- cross-posted to:
- texas
- cross-posted to:
- texas
Conservative activists, led by a local pastor and outspoken Israel advocate, pushed the district, Mission CISD, to excise books mostly about gender, sexuality and race. Their demands represented an extreme version of a nationwide culture war over books that has played out in recent years — and ensnared a number of books with Jewish themes.
In Mission, the long list of books on the chopping block includes a recent illustrated adaptation of Anne Frank’s diary; both volumes of Art Spiegelman’s Holocaust graphic memoir “Maus”; “The Fixer,” Bernard Malamud’s novel about a historical instance of antisemitic blood libel; and “Kasher in the Rye,” a ribald memoir by Jewish comedian Moshe Kasher.
In-Israel Israel advocacy, and American Judaism, are absolutely chock full of people who are disgusted with Netanyahu’s government and his “war,” in part because of how much he is doing to destroy Israel on the world stage and get Israelis killed for more or less no purpose, as well as the unfolding horror of the apartheid state and genocide he’s enacting in their name.
Zionist advocates and Israel advocates and Jewish advocates and human rights advocates are four sometimes overlapping but distinct categories.
Netanyahu is an evil fuck, but this isn’t his war, Israel has been doing slow and steady ethnic cleansing of the region for 50+ years.
Rabin was closer than anyone to ending it, and Netanyahu’s stochastic terrorism led directly to his death. And he’s been propping up Hamas ever since, to give Israel an enemy to hate and prevent peace from ever coming to the region.
Fuck him, he owns it now.
“No does more for Israel than I do”
“What about that time you killed a democratically elected Israeli leader who was doing good things for Israel”
“That’s what I said. He was doing more than me for Israel, and we can’t have that. No one does more for Israel than I do.”
True that. Netanyahu’s a little more extreme than the norm, but as I understand it, yes, Israeli politics is:
I’m speaking well of the dissident faction and highlighting its existence in the first place; I’m not saying it’s anywhere near the mainstream.
A Zionist advocate and an Israel advocate are the same thing.
Human rights advocates never overlap with those.
I sense the morass of an ever widening pointless argument opening up beneath me.
I’ll say my feeling on it and be done, and you’re free to disagree: No one should be hated for where they were born, or for wanting a home or a safe place to be. Not a Palestinian, or a Russian, or an Israeli citizen, or someone who was born and grew up in Nazi Germany. If you got born in Israel and managed to penetrate through a significant haze of propaganda and groupthink to realize that what your country is doing on the world stage is a monstrous crime, what should you do?
Advocate for the destruction of your home?
Move away, never to return, renounce your citizenship and want nothing to do with your evil of a country? Yeah, maybe.
But I can also see someone who sees it as their duty to resist Netanyahu’s government, tries to set their country back on the right course, advocates for the ICC, and turns out for protests against the government and gets brutalized and arrested for it. That stuff happens too. “Pro Israel” isn’t really the right word for those people, no. I actually don’t fully disagree with what you’re saying, that in the modern world if you are “pro Israel” you’re probably a piece of shit (or just totally propagandized / misinformed about what’s actually going on, which there’s a lot of also). So maybe I shouldn’t have phrased it in those terms. But definitely, I think there is a type of Israeli person who is trying to support their home, the only place they’ve ever known to live, by resisting the Netanyahu government, and is ashamed of Israel but not like “against” them in the sense of, I hate my home and all the people here. You can love the town you grew up in, you can have friends and allies (hopefully, ones who are also horrified by the death and destruction in Gaza) there. You can be “pro” that part of it while still hoping that Netanyahu somehow gets what’s coming for him, soon, and all of the killing that’s being done in your name stops.
Like I say, I don’t think anyone should be hated for where they were born.
(Oh, and also the far ends of the scale have 0 overlap, yes. You cannot be a Zionist and a human rights advocate, if my way of saying it made it sound like I thought you could.)
No one in Israel is out there protesting the genocide.
All the protests have been because not enough was done to rescue hostages or some other dislike of Netanyahu.
Overall polling shows Israel supports what is happening to Palestine or thinks not enough has been done.
Yes they are. It’s the same groups that have been campaigning to end the occupation since before October 7th. It’s not a majority or even close to - two-thirds of Israelis support the continuation of the war. But saying “no one” is an absolute falsehood. And, I think propaganda and misunderstanding of the situation on the ground is also a large part (in addition to, yes, some large amount of pure racism and violent vindictiveness that says it’s okay if Palestinians are dying because they are bad.)
The wheel you’re currently cranking on, is the same wheel that was turning right at the beginning of Israel, and managed to turn its way from “all the Nazis are wrong and evil” around to “the Jews are always the victims about everything” and has now arrived itself at “Israel can do anything it decides to and will still be the victim” and now, on the other side, “all the Israelis are always wrong and evil” is emerging into view coming in the other direction. I am telling you that no matter how hard you crank that wheel, on whichever side, your activity will never crank you around to arrive at a world that is peaceful or just.
(I know I said I’d stop after saying my bit; I just wanted to say a little more on it and shoot down the absolutely false idea that no one in Israel opposes the war on humanitarian grounds.)
That whole article talks more about protestors pushing for returning hostages and other dislikes of Netanyahu far more than it does generic ‘anti-war’ protestors.
So thanks for that really, just further solidifies my point.
Likewise life is not a fucking wheel, it doesn’t travel in some predetermined path you’ve created. Let me tell you something, no matter how hard you centrist “don’t do anything at all” approach it, you will never arrive at a world that is peaceful or just.