Chapotraphouse

I think what's happening here is a mistake in trying to turn a lesser contradiction into a non-contradiction. I'm going to repost a few comments I had about this a month ago because I think they're useful for grounding at least my thought. Whether it is accurate or appropriate, we can critique together. To be clear---This is not intended to be a reopening of a struggle session and I do not want to re-litigate the interpersonal conflict around the theoretical discussion. I am simply trying not to completely retype a comment I put some appreciable effort into in the past.

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.

This comment I am still developing my thinking on now, but I think it captures the complications in the problem and the frustration around it, at least. Some thoughts on this specifically; contemporary Judaism is, religiously, highly influenced by Zionism. This is in part survivorbias. The anti-zionist Jews were the ones not rushing off to form a settler-colony in Israel, so instead were systematically and industrially slaughtered. This goes for many working class and communist Jews too, who had a very different picture for the future of Judaism than the Zionists. The Holocaust probably killed many of the best Jews at the time, and the repugnant tools of empire willing to let themselves be used survived. What a sad, contingent historical fact. Added to this ugly narrative is that Zionists got to go, "See! we told you so!" and convince many that it was in fact necessary for Jews to have a state for them to be safe. Many jews have intergenerational trauma that shapes the figures we are discussing around the issue at hand, and I think a reasonable fear of rising reactionary sentiment. More on that later. For now, my next quoted comment gets into how we 'ought' to characterize Zionist Jews today and the culpability for their actions.

I appreciate a thoughtful and educating exchange. I maintain my commitments that Jews= /=Zionists, and that evocation of religiously based hatred is a bad thing.

That it is happening may be sensible, that does not require our uncritical support. Words are not void of the context they are used in or the history that precedes them--coconut trees and all that. There is a meaningful disanalogy between Christianity and Jews simply based on the power differential given numbers, Capital, and so on. What I actively do is accuse the Jews in Israel of allowing themselves to be "Kapos" for the kind of white supremacy and genocide the West wants to enact upon the global south.That's just about the most vicious word any jew can say to another. It's not equivalent of the N word because it lacks the historical context of oppression and dehumanization the N word has, but it's bad enough that I'd bristle to hear any non-jew say it. Kapos of course were the death camp inmates given special status and privilege for being willing to brutalize other Jews by the Germans.

As grotesque as Kapos malice may have been, it was an artificially permitted phenomenon by greater powers pitting oppressed people against each other. The most culpable were of course the Germans. In our current situation, that would be European Capital, the British specifically as the colonial power at the time of "hand of", and substantially more the Americans in the modern era than any other. Our language should help us clarify and understand and coordinate the world better, though, not conflate when unnecessary. I think that's exactly what The Sarkha does as it moves from a cry of pain to a political slogan outside of that original context. It would be easy and far more accurate to say "Curse upon Zionism" or whatever, than to broad brush against all Jews. It doesn't matter what the intent of the original utterance was when it starts getting repeated outside of that context. It gets flattened and weaponized by ignorance and misapplied. More precise language is better, and we have more precise language available to us.

Let me turn your thought experiment around a bit. Was the islamaphobia and hatred expressed by victims of 'terrorism' warranted after 9/11? What about queer folks who continue to be put to death in many Islamic countries? Would it matter that an arguably innocent person had been killed and their loved ones were mourning? Would that entitle their loved ones to begin repeating and evoking phrases like "Damn the Muslims?" I would hope you'd say "of course not, that would viciously flatten an entire non-homogeneous people and propagate an ignorance that will harm many more innocents in the long run." This is of course it's own imprecise analogy because Islamaphobia has its own history and context in the world, just like anti-Semitism does. But my point stands. More precise language is better, and the cries of the oppressed are not above criticism when they transcend the utterance of the directly hurt and become a rallying cry for a larger political project.

Ansar Allah is perhaps entitled to evoke that phrase given their direct experience with Zionist violence, I'm not out here to tone police the victims of genocide expressing their pain, but that doesn't make the phrase "incorruptible" or worthy of uptake in anyone else's mouths. It's obviously corruptible given how many words have to be spent to justify and contextualize it against misuse, and all this essay writing won't happen every time it's repeated and passed along.

I have edited the rest of the comment out to avoid needless hostility or unproductive interpersonal criticism on my end.

So what's this wall of text have to do with a lesser-contradiction vs non-contradiction? You say that the Jews are not oppressed, if anything they are protected. I argue that, maybe, but that is only so far as they are useful as a cudgel against other minorities. There is a rise in actual, good ole fashioned reactionary anti-semitism and the permissiveness/pervasiveness of it in the public sphere across the west. Many Jews live in the west, so they feel this viscerally and are not wrong. They are conflating it with Leftist criticism over Zionism and Palestine, and that is indeed in error, but the larger picture is a result of colonialism using a minority to impose violence and establish a casus belli against the majority it wishes to dominate more brutally. It does not cancel out the rising anti-semitism from reactionary sources as a real phenomenon with material effects---Jews feel less safe, so they circle up to protect themselves. They become over-sensitive to threat identification, and quicker to make excuses for 'self-defense' when they are actually being used as a weapon against others in a way that is not defending themselves.

We have the major contradiction, imperialism, and the minor contradiction, anti-semitism, interacting on different levels. Imperialism pits the jews against other would-be or actively oppressed people, and anti-semitism scares them into staying in place and thinking in "survival" mode instead of solidarity. To simply deny that there is a rising tide of actual reactionary anti-semitism is to simply deny our eyes and ears. The alt-right, far right, and major figures in western politics and business are increasingly indisputably anti-semitic, and rising in power. I think that is a contradiction that is worth consideration instead of erasure, and it helps us understand why the primary contradiction of Imperialism is working the way it is with the minority in question to begin with.