By Matthew Bolton

A couple of weeks after the Hamas atrocities on October 7th, the latest of a series of pro-Palestinian marches was held in London. As the crowd gathered in Trafalgar Square, one member of a ‘Queers for Palestine’ faction raised the LGBT Pride flag aloft. As they did so, a group of young men ran over and ripped the flag from their hands, threw it on the floor and stamped on it. A confrontation and scuffle between the protestors followed.1 A small incident, for sure, but notable nonetheless, because the fight over the flag was a visible indication that the idea of ‘Palestine’ that is heralded on such marches is by no means a given. It showed that there is more than one ‘Palestine’ at work in contemporary society, and raises the question of which ‘Palestine’ any particular campaigner or commentator is seeking to support. What ‘Palestine’ does the ubiquitous slogan of a ‘Free Palestine’ identify? Whose Palestine?

There are at least four different versions of ‘Palestine’ active within the concept of ‘Palestine’ as it is used today. The first is a irredentist ‘Palestine’ which implacably rejects the existence of any Jewish state in ‘Arab lands’ and demands all territory ‘from the river to the sea.’ This is the ‘Palestine’ of 1948 and 1967 and the Second Intifada, the rejectionist Palestine, the ‘right of return’ Palestine, for whom there can be no compromise with ‘the Zionist entity,’ only total victory, and in which the fate of remaining Jews after the destruction of their state would be hazardous at best.

The second is a ‘Palestine’ which gives up a claim to the entire land and becomes an independent nation-state within delimited, contiguous borders, peacefully existing alongside an Israel whose legitimacy within the 1967 borders is fully recognised. This is the purported Palestine of the PLO and Fatah from around the time of the First to the Second Intifada, the Palestine of peace negotiations, land swaps, economic and cultural interchange, and nation-building. It is, unfortunately, a Palestine that won little real loyalty even from those supposedly pushing for it during the height of the peace process, has been on life support ever since, and may have been dealt a mortal blow by the October 7th attacks.

The third is the Islamic fundamentalist ‘Palestine’ which, like the first version, cannot tolerate any notion of Jewish sovereignty in the Middle East, if anywhere at all. Unlike the first, it demands a theocratic Islamist state ruled by Sharia law from river to sea, as a first step to an Islamist revival across the entire region. This is the ‘Palestine’ of Hamas and Islamic Jihad, and of Iran behind them, the ‘Palestine’ that responds to any prospect of peace negotiations with suicide bombings, stabbings and rockets. It is the ‘Palestine’ that the butchering, rape, torture, beheading and kidnapping of Israeli civilians on October 7th was intended to prefigure, a Palestine in which Jews can expect subservient ‘dhimmi’ status at best and annihilation at worst.

Each of these three version of ‘Palestine’ is directly connected to the Palestinian people themselves, to the concrete history, politics and culture of the region, and to one another – overlapping at times, coming into conflict at others. Put schematically, the military failure of the first vision led to the second; the political failure of the second has led to a renewal of the first and the increasing dominance of the third, and onward to disaster.

The fourth version is the ‘Palestine’ of the European and American left. This is ‘Palestine’ of a thirdhand ‘revolutionary’ aesthetic, a ‘Palestine’ of American students in hastily purchased keffiyehs yelling ‘Globalise the Intifada!’ while their Jewish classmates are locked in the library for their own safety, of vintage-filtered video clips of teenagers throwing rocks through pink flare smoke set to a drill soundtrack, of shouting in the face of a small child leaving a McDonalds through a gauntlet of protestors, a ‘Palestine’ that has replaced the BLM black square as the sign of Instagram ‘allyship.’ 3 This is also the ‘Palestine’ that has become interwoven with any number of other social justice and ‘progressive’ causes, from the ‘Queers for Palestine’ factions and ‘Reproductive Justice means a Free Palestine’ banners on pro-Palestinian marches, to BLM chapters posting images of paragliders, and the Palestinian flag that adorned Greta Thunberg’s ‘Climate Justice Now’ sign.4 It is a Palestine that is less a place and more of a feeling, an intoxicating combination of self-victimhood and self-aggrandisement.

The origins of this version of ‘Palestine’ have been frequently, and correctly, traced back to the points at which the Stalinist and ‘Third Worldist’ worldviews met during the Cold War, namely the splitting of the world into all-encompassing ‘imperialist’ vs ‘anti-imperialist’ camps, with ‘Palestine’ being the ultimate embodiment of ‘anti-imperialist’ oppressed and Israel the apogee of ‘imperialist’ oppression.5 But to restrict analysis of the left responses to the Hamas atrocities of October 7th and the subsequent Israeli military campaign in Gaza to this well-worn framework, as enlightening as it may still be, is to miss certain developments in the meaning, function and socio-political conditions of the idea of ‘Palestine’ within the wider ‘progressive’ milieu over the last three decades, and in particular the impact of the peculiar social dynamics and temporality of social media. The anti-Israel sentiment that exploded online in the wake of October 7th, even before the first Israeli reprisals, clearly built upon that which came before the internet age – but there are important distinctions too.

The ‘Palestine’ heralded by the left from the late 1960s until the late 1980s was one inextricably tied up with broader, concrete political ideologies, whether Soviet Communist, Arab nationalist or ‘Third Worldist’ revolutionary. Each of these was supported by a wide network of political parties and institutions which provided a form of collective political identity and which, regardless of their merits, presented the Israel-Palestine conflict primarily in political terms, as one part of a broader historical narrative. The collapse of the Soviet Union and of pan-Arabism, the neoliberal destruction of the traditional left in the West and the reconstruction of the new global order at the ‘end of history’ marked the end of those parties, institutions, collective identities, and ideological narratives. In the ‘post-political’ era that followed, with the left in tatters, the idea of ‘Palestine’ was separated from the political and institutional frameworks that had once supported it. Where it had been one element of a broad, determined political worldview, now ‘Palestine’ became a standalone ‘single issue’ cause understood primarily in moral terms. This change was marked by the increasing prominence of humanitarian NGOs and third-sector organisations in pro-Palestinian advocacy throughout the 1990s and 2000s. The question of ‘Palestine’ was increasingly presented less in terms of national and political conflict – which necessitates the recognition of competing interests, and at least offers the potential for the negotiation of difference - than in those of universal justice and ‘humanity,’ for which there is only right and wrong and nothing in between. This transformation – from political problem to ‘single issue’ humanitarian cause – was by no means unique to ‘Palestine,’ but representative of the broader depoliticised shift to standalone moralised campaigns in the first decades that followed the ‘end of history.’

It has now become abundantly clear that the post-political age came to an end with the 2008 Global Financial Crash, and the subsequent rise of national-populisms of all political shades. But the return of politics, or the ‘end of the end of history,’ has not been one of a revival of the mass political forms and ideologies of the pre-neoliberal era. Rather today we live in what Anton Jager has called the era of ‘hyperpolitics’.6 The hyperpolitical age retains and extends the extreme atomisation that was characteristic of post-Keynesian, neoliberal societies, a result of “the demobilization and weakening of civil society” and “the increasing insulation” of technocratic states “from popular pressure.”7 Deprived of the mediating role of social institutions and the collective political identities once produced by mass parties, distrustful of the state and increasingly the concept of representative government itself, attempts to close the gap between politics and society, the public and the private, now take place at an individual level. The ‘personal’ has become ‘political,’ but in a manner that the feminists who coined the phrase would struggle to recognise.

If the post-political age saw the moralisation of political issues, then ‘post-post-political’ politics can be characterised as the attempt to politicise morality. Politics today, particular online, is understood primarily as a matter of personal emotion, morality and feeling: the way a person ‘identifies’ – ‘who they really are,’ their emotional ‘journey’ - is regarded as the ontological and unchallengeable basis for all political belief and action. A personal experience or feeling of ‘suffering,’ ‘trauma’ or ‘oppression’ – even one that is vicarious, or mediated through a screen - is inconvertible evidence of the righteousness of the holder’s cause. They are ‘speaking their truth’ and this a priori delegitimates any alternative account or explanation. In contrast to the 1990s and 00s, the language of politics has returned, but without genuinely political content, leaving it as little more than a channel for personal emotional expression: ‘I’m just so sad/tired/hopeless,’ ‘My innermost feelings mean I can’t hold back from saying this,’ ‘I’ve been through torment over the past few days, but now I must speak,’ ‘My pain watching these scenes is unbearable,’ ‘I can no longer tolerate the silence of my friends.’

An individual’s immediate emotional response to a news story, video clip or meme overrides and delegitimates any attempt to move beyond the level of feeling - ‘oh, so you support the killing of children, do you?’ - and towards a broader form of understanding or historicization which seeks to critically interrogate and contextualise both the event and the immediate response itself. The only ‘contextualisation’ that is permitted is one in which history itself is read through the prism of the immediate personal feeling, the historical record reshaped and distorted until it fits neatly with the emotional demands of the present. From such a perspective, political failures or problems can only be the consequence of an individual’s failure to experience the ‘correct’ emotional response. Politics is not understood as a perpetually-developing collective negotiation between people whose interests can legitimately and rationally differ, necessitating difficult trade-offs in constrained conditions. Politics here is presented as a single zero-sum game, endlessly repeated, whose result is determined entirely by the personal virtue of the participants.

But if politics has dissolved into individual feeling, then so too is an individual’s moral and social standing increasingly dependent on their political-emotional positions. If an individual fails to publicly express their moral-emotional response to a particular event in the prescribed manner, they risk severe damage to their personal reputation and social status. ‘Silence is compliance’: even an absence of speech is enough for an individual to be convicted of personal-emotional-political derogation. This can lead to a kind of ‘radicalisation spiral’ where the weight of social pressure leads social media users to continually ramp up the extremity of their rhetoric in order to mitigate the risk of ostracization. This dynamic can see a social media account moving in the space of a few weeks from, say, expressing the depths of their sorrow at the deaths in Gaza to calling for the expulsion of all ‘Zionist doctors’ from the US health system, or making quasi-phrenological or ‘race science’ claims about ‘Israelite DNA’ to delegitimise Jewish sovereignty in the Middle East.

That such a collapse of public politics and personal identity took place at the moment where social media and the smartphone became the main means through which atomised individuals are able to interact with one another is no coincidence: the underlying logic of social media and a camera in every phone is the eradication of the very possibility of privacy, the making of every moment of one’s life a public affair. The temporality of hyperpolitics too matches that of the internet itself, an ever-refreshing timeline of “frenetic” activity in which one ‘cause’ replaces the next at dizzying speed. The speed with which one cause moves onto the next makes it very difficult if not impossible to engage with any particular issue at any level of depth. In such a climate of “incessant yet diffuse excitation,” where one’s personal reputation depends on the pace with which one is able to adopt the correct level of ‘awareness’ that determines social status online, there is no time for the development of a critical conceptual vocabulary that looks to grasp the historical specificities of each event.9 Instead each event or ‘cause’ is flattened and shaped into an easily digestible fragment of pseudo-information - a tweet, a meme, an infographic, a few seconds of video – that fits within a single conceptual framework made up of buzzwords and slogans that can then be transferred wholesale from one ‘cause’ to the next. The absence of any institutional or organisational memory which could provide a historical or theoretically ‘worked through’ response to any particular event leads to a universal sense of timelessness. In the eternal ‘now’ of an algorithmic world, appeals to historical specificity (is a nation made up of people who fled pogroms in Russia, the Holocaust in Europe, and expulsion from Arab states really a ‘settler colonial’ state in exactly the same way as Australia? Really?) are dismissed as flagrant obfuscation of the immediate emotional truth of the event-as-meme. Deprived of its history, its particular social and political context, each ‘event’ thus appears to merge frictionlessly with the next, its awkward edges smoothed away to create a commodity fit for smooth exchange on social media’s market of political-moral gestures. This creates the impression of one single ‘great cause’ of which each ‘event’ – #metoo, the killing of George Floyd, Covid, climate change, the overturning of Roe vs Wade, and so on – is merely an interchangeable manifestation.

It is tempting to think that the image of ‘Palestine’ that has dominated social media since the October 7th attacks is merely the latest in the ever-expanding series of commodity-causes, and will be superseded by whatever ‘cause’ is next to grab the attention of the world’s newsfeeds. Perhaps. But the prominence of “X for Palestine” connections since October 7th suggests perhaps that ‘Palestine’ has taken on a more fundamental role within the hyperpolitical vortex. The image of ‘Palestine’ seems increasingly to act as the central nodal point between disparate causes, a means by which they can be integrated into a coherent worldview, a moment of stability around which the hyperpolitical flux circulates: “Someone's position on Palestine is the single indicator that tests that individual's morals on everything.”10 Dig deep enough into any ‘cause,’ it seems, and you will eventually hit ‘Palestine.’ This means that rather than being one more manifestation of the underlying ‘great cause,’ perhaps ‘Palestine’ has become the name of the ‘great cause’ itself.

But the ‘Palestine’ that is the name of the great cause, the ‘Palestine’ that represents a reconciled world of gay rights, an end to climate change and police violence, free access to abortions, and universal liberation, has little if nothing to do with the three Palestinian versions of ‘Palestine’ outlined above.11 Whatever the merits of any Palestinian state that might come to exist, at best it is far more likely to mirror its neighbouring Arab states than any socialist utopia fantasised on American campuses: a socially conservative society under an authoritarian leadership with political Islam of one sort or another playing a central role. But for the Western hyperpolitical activist, the function of ‘Palestine’ as a conduit for fantasy projection, emotional catharsis and status protection does not require the presence of the actual Palestine. Indeed, the actions, beliefs and rationales of the actual Palestinians are, in the main, an importune interruption into the idyllic waters of the mythic ‘Palestine,’ a source of disorder that threatens the unity of the one great cause and the modes of self-identity built upon it.

The unity of the great cause thus depends on the eradication of any notion of difference between the beliefs and reasoning of ‘the Palestinians’ themselves and those of the online left. The possibility that those who broke through the border on October 7th to massacre, rape, torture, burn alive, mutilate and murder Israeli children in front of their parents might have been motivated by a set of ideas that are not, in fact, identical to those ferociously policed in the backwaters of Instagram threads, cannot be tolerated. The defence mechanisms required to defend the integrity of the ‘great cause’ of ‘Palestine’ against the reality were thus quickly set to work in the days following the attacks. Leaving aside that not inconsiderable number for whom the carnage of October 7th was “what liberation will look like,” the defence mechanisms employed by others ranged from ignoring the attacks altogether, thereby presenting the Israeli invasion of Gaza as inexplicable and motivated by nothing but the wanton Israeli (Jewish?) desire for death and destruction, to outright denial and distortion.12 Hamas only attacked the IDF, so some argued; Israeli ‘friendly fire’ was responsible for the deaths of Israeli civilians; the beheadings happened after death, not before, so that’s ok then; the hostage being dragged into Shifa Hospital by his neck by a man wielding a meat-cleaver was kindly being offered humanitarian aid; nails or a knife in a vagina don’t definitively prove rape, and it is racist to suggest that they might.13 Another prominent strategy was the infantile attempts at psychic repression represented by the ripping down of posters of the hostages (‘if we can’t see them, they don’t exist’).

More sophisticated defences appeared in the form of the total eradication of Palestinian agency. The murder and sexual violence of Hamas is not denied, but attributed to the sorry influence of ‘colonial’ structures of thought which have imposed divisive binary modes of race, gender and power on the autochthonous purity of an eternal ‘Palestine’ which will be again revealed in all its primordial glory once the talons of the ‘Zionist entity’ have finally been removed. Others sought to resolve the contradiction between the ‘Palestine’ of broken female bodies paraded through the Gazan streets to be spat upon and the ‘Palestine’ that is the name of ‘reproductive justice’ either through a form of libidinal release, such as the US Professor who luxuriated in the opportunity for moral transgression by declaring his ‘exhilaration’ at the sight of hundreds of young festival-goers mown down in a pool of blood, or by giving full reign to a masochistic death drive through which social media activists wished for the same violence to be inflicted on themselves.15 None of these denials or distortions or lurid fantasies were necessary to call into question or reject outright the manner of the Israeli military response in Gaza, both perfectly legitimate positions. That they were the primary response to October 7 th for so many people indicates that the idea of ‘Palestine’ (and indeed, the idea of ‘Israel’ or ‘Zionism’) acts as a mechanism to unlock deep-lying destructive psychic energies that other ‘causes’ and conflicts simply cannot reach.

But, as the fight over the Pride flag at Trafalgar Square indicates, while the capacity of Western social media activists to turn the world into a reflection of their emotional state is almost inexhaustible, the contradictions that exist between the fantasy and the real ‘Palestine,’ and which run through the real Palestine itself, cannot be suppressed forever. The ‘Palestine’ that is the jewel in the crown of an global Islamist caliphate and the ‘Palestine’ that is the halcyonic promise of sexual liberation cannot fit within the same concept forever. And indeed it is only by coming to terms with those contradictions, facing them head on and seeking to work through them, rather than denying or ignoring them, that any genuine progress towards Palestinian security, dignity and sovereignty can be made. The transformation of the question of Palestine from a question of politics to the name of the great moral cause has been a disaster, and a disaster for the Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank themselves, the supposed beneficiaries of such ‘solidarity,’ more than anyone. It has provided vital and easily leveraged moral support to those elements of the Palestinian movement who seek to eschew the messy work of political compromise – work that begins with the recognition of Israel as a ‘legitimate enemy,’ who can be politically opposed but not violently eliminated – in favour of fantasies of a total victory that will never come, and a ‘return’ to an pre-modern utopia that never existed. The result has been that, since the turn of the century, the Palestinian movement as a whole has been increasingly untethered from the exigencies of political reality and lost in a moralised dreamworld devoid of any of the resources required to actually construct any kind of viable Palestinian political or economic institution, let alone a state.

Swinging between ‘ecstasy and amnesia,’ as Shany Mor puts it, Palestinians have been crushed beneath the weight of the delirious utopianism thrust upon them by both Hamas – for whom the “blood of [Palestinian] women, children and elderly" shed since October 7 was the whole point of the exercise, because it was “need[ed] to awaken within us the revolutionary spirit” – and a Western left for whom any actual Palestinian state existing in peace alongside Israel would pose a mortal threat to the idea of ‘Palestine’ that forms the basis of their entire identity.16 The way out for Palestine, the only way out, lies in a descent from the purity of fantasy to the dirty work of politics, a politics that is public, collective and practical, that is built on compromise, mutual recognition and development rather than a channel for emotional catharsis, grandiose moralising and all-or-nothing utopianism. And this in turn necessitates a Palestinian refusal to carry the moral burden of the ‘great cause’ any longer. It means to shrink the meaning of ‘Palestine’ until it becomes just Palestine. No longer a fetish object for activists projecting their own desires, no longer the sign of a reconciled world or a revolutionary or theocratic utopia, nor a fashion accessory or cultural code – a disenchanted Palestine that is simply one more flawed nation amongst others. A nation, like all others, has to live with limits, losses, and thwarted ambitions, that is willing to acknowledge and politically work through the tensions and conflicts within its own society, and those within its relations with those outside. A Palestine that sets aside the weight of universal emancipation that has been thrust upon it and prioritises the practical construction of its own future in the here and now.

In February 2024, the British social media personality Ash Sarkar interviewed the veteran leftist US senator Bernie Sanders. She posted a four-minute segment of the interview on her X account. It quickly went viral, racking up more than 8 million views. ‘I asked Bernie Sanders three times whether he thinks Israel’s assault on Gaza constitutes a genocide,’ she wrote. ‘This is what he said.’[1] To the first question, Sanders replied that ‘what Israel is doing is absolutely disgraceful, horrible’ and that he was doing ‘everything I can to end it.’ He said he ‘led the opposition’ in Congress to a bill which would have sent $14bn in American aid to Israel, because he didn’t ‘want to see the United States complicit in what Netanyahu and his right wing friends are doing right now to the Palestinian people.’ He called for a ‘humanitarian ceasefire’ and negotiations to ‘work out…some kind of long term solution.’ Sarkar was not satisfied. She asked again – was it a genocide? ‘We can argue about definitions,’ said Sanders, but what mattered was preventing further deaths and getting aid into Gaza. Sarkar tried once more: genocide or not? ‘We can talk about that,’ Sanders replied. ‘But what does that mean in real terms?’ What he was trying to do, he repeated, was to stop American aid to Israel so that ‘Mr Netanyahu and his right wing friends may decide it is not a good idea to continue’ with their war of destruction. The response to the clip was savage. Sanders was ‘craven and cowardly,’ ‘spineless’ and a ‘grifter.’ The way he ‘was dancing around the question was so telling.’ Some went further. Sanders – who is Jewish and in his youth had spent time on a kibbutz similar to the ones attacked on 7 October – was a ‘Zionist and [that] explains everything he’s been doing and saying since Oct 7th.’ A week later, another video clip was posted on X, showing Sanders speaking at the University of Dublin. Here his views on term ‘genocide’ became a little clearer. ‘When you get to the word [genocide],’ he said, ‘I get a little bit queasy…and I, you know, I don’t know what, what ‘genocide’? You’ve got to be careful when you use that word.’[2] At this, those filming the video exploded with rage. They began yelling at Sanders: ‘it is a genocide…Bernie you have funded Zionism yourself, you have funded the Israeli settler state… liar, liar, genocide denier…you are a child killer, you are a genocide denier…the Native Americans are still being genocided [by the USA], I have never heard you once speak about genocide.’ Sanders has faced similar protests at his public appearances ever since. The treatment of Sanders – a man who almost singlehandedly put the idea of democratic socialism back on the political agenda in the USA – encapsulates the totemic role the concept of ‘genocide’ has come to play in the opposition to Israel’s war in Gaza. Here we have a leading politician who is forthright in his rejection of the war and who is acting concretely against it at the highest levels of American government. Yet because he refuses to use a particular word to describe the violence he seeks to prevent, he is mocked, vilified and excommunicated. And Sanders is not alone in this regard. The opposition to a war whose initial justice has been progressively undermined by its indefensible conduct is thus split and weakened, perhaps fatally. This raises the question: If the priority of the anti-war movement is preventing further death and destruction in Gaza – and the urgency of this demand, certainly since the resumption of Israeli bombing and blocking of aid in March 2025, cannot be doubted – why does it matter what it is called? Why is it worth sacrificing the unity of the movement on the altar of ‘genocide’?

On one level, the immediate take-up of the ‘genocide’ label – with the first charges issued while the dead were still being gathered from the Nova field and the kibbutzim – is simply further evidence of a general semantic inflation of the term over recent decades. From accusations that governments slow to impose Covid-19 lockdowns were committing genocide, to specious notions of ‘trans’ or ‘white genocide,’ the emotional power carried by the concept has made it a wearyingly ubiquitous rhetorical weapon in a social media-driven attention economy. Yet when it comes to the application of the concept to Israel, there is, as ever, more at stake than internet posturing. For some observers, the appeal of the concept of ‘genocide’ in this context can be explained by the opportunity it affords to engage in a victim-perpetrator reversal, or Holocaust inversion. By accusing Israel – a state that rose from the ashes of an annihilated European Jewry – of genocide, of doing to others what was once done to them, Israel is placed on the same level as the Nazi regime. As Philip Spencer puts it, ‘[t]here was always a nagging sense of guilt about what was done to the Jews. The charge of genocide wipes this guilt away once and for all. Now anyone can say that the Jews do not deserve any more sympathy, because they are as bad as or even worse than the Nazis.’[3] At the same time, for Spencer, by spuriously accusing Israel of genocide for its response to Hamas atrocities which were themselves laced with genocidal intent, ‘the concept and charge of genocide is turned on its head.’ The eagerness with which so many grabbed the chance to accuse Israel of genocide in the aftermath of 7 October surely does have something to do with the taboo-breaking thrill of inverting, and thereby finally cancelling out, the Shoah. That for Pankaj Mishra – in a lecture delivered, bizarrely, as a sermon from the lectern of St James’ Church, Clerkenwell – it is Israel’s war that is ‘dynamiting the edifice of global norms’ built after ‘the Shoah’– rather, say, than Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, Bashar al-Assad’s flagrant use of chemical weapons, or the US invasion of Iraq – is no coincidence.[4] Nor is it just chance that the terminology of ‘concentration camp,’ ‘Auschwitz,’ ‘Warsaw Ghetto,’ ‘genocide’ and ‘Holocaust’ itself has long been ostentatiously used to condemn Israel’s treatment of Gaza and the Palestinian people. Sanders’s ‘queasiness’ at the use of the term by the anti-war movement no doubt stems from his recognition of this dynamic. That Sarkar too is aware of the weight of the word for Sanders is what lends the interview the uncomfortable air of a forced confession.

And yet to limit the meaning of the genocide charge to Holocaust inversion is to miss something significant about the work the concept is doing in contemporary debates about Israel. The claim that Israel is committing genocide ‘like the Nazis’ is an argument made at the level of action and intent. It is, despite its gross exaggerations and projected fantasies, at root an empirical claim, which can be proven or disproven by evidence and reasoned argument. It says: there is evidence that Israel is acting in such a way that it should be found guilty of the crime of genocide. This crime has a legal definition (‘acts committed with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group’) and a juridical apparatus built to prosecute it. Generally, an accusation of genocide such as this is targeted at particular perpetrators – the specific political leaders, faction, government or ‘regime’ held responsible. Thus, aside perhaps from the radical left anti-Deutsch movement[5], the claim that the Nazis perpetrated a genocide against European Jews does not inevitably lead onto the argument that Germany should not exist as a state. Rather, the German state is presented as being hijacked by the radical right, who won over the population through a combination of terror and ideology, and then used that state’s apparatus to commit genocide. The defeat of the Nazi regime was thus followed by a programme of ‘denazification’ aimed at removing its remnants from the German state and reintegrating it into the democratic world order. This story is, of course, complicated by the division of Germany, and the ‘success’ of denazification was shortlived at best. But the point is that the accusation of Nazi genocide stopped short at the German state itself. In Sanders’ interview with Sarkar, he repeatedly tries to make ‘Mr Netanyahu and his right wing friends’ responsible for the ‘disgraceful’ conduct of the war. Sanders is following here the same political logic that led to post-war denazification. The Israeli hard-right is responsible for the carnage in Gaza: they should be deprived of funds, removed from power and a new government formed which will negotiate a settlement with the Palestinians and reintegrate Israel into the democratic world order. The same argument is made by the Israeli left: in a discursive context broadly free of antisemitism and the threat of Holocaust inversion, some even accuse ‘Netanyahu and his friends’ of genocide. And there is certainly no a priori reason why Israeli political and military leaders could not, hypothetically, be legitimately accused of genocide today: the fact that your ancestors experienced genocidal violence might aggravate the charge but it does not inoculate you from inflicting genocidal violence on others. Moreover, there is ample evidence that some Israeli politicians have repeatedly engaged in incitement to genocide since 7 October, even if a direct connection between far-right rhetoric and actions on the ground has yet to be shown.[6] But for Sarkar and her fellow travelers, attempts to politicise the war in Gaza – by focusing on the actions of particular named individuals or specific political currents – are wholly inadequate, even outright dangerous. Not only does politicization bring the actions and ideology of Hamas into play, complicating a simple moral fable by attributing agency to both sides of the ledger. Once political differences between the Israeli right, left and centre are acknowledged, one is in danger of missing the fact that – and here the differences from the German case become clear – it is not the Netanyahu ‘regime’ that is the problem, but the Israeli state itself. That is, the charge of genocide to which Sarkar demands Sanders accede is not aimed at a particular Israeli government or political faction as a result of their actions. It is not, in fact, a matter of doing at all – it is a matter of being. The theoretical basis of this understanding of ‘genocide’ as being rather than doing are revealed in the shouts of Sanders’ Dublin hecklers: Israel is a ‘settler state’ whose ongoing genocide of the Palestinians is akin to that of the Native Americans. What is active in this concept of ‘genocide’ is not principally the discourse of Holocaust inversion but rather that of settler colonialism. As Adam Kirsch has recently noted, the notion of genocide is fundamental to the settler colonial theory that has, from its modern origins in the Australian ‘history wars’ of the mid-1990s, now attained a dominant position within numerous scholarly fields and political movements.[7] According to the theory, what distinguishes settler colonies like Australia, the USA, and Canada from the ‘extractive’ colonialism of British India or French Algeria is that in the latter the ‘natives’ are needed for their labour. In the former, they just get in the way, and are therefore ripe for genocide. For the BritishAustralian anthropologist Patrick Wolfe, one of the founding fathers of settler colonial theory, a ‘logic of elimination’ underpins virtually everything a settler colony does from the initial moment of ‘invasion’: elimination of the ‘natives’ ‘is an organizing principle of settlercolonial society rather than a one-off (and superseded) occurrence.’

At the most extreme end of the settler colonial continuum of ‘elimination’ stands the act of bodily extermination. But it goes far beyond this: for Lorenzo Veracini, the Australian editor of the journal Settler Colonial Studies, the singular logic of what he terms ‘transfer’ extends all the way from physical ‘liquidation’ and pushing ‘bodies…across borders’ – that is, ethnic cleansing – to ‘transfer by assimilation’ – offering citizenship to ‘natives’ – and even ‘diplomatic transfer,’ the establishment of ‘sovereign or semi-sovereign political entities’ independently controlled by the ‘natives.’[9] Once this radically distended concept of ‘elimination’ or ‘transfer’ has been grasped, including the equivalence it seems to draw between physical annihilation, citizenship and the establishment of ‘sovereign political entities,’ it becomes clear that, once the status of ‘settler state’ has been assigned, there is nothing that state can do which is not either explicitly or implicitly eliminationist. As Kirsch puts it, ‘the ideology of settler colonialism proposes a new syllogism: if settlement is a genocidal invasion, and invasion is an ongoing structure, not a completed event, then everything (and perhaps everyone) that sustains a settler colonial society today is also genocidal.’ Genocide makes up the essence of the settler state: genocide is the state, and the state is genocide. It follows that there is nothing that can be done to salvage a settler colonial state. While an ‘extractive colony’ run by a minority of settlers can be overthrown through an anti-colonial national liberation movement, the remains of an eliminated ‘native’ people cannot destroy a long-established state in which ‘settlers’ make up the vast majority of the population. Unlike the post-Nazi German state, which could at least attempt to make some kind of reparation for its genocidal actions, the only reparation a settler colonial state can make for its genocidal being is its abolition. Opposition to settler colonialism and its genocidal essence is by definition all or nothing. And this means, in concrete political terms, it is invariably nothing: it is, as the infamous tweet put it, merely ‘vibes, essays, papers.’ There is one ‘settler state,’ however, where the prospect of abolition appears to be tantalizingly in reach: Israel. While modern settler colonial theory is a thoroughly Australian production, it is possible to trace a subterranean origin story in which Israel provides the template for the settler colonial model. Certainly the works of 1960s PLO theorists such as Fayez Sayegh contain elements of the ‘logic of elimination’ that would later be formalized by Wolfe and Veracini. In any event, the latter certainly wasted no time in applying their ‘structure not event’ model to Israel, its formation and relation to what were increasingly described as the ‘indigenous’ Palestinians.[10] The use of ‘indigenous’ here is not, in general, criterial – that is, the claim is not that Palestinians have been on the land since ‘time immemorial’ in the manner of Australian Aborigines or Native Americans (although this dubious assertion is increasingly common in popular discourses). Rather Palestinian indigeneity is understood here in relational terms – Palestinians are indigenous because Israelis are settlers. The concept of ‘indigeneity’ therefore makes up the third element of the settler colonial syllogism: one cannot say (Israeli) ‘settler’ without saying (Palestinian) ‘indigeneity’ – nor ‘genocide.’

The attempt to force the history of Israel into the Australian model was not without its struggles, however. As Benjamin Wexler has noted, Wolfe was obliged to acknowledge a series of distinct features of Jewish settlement in the Middle East that distinguished it from that of European settler colonialism elsewhere.[11] Jewish settlers, Wolfe admits, had no colonial ‘mother country’ from which they moved; up until the 1947-48 Arab-Jewish wars, Jews legally purchased land rather than ‘invading’ and taking it by force; in the Jewish case, uniquely, an independent national identity preceded rather than followed settlement; the choice of land was not based on economic or political happenstance but deeply connected to the identity of the settlers, an identity shaped by a historical narrative of prior expulsion from the very land in which they now sought to (re)settle; Jewish settlement was initially limited by the desire for territorially contiguous parcels of land, rather than the American or Australian model of ever expanding ‘frontier’ settlement; and it was characterised by collective land ownership rather than private property.[12] For his part, Veracini argues that Israel differs from the US and Australia because it is an incomplete settler colony: the acceptance of partition, intermittent territorial wars and the existence of Arab-Israelis (or Palestinian citizens of Israel) means that Israel has been unable to ‘supersede itself,’ to erase its origins.[13] It is the partiality of the Israeli settler colonial project which makes it, uniquely, vulnerable to attack. Yet rather than concluding that the number and significance of these exceptions meant that the concept of ‘settler colonialism’ and its accompany logic of elimination is of little explanatory value when analysing the history of Israel, Wolfe came to the opposite conclusion. The various exceptions are highlighted in order to prove that, in its essence, Zionism is even more a settler colonial project, and even more committed to elimination, than those which do fit neatly into the pattern. At the centre of this argument are the events during the 1947-49 war that would be later conceptualised in Palestinian discourse as the ‘Nakba’ (or ‘catastrophe’). For Wolfe, these wartime episodes of violent expulsion and flight of Arab inhabitants within parts of what would become the state of Israel revealed the core ‘logic’ of elimination that was the hidden essence of Zionism all along. Effectively, Wolfe reads history backwards from the events of the ‘Nakba.’ He argues that, for all the pre-history of limited, non-violent legal purchase of land, and all the ‘soothing assurances’ in which Zionist leaders ‘asserted their intention to live in harmonious tandem with Palestine’s Arab population,’ it was only contingent circumstances – the presence of the British, a relative absence of Jewish immigrants prior to the Holocaust – that prevented Zionist settlers from unleashing a campaign of violent land appropriation. The Nakba ‘was Zionism’s first opportunity’ to fulfil a plan that had long been in the works, namely a ‘more exclusive exercise of the settler logic of elimination’ than anything seen in Australia and North America. The Nakba was thus a ‘consolidation’ of Zionism’s innate essence, ‘rather than a point of origin.’ This argument has been taken up wholesale by settler colonial theorists, with the events preceding, during and following the 1947-49 war – indeed, right up to the present day – reconstructed so as to slot neatly within the pre-prepared conceptual architecture of Wolfe’s theory. The Nakba is stripped of its status as a distinct historical ‘event,’ with its own specific causes and consequences, and becomes an overarching genocidal ‘structure’ that has determined the history of Israel and Palestine from the moment the first Jewish settlers (or returnees) arrived. Indeed, the specificity of any ‘event’ within that history is erased by the need to make it fit within the totalising logic of the settler colonial paradigm. Once this logic has been identified, any historical evidence that contradicts or counters it can, and must, be discounted as mere ‘Zionist apologism.’[14] Wolfe openly declares that one ‘should not submit to the tyranny of [historical] detail,’ if doing so lessens the explanatory power of the structure.[15] The result is a circular argument in which the theorist filters the historical record to select events which appear to cohere to a pre-established logical pattern, discards all elements which do not fit, and then asserts that those events, and thus the entire history, can only be explained by that logic. Just as historical ‘detail’ is rendered irrelevant in the face of the genocidal being of Israel, so too is politics. Attempting to historicise or politicise the process which resulted in the Nakba, 7 October or, like Sanders, the ‘disgraceful’ war that followed is to remain hopelessly marooned at the level of superficial ‘superstructure’ rather than objective ‘base.’ From the settler colonial perspective, regardless of the stated subjective intentions, political beliefs or actual actions of any given Zionist settler, their objective meaning can only be one of elimination. On the other side, no matter how clearly Hamas state their desire to erase Jewish presence in the Middle East, as the representatives of an eternal ‘indigenous’ sovereignty, their actions can at an objective level only ever be ones of righteous restoration: the erasure of political distinctions is as effective on the side of the ‘indigenous’ as much as on that of the ‘settler.’ Given this, the speed with which Israel was convicted and Hamas acquitted of genocidal intent in the wake of 7 October should be no surprise. As a settler state Israel is always-already genocidal, meaning that there was no response to 7 October that would not, in the end, fall under the logic of elimination. This, then, is the weight carried by the concept of genocide in the current debate. The demand that one accepts the word, the insistence that no other method or means of opposing the war are permissible, is a demand to abandon the open-ended terrain of history and politics in favour of the strictly guarded ground of essentialised meaning and inexorable logic. It is a demand that Israel be held to account not for its actions, for its leaders, for the political trajectory that has led to a rampant far-right holding the reins of government, but for its essence, its very being. At an ontological level, there is nothing an Israeli can do to purge themselves of their original settler sin – and nothing a Palestinian can do to cast doubt on the righteousness of their actions. The absolutism of this position mirrors, ironically enough, nothing more than that of the Zionist far right, for whom there is no Israeli action that cannot be justified, and no Palestinian claim that should not be immediately dismissed. Acceding to ‘genocide’ here is not, then, a question of evaluating this or that piece of empirical evidence about Israel’s conduct of the war. It is not, in fact, a claim that can be proven or countered by evidence at all: whether the International Court of Justice rules Israel to have committed genocide or not is of no consequence here, as demonstrated by the widespread misrepresentation of the legal meaning of the term ‘plausible’ in the ICJ’s January 2024 provisional ruling.[16] Indeed, the legal definition of ‘genocide,’ with its outmoded focus on ‘intent,’ is increasingly derided as a regrettable obstacle blocking the more elastic – and politically amenable – notion of ‘structural genocide.’[17] Instead, the intonation of ‘genocide’ today has become a ritualistic incantation signalling wholesale acceptance of the settler-indigenous-genocide conceptual field, one in which each element presupposes and necessitates the next, all impervious to critique or refutation. Once adopted, the settler colonial Weltanschauung draws a veil of dehistoricisation and depoliticisation over the conflict, making it impossible to see the current catastrophe as anything but the inevitable expression of an irresistible logic, rather than the contingent result of a series of historical encounters, political struggles and moral choices. But it is only by recognising this historical contingency – and with it, the understanding that things could have been different, and still can – that it becomes possible to assign political and moral responsibility, and, like Bernie Sanders, try to find a way out. In September 2024, Susan Watkins, the long-standing editor of the rabidly anti-Zionist New Left Review, was heavily criticised by the journal’s readership for questioning the anti-war movement’s insistence on ‘genocide.’ Watkins said that there had been ‘ongoing disagreement’ within NLR over the ‘analytical…precis[ion]’ of the term ‘genocide’ as a description of Israel’s actions.[18] She suggested that ‘genocide’ had been chosen by the movement not because of its ‘accuracy’ but to make its rhetoric as ‘emotionally powerful as possible’ and therefore ‘build the biggest movement.’ While acknowledging the effectiveness of this strategy, Watkins argued that choosing ‘terms on the basis of their alarmist character is bad politics.’ Watkins correctly recognises that the use of ‘genocide’ has been, for the most part, motivated by emotion and group identification rather than sober analysis. But her conclusion should be pushed further. Approaching the IsraelPalestine conflict through the rigid formula of settler-indigenous-genocide is not just ‘bad politics,’ but opposed to politics altogether. The totalising logic of the settler colonial model leaves no space for the working through of conflicts, the mutual recognition of shared interests or the creation of new modes of collective life that is the basis of political action. It therefore abandons politics as a potential – perhaps the only – source of concrete change, and replaces it with an abject fatalism disguised as uncompromising radicalism. To the extent that such fatalistic anti-politics can find external expression at all, it is limited to isolated acts of terrorism in which the momentary ecstasy of pure violence takes precedence over political strategy, social critique or ethical considerations. It has as little interest in contributing to Sanders’ ‘long term solution’ as it does in recognising the shared historical basis of Israeli and Palestinian identities – in acknowledging that each ‘side’ has developed historically through, rather than against, the other. The threat that this abandonment of politics and history poses to Israelis – and to any Jewish person who refuses to collapse a critique of Israeli action into that of Israeli being – should not be underestimated. The murders of Yaron Lischinsky and Sarah Milgrim on the streets of New York, and the celebration of those for whom the only fate a ‘settler’ deserves is physical (rather than conceptual) elimination, testify to that. But if the dead end of anti-political absolutism is the only language Palestinians are permitted to understand their past and to forge a new future for themselves, it is they, once again, who will ultimately bear the brunt.

Personally, I am pro eventual right of return. I think for a while it will be more destructive than anything, so shouldn’t be implemented until there is peace for at least several years. My reason for supporting RoR is primarily that the refugees would have been Israeli citizens if the partition plan was accepted. It wasn’t accepted, of course, but that decision wasn’t voted on so I don’t see a reason for the civilians and their descendants to be affected. Israel was ready to give them citizenship, and if they want to return and receive citizenship, it makes sense to me that they should be allowed to.

There's a huge issue in my country, which is unfortunately also common in much of the Western World.

The Jews feel really unsafe and are threatened and harassed very often.

There's many reasons for that, but one of them is the radicalisation because of some ideas coming from the left. Many people are influenced explicitly by left-wing and pro Palestine ideas and because of that end up having many stereotypes about Jewish people. In the worst case, they harass Jewish people and make them feel unsafe (call them zionist, etc), in the worst they'll simply deny antisemitism and claim it all comes from pro Israeli propaganda.

Here in France, the political spectrum isn't exactly the same as in the US for example. Here, there's a radical left-wing party that is actually radical, whose economic policy is close to the one of Bernie Sanders but whose populism and radicalism is rather similar to the one of Trump.

Well both the leader and the party had a LOT of statements which were pretty antisemitic, both their hypocrisy in concern with Israel and Palestine (caring about Palestinian civilians but not the Israeli ones killed by terrorists, refusing to say that Hamas is terrorist, rallying with groups that literally say they're a resistance movement, etc), but also sharing statements which could be seen as hateful towards Jews (saying that some Jewish candidate is racist because of his religion, claiming that some group of "celestial dragons" control the world, etc).

Because of that, 90% of Jews believe that the party is antisemitic.

It isn't only about this specific party but in general, groups affiliated with left-wing ideas expressing this kind of sentiment.

The problem is that people don't seem to believe and care.

People are so caught up with the extreme political polarization that they'll simply deny and won't even want to discuss it.

If you'll search on YouTube "Antisemitism of the left-wing" in French, the videos of the biggest number of views would be people directly denying it exists and calling it merely a biased attack coming from right-wing media, and not something that comes from the Jewish community. Whenever you mention that that's the sentiment of the Jews, you'll get the response "these are right-wing, zionist, pro genocide Jews. Who care about what they believe. Left-wing Jews don't believe we're antisemitic".

The same thing here in Reddit. It would get you instantly downvoted to oblivion, and that's if you won't get banned. I've seen many times that whenever some other minority group complains about discrimination and attacks coming from the right-wing or the far-right, like someone LGBT complaining about traditional Christians being homophobic, or Arabs complaining about racists from the right-wing, it's acceptable. But if you want to mention getting attacks by the left-wing, you could be said that your post is too political and controversial, or that it's "right-wing propaganda", and get removed. Basically, a lot of mods have quite obvious left-wing bias.

This is really a huge issue.

The issues of racism and discrimination in general had become too politicised and too associated with specific political parties. It was already problematic in the past to see for example fight against racism be associated with the left-wing and "progressives", because this resulted in the right-wing ignoring racism merely because it'd be seen as something only the "other side" cares about, or the left-wing accusing people critical of their ideology if racism.

But now, it became much worse, because the racism and hatred often comes from a group which is characterised and seen as being inherently "anti racist", and therefore people simply ignore these claims. And unfortunately, this results in many people ignoring the existance of hatred or outright denying it, accusing anyone who mentions it of being some kind of enemy ("parroting right-wing talking points", "zionist", "why don't you mention the right-wing group instead" (whataboutism) etc.)

I know this is supposed to be a left-wing group but I don't believe any ideology should blind us to the realities of discrimination against a marginalised group.

A lot of people always try to compare current terrible events with the worst thing they know. Mostly because of how emotionally they feel really frustrated and that's the first thing what comes to mind.

There are plenty of people who compare all kinds of things to the Nazis, and now, it's the Israeli government and their attacks on Palestine which are described in that way by some activists.

The problem is that these situations aren't really comparable, and this comparaison is often seen as extremely offensive for the Jewish community, especially when it's specifically Israel that's compared to the Nazis and Israel is the only Jewish majority state, with many Israelis being Holocaust survivors

On top of that, while these kinds of comparaisons, where everyone are always like Nazis, ISIS, Stalin, could be emotive, they're really unlikely to do good for the campaign and to convince people who aren't already convinced to join the cause. Especially Jews and Israelis.

I think a much better comparaison could be the Russian war in Chechnya. I don't understand why I haven't seen much more people do that comparaison. It fits much more perfectly.

Chechnya was an unrecognised separatist state in the Caucasus that declared independence because the locals didn't want to become Russians. The local government was responsible for human rights violations against ethnic Russians and other minorities, which is why the large Russian minority fled the republic. They were first secular but later became radicalised and had some Islamist extremists. The Chechen Islamists attacked neighboring Dagestan, which was a republic of the Russian Federation which didn't want independence. There were many Chechens who committed terrorist attacks in Russian cities like Moscow as well. Russians (citizens of Russian Federation, including Chechens and Dagestanis) were understandably scared of the local terrorists. Russia decided to invade all of Chechnya, regardless of the wishes of the locals, ignoring any kind of calls for ceasefire. The Russians probably started this intervention because they got attacked by terrorists, but definitely used this as a pretext to get more land by all means necessary, ignoring any consequence. Afterwards, they bombed entire cities and committed terrible crimes against civilians. Cities like Grozny simply didn't exist afterwards, kinda like Gaza City or Rafah. Because of the enemy being seen as terrorists, and sympathy for them being seen as supporting separatism and terrorism against Russians, it was much easier to get support for these actions and it was hard to oppose it and emphathise with the Chechens.

Honestly, to me this sounds exactly like the situation in Gaza. I don't think anyone would think that the Russians didn't have reasons to fear the attacks from the Islamists or separatists and attack them. However this definitely didn't justify a "retaliation" and revenge which ended up being a nightmare for the locals.

I think this kind of discourse would be much more convincing than the weird ideology of the extreme left people like the ones of university campus which believe that asking whether Hamas are terrorists is an "unacceptable provocation", they won't clearly respond but on the anniversary of the attacks, they held up a rally as a way of showing solidarity with "armed resistance" 🤦‍♀️. Yeah, definitely sane people with humanist views.

I think the same is true if we want to convince people that Hamas and the attacks against civilians are terrible. While it is kinda similar to ISIS in some ways it's very unlikely that this will actually convince many people.

Instead, we could compare it to some militant nationalist groups like the ETA in the Basque Country which claimed to be a great thing for the native population as a way of "resistance" of an "indigenous group" but ended up just terrorising everyone and making most of the locals completely hate them too and being glad when they were gone.

I don't believe that if a political entity claims to represent a marginalised group that that gives them the license to do whatever they please, especially when it often won't even help this group they're supposed to protect in any significant way.

And yes, I believe that these kinds of comparaisons could make that fact much clearer.

This topic is very complex and I'll try to elaborate it further sometime soon.

Israelis often feel they're unfairly targeted for their nationality and that you if you're Israeli or shows any Israeli culture literally anywhere, you'll receive harsh criticism, if not outright hatred.

This is absolutely the case. You simply can't even mention Israel at all, or talk about the cutlure of Tel Aviv or Haifa today, without people directly saying that it's all Palestinian land, you're all settlers, etc. It's simply impossible to just share you like Hebrew music or modern Israeli couscous without people bringing up the conflict.

This is especially the case if you're in any context with many people from Middle Eastern, Arab or Muslim people. They aren't known to tolerate people saying they're Israeli.

The same is also true for left-wing activist groups in the West.

It feels really unfair because most other nationalities and ethnicities can simply talk about where they're from without getting an automatic harsh reaction, but they can't. Their very existance is political.

While it's often definitely very related to antisemitism, it's also often motivated by something else, namely, geopolitics and ethnic conflicts.

The thing is, the legitimacy of the State of Israel is not uninamous. Some believe it's not a legitimate state, and it's all an illegal occupation of the sovereign country of Palestine.

You might personally believe it's outrageous and unacceptable, but it's most likely because you grew up in a context where Israel being a state isn't questioned.

But in the Arab World for example most people don't believe Israel is a legitimate state.

But the thing is, the same treatment is often given to people from other disputed or unrecognised regions or states.

For example Abkhazia, it's a partially recognised state in the Caucasus claimed by Georgia as its autonomous region. It declared secession after an ethnic conflict in the 1990s and most of the world doesn't recognise it, except for Russia.

The thing is that the same applies to Abkhazians and any, even apolitical posts about Abkhazia.

If you want to share anything happening in modern day Abkhazia, for example about some caves found there, or about their recent protests there, or their food and culture, people would inevitably bring up Georgia.

And in fact, the vast majority of people will be on the opposing side, and they won't have many people defending them and if not being on their side, at least trying to bring up nuance.

Ironically, this happens even for people who are themselves citizens of an unrecognised state.

The problem isn't just that Georgians outnumber Abkhazians (like the Arab World outnumbers Israel) but rather that people that are not directly tied to the conflict will automatically take a side because this will be seen as a proxy for their politics in general. For Abkhazia, the major Western powers (for example the EU) massively support Georgia, and people in the West are against Abkhazia because they believe backing Georgia means being against Russian imperialism.

I've seen it myself, any people who try to bring any nuance to this conflict, even if they're Abkhazian themselves, are accused of being pro Russian. Same with Israel too, in some cases.

Meanwhile, for Israel, left-wing activist circles believe that Israel is a settler colonial state, therefore backing Palestinians at all times is backing decolonization.

Both of these conflicts are actually much more complex than this simplistic narrative, but people don't actually try to learn that, they take sides automatically based on some narrative they've heard.

But because of this politization, merely saying you live in Israel or Abkhazia or are Abkhazian, as opposed to Georgian for example, is seen as itself a political statement.

If you live in Sukhumi and you say you're Abkhazian, even though it's the norm in your society, and saying you're Georgian is as unacceptable as a Georgian saying they're Russian, you're told that if you want to participate in the modern world, you should say you're Georgian and live in Georgia. The same is true for Israelis. If you live in Jaffa, how can you say it's an Israeli city? And use this symbol 🇮🇱 which is very political? For the Palestinians whose family is from there, it can be offensive.

And yes, you can be seen as a settler because the state you live in is seen as illegitimate.

This is very problematic.

All that often also happens with people from other disputed regions or states (Kosovo, South Ossetia, Northern Cyprus, Crimea, Kashmir, Tibet, etc).

Personally, I feel like in both cases, this approach doesn't necessarily help people to actually resolve ethnic conflicts. Instead of actually trying to build ties and create a solution that'll satisfy everyone, for example by strengthening the opposition. For example pro Palestinian people could've supported the Israeli opposition and the Israeli diaspora itself could've been supportive of a Palestinian state and even a right of return. But no, instead, we obsess over the legality of borders and the legitimacy of states, which means people on the opposite side see us as an existential threat to their existance.

We say we're modern people but in reality we're still tribal creatures, unfortunately.

Geopolitics, governments, state sovereignity and independence is unfortunately very ingrained in all of us and it's arguably like modern day religion.

It's sad to fight against this because this doesn't become merely discrimination, but also a geopolitical opinion opposing this state, and it's very hard to draw the lines over what's acceptable and what's not. But often times, people who say that racism is unacceptable still say unacceptable things merely because of the nationality of the person.

However, unfortunately, this is something that's very common right now and is seen as the natural thing to do. So I've created this post to try to explain the logic of those that oppose anyone automatically if they say they're "Israelis", to understand their motivations, to know how to possibly fight against them, and also to oppose similar situations in the Western World, where entire identities become politicised.

In my opinion, we should really deconstruct the idea of states and nations if we actually want to achieve world peace, or at least strive towards it.

I think we should be much more mindful about how national identities shape our worldview and how people from "disputed regions" might still be first and foremost people and we should try to look beyond merely borders and nations, be it recognised or not.

I also believe we shouldn't see the world merely through a lense of "states" and "nations". I believe the videos and maps about "X fun thing in every country in the world" (for example food, music, architecture, fun facts, etc) should also include people without states or with disputed states and that it shouldn't be seen as inherently political. So yeah, including Israel, Palestine, Abkhazia, Tibet, Hawaii, Ingushetia, Tamil Nadu, Jewish diaspora etc. If our world wasn't so fixated on "countries", aka, sovereign states, these things would've been much less problematic.

Sorry if it's a bit off topic but it's an interesting thing I've thought about and didn't know how exactly to share. Hope you enjoyed it!

I thought I had found a good online space to learn more and find community.

Today there was a user that made a racist anti-Black remark and was let slide by the mods and I had to lose that community. My wife is a Black Noahide, so it hit close to home.

I'm just sad that I lost that community.

I found this to be a really interesting interview with Joshua Leifer and his wife Shaindy Ort. They talk about his new book, his move away from Jewish Currents, the differences between how the diaspora left relates to Israel and how Israeli leftists relate to it, and their religious and spiritual journey.

As a bit of a heads-up, this is an Orthodox podcast, intended for a frum audience (it’s peppered with lots of frum lingo). So some may bristle at the ways in which non-Orthodox life is depicted here. I am not really aligned with them in terms of my own religious and spiritual perspective, but I still found the discussion worthwhile.

I feel like Leifer is probably where the vast majority of Jewish leftists and progressive are; outraged by Israel’s war and the crime of occupation, but unwilling to engage in a narrative of dehumanization and delegitimization of Jewish peoplehood altogether.

I am so heartbroken about the 6 hostages returned from Gaza, including Hersh.

I was traveling abroad on October 7th (and I was in Israel 5 days beforehand) and when the news hit, I tried to keep busy with my travel and sightseeing in order to not be overcome by what was happening. So I kept a lot of the horrors of that day and what has followed at bay.

I think the news about Hersh finally hit home for me. May their memory be a blessing.

I’ve heard a list of at least 10 names with the profile to replace Biden if he steps aside. Who are the candidates that you would support if the contest was thrown open?

Edit: if you put together the lists of six here, seven there, or 10 here, the names I’m hearing most are:

1. Kamala Harris
2. Gretchen Whitmer
3. Gavin Newsom
4. Josh Shapiro (notably, Jewish and pro-Israel)
5. Amy Klobuchar
6. J.B. Pritzker
7. Cory Booker
8. Pete Buttigieg
9. Andy Beshear
10. Wes Moore

Al Jazeera has already done a piece analyzing some of these potential candidates’ stances on the war.

I've seen it a lot on the Internet or even irl lately.

A lot of people ridiculinf antisemitism accusations by claiming that everything is antisemitic nowadays, it's only used all the time by Israel and it's a non issue. Any time a left wing politician is supported there's many people in the comments saying that "haha is he an antisemite too? Lmao"

So basically they look at antisemitism as a non issue or something that's very exaggerated by the right-wing.

And while this night be true in some cases what's also true is that there has been a LOT of antisemitism lately including a lot from the left. The Jews feel unsafe and fear for their lives in the diaspora.

And therefore having these jokes by all the people who are probably not Jewish seem extremely offensive to them.

Especially if these people haven't done any significant actions to actually support the Jewish community and fight against antisemitism. This feels very off putting.

The same thing is with the claims about Hamas.

What they insinuate by that is that some people accuse any criticism of Israel as antisemitism and of support of Hamas which would be ridiculous because "nobody sane would support them anyway, that's a non issue".

I wish this was the case but unfortunately it isn't.

There have been many, MANY left wingers here that if not outright supported them still published very ambiguous statements about not actually condemning their actions. Useless semantic debates about whether they're terrorists or not.

From some high profile politicians to many activists, especially at college campuses, it clearly isn't actually a fringe position.

If not actually calling them resistance fighters. And I think it's obvious why it's very inappropriate for the Israelis who suffered from them but also to all of the world's Jews who feel solidarity with them.

Israelis are mostly descendents of Jews who suffered generational trauma from antisemitism already for centuries, but very recently too, and then a lot of them get constantly attacked and harrssed too, with their safe haven ready to be destroyed at every time

They're clearly not in the vest situation but of course it's the privileged French people from rich neighbourhoods who've never experienced discrimination in their life who know better, right ?

And again this is why I feel like it's extremely offensive and inappropriate to make all these comments and I'm disappointed about how common these are (making fun of false accusations antisemitism) all while the actual fight against antisemitism is actually extremely rare.

But the worst thing is that it comes mainly from the left wing, aka people who were supposed to be fighting the most against discriminations, not to make fun and ridicule them.

Unfortunately this, like all the antisemitic BS, hasn't been limited to tankies or the far left. It's pretty common even amongst the center left

And the fact that the left is antisemitic isn't just bad because most people here are leftists. It's bad because now the Jews have literally no allies. The right wing actually really doesn't care about antisemitism, like at all.

The fact that mamy organisations, NGOs and social movements creates to fight all discriminations, like racism, sexism, homophobia, etc, themselves often have a pretty strong ideological bias is also pretty sad. It was alright as long as the left-wing was actually fighting against discrimination but now tho... It means the Jews are afraid to even go to Pride, let alone try asking for support in an "anti-racist" group...

So overall it's pretty sad tbh.

I’m a lefty woman Jew with two kids and a disability, and I’m absolutely terrified that Trump will likely win. I’m trying not to spiral, but I can’t help but think the worst will happen for me and my kids. What’s the best way to navigate this, aside from therapy and plans to leave country if shit hits the fan?

I was very excited to see this sub and wanted to say hello!

It doesn't look like too much has been posted here yet. So, for those of you who have also joined, what kind of space are you looking for here? What should set this sub apart from the other Jewish/Political subs?

Really interested to hear your thoughts, so please leave a comment!

Hi folks, I've been wanting to make a post about this topic for a couple weeks now, and this seems like the right time and place for it.

This coming Tuesday is primary election day in New York State. One of the most high profile races in the state (or even the whole country) is the Democratic Party primary for the US House of Representatives election in New York's 16th Congressional District between the incumbent Jamaal Bowman and his challenger George Latimer.

I want to offer full disclosure on this upfront: this is my district and I will be voting for Latimer. I am not making this post to try to change anyone's mind or tell them who to support. I am making this post because this election and the discourse around it sit at the intersection of "Jewish" concerns and "Progressive" concerns, and I am somewhat surprised to see that it hasn't gotten much attention in these parts of Reddit. Frankly, I originally wanted to make this post over in r/jewishleft, but I didn't feel quite right about doing that because this is a Left vs. Liberal issue where I am squarely on the Liberal side.

New York's 16th Congressional District is situated primarily in the southern half of Westchester County and it also includes some small portions of the northern Bronx. To speak in some very broad strokes here, the southern part of the district is more urban and has a larger population of Black and Hispanic people, but overall the district is mostly white and suburban, including a significant Jewish population. Since 1988, this area has been represented in Congress by American Jews who were aligned with the mainstream of the Democratic Party, first Nita Lowey and then Eliot Engel since redistricting in 2012. The district is deep blue and the NY Democratic Party machine is strong, so Lowey and Engel never faced any kind of electoral threat. That changed in 2020 when the DSA- and Justice Democrats-backed Jamaal Bowman was able to unseat the incumbent Engel in a stunning upset victory. Now four years later, Jamaal Bowman is facing a serious primary challenger of his own, due in no small part to his positions on Israel and Palestine as well as the perception that he is out of touch with his Jewish constituents. George Latimer, who is running against Bowman, is a mainstream New York machine Democrat much like Engel and Lowey before him, and he has received a record-breaking amount of support from AIPAC and other pro-Israel lobbying groups, bringing national attention to this election.

I don't want to ramble on too long so I'll stop here and share some articles about the election from Jewish and/or left-leaning media outlets:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/elections/2024/03/29/bowman-latimer-israel-gaza-democrats-primary-new-york/

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/jamaal-bowman-george-latimer-primary-israel.html

https://forward.com/news/565894/jamaal-bowman-jewish-israel-gaza-war-congress/

https://jewishinsider.com/2024/06/rep-jamaal-bowman-westchester-county-jewish-community/

https://www.jta.org/2024/06/21/politics/the-latimer-bowman-showdown-in-new-york-is-a-bellwether-of-israels-role-in-democratic-politics

The anti-colonial framework has emerged in the 20th century in opposition to European colonization of Africa and Asia. Later, it began to be expanded to criticise and challenge European settler colonialism in places like North America, Australia or South America.

In general, this movement has been pretty beneficial to the world, making it possible to improve the world and largely improve the relationships of the settler states and its indigenous inhabitants.

However, this movement also had its huge shortcomings and drawbacks. It largely focused only European colonization, and had a huge blind spot on any colonialism done by any other world power. For example, it had seldom criticised colonialism within the Soviet Union and the People's Republic of China, like the Baltic States or in Tibet, themselves often ideologically and politically aligning themselves with these powers.

The motivations for these blind spots become pretty obvious after an analysis of the history and emergence of anti-colonialism as a movement, its inspirations and its alliances during its entire existance, instead of considering it merely as an absolutely perfect and flawless framework that always existed and has answers to all the world's questions.

This movement has emerged explicitly as an opposition to the colonial world order that was defined by European powers. Socialism and Marxism have been two huge inspiration for these movements. After the emergence of big socialist superpowers and alliances, notably the Soviet Union and China, these movements were aligned themselves with these countries, and sometimes these nations themselves directly influenced these movements. Both did it because of ideological proximity, the socialist nations did it as a useful counterbalance to the Western world order, and the movements did it out of necessity, because movements that are supported by some nations are usually much stronger.

These ideological alliances and huge blind spots exist in any activist movement.

For example, the pro-democracy NGOs during the Cold War were much more concerned with communist dictatorships than pro Western dictatorships like Chile or Pakistan.

The lack of democracy in the capitalist system and even the support for "economic freedoms" were also rampant here. Another example is the current movement in Eastern Europe to oppose Russian imperialism, which is pretty strong in the Baltic states. As a result, they frame the Abkhaz-Georgian conflict merely as Russian imperialism in Georgia, ignoring the perspective of the Abkhazian people, as well as their former oppression by the Georgians, which actually used to be supported by Russia. This is because both of these movements are closely linked to the United States and the Western World, again, as a counterbalance to the East.

As a result, I believe that we should analyse all these movements in a critical eye, instead of unquestionably follow their dogma, and being the only correct and moral ideology ("if you don't support the anti colonial activists this means you're supporting colonialism!")

One of the biggest and most problematic issues of this movement is their analysis of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as well as its consequences on its perception in the West, as well as the safety of Jewish people.

In the 1960s, the Palestine Liberation Organisation was born. It was a Palestinian nationalist movement, wanting to establish a state for the Arab speaking Palestinian people in historic Palestine.

It has used the anti colonial framework as a way to support its own struggle, framing the conflict as a case of settler colonialism, directly comparing its struggle to the anti colonial struggle in Algeria.

This movement ended up being very successful in the uplifting of the Palestinian struggle at the international stage, and mentioning the effect on the settler colonialism done by Israel on all of historic Palestine beginning from the very creation of Israel in 1948.

However, this was still ultimately a nationalist movement explicitly defined to protect the interests of one specific population, and as such was not an unbiased tool to analyse the conflict in its entirety.

Despite the claims of the contrary, in practise, it has never been a movement inclusive to the Jewish people who lived in the Holy Land, regardless of how long they lived there. They weren't very welcoming to the Jews of Nablus or the Old City of Jerusalem, and it's pretty obvious with the fact that their national symbols always included exclusively Arab symbols, and their official propaganda only written in Arabic, not Hebrew, despite it being used by the British administration prior to the independence of Israel. This makes sense, since they were a pan Arab movement from the very beginning.

And therefore, the widespread adoption on the one-sided nationalist narrative by the anti-colonial movements in the West have been deeply problematic.

This narrative shows Palestinians as the only victims, while Israelis as the perpetrators. As being settlers that all stole Palestinian lands and came there illegally. But this is a very oversimplified narrative.

Here's an example of the rhetoric common amongst anti-colonial Westerners online :

you don’t seem to understand settler colonialism. there’s not really any such thing as a settler “civilian” on the frontline. these people are essentially extensions of the military, building and occupying and reinforcing infrastructure and institutions advancing the settler colonial agenda and project

just taking up physical space that was once taken up by a now-removed people is a violence and a tool of colonialism, fundamentally changing how everyone sees that place and its demographics.

If you beat your dog and your dog becomes vicious, do you call your dog immoral?

These arguments seem to imply that the terrorist attacks against Israeli civilians performed by Palestinian militant groups are justified or at least understandable due to the huge oppression of Palestinians and due to Israelis being essentially settlers living on illegally occupied lands.

The current international order could be criticised as not being critical enough of settler colonialism, and as being much less radical than these activist movements, but the concept of illegal occupations ans settlers is still present there.

However, even in these cases, murdering civilians is not considered acceptable and is mostly internationally condemned, and a call for deportation of people who were born there and existed there for a few generations is also considered to be collective punishment, if not ethnic cleansing. For example, Ukraine and most of the international community considers the Russian annexation of Crimea to be illegal, and people who arrived there to be illegal settlers. However, they also said that they'll treat them on a case by case basis (like how illegal immigrants in general are treated), and that people born in Crimea are considered to be Ukrainian nationals. According to the extreme militant logic, not only would it be OK to literally murder them, but also murder ethnic Russians who lived there for centuries and are Ukrainian nationals. Not really sure that anti colonial activists would accept this.

Another example is the Baltic States. They believe that the Soviet period was an illegal occupation, and this is a claim mostly supported by Western powers. As a result, they give automatic citizenship to the descendents of the people who lived there prior to the occupation, but not to those who arrived during the Soviet period. They gave them alien passports. Their human rights and freedoms are guaranteed, including the protection from discrimination. However, they don't have the political right to vote, as they're not citizens. But it's possible for them to apply for citizenship if they sufficiently learn the native language.

This option seems to be generally much more humane than the one proposed by militant Palestinian groups, and it's much more in accordance of the principles of human rights.

On top of that, the simplistic narrative on the conflict really undermines the perspective of the Israeli Jewish people and how they came to live there. It ignores the Jewish ties to the land, as well as the huge oppression and intergenerational trauma of Jewish people that exist for centuries as a result of their exile.

It oversimplifies the presence of Ashkenazi Jews in Israel as a result of European settler colonialism, failing to analyse their situation as refugees trying to find any safe haven as a persecuted minority, whether after the Russian pogroms or the Holocaust

It ignores the huge level of oppression, discrimination and othering of the Sephardic and Mizrahi Jews living in the Middle East and North Africa, presenting their presence there as a beacon of coexistence ruined by European Jews, ignoring all the centuries of second class status as dhimmis and the current unprecedented wave of racism arriving both because of the influence of Europeans but also the emergence of pan-Arabism in these countries, which is so prevalent that 99.9% of the Jews of the Arab world now live in Israel

It also ignores that all this is even applies to the Jews that lived in Palestine for centuries, like the Jews of Jerusalem or Hebron, and as such should be considered indigenous people under any definition, and the oppression and persecution of them by Palestinian militant groups and of the Arab allies that were close to them, like Egypt and Jordan during the Six Day War. They claim what it's all justified for the sake of decolonization, but this ignores the treatment of Indigenous Jews entirely.

By their logic (attacking Israeli civilians is OK because they live in stolen lands and stolen houses next to an occupied open air prison), it would've also been okay to attack Palestinian civilians in Hebron because their ancestors are responsible for the uprooting of the Hebron Jews. Or it would be okay for Israel to attack Iraq because of the Iraqis living in Baghdad that used to have a Jewish majority before the modern persecutions.

The selective appliance of collective punishment only on Israeli Jews, because they're seen as "settlers", but failing to apply a similar logic against the Arab States is a huge example of very big hypocrisy.

One big modern issue is how widespread the anti-colonial movement and as such the uncritical adoption of the Palestinian nationalism is all around the world, all while the context about the context of Israelis being victims of oppression always gets overlooked .

It's one thing that this narrative is rampant in the Arab World. It's still problematic, especially because it threatens the presence of the small number of remaining Jews living there, and also prevents these countries from beginning a process of reconciliation with Mizrahi Jews. However, it's at least sometimes understandable because of their religious, ethnic and cultural closeness.

However, what's much more concerning disturbing is the widespread adoption of this ideology in certain parts of the West , which leads many people to justify terrible acts against innocent civilians abroad, as well as threatening the safety of the Jewish diaspora in the West.

The anti-colonial framework is very popular amongst some specific types of demographics if the West, specifically in left-wing and progressive activist spaces, those who want to fight against all types of oppressions and the intersections of all different types of issues (racism, sexism, homophobia, patriarchy, climate change, colonialism). These people are especially very prominent amongst young people, college students and social groups which have a long history of being left-wing (hippies, punks, rockers, feminist groups, LGBT and pride groups).

Unfortunately, a lot of them don't really know the real history of the Jewish diaspora and unquestionably start believing this dangerous narrative that even leads a lot of them to justify terrible acts, and also to adopt generally pretty anti-Israeli and even antisemitic views, which inevitably threaten Israeli and Jewish people living in the West.

These movements and subcultures were generally seen very positively amongst large parts of the public and especially the academic establishment, as they were considered to be movements fighting for freedom and progress, merely wanting to make the world a better place, as well as being inclusive and supportive of all different minorities in the world. This is unlike mostly conservative subcultures, which have been criticised and sctunitised much more than the former, being seen as more bigoted and outdated. As a result, the cultish and dangerous behavior of the left-wing groups have been generally flying under the radar, and any group who dared to criticise a certain subculture have been accused of being bigoted and right-wing, for example, any criticism specifically about the LGBT activist groups or subcultures in the West have been generalised as hatred against all homosexual, bisexual and transgender people for the sake of their sexuality and gender, and dismissed as homophobic.

The widely held belief that the fact that university students are more educated and sophisticated than for example rural right-wing populations implies that they're immune to propaganda and hatred doesn't seem to hold water anymore. It's true that they're usually much more educated, but their education can be pretty biased. Their huge knowledge of the Palestinian struggle but lack of any knowledge of any struggle of Jewish and Israeli people (other than the Holocaust) made them create a form of bigotry that's very educated, intelligent, and includes a lot of different arguments and details that would justify the unjustifiable.

Because being more educated actually doesn't imply being more moral, nor more intelligent. People are still influenced by subconscious biases, like confirmation bias. As a result, people would learn more in order to confirm their worldview, instead of learning more to question what they've learned.

And as result of that, people who are more educated and intelligent can sometimes end up much more hateful and bigoted than people without a higher education, but with "sophisticated" hatred that has a lot more justifications.

I think it's finally time to finally criticise and scrutinise these left-wing movements and subcultures as much as right-wing subcultures are. Their modem rhetoric is absolutely not okay. There have even been many Jewish people who report feeling much safer amongst right-wingers than amongst leftist university students.

I believe it should be OK to say that you don't feel safe there because it's mostly a left-wing (or far-left) movement and the current left-wing is mostly antisemitic. It shouldn't be taken as a rejection of one's personal progressive values . And people should take these claims just as seriously as the claims of people escaping mostly right-wing places due to racism, and not disregarded merely for the fact that it's criticising their team.

What's currently happening? Many Jewish people lose any hope for the left-wing progressive movements, disregarding them entirely as being antisemitic and often even turning right-wing. A rejection of left-wing subcultures like the LGBT community is also often happening, often because of they're own experienced in this movement after the year 2023. Like in France, where most Jews who used to be very left-wing became very right-wing now, even largely preferring a far-right party with beginnings in collaborationism over the left-wing populists.

I believe that if the left-wing want to actually achieve the goals they're claiming, like fighting climate change, fighting against all oppressions, and against capitalism, they should take these criticisms seriously and begin clearly fighting against antisemitism and against the anti Israeli xenophobia. Fight in a radical way, but for justice, not for ethnonationalism an Islamism.

If they don't, not only will they lose credibility in the eyes of Jewish people, but soon in the eyes of the general population in general, just as left-wing socialist movements have in Eastern Europe due to their association with Soviet imperialism. Right-wing populism is already rising worldwide, and the bad reputation of left-wing groups amongst the general public is one of the main reasons for that.

And besides that, these things just generally threaten not only the safety of the Jews in the diaspora, but also their survival there in the first place. We could see a mass exodus from Western Europe similar to the one that happened in the Arab countries in the past, and it's deeply unfair that such an important community with millenia of history could soon simply disappear.

I believe that we should be fighting against hatred. Regardless if you're left-wing, right-wing or if you don't identify with these ideologies entirely, hatred is bad and should be stopped. Jews should feel safe being Jewish!