Maturin

The 74-40 tomatoes being unpeeled and unsliced in the picture is very confusing

The argument (particularly from Haredi non-Zionist Jews) goes along the lines of this:

If the Japanese ruling class decided, one day, to say “actually, we , the Japanese, are the real Jews AND we are compelled to conquer, enslave, and commit genocide on the people of China in the name of Judaism” does that create an affirmative obligation of a religious Jewish person in a religious Jewish community from a long line of religious Jewish parentage in, say, the Iranian Jewish community (which still exists) to affirmatively do something because these people, on the other side of the world with no connection to them whatsoever other than trying to steal their name are “doing it in their name?” Are they “fence sitters” if they say “I don’t know anything about China and the only thing I know about Japan is that it has nothing to do with me or Judaism despite how they hold themselves out to the rest of you?”

This is essentially how religious Jews historically treated Zionism (for nearly 2000 years): “Zionists (particularly Christians), identify these people as the only “real Jews” but I see them as, at best, heretics and more likely Christian converts who have nothing to do with actual Jews in general and me in particular.”

The western positionally you identify is important but I think you are needlessly singling out Jews. Can any citizen of a western country (let’s just say US/UK) dust off their hands and say “nothing to do with me”? When the Zionist project is, at base, western colonialism? Would a Jewish American be morally worse than an evangelical Christian for doing that?

I think what’s getting me hung up on this framing is the idea that someone else, by essentially coopting one’s identity, creates a moral obligation on the victim of that co-opting that is greater than the moral obligation of the rest of the population to stand up against injustice when it should essentially be no different.

In a practical sense, a non-Zionist western Jew, when confronted with the facts and news all around them, is going to ultimately take a more affirmative political position (pro or anti). Just as any westerner should. But that is looking at the issue through the lens of the 2020s where it has infiltrated most of organized Jewish institutions and the local and country governments where they live. Once their synagogues and community centers become centers of Zionism and Zionist worship, they either keep going (implicitly supporting) or stop, so they have to confront the question in their daily life and few can escape to “the way things were” when you could be Jewish and Zionism was one of those political ideologies that was out there, like liberal capitalism versus communism or nationalism versus pluralism, that you could be a part of but it wasn’t a necessary component of ones identity and you don’t have to have an opinion on it.

I think opposition to Israel - as in "Israel should not exist as a "Jewish State"" - is anti-Zionism. I think "fence sitting" could be a bit harsh on non-Zionists if applied to all of them. "Israel has nothing to do with me and I have nothing to do with Israel why are you even asking me about it?" could be an example of a legitimate non-Zionist position that is not fence sitting (especially outside of the US, where your other status as a US tax-payer puts you back squarely in the middle of the issue).

As an illustration, if a person from, say, Honduras said "I don't understand the Russia/Ukraine thing, it has nothing to do with me, it is on the other side of the world" would you say they are "fence sitting"? Even if their great-great-great-great grandfather was Ukrainian?

I think the point I'm trying to make about non-Zionist Jews is that there is no affirmative obligation for someone to be involved in or have a deep understanding of the politics and ideology of Zionism solely because they are Jewish. In the US, UK, and Palestine, not having a position on that becomes harder to justify, not because of one's Jewishness but because of one's participation in the political system that supports Zionism.

There is not a really clear line between "non-Zionist" and "anti-Zionist" but, with Zionism being a political ideology and Judaism being a religion, a "non-Zionist Jew" could be used to describe a member of the Jewish religion whose Jewish identity and religious belief does not involve any Zionism while an "anti-Zionist Jew" is a Jewish person who takes an affirmative political or ideological stance against Zionism. And of course there would be significant overlap between the two.

Much more nuanced. Doesn’t hit it square on the nose by saying “she was, at base, a liberal bourgeois academic who never fully opened her eyes to it even after nearly being ground in the gears of that system” but basically hints at that. The end of that one even says that you should read her despite her, shall we say, banal liberal racism/orientalism (including, famously, against poor, Eastern European Jews). But the context helps to understand when she is making valid observations and decent (and sometimes controversial) insights and when she misses the mark because of her prejudices.

That first article is about as terrible as one comes to expect from the Jerusalem post. I’m not saying there isn’t much to criticize in Arendt’s writings (particularly if your criticism comes from the left) but a Zionist spin article about a prominent anti-Zionist Jewish political scientist (who did admiral work pointing out the Zionist connections to the Nazi death machine) falls pretty flat. And it follows such a traditional Zionist pattern: have you considered that this anti-Zionist Jew is the real racist and this we should not pay attention when she reports on Eichmann’s warm and collaborative relationship with the Zionist partisans that formed the political core of the colony?

Hell yeah. I made the screenshot.

Bleak

Now now, maybe the other papers published by the bluesky account are just that terrible

Israel was not a victim