cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/26226120
cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/17887604
“Children have been shot in other conflicts I have covered. But never before have I watched as soldiers enticed children like mice into a trap and murdered them for sport.”
- Christopher Hedges American journalist on assignment in Gaza
How a group of people can switch up so fast from oppressed to oppressor is beyond me
Because the groundwork existed and because they have legitimate fear for their people’s existence. The justification you often hear for the existence of Israel is the idea that jews cannot be safe without a nation of their own. The nakhba was a genocidal act done basically immediately after their own people had experienced genocide.
And it’s worth saying that some very vocal opponents of Israeli actions here are Jewish.
Israel had been colonizing Palestine for decades years before the Holocaust. Zionists celebrated the Holocaust because it gave their plans a massive boost.
These people are not The Jewish People (as a group), they’re just ethno-Fascists (specifically Zionists) - a disgusting self-serving extremelly racist political ideology - who pass themselves as representatives of all Jews when there are plenty of Jews who say “not in my name” (and whom, curiously, these types will accuse of being anti-semitic).
You’ve been sold a Racist and Prejudiced view of people who happen to be Jews as being X, Y and Z because of their ethnicity and now you’re trying to match that racist lie into a reality that contradicts that hyper-reductive view of human beings and it won’t fit, it will never fit, because people are individuals, not members of some “ethnic” hive-mind - all such groups have naturally wonderfull people, naturally awfull people and a (generally large) majority of “go with the flow” people in the middle.
Please rethink that view of people as ethnics first and foremosts - just because somebody happens to have been born with some characteristics that mean they’re part of a certain ethnic group doesn’t make them inherently anything, good or bad: people are what they do, not the prejudices around some ethnicity they happen to be born into, and it just so happens that this new bunch of extremelly racist mass-murderers were born into an ethnicy were other, completelly different people, were targetted by the last bunch of extremelly racist mass-murderers due to their ethnicity - these sociopaths have no actual psychological, experiential or behavioural (outside some religious traditions) relation to the people who were made victims by the Nazis, they just happen to share a religion and in literally a handful of cases be direct descendents of victims two generations ago.
My comment was referring to Zionists who were apart of the holocaust, not Jews in general. Didn’t mean to come off that way
Well, personally I’ve started being very careful in making absolutely sure “The Jewish People” and “Zionism” are very clearly not treated as the same or even similar.
As for specifically the idea that Zionists who were victims of the Holocaust would behave otherwise, it has been my observation (and also History shows) that individuals who have been victimized or oppressed in their past aren’t any better as persons than individuals who have not. In fact one of the ways in which Sociopaths are created is victimizing people when they are children.
Different people react very differently to being inflicted such suffering, and whilst for some that experience informs their Empathy towards others who might be made to suffer something similar (hence they do not want that to ever happen to others), others - such as people high on the Psychopath side of the spectrum and hence with little or no Empathy - might just add it to their toolset of things that can be done to other people to force them to do what they want.
One can’t assume that being victimized or oppressed directly will make somebody a better person, much less when that happens indirectly (for example it happening to family members).
This is why nationalism is bullshit
It’s always a sliding scale. The enemies of the state will always be convenient. There will always be another threat to National Security.
People have been rightfully critical of Israel since its inception