A serious post where we take a long trip down the abyss of infinite lunacy, courtesy of an "Anti Palestinian Racism" webinar by Anti-Zionist UMass Boston faculty.
A while back I wrote a piece trying to figure out what "Zionism" was. It was a word that had been spat out, since the 7th of October, like some curse word, with the implication being that " here be monsters" like some kind of Nazi or Fascist. I didn't actually know what one had to believe in to deserve such an awful categorisation. Those beliefs must be pretty vile, right?
Like many things categorised as "evil" in our world of woke make believe (eg JK Rowling, Jordan Peterson, wearing a hairstyle that doesn't 'belong' to you, etc) the actual 'evil' was somewhat difficult to spot.
I discovered that although I'm not Jewish, I am one of these unmentionables; a Zionist. Zionism, my reading informed me, constituted the 3 primary beliefs that (a) the Jewish people should have their own homeland where they could again determine their own destiny free from the fear of persecution that had bedevilled them for centuries (b) that this state should be located somewhere in the region that had once been their homelands and upon which there had been a continual Jewish presence, albeit mostly in a minority since the Romans kicked them out and (c) that this state should have the right to protect itself both militarily and economically.
I am not entirely sure which of these principal pillars is deemed to be so worthy of hate? With the possible exception of (b) they seem pretty much the norm for any state. The issue with (b) is the location. It's always location, location, location. In this case, however, it seemed that history (or maybe God?) had paved the way; nobody actually 'owned' that region and there wasn't actually a 'country' there in the usually accepted sense of that word.
The region had been 'owned' by various entities for around 2,000 years by right of conquest. And guess who the original conquered were? Since that time there had been no other nation state in existence defined by that geographical region. When the last 'owners', the Ottomans, were conquered, the Brits were given the mandate to sort it all out, eventually.
After the false start of around 1920 when it was proposed that the Jewish people would have 20% of what is now Israel, a proposal agreed upon by the Jewish people living there, we ended up in 1948 with the establishment of the state of Israel consisting of just over 50% of the land - although a fair chunk of that was the Negev.
A very sizeable chunk of the region that had been called Palestine was used to create the new country of Jordan. Curiously, the Palestinians don't seem to want this back, even though it was land taken from them by the Brits. This interesting fact indicates that, maybe, there's a bit more to this conflict than just land ownership.
Within a day of its establishment this new country of Israel found itself at war with the other 50% of the region that, minus Jordan, had been carved up. If you were asked to place a bet on the victor at that time you probably wouldn't have put your money on Israel, but win the war they did.
It is hard to know what history would look like today had that war never been started.
What I find very interesting is that much of the pro-Palestinian narrative I've seen - and you can see it in the posters in the current campus protests - consists of mentioning the establishment of the state of Israel and then, seemingly out of nowhere, these evil Zionists just kicked around 400,000 Palestinians (who weren't at the time technically Palestinians) off their land. It's as if there was a whole bunch of people were there singing the Islamic version of Kumbayah round their campfires at night when in marched the Zionist thugs to kick them off their land.
No mention is made of the context of a brutal civil war.
Perhaps it's because Israel didn't actually start that war? It's kind of hard for the Zionists are aggressors narrative when it turns out that in the single biggest sequence of events that set the tone for the next 75 years, the nasty Zionists turn out to be the non-aggressors.
Incidentally, you also won't often hear of the upwards of 400,000 Jewish people who were kicked off their land by the neighbouring states at around the same time. It's as if expulsion only matters one way.
I can't remember which Israeli Prime Minister said something like "If Israel laid down its arms there would be no Israel. If Palestine laid down its arms there would be peace". I fully believe that. The historical record of Israel trying to find peaceful solutions through negotiation is well-documented. I do not see the evidence for portraying Israel as some kind of Zionist Hate Monster.
This is not to say that Israel over the years has not done some terrible things. But that's an accusation that can be levelled at many countries. Iraq, Afghanistan, anyone? Didn't we in the West also do terrible things in these places to pursue what we believed to be in the interests of our own security?
There's much I still have to learn about the history of the conflict in the region and I'm fairly sure there are some significant things I'm missing, but the conventional pro-Palestine narrative with words like colonial, apartheid, genocide, etc is so facile as to beggar belief.
There are 2 contexts that are often missed out, or glossed over somewhat. The first of these is the religious aspect; this conflict is not merely about land but is mixed in with a clash of religious ideologies. The second context, which I've already mentioned, is that of war.
Although we often think of the initial war, not started by Israel in 1948, as 'over', I'm not sure that's correct. I think it's still ongoing to some extent. The actions of Israel should be interpreted from within that context; they're doing what they need to do to survive, or at least what they judge they need to do to survive.
Even within that context we might still come to the conclusion that Israel goes too far at times, but the context and historical record does not lend itself to the notion that Israel and 'Zionists' are some lunatic monstrous demons hell-bent on genocide. Quite the opposite in my view.
Outsiders who don't know much about the subject may think: Who do we support? It's complicated and both sides didn't do themselves a lot of favors in the past and present. And then they see the protests and the encampments and the blatant lies and falsehoods and the question becomes clearer. Even some Palestinians beg them to stop because they're hurting their cause:
One of our oldest posts hypothesized that maybe the hard-core protesters were Zionist spies whose goal is to make the SJP look so pathetic that people turn away from them.
Thank you for taking the time to write this. Having this nonsense propaganda thoroughly and competently debunked is so important these days.
I'll add (because this is often ignored in the sea of bullshit surrounding the topic) that the story whereby all the *non-Jewish/Zionist* residents of the area were all living together peacefully before Zionism appeared on the scene is, of course, a completely nonsensical myth. (Probably along the lines of similar narratives about Native Americans). There were plenty of conflicts, including violent ones, between rival local factions/tribes, between the agrarian rural population at the time and what would be considered the local elite that had connections with the bureaucratic Ottoman and later British mandate higher-ups and various regimes (including the Nazis at the time - talk about "Western imperialism") and had interests that conflicted with the rural population, they were all subject to random raids by Bedouin tribes, etc.
Thanks for the info! I find the whole narrative of "the 'Natives' lived peacefully together, herding goats, smoking weed and having fun until the evil 'whites' came and ruined everything" extremely infantilizing and patronizing.
They also had different, sometimes conflicting attitudes and interests re Zionism (from what has been documented), but that's a story for a different day. :)
Divest and defund the MTA? It would be a sad irony if Jewish members had to give up on their unions given the important role of Jewish Americans in the union movement, the folks who brought you the weekend, paid sick leave and pensions. But important as the Isreal issue is, the meta conflict is really the international intifada-revolution they are calling for: "She then showed a map comparing the colonization of America by the whities... " What is the MTA doing promoting radical, treasonous propaganda? Ridiculously inaccurate since native Americans were not unified possessors of territory and neither were "whites" but, like the 1619 project it provides a rationale for revolution and wealth redistribution. Is it time for patriots, Jewish or not, to fight or split the union?
First of all, "whities" is our invention. The exact quote from the transcript we based the post on said:
"I'm happy to answer questions at that. I know that that's a lot. It's very dense, but I think all those pieces are really important. And it should actually sound familiar to us because this is exactly what happened in the so-called United States. We had settlers come from elsewhere with no intention of returning. They came to stay and through a process of elimination attempted to eliminate and get rid of indigenous people and take their land.
And we can talk more about it, but Americans frequently indigenize themselves, plus facto, and claim, you know, we've always been here. This is what happened in the United States, and it is exactly what's happening in Palestine or what has happened in Palestine. So the map on the left, the very far left, this is a map of pre-48 Palestine and what land was inhabited or lived in by Jewish people. The first map of what land was inhabited or lived in by Palestinian people."
End quote.
Notice she said "the so-called United States". She said the Americans claim to have always been there. I've never heard any white American say that.
At the end of the quote there is the lie about the pre-1947 map. Most of the green area wasn't lived or inhabited by anyone, and it belonged to the "state" which was the British Mandate at the time. Also, if I'm not mistaken, the word "Palestinian" at the time referred to anyone who lived there, Jewish or Arab. We're no experts on the topic either, but all of it can easily be found on Google.
I don't know what to do with the union. I wish they just did their job. Most of this site is dedicated to mocking our university's leadership and their shenanigans. If the union focused on helping us with all this instead of weighing in on things they clearly know nothing about and are not paid to deal with, maybe things would be much better for us workers.
Yeah, I understood whitie was your editorial take but in any case why pay dues for their elitist academic jargon and far left propaganda? They've lost their way and their hard working membership is footing the bill. Such a shame.
Thank you for posting this.
Someone had to.
A while back I wrote a piece trying to figure out what "Zionism" was. It was a word that had been spat out, since the 7th of October, like some curse word, with the implication being that " here be monsters" like some kind of Nazi or Fascist. I didn't actually know what one had to believe in to deserve such an awful categorisation. Those beliefs must be pretty vile, right?
Like many things categorised as "evil" in our world of woke make believe (eg JK Rowling, Jordan Peterson, wearing a hairstyle that doesn't 'belong' to you, etc) the actual 'evil' was somewhat difficult to spot.
I discovered that although I'm not Jewish, I am one of these unmentionables; a Zionist. Zionism, my reading informed me, constituted the 3 primary beliefs that (a) the Jewish people should have their own homeland where they could again determine their own destiny free from the fear of persecution that had bedevilled them for centuries (b) that this state should be located somewhere in the region that had once been their homelands and upon which there had been a continual Jewish presence, albeit mostly in a minority since the Romans kicked them out and (c) that this state should have the right to protect itself both militarily and economically.
I am not entirely sure which of these principal pillars is deemed to be so worthy of hate? With the possible exception of (b) they seem pretty much the norm for any state. The issue with (b) is the location. It's always location, location, location. In this case, however, it seemed that history (or maybe God?) had paved the way; nobody actually 'owned' that region and there wasn't actually a 'country' there in the usually accepted sense of that word.
The region had been 'owned' by various entities for around 2,000 years by right of conquest. And guess who the original conquered were? Since that time there had been no other nation state in existence defined by that geographical region. When the last 'owners', the Ottomans, were conquered, the Brits were given the mandate to sort it all out, eventually.
After the false start of around 1920 when it was proposed that the Jewish people would have 20% of what is now Israel, a proposal agreed upon by the Jewish people living there, we ended up in 1948 with the establishment of the state of Israel consisting of just over 50% of the land - although a fair chunk of that was the Negev.
A very sizeable chunk of the region that had been called Palestine was used to create the new country of Jordan. Curiously, the Palestinians don't seem to want this back, even though it was land taken from them by the Brits. This interesting fact indicates that, maybe, there's a bit more to this conflict than just land ownership.
Within a day of its establishment this new country of Israel found itself at war with the other 50% of the region that, minus Jordan, had been carved up. If you were asked to place a bet on the victor at that time you probably wouldn't have put your money on Israel, but win the war they did.
It is hard to know what history would look like today had that war never been started.
What I find very interesting is that much of the pro-Palestinian narrative I've seen - and you can see it in the posters in the current campus protests - consists of mentioning the establishment of the state of Israel and then, seemingly out of nowhere, these evil Zionists just kicked around 400,000 Palestinians (who weren't at the time technically Palestinians) off their land. It's as if there was a whole bunch of people were there singing the Islamic version of Kumbayah round their campfires at night when in marched the Zionist thugs to kick them off their land.
No mention is made of the context of a brutal civil war.
Perhaps it's because Israel didn't actually start that war? It's kind of hard for the Zionists are aggressors narrative when it turns out that in the single biggest sequence of events that set the tone for the next 75 years, the nasty Zionists turn out to be the non-aggressors.
Incidentally, you also won't often hear of the upwards of 400,000 Jewish people who were kicked off their land by the neighbouring states at around the same time. It's as if expulsion only matters one way.
I can't remember which Israeli Prime Minister said something like "If Israel laid down its arms there would be no Israel. If Palestine laid down its arms there would be peace". I fully believe that. The historical record of Israel trying to find peaceful solutions through negotiation is well-documented. I do not see the evidence for portraying Israel as some kind of Zionist Hate Monster.
This is not to say that Israel over the years has not done some terrible things. But that's an accusation that can be levelled at many countries. Iraq, Afghanistan, anyone? Didn't we in the West also do terrible things in these places to pursue what we believed to be in the interests of our own security?
There's much I still have to learn about the history of the conflict in the region and I'm fairly sure there are some significant things I'm missing, but the conventional pro-Palestine narrative with words like colonial, apartheid, genocide, etc is so facile as to beggar belief.
There are 2 contexts that are often missed out, or glossed over somewhat. The first of these is the religious aspect; this conflict is not merely about land but is mixed in with a clash of religious ideologies. The second context, which I've already mentioned, is that of war.
Although we often think of the initial war, not started by Israel in 1948, as 'over', I'm not sure that's correct. I think it's still ongoing to some extent. The actions of Israel should be interpreted from within that context; they're doing what they need to do to survive, or at least what they judge they need to do to survive.
Even within that context we might still come to the conclusion that Israel goes too far at times, but the context and historical record does not lend itself to the notion that Israel and 'Zionists' are some lunatic monstrous demons hell-bent on genocide. Quite the opposite in my view.
Outsiders who don't know much about the subject may think: Who do we support? It's complicated and both sides didn't do themselves a lot of favors in the past and present. And then they see the protests and the encampments and the blatant lies and falsehoods and the question becomes clearer. Even some Palestinians beg them to stop because they're hurting their cause:
https://x.com/afalkhatib/status/1783341589693415467
One of our oldest posts hypothesized that maybe the hard-core protesters were Zionist spies whose goal is to make the SJP look so pathetic that people turn away from them.
https://theflickeringbeacon.substack.com/p/a-spy-among-us
The hummus ban was a true story.
https://www.newsweek.com/message-gazan-campus-protesters-youre-hurting-palestinian-cause-opinion-1894313
Thank you for taking the time to write this. Having this nonsense propaganda thoroughly and competently debunked is so important these days.
I'll add (because this is often ignored in the sea of bullshit surrounding the topic) that the story whereby all the *non-Jewish/Zionist* residents of the area were all living together peacefully before Zionism appeared on the scene is, of course, a completely nonsensical myth. (Probably along the lines of similar narratives about Native Americans). There were plenty of conflicts, including violent ones, between rival local factions/tribes, between the agrarian rural population at the time and what would be considered the local elite that had connections with the bureaucratic Ottoman and later British mandate higher-ups and various regimes (including the Nazis at the time - talk about "Western imperialism") and had interests that conflicted with the rural population, they were all subject to random raids by Bedouin tribes, etc.
Thanks for the info! I find the whole narrative of "the 'Natives' lived peacefully together, herding goats, smoking weed and having fun until the evil 'whites' came and ruined everything" extremely infantilizing and patronizing.
They also had different, sometimes conflicting attitudes and interests re Zionism (from what has been documented), but that's a story for a different day. :)
Fuck Me........
Divest and defund the MTA? It would be a sad irony if Jewish members had to give up on their unions given the important role of Jewish Americans in the union movement, the folks who brought you the weekend, paid sick leave and pensions. But important as the Isreal issue is, the meta conflict is really the international intifada-revolution they are calling for: "She then showed a map comparing the colonization of America by the whities... " What is the MTA doing promoting radical, treasonous propaganda? Ridiculously inaccurate since native Americans were not unified possessors of territory and neither were "whites" but, like the 1619 project it provides a rationale for revolution and wealth redistribution. Is it time for patriots, Jewish or not, to fight or split the union?
First of all, "whities" is our invention. The exact quote from the transcript we based the post on said:
"I'm happy to answer questions at that. I know that that's a lot. It's very dense, but I think all those pieces are really important. And it should actually sound familiar to us because this is exactly what happened in the so-called United States. We had settlers come from elsewhere with no intention of returning. They came to stay and through a process of elimination attempted to eliminate and get rid of indigenous people and take their land.
And we can talk more about it, but Americans frequently indigenize themselves, plus facto, and claim, you know, we've always been here. This is what happened in the United States, and it is exactly what's happening in Palestine or what has happened in Palestine. So the map on the left, the very far left, this is a map of pre-48 Palestine and what land was inhabited or lived in by Jewish people. The first map of what land was inhabited or lived in by Palestinian people."
End quote.
Notice she said "the so-called United States". She said the Americans claim to have always been there. I've never heard any white American say that.
At the end of the quote there is the lie about the pre-1947 map. Most of the green area wasn't lived or inhabited by anyone, and it belonged to the "state" which was the British Mandate at the time. Also, if I'm not mistaken, the word "Palestinian" at the time referred to anyone who lived there, Jewish or Arab. We're no experts on the topic either, but all of it can easily be found on Google.
I don't know what to do with the union. I wish they just did their job. Most of this site is dedicated to mocking our university's leadership and their shenanigans. If the union focused on helping us with all this instead of weighing in on things they clearly know nothing about and are not paid to deal with, maybe things would be much better for us workers.
Yeah, I understood whitie was your editorial take but in any case why pay dues for their elitist academic jargon and far left propaganda? They've lost their way and their hard working membership is footing the bill. Such a shame.
If it continues like that they'll lose membership too. We no longer have to pay for this crap.