4 ms·
Not one single person forgot what triggered it. Most people who aren't bots or shills just disagree that this is at all an appropriate response. Killing civili
by jstarfish 3y ago
Not one single person forgot what triggered it. Most people who aren't bots or shills just disagree that this is at all an appropriate response.
Killing civilians in retaliation is not war and no amount of rabbinic rhetoric makes it right. Find a diplomatic solution.
It's almost like Israel [leadership] wants another generation of people to hate the Jews.
But what do I know of persecution; I'm just a gypsy. Everybody loves when my people come around.
- tptacek 3y ago"Rabbinic rhetoric"?
- hypeit 3y agoThings like calling the Palestinians “amalek”, carving the Star of David into a playground with bulldozers, IDF soldiers taking about fulfilling prophecy…
- tptacek 3y agoIf the claim is that militant Israelis are using religious rhetoric to justify their actions, that seems uncontroversial (though the "Amalek" thing is a misquote, and refers not to Palestinians but to Hamas itself). If instead the idea is that the "rhetoric" of "rabbis" is somehow automatically dehumanizing to Palestinians, that seems like a problematic claim.
- enterprise_cog 3y agoYou might want to let the IDF know then, cause they have taken the Amalek quote quite literally. “‘I will punish the Amalekites for what they did to Israel when they waylaid them as they came up from Egypt. Now go, attack the Amalekites and totally destroy all that belongs to them. Do not spare them; put to death men and women, children and infants, cattle and sheep, camels and donkeys.’”
- tptacek 3y agoOnce again: that quote refers to Hamas, not the Palestinian people. I am not disputing that it represents religious rhetoric used to justify IDF actions. I'm only pushing back on the notion that it refers broadly to Palestinians.
- enterprise_cog 3y agoThey have killed over 30k Palestinians. The settlers using that rhetoric are killing people in the West Bank. It’s pretty clear it means the Palestinian people.
- tptacek 3y agoKahanist extremists have used the term to refer broadly to Palestinians in the same way Christian extremists have deployed Christian tropes to dehumanize, well, everybody in the world at one time or another. But the "Amalek" quote is famous because Netanyahu said it, and we have the context for the speech in which he did: he was referring specifically to Hamas.
- enterprise_cog 3y agoAll the child and infant Hamas members. Yeah, right.
- tptacek 3y agoI don't know what you're trying to argue here. Nobody denies that an enormous number of civilians have been killed in the IDF's Gaza operation.
- khokhol 3y agoI don't know what you're trying to argue here. That you are attempting to wiggle away from the plainly obvious nature of the quote, for some reason. Nobody denies that an enormous number of civilians have been killed in the IDF's Gaza operation. Except of course numerous Israeli government officials. (They don't deny that many civilians have been killed -- but they have continually attempted to dial down the proportion of civilian casualties, along with all the rhetoric about there being "no innocents" or "no uninvolved civilians" in Gaza to begin with).
- defrost 3y agoFor my part I find the implication that the rhetoric of rabbis is homogenous and aligned to be most problematic. There are those that appear to fully back Netanyahu and his longstanding views on treatment of the Palestinian state, there are others who are loudly against the actions of the Israeli state in recent years. ( I'd remark that there are more than two extremes but feel this is not the right thread to comment about rabbis on a spectrum )
- tptacek 3y agoYes, that's what snagged me here too. If the idea is just that IDF soldiers are brutalizing Palestinians while shouting religious slogans, maybe "religious language" is the better term to use. It's a common phenomenon on war and doesn't have any connotations of Jewish people being somehow exceptional about this.
- enterprise_cog 3y agoZionists benefit from antisemitism. It furthers the idea that Jews are only safe in Israel. It’s part of the reason they call everything antisemitism, it scares the diaspora and justifies the existence of Israel.
- weatherlite 3y ago[flagged]
- tptacek 3y agoThey also call a lot of things antisemitic because they are antisemitic. The notion that Israel is an ethnically Euro-American colony is antisemitic (and racist), erasing the MENA origins of a plurality of its citizens. The notion that Jewish Americans are untrustworthy interlocutors because they have duel loyalties is antisemitic. Calls to "decolonize" Israel and to "globalize the Intifadah" are straightforward appeals to ethnic violence on civilians, just as "Palestinians had a right to self-defense against colonizers" is a straightforward excusal of an atrocity. This stuff is all over the place. Just today, the Harvard Faculty SJP chapter posted an old racist SNCC poster depicting a hand with a Star of David puppeteering two Black men. Nobody can deny that the concept of "antisemitism" is weaponized against critics of Israel. But at the same time, nobody can deny that many critics of Israel, or out ignorance or animus, weaponize antisemitism against Israel.
- Qem 3y agoOn this conflation, I think the best discussion I read up to now was this: https://www.newyorker.com/news/the-weekend-essay/in-the-shadow-of-the-holocaust https://www.newyorker.com/news/the-weekend-essay/in-the-shad...
- tptacek 3y agoLike every other Masha Gessen piece, this is an engrossing read, and the Jerusalem Declaration is helpful: what I mean to say is that it's easy to come up with examples of Palestinian advocacy that are, according not just to the IHDRA definition but the Jerusalem Declaration, antisemitic.
- weatherlite 3y ago[flagged]