I was raised reform Jewish and am half Jewish by family history. I have ancestors who were victims of the pogroms in the Russian pale of settlement – specifically, all four of my great-grandparents on my father’s side, along with their parents (my great-great-grandparents). When they were children their families fled and eventually resettled in the USA.

There is another place that they could have gone instead: Palestine. At that time it was still part of the Ottoman Empire, and some of the displaced Jews of that time did elect to go to Palestine. As it happens, my ancestors chose the US, but they could have gone to Palestine if they’d wanted to.

The fashionable posture on the left to take towards Israeli Jews recently has basically been a combination of glibness and vitriolic hatred, often reaching the point of wishing death upon them (examples: 1 2). I don’t know… I just can’t really feel good about stuff like that. The fact that my family ended up in the US and not Palestine is really just a quirk of fate. I don’t think that my ancestors were, like, morally better people for choosing the US over Ottoman-era Palestine. (And given the recent uptick in “Turtle Island” discourse, it seems like a fair number of leftists believe my ancestors shouldn’t have been allowed to resettle in the US either.)

I think that Zionism (with the possible exception of cultural Zionism) has generally been a noxious idea throughout its history. I don’t think the state of Israel should continue to exist as it is currently constituted, and I think the near-ubiquitous racism among Israelis is shameful. But I also don't think that every Jewish person who moved to Palestine in the last 150 years was a bad person for doing that, and I’m not prepared to circle-jerk over the deaths of people that I have a fair amount in common with historically.

Am I missing something? Have I been hoodwinked by Zionist propaganda?

https://www.jta.org/archive/ben-gurion-reveals-suggestion-of-north-vietnams-communist-leader https://www.jta.org/2014/11/02/culture/from-the-archive-israels-friend-in-hanoi https://richardpollock.substack.com/p/two-unlikely-national-liberation (pro-Israel blog)

This seems kind of disappointing.

My parents have had a terrible marriage for basically as long as I can remember. I have been anticipating their divorce on some level since I was about 11 (I'm now in my late 20s), and I don't know why they don't just pull the plug. In fact, I don't even know why they got married in the first place; they don't enjoy each other's company, they don't have congruent ideas or tastes on basically anything, they're basically incompatible in every way.

I think they both would have been better off if they had split up early, never gotten married and never had children together. They should have married different people, or just not gotten married at all.

The obvious implication of this, of course, is that I shouldn't have been born. This does cause me some existential discomfort. Thoughts occur to me like, "Why do I care so much about the future? Why do I pay so much attention to politics? What's the point of advocating for socialism or trying to work towards a better future? I don't have kids, I can't have kids\*, I don't think I should have kids, and I don't even think my parents should have had me. In a better timeline, I wouldn't even be here anyway."

\*(I had a vasectomy a few years ago)

I would like to feel a bit more assured about all of this. What do you think?

"we'll never be able to accomplish fascism in the US because our base of suburban Fox News watchers are stupid and incurious about political theory" is a pretty amusing premise

I have seen some leftists stand by this statement as entirely true, and I have also seen some leftists dismiss this idea as cope on the part of liberal Zionists who dislike Netanyahu/Likud (and who would like to delegitimize both Likud and Hamas together).

The following are some relevant articles that support this idea:

https://www.timesofisrael.com/for-years-netanyahu-propped-up-hamas-now-its-blown-up-in-our-faces/amp/

https://theintercept.com/2018/02/19/hamas-israel-palestine-conflict/

https://www.thenation.com/article/world/why-netanyahu-bolstered-hamas/

What is clear is that Israel has allowed Qatar to fund Hamas on numerous occasions without much interference. However, whether Israel has ever actually funded Hamas specifically with Israeli money is not as well-established (although many of the people who support the general “Israel propped up Hamas” idea definitely imply that this has happened). So as a corollary question, how important of a difference is this?

I currently live with my parents. If I moved to a part of the country with lower cost of living (which I could feasibly do since I have a remote job) I could definitely afford to rent an apartment or even buy a condo by myself, but I know from previous experience that I don’t enjoy living alone and would probably get depressed.

cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/2017860

> Just to clarify, I don't believe any of the following arguments and I'm fairly sure they're all bullshit, but I'd like to bolster my understanding of how to refute them the next time I see them. > > These are all paraphrased or "steelmanned" (as opposed to strawmanned) versions of arguments I've encountered elsewhere on the internet. > > 1. Israel does not unilaterally blockade the Gaza strip all by themselves; Egypt also has a border with Gaza and also participates in the blockade, and yet pro-Palestinians never seem to allocate any of the blame to Egypt, they always put it entirely on Israel. This is unfair and possibly antisemitic. > 2. In 1948, the Zionists allowed Arabs who didn't fight against them to stay in their homes and become citizens of Israel. This population of Arabs became known as the "48-Arabs", and they and their descendants are still citizens of Israel today. The fact that the Zionists accepted these people into their new state proves that the Zionists were not aiming to ethnically cleanse all Arabs and that Israel is not a racist state, or at least not a foundationally racist one. If the Arab Palestinian militants of 1948 had just done what the 48-Arabs had done instead of starting a war, they and their descendants would also be full citizens of Israel today. > 3. Western pro-Palestinian advocates make a critical error when they assume that Palestinians are primarily concerned with "civil rights". The main thing that motivates Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza (as opposed to Arab Muslim citizens of Green Line ‘48 Israel) is not their lack of "civil rights" (which are a largely Western notion, after all), it's that they resent Israel's existence as a non-Muslim-dominated society in what they see as "Muslim lands". They do not desire a secular democratic state with equal civil rights for all, they desire a Muslim controlled, sharia law state in which they can dominate Jews as a persecuted minority of second class citizens (dhimmi, infidels) or just drive Jews out entirely at their whim. Maybe in 1948 the Arab population of Palestine would have been satisfied with a secular, democratic state, but unfortunately extremist Islam has become a much more prevalent ideology since then and has changed the political equation. > 4. During the period of the British Mandate of Palestine (roughly 1910s to 1940s), Jewish immigrants improved the living standards of the region and initiated a lot of new economic activity. As a result, many Arab Muslims from neighboring regions like Egypt, Syria, and Jordan immigrated to the Mandate of Palestine because they were attracted by the new economic opportunities, and today's Palestinians in Gaza & the West Bank are largely descended from these Mandate-era Arab immigrants. Given that their ancestors came to Palestine at about the same time that Zionist Jews did (and in some cases later), their claims of having a superior right to the land of Palestine over Israeli Jews don't make sense. (example of this argument can be found here and here) > 5. Often pro-Palestinian advocates say that "Western countries should have accepted Jewish refugees in the 20th century instead of pressuring them to go to Palestine." This is true on a surface level, indeed a lot of things would have gone better if powerful Western countries had done that. But alas, they didn't, and that wasn't something that the Jews of the time had control over either way. Therefore the Jews who settled in Palestine at that time can't really be blamed for what they did, they were just looking out for themselves in the absence of any benevolent world power who would take them in. > 6. Pro-Palestinians misunderstand the Haavara agreement and overstate its importance. The fact that the Haavara agreement occurred does not prove that Zionists supported Nazism, or vice versa. If the Haavara agreement "proves" anything, it is simply that for a few years the Zionists had just enough political leverage with the Nazis & British to help out some fraction of German Jews as their situation in Germany was becoming more precarious, and the Zionists took the opportunity to do this while they could. This does not at all prove that the Zionists "supported the Holocaust/allowed it to happen" or anything like that, and the fact that some pro-Palestinians interpret it that way is really rather disappointing.

https://twitter.com/eean/status/926892649096740866?lang=en

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Liberty_incident

I’m open to the possibility that there’s still something being kept secret here, but the fact that internet Nazis like to bring this up in their redpill memes so frequently is disconcerting.

If you know any books or blogs/websites that cover this, please recommend them.

I'm asking so that I have ammo against Zionists when they say things like "Palestine never existed" and "Palestinian identity/culture didn't exist until after Israel was founded".

I've tried doing some basic internet searches for things like "Palestinian art", "Palestinian art history", and "Ottoman Palestine artwork" but unfortunately the results are largely focused on Palestinian art from 1948 to present. Some of the results go back a bit further to like 1850, but I'd be interested to see some examples of Palestinian cultural production from the 1500s, 1600s & 1700s. Can anyone help me out?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_exodus_from_the_Muslim_world

In 1948 and the years following, many countries in MENA became significantly more hostile to their Jewish minority populations. Most of the time this occurred in the form of pogroms and riots in Jewish neighborhoods, rather than official government action, although there were some instances of that too. As far as I can tell the worst cases of this were in Morocco, Libya, Yemen, Syria, and Iraq.

Between 1948 and 1978, about 650,000 Jews moved from Muslim-majority countries to Israel, and although not all of them were driven out by antisemitic violence, certainly some of them were. The debate over the relative importance of "pull factors" vs "push factors" is ongoing.

Zionists like to bring this up as a gotcha and ask things like "why doesn't the pro-Palestine side ever talk about giving Jews who were pushed out of Morocco a right to return there? Expulsion didn't just happen to Palestinians"

As far as I can tell we haven't really come up with a good answer to this, so maybe we should formulate one.

I'm trying to work out how I feel about this.

Every so often, republicans in the US will accuse democrats & leftists of being "pro-abortion up to the point of birth". Sometimes they go even further and make stuff up about "post-birth abortions" (I think Trump said something about that at one point).

I always hate it when they say stuff like that because it just feels so mendacious... but honestly, I have trouble refuting it because it does seem like a fair amount of liberals & leftists are opposed to any gestational limit. (Look at the comments in this Reddit thread to get an idea of what I mean). Their reasoning seems to be that even though a qualified restriction on late-in-the-pregnancy abortions might seem like an appropriate rule to have, it's impossible to write such a law perfectly so that it would still allow abortions to be performed in every appropriate case. There would always end up being a few cases where a woman who really ought to be allowed to get an abortion would be encumbered from getting one.

I understand that argument, but... idk, I guess I just can't shake the feeling that such a law can still be implemented in a good way, and should be. The UK, the Netherlands, and Pennsylvania all have gestational limits on abortion of 24 weeks, with cases of fetal impairment, risk to the life/health of the mother, and pregnancies that resulted from r*pe excluded from the limit (as is common). I do not see the UK, the Netherlands, and Pennsylvania as particularly oppressive places for reproductive rights. As far as I know, the medical consensus is that 24 weeks is both the point when fetuses become developed enough to survive outside the womb, and also when they become developed enough to experience pain, so I do think there's some moral consideration to be given to that.

So what's the right answer here?