tikkunolamorgtfo:

socialismoffools:

mishpacha:

saltdragon:

i just read this little book put out by JVP containing stories by members about how they arrived at anti-zionism, and a few things stick out. most writers come from academic and middle or upper-middle class backgrounds. many writers connect anti-zionism to other movements rhetorically, but not materially; they have no conscious political ideology underpinning their anti-zionism or connecting it to other political movements. most writers recount the same story: zionist upbringing, personal moral awakening, political activism through JVP.

for a movement so often called radical or leftist, the more i learn about JVP the more they look like liberal jews using activism to assuage their moral guilt over israeli occupation of palestinians. guilt cannot form the basis for any meaningful political program (it’s time for INN to retire the “moral disaster” refrain and find a material basis for its politics). it’s ridiculous that they have a near monopoly on the jewish left.

The term ‘radical’ is at this point absolutely meaningless and can be used by pretty much anyone. And considering that JVP put out a statement on how to fight antisemitism by ignoring it and fighting every other form of bigotry instead, I’m not in the least surprised.

This is what most leftists in America are like, tbh. As someone who went from anti-Zionist to becoming a Zionist, a big part of what changed me was realizing that the Jewish communities that tended to be the most Zionistic were also the most precarious: working class, less “rooted” in their home countries (former USSR, Latin America, Middle East/North Africa), recent immigrant status, facing political turmoil or rising ant-semitism.

A common, unexamined trope in leftist “de-Zionification” narratives is “I realized that I don’t need Israel, so why should you?” But “you,” a white American who went to Oberlin, don’t speak for everyone: certainly not the masses of Jewish refugees from Eastern Europe and MENA after WW2, certainly not Jews fleeing Venezeula or Yemen or Ethiopia in the past 20-30 years, and certainly not the millions of Jews currently living in Israel. It’s actually pretty ballsy to be living in America, the richest country in the world, the economic and military powerhouse of the Western World, while campaigning to take away the democratic rights of Jews living in a tiny country in the Middle East because Jews are just so, like, so white and annoying.

There’s a lot of intra-community American-centrism and colourism involved in Jewish American political thought on the left, tbh.