ethnicity is not ethnic cleansing? (I would disagree). Or are you using different definitions altogether?
    - rendall 3y ago
      What makes discussion of this difficult is that whenever someone neutrally discusses this, someone invariably jumps in, angry, with an uncharitable whatabout. Please ignore it when it happens. When you dig into the history of the region, as an interesting topic in its own right, without reference to any current conflict, without motivation to prove any particular side right or wrong, just letting history tell its own story, some patterns emerge. I'll give you the Cliff Notes the way it seems to me, a non-Jew American, culturally leftists. If I'm wrong I'll hear a calm, considered, good-faith-well-sourced-not-weird fact I may not be aware of. To answer your question, when Israel started, the new state invited its Arab neighbors to participate and this invitation was sincere. This fact is elided quite a lot, but it's true and I can show you receipts. This directly relates to your point. As you might imagine, Zionist Jews were really not interested in fighting. Many Arabs agreed to participate in the new state, stayed, were peaceful and their descendents are full Israeli citizens today. There was no intention for an "ethno-state" by point 2 of your definition at this time, but there was a Zionist desire to defend themselves. The borders of the new democratic state did demographically put Jews in charge, but there wasn't a desire to expel Arabs. I know, hard to fathom, but it's true. Nevertheless, Arabs were expelled. From the Zionist perspective, they weren't expelled because they were Arabs, but because they participated in a genocidal war with the stated intention to expell and kill Jews. Where did that intention come from? Surely the Zionists did something to deserve that hate? Stole land? After really looking at it, from my Western, American perspective, they did no more than Jews did when they immigrated to my own country: start businesses, purchase land, prosper to the envy of some of their neighbors. If you can demonstrate that Zionists literally stole land, lmk. However, instead of emigrating to the Lower East Side, which was rough but still more or less had the rule of law, Zionists immigrated to a lawless backwater of the dying Ottoman Empire where they were were the target of explicitly genocidal attacks by Muslim Arabs. These attacks spilled over to historically Jewish villages, such as Hebron. So, when I hear "Zionists stole land" I hear "Micks stole our jobs" and not "Boers violently displaced native tribes from fertile farmland". It's a better analogy for what actually happened. Today, Israel controls lands, the West Bank and Gaza, populated by the descendents of the people who tried to ethnically cleanse them on first go. No one else wants that land and its people. Not Egypt, not Jordan, not Lebanon. Now it's on Israel to try to deal with this.
KittenInABox 3y ago
I actually wonder how to navigate this actually. Like, I have seen criticism of things Israel has enacted in order to ensure that the population is a majority-Jewish, Jewish-own-all-the-political-power. Is that antisemetic to argue against anti-arab laws, if those laws are in place to ensure that Israel is a jewish state first and foremost, as opposed to Israel being a jewish state, if that makes sense?
- rendall 3y ago
  What anti-Arab laws?
ok123456 3y ago
Why should we in the West support a religious ethnostate? No government has the divine right to exist. Governments succeed or fail by the will of those who live there.
- simonh 3y ago
  Israel has a population of around 2 million Arab Muslims. They have full citizenship, serve in the police and army, are represented in the Knesset, serve as judges and one of them sits on the Supreme Court. One of them won the Miss Israel competition a while back. Does that sound much like a Jewish ethnostate? Do you know what the Jewish populations were in Arab states back in the 1940s? It was about 800,000. It’s only the fact that the state of Israel existed, and gave them somewhere to flee to, that so many managed to escape with their lives. It is true there were expulsions of palestinians during the 1948 invasion by the Arab armies, which is abhorrent, but this was in the context of a concerted, explicitly declared attempt at mass ethnic cleansing of the Jews. They were literally fighting to exist. Then-Secretary-General of the Arab League Abdul Rahman Azzam, said, "This will be a war of destruction and a great massacre." Other Arab leaders made it clear they intended to kill or expel the entire Jewish population, a policy which they actually carried out in their own countries. So we know this wasn’t just rhetoric, where they could do it, they did.
  - ok123456 3y ago
    It's codified in law they're second-class citizens. See the "Nation State Law". The Nakba.
    - simonh 3y ago
      The legal code and constitution also guarantees equal rights under the law. Can you cite an example of an Israeli Arab being denied any legal right due to that law? Don’t get me wrong, I wish that law didn’t exist. It’s a mistake, but it’s mostly posturing by the Jewish nationalist faction. The nakba was an appalling catastrophe. It shouldn’t have happened. But then the Arab invasion with the explicit aim of killing and expelling the Jews shouldn’t have happened either. Nor should the expulsion of 800,000 Jews from Arab countries. They were all terrible disasters. The world would be a better place if they hadn’t happened, but they did. Now we live in the world of today. Are the Arab countries going to let the descendants of their Jewish populations back, and return the property and land confiscated from them? Are they going to grant them citizenship and let them serve in the police, army and judiciary with full democratic rights?
bluish29 3y ago
It is interesting that the widespread view of isreali people that Palestinians doesn't have right to have a state is not viewed as bad as the other way around. Ironically it can be called antisemitism too. Because they are Semitic too [1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semitic_people https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semitic_people
- Aloisius 3y ago
  That's a classic etymological fallacy. Antisemitism is a word that was coined in the 19th century specifically as anti-Jew. The fact that Semite today can now refer to non-Jews doesn't mean Antisemitism refers to non-Jews as well.
  - bluish29 3y ago
    I understand that and that is why I said "ironically" and "it can" while technically not "antisemitism" as most people define it. It can be viewed as valid use of languages, because well for a fact jews are not the only semetic people. But anyway that wasn't my actual point anyway and you picked this over the main point. It is still valid, and you are free to pick a name specifically for it. Antiarab, antipalestanian or whatever you want.
dml2135 3y ago
Why is saying Israeli should not be a Jewish state any different than saying the US should not be a Christian state?
- unholythree 3y ago
  Well Jews are a cultural and ethnic group as well; so saying Israel shouldn’t be a Jewish state is similar to saying Japan shouldn’t be a Japanese state. It was explicitly established to create (or some would say reclaimed) a Jewish homeland. It’s Jewishness is central to it’s raison d'être.
  - dml2135 3y ago
    I’m not completely bought into your comparison, but running with it for a second — If one were to challenge the notion that the Japanese state should privilege ethnic Japanese over other people living in its borders, no I would not consider that position to be “anti-Japanese”. Similarly, I don’t understand is how expressing the personal view that all of the people living in the territory of Israel — Jews and non-Jews alike — would be better off living in a secular state, is somehow akin to anti-semitism.
  - sterlind 3y ago
    Japan isn't an officially Shinto state, afaik. And it wouldn't be wrong to criticize its subjugation of the indigenous Ainu people. I think that calling for a multi-ethnic, secular Japanese state is fair.
    - dijit 3y ago
      Japan isn’t officially a Japanese country? Come on mate, thats possibly the most asinine and distasteful argument I have seen on this site.
      - bluish29 3y ago
        The comment said > Japan isn't an officially Shinto state You are just misquoting the comment
Dig1t 3y ago
Genuinely curious, why does it imply ethnic cleansing? Why does it need to be a binary choice between ethnostate and complete ethnic cleansing? We have seen that in the western world that we do not abide the idea of ethnostates, e.g. it is considered bigoted to oppose unlimited migration from refugee countries into Europe or North America. Likewise it is not okay to say "only X race or Y religion can be in government". Why is it okay in the case of Israel? Jews lived and existed before Israel was established and they were not ethnically cleansed. I don't really have a dog in this fight and I'm not trying to controversial, I'm genuinely curious because the choice you offer seems like a false dichotomy.
- orthecreedence 3y ago
  [flagged]
  - gr48thecat 3y ago
    [flagged]
khazhoux 3y ago
> Criticizing Israeli settlements in the West Bank is not antisemitic. But suggesting that Israel has no right to exist as a Jewish state is antisemitic as it implies ethnic cleansing. This is precisely an example of the conflation of "anti-Israel" with "anti-semitic." It is entirely possibly for a person to disagree with the geopolitical decisions and military actions that led to the formation of Israel, without harboring ill will against anyone for being Jewish.
catlover76 3y ago
> But suggesting that Israel has no right to exist as a Jewish state is antisemitic as it implies ethnic cleansing. I've seen very few serious declarations that Israel has no right to exist. I have seen even fewer genuine existential threats to it in the past 2 or 3 decades, and that's not to discount how big of a deal or how sad an event Hamas's attack was. But I have seen a lot of pro-Israel voices, e.g. at recent Congressional PR-stunt hearings, aggressively question anyone who doesn't bow in deference to their narrative whether they agree Israel has a right to exist. That whole line of tactic is a massive distraction from the question those voices don't want asked, either of themselves or anyone else, which is "do you think Israel has the right to do what it is currently doing to the Palestinians?"
mkoubaa 3y ago
Is saying that "no state has a right to exist, that they exist with the permission of the governed" antisemitic too?
r00fus 3y ago
> But suggesting that Israel has no right to exist as a Jewish state is antisemitic as it implies ethnic cleansing. As opposed to what's happening right now - which is ethnic cleansing in both Gaza and the West Bank. Netanyahu wants to "thin out the Gaza population" and is asking for the US and other countries to accept refugees after Israel destroys the place. One is speech, and the other is action - one is being argued about, while the other is actively happening with 20k+ deaths.
Qem 3y ago
> But suggesting that Israel has no right to exist as a Jewish state is antisemitic as it implies ethnic cleansing. Does it really implies it, or just the end of apartheid?

neoromantique 3y ago

[flagged]

giraffe_lady 3y ago
[flagged]

jesusofnazarath 3y ago

[dead]