My best friend in shul, and still to this day, comes from a long line of anti-Zionist leftists. My own family history is more mixed, but includes several socialists and anti-Zionists.

Interestingly, one of the portions of the IHRA definition of antisemitism enshrined in this law is:

Denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination, e.g., by claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavor.

Now, e.g. means “for example” which means it’s not the only example. Might another example be the silencing of anti-Zionist speech? After all, as stated in the article:

The Jewish Bund was the largest Jewish trade union movement and Jewish political party in Europe, and it fought for Jewish liberation alongside the struggle for socialism and international solidarity with other workers and oppressed peoples. […] Against Zionism, the Bund insisted “wherever we are, that’s our homeland.”

Isn’t this Bundism a form of self determination? And wouldn’t denying the anti-Zionism inherent in it be tantamount to denying the self-determination of the Jewish people?

Can I sue Congress under the Civil Rights Act of 1964?

Well, yes, I suppose, and that’s why I said all the stuff I imagine you must have read before you got to that part, and the thing I said right after that, too.

I appreciate you adding context to why some Jewish students feel unsafe with the discourse going on at the moment.

I feel like a dick talking about it with what’s going on, but it’s still important. And to be clear, we Jews who are inculcated with Zionism and the generational trauma of the Holocaust from a young age have to zealously interrogate our unconscious fears and biases. The protests provide the perfect opportunity to confront it head on if you can swallow your pride and just listen. My Arab & Muslim friends are some of the most thoughtful people I know, with strong opinions and moral convictions that come right from the deepest parts of their being. I feel as at home with them as I did in the Synagogue growing up, and I have no doubt if I were to attend a peace protest that I would find many more like them. They’re an absolute gift; I was never a supporter of Israel, but their friendship has thrown the whole thing into even sharper focus since October 7th. I hope one day the Zionists can be defeated, and from the river to the sea, all good people will finally be free.

Full disclosure, I am Jewish myself, and sorry for the book… try not to knee-jerk react to it.

I hate to partake in this genetic essentialism garbage, but Ashkenazis by and large share their paternal heritage with Sephardic Jews and other Semites, although that Semitic heritage has become somewhat diluted over time by converts in the maternal line and their descendants. My point in saying that is not to say that Zionists have any legitimate claim to Palestine - they absolutely don’t. It’s just “Ashkenazi Jews aren’t Semites” is a highly debatable and fraught claim that has the potential to lead one down a rabbit hole into actual racism, and incidentally has absolutely nothing to do with the crimes of Zionism. When I hear that implication, my mind is drawn to the adoption by antisemites (most recently Black Hebrew Israelites) of the now disproven myth that the original Semitic Jews died out and were replaced by Khazars.

I’m stopping short of calling what you said, specifically, antisemitism, but in another context a similar statement might be called a dog whistle. People can say these things unintentionally when they just don’t understand the implications. This kind of reckless use of language and ideas is at least part of why we have Jewish students on college campuses claiming they don’t feel safe. We Jews have grown up being implicitly taught to keep our ear to the ground when it comes to rising intolerance, and yes in a lot of cases that has resulted in a massive blind spot for our own intolerance, but it doesn’t mean we should ignore warning signs. Of course, as a Jew, and like you, I often scoff when I hear claims of antisemitism, and in fact I get angry about them when they conflate Jewishness with Israel & Zionism, which ironically IS antisemitism.

Now I mentioned the Khazar myth and Jewish students who don’t feel safe. The issue here is that they lack the self awareness to say, “maybe my hangups about certain things people say are a product of my own upbringing and sensitivities, rather than any intentional antisemitism on their part.” On the other hand, when people talk about Jews or Jew-adjacent issues like the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, they should also have the self awareness to ask themselves “am I contributing to a climate that lets actual antisemitism fly under the radar and should I be more careful about the things I say?”

In any case, flinging accusations back and forth is unproductive. If my fellow Jews feel threatened by protestors and their words, I would recommend they approach those protestors with humility, and listen to their grievances before making assumptions about their intentions. Which is funny, because here I am Jew-splaining in response to a flippant remark in an internet comment section, but the reason is I just desperately want people to understand each other (and themselves) better.

But have you considered the heat death of the universe?

Your quote from the Jordanian commander dates to after the Nakba. There was significant intercommunal conflict in Mandatory Palestine because of the mismanagement of Jewish migration by Britain, and escalating tensions from the “legal” land purchases you mentioned that had been occurring since the late 1800s. Yes, Jews attempted to purchase and settle uninhabited land, but the fact is big chunks of the land purchased were misappropriated under the Ottoman Land Code, and European Jews frequently expelled (by force if the implication wasn’t clear) the Arab Muslims they found living on it, who may have had no idea it was sold out from under them.

Is that true?

The real mistake may have been attempting to pivot to Iran in an attempt to reinstate the JCPOA. As admirable a goal as that is, I also think it’s clear Trump squandered any trust Iran had in the US when he cancelled it. Iran has taken the Biden admin’s overtures as an opportunity to test its regional influence, instead of being a good faith negotiating partner - and why would the Biden admin have expected anything else when the US hadn’t been a good faith partner? Trump was awful on foreign policy, and set middle-east peace back decades, but Biden has completely failed to understand and adapt to the new status quo.

Yeah I took digital art classes in the 90s and the teacher and all the students pronounced it jif. I never heard the hard g until that dumb YouTube video.

no u

Yeah, I have friends who say it with a hard g and I never say a damn thing, but I say jif once and it’s “jraphics” this and “jod” that. I get it, you watched that stupid video in 2012, congrats.

Historically it doesn’t matter what the creator of anything prefers unless it’s an “unveiling” and they name it on the spot.

I can’t for the life of me find it now, but the gif was introduced with an image that contained in its metadata a statement that “it’s pronounced jif”. You can still find it somewhere and open it in notepad and read it for yourself.

What’s frustrating is that anyone can find a piece of evidence for their argument, and there are propagandists everywhere offering up grand narratives full of such evidence. So when someone is extremely concerned about children getting sex changes, and you say something to the effect of “that’s not really happening” they’ll just come back at you with a few examples and you’re like “yeah but a few examples isn’t a statistical trend and you’re blowing this way out of proportion” and then they call you a groomer. Like, I’m not okay with it, but also it’s not something that we need to be specifically worried about and build an entire political movement around. Like children get attacked by sharks occasionally (probably more often than they get sex changes), but there’s no mass political movement to shame parents who encourage their kids to swim in known shark habitats.

Humanity divorced itself from nature long before capitalism existed. Without natural bounds on growth, any organism will multiply indefinitely. Every technology we’ve developed, from stone tools and fire to transistors and fractal antennas, has been in service of removing natural bounds. After the world wars, people were concerned about our ability to feed an exploding population, then the green revolution happened. Today, we’re grappling with how to feed 3 to 4 times as many people, as well our depletion of other natural resources and the effect we’re having on the planet as a whole. We’re developing fusion, solar & wind, carbon sequestration, desalination, vertical farming & hydroponics, and the asteroid mining and extraterrestrial colonization you mention.

It’s scary now because it feels like we’re truly on the brink of destroying ourselves - outgrowing our planet’s ability to host us in multiple different ways - without a nascent technology close at hand to save us from ourselves again. We’re smart, but are we smart enough to defeat nature entirely? Either we stay one step ahead of perpetual growth, or we finally realize that perpetual growth is the one natural thing about ourselves that we have not managed to truly grapple with.

What would be beautiful is if “entity” meant “subdivision of a single state” but I won’t hold my breath.

The PA was intended to manage the Israeli withdrawal and establishment of an independent Palestinian state, as agreed upon in the Oslo Accords, and yes that was meant to be a collaborative process with the Israelis. There were people on both sides who were serious about the peace process, but unfortunately the people in charge often weren’t, and so the situation deteriorated until Hamas and Likud, the two worst possible parties to oversee the peace process, consolidated power.

Just make sure no one named Ted Faro gets anywhere near the project.

The problem is democrats love exploiting brown people for their cheap sweat shop labor.

You could build an IMAX theater with all that projection.

I suppose that’s because parliamentary parties are much stricter with their membership. A small difference of opinion could lead to the expulsion of a member. US parties can’t really do that, so instead we have caucuses within the parties that vote along party lines most of the time, but differently on some important issues. In a parliamentary system, the caucus members would be expelled and would have to form their own party to have their views represented.

Yeah, beyond that I was mostly responding to the assertion that “Americans are stupid and easily manipulated.”

No, they are responding to an imperfect system that punishes them for having strong morals. Far from stupid, it’s actually quite rational. The best thing you can do if you care about not having to choose between genocide and even more genocide is get involved in pushing ranked choice voting through ballot measures, lobbying your state legislature, or hell, start with just municipal elections if you think you can get that done.