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Norm Finkelstein argues back that anti-Semitism is defined as an “irrational” hatred of Jews, but that the resentment is rational.
Hasan argues that no people are monolithic, and the scapegoating of Jews is a common tactic. That people understand that when Tucker Carlson says America has “demographic concerns”, that is white supremacy.
He says that if Jews were monolithic there would not be such a generational divide on Zionism and billions spent to maintain its indoctrination.
Finkelstein says he would not tell someone who has experienced the Holocaust that they should not hate Germans. And that he would not argue with a Palestinian who feels the same way about Jews.
Norm cites that 95% of Israeli citizens agree with the force used against Gaza, and that its citizen army that represents its population carried out mass starvation as a method of war.
Hasan Piker says he agrees with the facts, but he has a more optimistic perspective in terms of changing people’s minds on conflating Judaism with Zionism.
Saw a bit of this interview and it was absolutely fuckawful for both of them. Two faces I tire of seeing held up as “based” on this fuckin website. Norman “what makes citing Palestinians a virtue” Finkelstein.
Finkelstein says he would not tell someone who has experienced the Holocaust that they should not hate Germans. And that he would not argue with a Palestinian who feels the same way about Jews.
Norm cites that 95% of Israeli citizens agree with the force used against Gaza, and that its citizen army that represents its population carried out mass starvation as a method of war.
Aside from these, there’s another argument I’ve heard Finkelstein make, equally valid. He’s explained that anti-Semitism as exists in most places it’s found, isn’t the sort of bigotry that anti-black racism in the US and such are in its effect.
Even disregarding all the conflation of anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism, the vast majority of instances touted by Zionists are someone saying or implying something against Jewish people. The lists are full of microagressions, not people being discriminated against for having Jewish-sounding names in applications, not their communities being overpoliced and undervalued to keep them down, and certainly not people being rounded up on the thousands on suspicion of being Jewish, on the basis of some visual characteristic, to be assaulted, brutalised, mistreated, raped, deported, or even murdered.
I’m convinced, due to the actions of the Zionist entity, the rabid behaviour of its people and the inaction/support of the west, the lingering resentment in the populations is something Communists will have to deal with after the Zionist entity and its patron hegemon fall. Nevertheless, I cannot emphasise how minor this concern is today, considering an ongoing genocide against Palestinians and all other crimes imperialism commits every day. This issue deserves to be raised once every ten thousand times the question "What’s to be done to stop this genocide?’ and its ancillaries are asked.
Removed by mod
Anyone who has ever said a positive word in favour of the genocide should be charged with terror offenses, and anyone that has said a positive word in favour of the genocide while materially benefitting from it should have their assets seized, and possibly even lose their life.
This inevitably will disproportionately affect Jews
I want to push back on this. The majority of people who support Zionism are in fact not Jews.
I want to push back on this. The majority of people who support Zionism are in fact not Jews
The person you are responding to is a reactionary, but statistically I think that last statement was correct. “Will disproportionately affect” is different from “will mostly affect,” it means it will affect the group more relative to their share of the population than other groups, and even though you are completely right that the overwhelming majority of Zionists are white (and white people would probably also be disproportionately affected), members of the Jewish population would also be disproportionately affected because such a large portion of them are zionists, same as the New Afrikan population would be disproportionately not affected because, while there are certainly zionists among them, it’s a lower portion of their population.
This is completely different from the question of supporting antisemitism, i.e. the targeted disenfranchisement or other persecution of Jews for being Jews rather than disenfranchising people for things that might correlate one way or another with different ethnic groups. Throwing someone in jail for being a zionist dog when they also happen to be Jewish is not the same as throwing them in jail for being Jewish, which is effectively what the above antisemite was conflating. An absurd position like that does Israel’s work for them
Aw dang good call, statistics can be very unintuitive
this may very well be true, it doesn’t however change the fact that most jews are sadly indeed zionists.
Anecdotally the Jews I personally know support Israel out of sheer blind ignorance. They conflate Israel with Judaism itself and to be against one is to be against the other which is exactly what the propaganda pushes. I don’t think they’re any different than any other ignorant assholes I know just because they’re Jewish. Fuck all the idiots that refuse to pay attention because it will disrupt their precious fragile egos that were built for them by propaganda.
"Jewish settlers stole my house. It’s not my fault they’re Jewish."
WHEN WE WERE GROWING UP in occupied Jerusalem, the people seeking to expel us from our neighborhood were Jewish, and their organizations often had “Jewish” in their name. So were the people who stole our home, scattered our furniture in the street and burned my baby sister’s crib. The judges banging their gavels in favor of our expulsion were also Jewish, and so were the lawmakers whose laws facilitated and systematized our dispossession. […]
Not only do we live in fear of displacement at the hands of a colonialism that professes itself as Jewish, not only are our people bombarded by an army that marches under what it claims is the Jewish flag, and not only do Israeli politicians over enunciate the Jewishness of their operations, we are told to disregard the Star of David soaring on their flag—the Star of David they carve into our skin. […]
The Palestinian people have consistently made it crystal clear that our enemy is the colonialist and racist ideology of Zionism, not Jews. Our capacity to produce such distinction is admirable and impressive, considering the heavy-handedness with which Zionism attempts to synonymize itself with Judaism. However, this distinction isn’t our responsibility, and personally, it isn’t my priority. A Palestinian’s perceived resentment doesn’t have the backing of a Knesset to codify it into law. Tropes aren’t drones, nor can one convert conspiracy theories into nuclear weapons. We are past the early 1900s. Things are different, power has shifted. Words are not murder.Mohammed El-Kurd
I’m not reading all that. Free Palestine
I think the broader point of this and future shitshows of this type is that anti-Zionist Jews aren’t meaningfully organized. Zionist Jews as a collective have a military, a global media apparatus, and nukes. Anti-Zionist Jews have nothing. Arguing about whether Jews are a monolith or not misses the point.
You could have a situation where 70% of Jews are against Zionism, but if the 30% are properly organized and the 70% are completely atomized individuals, the 30% will steamroll through the 70%. Reality is more like the reverse with at least 70% of Jews having global Zionist networks that have a ubiquitous presence in Jewish communal life and the sub-30% of Jews having nothing outside of a few select orgs that are utterly irrelevant in Jewish communal life. Zionists completely control synagogues and yeshivas. Think of something like Chabad and that’s not even the full extent of Zionist presence within Jewish life.
Since al-Aqsa Flood, I haven’t seen a case of a God-fearing rabbi expelling the Zionists from their synagogue lest their perverse desecration of Judaism further offends God. However, I’ve seen plenty of cases where rabbis who are otherwise sympathetic towards Palestinians are cowed towards silence or rabbis trying to push some bullshit radical centrism in order to not split the congregation. Instead of seizing Jewish communal life from the Zionists with the ultimate goal of expelling them from Jewish communities, I mostly see anti-Zionist Jews either practice their Judaism in silence or simply stop practicing Judaism altogether. Far from expelling Zionists from Jewish communities, it’s the Zionists who are expelling anti-Zionist Jews from Jewish communities.
, I mostly see anti-Zionist Jews either practice their Judaism in silence or simply stop practicing Judaism altogether.
I mostly see a third option: form explicitly anti-zionist Jewish organizations that oppose but are much too weak to do anything about the massive Jewish institutions that are zionist to their core. There’s a tiny number of cool af rabbis running radical collectives. But their position in Judaism mirrors any small, marginalized would-be revolutionary movement: aspirational
Schisms don’t happen in a day. Hard to organize when your entire cultural identity is weaponized against you by both your own community AND opportunistic reactionary outsiders. Jews have a long spiritual tradition of sticking together in order to survive, too, so it’s doubly harsh to try and organize what is essentially a schism within the faith, and it’s not even just a faith but an ethnicity/culture. How the fuck are secular Jews supposed to kick people out of a congregation? It’s incoherent to suggest it.
from the log it sounds like they were talking past each other. Norm is absolutely right that I would not blame a Palestinian if they were anti-Semitic, but Hasan is right in that I would absolutely blame a westerner using anti-Israeli sentiment to foment antisemitism.
edit: okay I’m actually watching the clip now and Norm is coming off a lot worse. He doesn’t sound like he’s just talking about Palestinians, it really sounds like he’s talking about everyone, and I would say that if you’re not one of the groups being explicitly targeted by Israeli violence then you absolutely need to have a nuanced view here. Israelis are doing a genocide, Zionists abroad are arming it, and I find any conflation of those groups with “Jews” to be antisemitic.
He even talks about Israel’s conflation of itself with Judaism in the clip, seemingly his argument is that because they are doing that then you are correct to conflate the two! I’m really not a fan of that.
I find Norm’s example of his parents to be an example of the “talking past” I was mentioning before. Hasan is talking about antisemitism in general, and Norm is countering with a point about victims of violence. It makes it seem like he is saying that the grace that can be extended to a victim should be extended to everyone everywhere.
How do you square allowing Palestinians to have a less nuanced view (implied by you directly) on the situation? It seems you’re sneaking in some infantilizing view of Palestinians here. I think that Palestinians can completely understand the system which oppresses them, which includes the direct support of the vast majority of Jewish institutions, organizations, and cultural identity across the world. Westerners aren’t capable of understanding this better because of distance or such.
I don’t think I can really find the perfect answer here, but I’m skeptical whenever someone makes it seem like westerners should just be better at understanding it holistically or something. That’s ridiculous. If the split you insinuate does exist, then either we westerners know better and should inform the Palestinians (big doubts), or we should learn that they are correct and figure out how to act with thay knowledge, while protecting any and all supporting their liberation regardless of religion or race. I clearly lean towards the latter, and am sensitive to how dangerous that rhetoric can sound (is close to conflating Judaism with all individual jews and with zionisn). But I think there is some sublation possible here, and I am not the expert to find it, unfortunately.
infantilizing
I don’t view it as infantilizing, I view it as having grace for a victim. I would not hold it against a Palestinian if their lived experience had led them to certain reactionary views in the same way that I would hold it against somebody in the imperial core who holds those same views. And bear in mind that I would only have this grace for somebody who is in the direct line of fire, I wouldn’t feel this way if you just had Palestinian heritage but you had grown up somewhere else.
Then no, I think you’re just wrong. A victim who misunderstands their oppression should be critiqued for such for both moral and strategic reasons. They should be helped to understand it better to better resist and overthrow their oppressors. The only exception is when their misunderstanding presents no contradiction with the strategy of liberation. But I think here it is reasonable to think thats not the case. Either their oppression is supported by structure of the vast majority of Jewish institutions and thus their liberation requires a significant change in that structure, or it doesn’t and they can win by focusing only on Israeli zionists. And I think the latter is a much worse analysis.
A victim who misunderstands their oppression should be critiqued for such for both moral and strategic reasons.
then I guess we’ve come back to the Norm Finkelstein question. if a Palestinian who has personally been brutalized by the Israeli state said some anti-semitic shit and you were in the room with them, would you say “no actually”? I wouldn’t.
I guess it’s for similar reasons as to why I think we should have critical support for Hamas even though they are a deeply imperfect organization. We shouldn’t demand perfect victims or perfect resistance to colonialism.
Im not demanding perfect victims, I’m demanding revolutionaries. If you’ve been talking about random Palestinians as individuals, I couldn’t care less about that. Sure, they can be whatever. I’m talking about victims as organized resistance, that should be correct or corrected. The individuals should be then corrected by those structures where possible and necessary
there are parts of the Osama bin Laden manifesto where he also conflates Judaism as a whole with Israel, for the same reason as Finkelstein.
i guess I find the whole debate fruitless and divorced from the point. If anything the largest antisemitic group on Earth would be the state of Israel. They’re the only country I know who has, since WWII, had a policy of sterilizing Jews (in the case of Ethiopian immigrants).
I condemn antisemitism and the conflation of Jews with the crimes of Israel.
I think Finkelstein’s point is that until the genocide stops (and even after), the inevitable waves of antisemitism that come from it aren’t unjustified.
It’s important that they are controlled and not allowed to baloon out of scope (e.g. straight pogroms of non-Zionist groups), but you aren’t allowed to look at that and call it irrational.
It’s no different than the reign of terror, 500 years vs 5 months.
Second.
sorry for not being an antisemite
some crimes can never be forgivenDisclaimer: I didn’t (and won’t) watch the clip
Someone I follow online made a video on this subject and raised the extremely good point that if neo-nazi rhetoric gets normalized that has horrifying implications for the power it gives those people, and the harm they might do to other vulnerable people whether theyre Jewish or not
Also saw someone say “you must love the oppressed more than you hate the oppressor” and that feels like a really helpful guide in sincere allyship rooted in a desire to see the liberation of people who are being harmed
I agree that neonazi rhetoric should never be normalized… but in your opinion, who in this hypothetical is normalizing neo-nazi rehtoric? what exactly is the implication here?
imo, when people conflate Israel with judaism, that is deeply anti-semitic. The corporate media and western politicians (among others) have normalized that for decades.
That, “loving the oppressed more than you hate the oppressor” sounds like liberal pablum that will never directly challenge oppression. You can do both and they aren’t comparable or incompatible. it is a false choice meant to disarm you. Besides all that, you shouldn’t have to love someone for you to want for them dignity or justice, if you have a moral compass. if you are only concerned with being a good ally, i guess that stuff sounds fine, but it doesn’t do anything except make you feel good. if both of you want an end to oppression you can work as comrades towards that shared goal together. you don’t need to be friends to be comrades.
People using rhetoric that alludes to a secret Jewish cabal, or that Jewish people secretly control the US and is making us support them rather than that we support Israel because they ostensibly protect our imperialist interests in the middle east, and are a settler colonial state just like us (Though in practice theyre kind of too bloodthirsty to be particularly reliable allies a lot of the time). But I regularly see lefitst act like israel controls the US; meanwhile biden is on video in 1986 saying Israel is the best 3 billion dollar investment the US makes, and that if Israel did not exist in the middle east we would have to invent an Israel to defend our interest https://youtu.be/FYLNCcLfIkM
Theres been a pivot by some of the right wing talking heads to be critical of israel, and they tend to have a neonazi flavor of doing that. The video I’m referring to (made by a leftist) talks about how he feels that gives the right cultural power that enables to then turn around and do harm to vulnerable people, he speaks on that as a black man, and also mentions the harm that those types want to do to other vulnerable populations. It feels like some people have adopted that version of antizionism. And that’s not a problem for Palestine to worry about, its a problem for us if those people gain culturally legitimacy because the other talking points those folks have are real dangerous
That being said, I don’t know that Finkelstein is really an example of that specifically, the post just kinda made me think back on the video and I was commenting as I process how all of these ideas relate for me. I apologize if its clumsy, I’m still figuring a lot out about how I relate to political ideology and talking about stuff with people is helpful to me
I’m tired of the US being in debt slavery to Jewish superbankers
the theory goes WWII and the Nazi fascism was started by Zionist Jewish superbankers
they were nomadic, they had no nation of their own they had weird fucking religious beliefs, everyone hated them only being a banker allowed them to get their teeth into the economy of a country and this make it harder to be unroofed [sic]
Actual things a fellow queer (who I believe probably would have self identified as a leftist) I met online sent me, explaining how Jews brought nazi persecution on themselves by being weird and unlikable, and Zionist superbankers actually engineered Nazi germany. I wish I could send the whole thread, but they sent it in like 1 sentence messages and it’d take ages to copy and paste all of it in order. There was a ton of (((they))) conspiracy theory rhetoric, and a lot of “its the Jews fault that the US sucks”, and generally a lot of Protocols of the Elders of Zion, mixed in with fairly common leftist talking points.
I agree they’re not incompatible, but I think people priotizing hating someone over asking themselves how you support the liberation efforts of another group is how you get people like Finkelstein. He centers himself in the Palestinian struggle and it feels to me like thats rooted in having lost sight of who anti-zionist advocacy is supposed to be in service of. The video talks directly about Finkelstein a couple times, and I thought the points were salient though I don’t know if I have processed them well enough to explain them well.
You can do both, but in my mind if your hatred of the oppressor comes first I don’t think you will be a good ally. The hatred of the oppressor should always be a product of your love for the oppressed, and I feel like I regularly see people loose sight of that. I’m learning what it means not to center myself in other people’s fights, and so the quote was helpful to me in remembering what it looks like to show up for people in the way they might benefit from, not the way I want to because it’s cathartic to have someone I’m allowed to have hatred for
Hopefully that clarifies what I do or don’t mean by my first comment. I’ll grab the link to the video in case you wanna know what I’m talking about, though fair warning its a long video
Video: This Video is NOT About Candace Owens by F.D Signifier https://youtu.be/BZkxE0YNj8o (he uses Candace Owens as an example of the right wing antizionists, and to get people to click on the video cause he knows folks would show up for that title and thumbnail)
I found YouTube links in your comment. Here are links to the same videos on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
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I turned off this interview, Norm was flinging awful opinions everywhere. Starting with talking about his good friend Noam Chomsky and i turned it off when he started blaming Arab racism on woke. He says some vile shit I don’t agree with.
I think the best way to call this out is to demand Jewish people and their groups end all ties to Israel. Rather than labeling all Jewish people as [insert trope here] or giving a xenophobia pass bc of the ongoing genocide.
Finkelstein has the brain disease that professors get where they become outlandishly contrarian and also harp on about cancel culture. It’s kind of tragic he’s become like this in the past decade or so because his earlier scholarship on Palestine is really good. I think with him he’s a guy who simply doesn’t go on the internet much and yet he’s always interacting with younger people and internet figures so he’s fabricated a whole bunch of nonsense in his head
Yes please! I still love my Judaism and so many aspects of Jewish culture but I can’t participate in almost every Jewish organization in my area because they are rabidly zionist. If these organizations choose Zionism over Judaism they are dooming the religion and failing the Jewish people.
blaming Arab racism on woke
Damn I didn’t know the Middle Age Crusaders invented wokeness
What’s Norm trying to say here? That Palestinians are reasonable to hate all Jews?
I think they’re reasonable to hate all Zionists, but I agree with Hasan that Jews are not a monolith. Israeli Jews almost are, given the 95% support number (and that they live in the Zionist state), but diaspora Jews are not the same.
Palestinians have no responsibility to love their oppressors or pray for their persecutors. It is not Palestinian responsibility to make sure they frame their, correct, observations in a way that is palatable to feelings of their oppressors or those that share an ethnic or cultural designator with them.
Palestinians have done so, so, so much to clarify that their opposition is to israel, and at this point they bear no responsibility for our refusal to listen to their words or see what is happening to them.
I think it’s changing (thanks to the internet).
My parents are Palestinian diaspora, but older arab media (from the late 90s, even) rarely ever made the distinction between zionism and judaism.
My mom used to say “kos im al yahud” or “fuck the mother of the jews” whenever something bad happened, she doesn’t anymore, obviously.
For them, the only jewish people they interacted with or saw in the media were rabid genocidal zionist freaks. If we asked an indigenous person during the peak of settler-colonialism what their thoughts on white people were, I’m sure it’d be similar. There were very few white people who gave them a reason to make the distinction.
Even moreso that the closest jews to SWANA other than the “israeli” zionists would be european zionists, so even if they traveled abroad they would only be interacting with jews who were zionists.
There’s this funny movie I watched many times as a kid Hamam Fi Amstirdam in the timestamp I linked, he moves to Amsterdam from Egypt, meets a guy who knows Arabic, finds out he has ties to “israel” and tried to claim that the pyramids were his.
It was, and still is, to a lesser degree, extremely rare to interact with a jewish non-zionist, especially from within SWANA.
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
Sure, but (and I think this is Norm’s point) are you gonna try and tell a Palestinian that? Like if some Palestianian woman who watched her entire family get liquidated by the IDF in the most horrific way possible is spouting some anti-Semetic conspiracy theory nonsense, are you really gonna be like “no, not all Jews!”?
some anti-Semetic conspiracy theory nonsense
Whilst that may be happening, a lot of what is being said and done by Palestinians that is called antisemitism is just honestly stating what is happening. Jews took their lands, jews are killing them, jews are oppressing them, jews overseas send money to jews in Israel citing judaism who kill Palestinians while waving the star of david.
And Palestinians can’t say that without it being deemed antisemitic, and that isn’t fair.
No. I get your point, but that’s a trauma response, right? It’s not necessarily going to be rational, and we shouldn’t expect it to be. You can’t “correct” someone’s response to trauma.
And I think that goes back to Hasan’s point that Israel trying to tie Jewishness to Israel (or support for Israel) makes that response more likely, and Israel doing it is worthy of condemnation because of the blowback that will be felt by anti-Zionist Jews.
spouting some anti-Semetic conspiracy theory nonsense,
that’s not a case for “not all jews”, those are just factually incorrect. obviously we’re not going to browbeat someone but there’s jbs dinosaurs and klan offshoots around here so i’d broach the topic on the basis of not helping those groups out by saying certain things in public when they’d just as soon kill her too.
Kind of feels like they agree in broad strokes, but are talking about different things.
This type of discussion is really just a huge waste of time and only gives air to zionist hasbara. As long as zionists are able to weaponize this “discourse” surrounding an “antisemitic crisis” they can dilute discussion surrounding direct action against synagogues that sell Palestinian land or “Jewish heritage” groups that are just fronts to whitewash settler-colonialism and groom kids into white supremacy.
We can’t have multiple discussions? These are the discussions happening, we should think about how to frame them.
We’ve had different versions of this discussion before on hexbear (infamous
struggle session comes to mind or Al Sarkha discourse)Being able to counter the antisemitism smear in public is useful, but a public broadcast of two already antizionist figures giving publicity to this highly choreographed moral panic isn’t productive/strategic, especially considering it went off the rails.
I see that Norm’s got a new book out (Gaza’s Gravediggers: An Inquiry Into Corruption in High Places). Anyone read it yet?
(also, if you wanna hear Norm really spit on this issue, check out this lecture he gave recently)
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
