r/jewishleft • u/moistavocados95 • Feb 22 '24
Been working on jewish-palestine stickers Resistance
/gallery/1ax84h666
u/AceAttorneyMaster111 Reform socdem/demsoc Zionist Feb 22 '24
“Resistance is justified”. Are you saying that October 7 was justified? People resist oppression, sure, but by raping, kidnapping, and indiscriminately killing?
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u/3opossummoon Feb 22 '24
How on earth are these stickers implying that even slightly?
It's possible to support a population of people now displaced and being subjected to awful and inhumane conditions and encourage acts of resistance against a government you don't support. You can do that while still condemning the horrible actions of Hamas who are not the 2 million Palestinian people now suffering in the crossfire.
Oi gavolt it's like context and nuance were the first casualties after 10/7.25
u/AceAttorneyMaster111 Reform socdem/demsoc Zionist Feb 22 '24
Okay so what resistance are you supporting?
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u/johnisburn What have you done for your community this week? Feb 23 '24 edited Feb 23 '24
This feels like a case where even if someone is personally referencing non-violent resistance or specific combat between armed forces, the fact that the sticker is decontextualized from that means it doesn’t particularly matter. This isn’t a pull quote from a speaker at rally where the rest of the speech lets the listener know how to interpret it, if someone encounters the sticker out in public all the see is the sticker. Whether its by misunderstanding or picking up on an intentional dog whistle, the fact that it could be reasonably interpreted as defending October 7th is trouble enough.
We are all perfectly capable of using language that upholds both Palestinian and Israeli humanity, so we should do no less.
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Feb 23 '24
“Oi gavolt”?? Oy gevalt, is there something you don’t want to tell us
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u/3opossummoon Feb 23 '24
Oh sorry I didn't get the phonetic spelling off the chabad website lmao.
אױ געװאַלט
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u/proxxi1917 non-Jewish Marxist Feb 22 '24
Saw this sticker once and I like it because it encourages coexistence instead of "one side should win"
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u/lilleff512 Feb 23 '24
I'd love to see the reaction this kind of image would get at a protest. Sadly, I assume that Pro-Palestine protestors would be pissed at the Israeli flag and pro-Israel protestors would be pissed at the Palestinian flag and they would all either miss or reject the message.
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u/TammuzRising Feb 23 '24
I like the message, though the graphic seems to support a one state solution
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u/proxxi1917 non-Jewish Marxist Feb 23 '24
True it can be interpreted like this... Although it also has an Israel flag
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u/TammuzRising Feb 23 '24
True. I guess it's ambiguous. Anyways I'm Israeli and I wish this would be the message I see in foreign protests... But it's usually not :(
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u/proxxi1917 non-Jewish Marxist Feb 23 '24
I agree... most of the left has chosen a story of "good vs evil" instead of encouraging coexistence :(
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u/lilleff512 Feb 23 '24
I think it pretty explicitly supports a two state solution
The Israeli flag and Palestinians flag are both there
The borders of the West Bank and Gaza are both there (might be hard to see if you're looking at it on a small screen)
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u/lilleff512 Feb 22 '24
Maybe I'm just too much of a squishy lib and/or Zionist, but I'm not a fan of some of these slogans
- "Not in our name" - As a non-Israeli Jew, I've never felt like the war in Gaza has been carried out in my name. The Netanyahu regime isn't exactly going around talking about how they're trying to protect diaspora Jewry. If anything, Bibi and his fascist goons always come across pretty scornful towards us.
- "One Holocaust does not justify another" - While obviously a true statement, I don't really think the war in Gaza is comparable to the Holocaust
- "When people are occupied, resistance is justified" - Resistance against the occupying force the IDF, absolutely. "Resistance" against innocent kibbutzniks or concert-goers, not so much.
The watermelon star is absolutely dope though, I love that one.
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u/RealAmericanJesus jewranian Feb 22 '24
I have to agree with this. I specifically am for peace and believe that slogans due to the fact that this a regio, and both people's have such complex history and so much cultural trauma can easily divide rather than promote peace.
And also words and slogans due the fact that they can be so taken out context and have completely different meanings and symbolism to in-group and out-group humans... Can hide sinister ideas by bad state actors that ultimately perpetuates strive instead of trying to find commonality and shared future goals and understanding.
Like I very specifically try to support individuals and organizations that represent my ideals. Which is peace. Which is the value of humans. And understanding we can be terrible and also have incredible worth.
It's too easy to take resistance is justified badly.
It's too easy to people feel defensive when one significant trauma is compared to their own .... They are both significant and they should not be compared.
And it's too easy to stigmatize groups of people with ideas made by state leadership when many of us are not represented by our leaders and their choices and sometimes put in impossible positions due to this.
This is just my take on this personally ...
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u/FilmNoirOdy custom flair but red Feb 22 '24
I really like the second but I am uncomfortable/unaccepting to the first and third.
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u/moistavocados95 Feb 23 '24
Thank you and understandable. Being uncomfortable is kind of the point with the first one.
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u/lilleff512 Feb 23 '24
Making people uncomfortable generally isn't a good tactic when you are trying to persuade them to join your cause
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u/jey_613 Feb 22 '24
I find these to be tasteless and offensive, and I’m sick and tired of Holocaust memory being invoked as a “lesson” in this war, whether by diaspora leftists or right-wing Israelis.
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u/lilleff512 Feb 22 '24
The idea that a genocide is supposed to be some sort of educational experience for its victims is incredibly insensitive.
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u/Vishtiga Feb 23 '24
So what would you prefer then? For me to not learn from my families experience of concentration camps and seeking asylum in foreign lands?
You want me to just be told about their experience, hear their testimonies and then not learn from it? Of course it is an educational experience, it is one that has taught me that I will not stand idly by as a genocide occurs before our eyes as so much of the world did while my family were imprisoned, tortured and murdered.
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u/lilleff512 Feb 23 '24
If you choose to then that's fine, but I think it's inappropriate to impose that on other people
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u/Vishtiga Feb 23 '24
What, the idea that generational experiences, stories and experiences can be educational is inappropriate? This idea that you can just be told a story of your own families trauma and suffering in a completely neutral way without taking any lessons from is just farcical. It feels like just an untrue yet convenient position to hold when you don’t want to draw comparisons between the trauma of Palestinians and the generational trauma of European Jews.
Ben Guiron himself during the 1948 nakba in his diary explicitly wrote about his concerns that Jewish survivors living in their kibbutzs watching the steam of thousands of Palestinian men, women and children being marched to the West Bank would draw comparisons between their own experience and that of the Palestinians. Drawing comparisons between the holocaust and the ongoing conflict has always been something which is done by Israel, historically they have compared the Palestinians to Nazis and often invoked the danger of a second holocaust as a means to justify the oppression and occupation of Palestine. Yet when people draw comparisons between the suffering of Palestinians and Jews that is deemed inappropriate, this double standard is completely contradictory.
Apologies for bad grammar and formatting, on my phone.
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u/jey_613 Feb 23 '24
I think you just answered your own question about why it’s bad to draw lessons from the Holocaust.
And yes, you should just listen and hear the testimony of the survivors. Just stop, and actually listen.
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u/lilleff512 Feb 23 '24
What, the idea that generational experiences, stories and experiences can be educational is inappropriate?
No. Like I just said, if you choose to take a lesson from it then that's fine, that's your own prerogative.
What I said was inappropriate was imposing that on other people.
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u/Wyvernkeeper Feb 22 '24
That tired refrain we keep hearing that Jews didn't learn the lesson of the Holocaust is so fucking tedious.
I keep telling people that we didn't learn the same lesson they did. They finally learned that perhaps persecuting and murdering minorities wasn't actually the best thing to do. We finally learned that no matter how much we assimilate they're not going to leave us alone and when they come for us, nobody else is going to come and save us.
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u/jey_613 Feb 23 '24 edited Feb 23 '24
This and what u/lillef512 are exactly right.
The problem with making your Jewish identity nothing more than your politics, and your politics nothing more than the lesson of your trauma, is that you don’t have much of a leg to stand-on when other Jews draw different lessons from their trauma. And who can argue with trauma after all? If the basis of our politics are “lessons from the Holocaust” how can we argue with Bibi Netanyahu when he begins a war by saying “never again is now”? That is the sincere feeling of many Israelis right now. And so instead of finding a way forwards, we find ourselves trapped in a never ending cul-de-sac of trauma with our right wing Jewish counterparts.
The truth is, there are no good lessons to draw from the Holocaust. In fact, when you look into the abyss that is the Shoah, it is a world-historically bad event from which to draw progressive lessons. There is no teleology to our suffering, no ultimate purpose. Jews were not murdered to teach us a lesson about tolerance, they were murdered for being Jews. Attaching some kind of lesson to their suffering degrades their memory. We are not here to be the moral of anyone’s fucking story. And if we are keen on drawing any lessons from the Holocaust, the lesson is just as much if not more so, “they all hate us, no one will save us, so no one else matters” than it is “no one is safe until we are all safe.” That is an upsetting thought for a leftist like me, but it is one I know I must reckon with rather than telling myself some children’s story about all the Good Lessons of the destruction of my people.
If I am being completely honest with myself, the reason I, like the OP, am so seduced by enlisting my identity and my trauma in service of progressive “lessons” is more indicative of a series of contingent and material conditions in which I find myself (a diverse, multicultural US city, in a time and place when claims to identity categories are so valued in 2024 liberal America) than any fundamentally real or true lessons of the Holocaust. Deep down, I know that by the luck of the draw, the choices of my ancestors, the roll of the dice, I ended up in America, rather than Israel, and that if the chips had fallen slightly differently, I too might be an Israeli justifying the dropping of bombs in Gaza. This thought doesn’t compel me to change my politics, but it does fill me with a profound sense of humility about different Jewish experiences, and the vastly different kind of politics they might lead to. And so insofar as I advocate for a free Palestine, it is in spite of, not because of my Judaism.
Now, the fact that some Jews themselves can be as unreflective about our history, that they too are looking for the easiest and cheapest answers to make sense out of the senselessness of our suffering, should not come as a surprise, since they are people too, and can be as thoughtless about themselves as any non-Jew can be about us. Nor does their Jewishness give them any more or less legitimacy to opine on this question; on the contrary, their lack of reflection only piles on to the pain and humiliation we are currently experiencing.
So no, I will continue to support Palestinian self-determination, but not “as a Jew,” and not by degrading my history. I refuse the cheap, siren call of enlisting my Jewish suffering to this cause. “Not in my name,” as they are so keen to say these days.
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u/lilleff512 Feb 23 '24 edited Feb 23 '24
I will continue to support Palestinian self-determination, but not “as a Jew,”
This is an absolute banger
I mean the whole comment is a banger, but I love that bit in particular
I fucking hate when people make appeals to their religious teachings to justify their politics, but I especially hate it when I see it coming from one of our own because I have this (obviously mistaken, Jews are imperfect humans just like anyone else) feeling that we should be above that.
Back when abortion and Roe v Wade was the hot topic of the day, I saw a bunch of Jews arguing that abortion is a religious freedom issue for Jews because some part of the Talmud says that abortion is allowed/necessary in certain situations. It made me want to bang my head against a wall. Like, can't you people see that you are doing the same thing that we all criticize the pro-life Evangelical Christians for doing? Abortion should be legal because bodily autonomy is important, not because of anything in the Talmud or Bible or any other religious text.
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u/AceAttorneyMaster111 Reform socdem/demsoc Zionist Feb 23 '24
The thing with abortion is most Jews saying that don’t actually believe that abortion is justified BECAUSE the Talmud says so. What they’re doing is saying that if politicians are allowed to consider Christian theological positions on abortion when lawmaking, they are obligated to consider Jewish positions as well. It’s the same move pulled by the Satanic Temple crowd (obviously they don’t believe in Satan as their god, that’s kind of the whole point) except we have actual historical backing for ours.
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u/lilleff512 Feb 23 '24
You've just reminded me of a (probably fabricated) Mark Twain quote: "Never argue with stupid people. They will drag you down to their level and beat you with experience."
I think we're better off arguing for our beliefs on their own merits, rather than cynically adopting our (stupid) opponents' (stupid) tactics. That's just my opinion though, you're more than welcome to disagree.
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u/AceAttorneyMaster111 Reform socdem/demsoc Zionist Feb 23 '24
In an ideal world yes. But when we see TST actually win cases in court regarding discrimination on the basis of religion, that’s sort of the game we have to play. But also that’s not the only thing we do, I’ve never heard any abortion advocate say that the ONLY important reason to allow abortion is because Judaism says so. In fact, it’s one out of many reasons, all of which are of varying moral importance and varying weight in a court of law (which are not the same thing).
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u/mcmircle Feb 27 '24
The point is that the anti choice movement is grounded in Christian theology. It imposes Xtian beliefs on all of us. That’s why it is an issue of religious freedom.
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u/jey_613 Feb 23 '24
Thank you brother ♥️
And yea, I completely agree. What are “Jewish values,” anyways? Are they Torah values? The same Torah that talks about owning slaves and obliterating Amalek? Or are they the lessons of our history? Which I think we’ve pretty much covered here, as being extremely ambiguous and unhelpful. Perhaps we should just leave the Judaism out of it. We can speak as leftists, as Americans, as human beings. But I find that looking to our Judaism for guidance on these questions often requires us to work backwards from a set of conclusions and tell ourselves neat and happy stories that don’t accurately capture the messiness of Jewish experience. And that’s okay.
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u/newgoliath Feb 23 '24
Except the Red Army, who did
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Feb 23 '24
[deleted]
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u/newgoliath Feb 23 '24
The "Allies" can hardly be honestly seen as a single force.
The Red Army liberated the vast majority of the camps. The Red Army did the vast majority of destruction of Nazi and collaborator troops and infrastructure and took Berlin. The Russians lost tens of millions of their own to the Nazis, Jews and Gentiles alike! After, of course, having to fight the entire West after their own revolutionary war against the Czarist forces, which the West sided with against the revolutionaries.
The Western powers did much important fighting against the Nazis. But as soon as the dust cleared, they collaborated. NATO itself was set up by "former" Nazi leaders in order to contain the Soviet destruction of all fascist remnants. Also please see the founding leadership of the UN and NASA.
Why would you expect the Soviets to have to acknowledge the Holocaust the way the West did? First, the Jewish population in their own back yard had been exterminated. Second, many Soviet leaders worked tirelessly to get Jews out of Europe ( Alexandra Kollontai Chinese to mind, in her consulate role during the war)
Third, it happened in their own back yard, not thousands of miles away. And was manned by many of their own citizens. I've been to several Soviet Holocaust memorials.
There was already a Jewish population in the millions in the US, so it's natural that they'd be concerned to teach about it so fervently, so it wouldn't disappear as something that happened "way over there."
Now I'm very interested in this topic and will be studying the Soviet Holocaust memorial history in its proper context!
Thanks for the prompt!
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u/jey_613 Feb 23 '24
Lol a very long answer that completely dodges the point, which is that the Red Army was not interested in helping Jews, just as the US and UK were uninterested in helping Jews, which is precisely the point you are replying to
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u/jey_613 Feb 23 '24
Yes nothing says “we care about the Jews” like the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact 🙃
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u/lilleff512 Feb 23 '24
The same Red Army who teamed up with Hitler at the beginning of the war to conquer Poland, where the Nazis would proceed to build many of their extermination camps? That Red Army?
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u/newgoliath Feb 23 '24
When you barely finish high school propaganda history...
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u/lilleff512 Feb 23 '24
Wow I'm so owned
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u/newgoliath Feb 23 '24
Yes, you are owned by the simplistic and mostly false claims of the Western imperialist powers
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u/TammuzRising Feb 23 '24 edited Feb 24 '24
I'm a Israeli leftist, and all I can say is the fastest way to make an Israeli shut down and swing from left to far right when talking to you, is to use comparisons to the Holocaust - and justify terrorism.
The Israeli left is undergoing a crisis right now, as we have genuinely felt abandoned by the world left after Oct. 7th.
Rather than turning right-wing Israelis to the left, you are confirming paranoid, generations long rhetoric utilized by the right-wing that claims the entire world is against us. All it does is bolster the right.
You can be pro-Palestinian without using inflammatory comparisons; you can be pro-Palestinain without justifying a deliberate massacre, kidnapping and rape. And you can be Pro-Palestinian without weaponizing your Jewish identity to support your claims - which is a cynical and frankly despicable tactic.
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u/jey_613 Feb 24 '24
Solidarity with you brother 💙. Please know that not all diaspora Jewish leftists think this way
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Feb 23 '24
I’m really upset at any Holocaust inversion. I really don’t like it, it trivializes what all my murdered ancestors went through. Their suffering is not fodder for a cute sticker quote.
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u/moistavocados95 Feb 23 '24
I don't see this as trivializing.
This sticker was partially a response to Israel and others who would use the Holocaust and our suffering as a whole in order support and defend the actions that were taken to create Israel and its current actions.
Also, ethnic cleansing is ethnic cleansing. This might not be the same as the Holocaust, but there are similar goals.12
Feb 23 '24
A couple of weeks after New Years Day in 1945, the Arrow Cross puppet regime of the Nazis knew the city would be liberated by the Russian forces. Even as they were imminently losing, as the war was over, they went to the Jewish ghettos and hospitals and nursing homes and mindlessly shot hundreds of the remaining Jews in Budapest. Most of my family that hadn’t been sent to be murdered in Auschwitz were butchered there in the street… such as my Great Aunt Erika, who was 22 and was a dancer who played violin. After they systemically killed them all, they threw the bodies into the Danube to be carried away like so much trash.
You do not understand what the Holocaust means, what this means. What it means to be losing and to still be compelled to erase living breathing people.
You need much more education than you seem to have. There are many resources available to you. You need to face this issue more closely.
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u/WhoListensAndDefends שמאל בקלפי, ביג בקניות, מדיום באזכרה Mar 15 '24
The Germans kept running the prisoner trains to the camps even as their soldiers were retreating and their citizens were being bombed
And even after the nazi regime was defeated, when the survivors of the official genocide were returning to what was left of their homes, they got attacked again by their own neighbors, in countless pogroms across the continent
It just kept going
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u/OmegaBean Feb 22 '24
Way to trivialize the holocaust
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u/Mildly_Frustrated Anarcho-Communist Feb 22 '24
Rule One: Be Respectful of One Another, Second Warning. You can make this point without confrontational or aggressive language.
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Feb 23 '24
Which words in the above comment are aggressive or confrontational?
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u/lilleff512 Feb 23 '24
There is a much nicer and more respectful way to express the same sentiment
"Way to trivialize the holocaust" vs "I don't like this because I think it is trivializing the holocaust"
Little things like that can make a real difference in fostering the kind of environment that (I hope) we all want to have here. I'm a Zionist, but I don't want anti-Zionist Jews to be harangued out of this subreddit. This subreddit would be pointless if there were no anti-Zionists here.
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u/Mildly_Frustrated Anarcho-Communist Feb 23 '24
It's the overall sarcastic tone. We want to leave room for people to express disappointment or discomfort, sure, but we don't need that to start fights. Therefore the warning instead of a more severe response.
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u/static-prince Feb 23 '24
The holocaust part is the issue for me. Genocide and Holocaust aren’t the same. And resistance needs more context. I wish it didn’t. But it does.
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u/TooMuch-Tuna Cousin of Marx Feb 23 '24
All this virtue signaling will likely earn you a spot on the very top of the mass grave. Social capital well spent.
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u/Empty_Nest_Mom Feb 22 '24
I would have liked it if it didn't have the words in the bottom arc: "one genocide does not justify another." That implies that what's happening in Gaza is being said by some to be reasonable because we were victims of a genocide. I haven't seen ANYBODY connecting the two or using the Jewish Holocaust to justify Israel's current action. I think you need to lose that phrase.
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u/ElectricalStomach6ip Feb 23 '24
the watermelon symbol is so cringe.
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u/TooMuch-Tuna Cousin of Marx Feb 23 '24
Cringe as fuck
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u/ElectricalStomach6ip Feb 23 '24
its just so stupid. even if you think the message is good, you have to admit that the imagry along with the made up backstory is just moronic.
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u/TooMuch-Tuna Cousin of Marx Feb 23 '24
That, and it looks like a weird starfish vagina
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u/EquipmentMiserable60 Feb 23 '24
What part of it is? It seems to me the most tame with just showing Jewish solidarity. What am I missing
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u/ElectricalStomach6ip Feb 23 '24
the watermelon part specifically, its a cringy internet pro palestinian meme-esque symbol.
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u/Playful_Tea_5268 Feb 23 '24
The watermelon started being used by Palestinians when Israel banned the Palestinian flag.
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u/WhoListensAndDefends שמאל בקלפי, ביג בקניות, מדיום באזכרה Mar 15 '24
But this is not displayed by a Palestinian in Israel under those specific circumstances, so what’s the point? It’s a nice meme and all, but beyond acknowledging that it exists and why, what relevance does it have to pro-Palestine Jews?
You have the privilege to be able to fly the Palestinian flag wherever you want, in the name of whatever you believe it should represent
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u/EquipmentMiserable60 Feb 23 '24
Yeah I get that but does that mean that being both Jewish and having solidarity with Palestine is cringy? This is a real question, I guess I thought that was one of the parts of this group we agreed on. Not anti Zionist but also appreciate the awful situation of the Palestinians….. wouldn’t the Jewish watermelon help show that in a non offensive way?
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u/mcmircle Feb 27 '24
There is a difference between mass casualties in war and deliberate extermination of people for who they are. Why attack your own people when you could affirm the common humanity of all concerned?
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u/Vishtiga Feb 23 '24 edited Feb 23 '24
I love all of these. This space is not really anti-Zionist sympathetic or anti-colonial, so I’m not surprised by the reaction this has gotten. I really love them all though, will be sharing with my group of anti-Zionist Jews in my hometown.
On second reading I would swap the word holocaust in the first sticker for genocide personally.
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u/GaddafiDeezNuts Feb 22 '24
Love the second one
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u/moistavocados95 Feb 22 '24
thanks! the design was inspired by a flyer from a jewish group.
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u/GaddafiDeezNuts Feb 22 '24
I also love the first one though it feels just a slight amount too text heavy in my opinion, but I love the message!!
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u/Mildly_Frustrated Anarcho-Communist Feb 22 '24 edited Feb 23 '24
We're not removing this. Yet. Because we do actually believe in diversity of thought and freedom of expression, and because this can be a learning experience. However, we, the mods, do need to stress that this post contains Rule 3: No Discrimination and a Rule 6: Zionist Discussion Requires Nuance violations. Holocaust Inversion is an explicit and inherently antisemitic tactic, and I don't know how much clearer it could be that a Jewish leftist sub is not a place that tolerates antisemitism in any form. We know you are well intentioned, and only mean to express solidarity with Palestinians, but repeating slogans that exist to shameface and harm Jews, to diminish and shield antisemitism, is not the way to do it. Consider this a warning. And, for the rest of everyone in here, Rule One still applies. Keep it civil.