Chapotraphouse

​"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.

Mohammed El-Kurd

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 im 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I condemn antisemitism and the conflation of Jews with the crimes of Israel.

I've become an anti-semite.

Many Jewish people aren't zionists, but most Jewish organizations have become zionist.

From 2008 until 2018, taking part in the BDS movement, I held strong with the belief that Jewishness was entirely separate from zionism. After the March of Return bloodshed and seeing the reaction of many Jews I know personally, I lost the strength to consider Jewishness in an impartial and unprejudiced way. It's no longer tenable in my life not to be wary of Jews over 30 - because it's more likely than not that they are zionists. Initial suspicion (prejudice) has sadly become good sense for me because it's not at all a rare thing that the given person in question is a racial-supremecist human-annihilator of the highest order.

The original meaning of anti-semitism, before it meant being against genocide, and before it had the connotation of irrational "anti/phobic" prejudices, was that of specifically being in favour of disenfranchisement of Jews.

I want to see all zionists completely removed from the levers of power in my country. 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.

My anti-Semitism is weakness, but I think (as all prejudiced people do) that it's rooted in rationality. The cure, of course, should be to love the oppressed more than I hate the oppressors... but every single Palestinian activist I personally knew and have worked with as part of various programs and missions over 20 years, has been murdered - even those in the west bank didn't survive.

Everyone I knew from distributing cameras, medicine, firefighting equipment, pumps - all dead. Now I just have a burner phone full of dead activitist contacts while I'm full of hate.

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)

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.

I think Norm gives inconsistent definitions of antisemitism. He has previously defined it as something similar to what the term was first coined to mean, not any kind of personal feeling, but a political project to disenfranchise Jewish people. I don't think he justified the definition by the historic meaning but made more of a "structural racism vs personal racial prejudice" type argument. I think the argument in the OP is less reasonable for the reasons regul has stated.

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'm not reading all that. Free Palestine

sorry for not being an antisemite

some crimes can never be forgiven

Kind of feels like they agree in broad strokes, but are talking about different things.

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.

norman finkelstein probably has internalized antisemitism. minorities in 2026 have internalized bigotry so imagine what it was like for minorities back in the day. he lost most of his family to the holocaust besides his parents which is brutal and lives knowing that people still spread that bullshit ideology to this day. this is what i think is happening here. its especially soul crushing when a member of your group does some bullshit that youre stereotyped to do because you know that destroys your argument and gives ammo to the opposition. i can get that but he shouldnt say these things publicly.