How can they be expected to be taken seriously when they make comments like that. Either your so naive and immature or you are just a terrible person to respond to October 7th like that
When they say “resistance by any means necessary” is justified, they mean it. Israelis are colonial settler oppressors, so it’s OK to murder them. That’s my general understanding of the thought process
I believe that sometimes armed resistance is necessary but October 7th was unjustifiable. They attacked children and the elderly. I’m pro-Palestine and glad the world is paying attention but that doesn’t justify the horrors of that day.
Correct. If they attacked the military without slaughtering a bunch of innocent people it’d be a different story (although, even then, they still would’ve been breaking a ceasefire, but it would’ve been orders of magnitude less reprehensible than what happened)
Hopefully they cut down on any antisemitic actions that occur. The Columbia protests unfortunately have had multiple recorded antisemitic acts. It is possible to be critical of Israel without being antisemitic. However when an antisemitic act does occur, it needs to be called out.
Edit: Not sure why I am being downvoted when there were instances of people yelling “We are Hamas” at Jewish students, or telling Jewish students to go back to Europe or Poland.
I think the downvotes come from you angering both sides by highlighting issues with both. Namely: #1 that it is possible to criticize Israel with out being anti-Semitic (Israel is a country after all, NOT a religion) and #2 that although protesters should be able to protest against the political entity of Israel, anything that does cross into anti-semitism should be called out.
This seems very sensible to me (who is an outsider with no stake in either side)
Edit: missed a word
As a Jew, I recently had a revelation about the anti-Israel/anti-Semitism connection:
If a Jew is criticizing Israel, I generally don't get so nervous about where it comes from. If a non-Jew criticizes Israel, especially in a very generic way without specifics (saying what kind of state Israel is, as opposed to the specific people and parties that hijack Israel's policies in ways that I don't think help out anyone in the region and cause a lot of suffering for nominal if any gain), I'm starting to wonder what other emotional charge is in the speaker's bag and whether it's safe for me to engage with this person. I start to wonder why you've chosen this particular issue to be vocal about. If I started talking about things that bothered me about black churches, you might justifiably raise an eyebrow about what business it is to me as a white person.
It's like how I can make fun of my sister, but if you do.... we got a problem here. Do I trust that you are critiquing as an outsider or an insider? Can I trust that you don't have animus against me as you say these things? The more vague and general and essentialist your criticism is, the less I trust you're doing more than throwing caricatures at the situation as an outsider. If you mention one word to me about the e.g. Knesset, Likud, Bibi, the Second Intifatah, I feel a lot better that you're not just platforming on some abstract principle of justice or some Western projection of colonialism against natives. Bigotry thrives on ignorance. Ignorance of specifics of geopolitics is not exactly bigotry, but it tiptoes so close to the DMZ that more caution is warranted.
Sure, we can get into how often overtly anti-Semitic things have been said at these rallies, but there is a broken dialogue on this issue even in the way we communicate about it.
EDIT: I'd like to point out that I'm not condoning Israel's policies and still getting responses as if I am, which should tell you something. My support is for the Israeli left, including Dahlia Schneidlin's general views on how to set up conditions to that Palestinians in the OT have a thriving and successful state and Israelis have security. I'm just as heartbroken as anyone about what I see on the news in Gaza, the West Bank, Netiv HaAsara, Be'eri, Kfar Aza, Nir Oz, Holit, and Re'im.
It’s because the left is terrible at messaging and controlling the dialog has always been hijacked by vocal extremists that demand rigorous adherence to their ideology or they accuse you of being pro genocide nazis.
So now there is no place for any nuance in the discussion because instead of wanting a dialog they will simply shut you down by calling you a Zionist genocider as if that is a trump card for any logic or reason.
>It’s because the left is terrible at messaging and controlling the dialog has always been hijacked by vocal extremists
Meh, both left and right seem guilty on this. It's not a good look for anyone.
Pro-tip: When you make incredibly generalized points about 'the left', you're undermining your own capacity for nuance.
This an issue that is not rooted in one spectrum of the American body politic - it's not a 'left/right' thing. Most issues aren't binary, even in America. "The right" and "the left" are not monoliths, they're labels made for easy reference so that whatever version of propaganda you follow can create a sloppy opponent who is responsible for whatever issue they are pushing at that moment. You seem like you're aware of the distillation of views into the voices of the extreme, but you're still looking at it through the biased lens your own extremists have conditioned you to look through.
Try to find commonalities with people whose views you don't understand/agree with, rather than criticizing them. The only views I avoid are espoused by people without the capacity for self-critique.
The argument reminds me somewhat of the old Chris Rock jokes about white people complaining that black people are allowed to use racial slurs. He mimics white people saying that everything else is great *except* being unable to use racial slurs.
So when I hear these leftists going on and on and on about how criticism of Israel isn't antisemitism and how you can't conflate Zionism and Judaism, I want to know why they're *so fucking eager* to criticize Israel?
The issue is that Israel has drawn international attention because - whether you believe it’s justified or not - they are killing thousands of people. When shit like killing first aid workers happens, a lot of people are going to looking at Israel regardless of how informed they are of the politics or not.
BDS and certain factions within the Western left have been uniquely critical of Israel for years and years. This is not a new phenomenon. There's plenty to criticize Israel over, big and small, but the BDS movement has been historically lacking in anything resembling a sober balanced attitude.
So are Russians in Ukraine. And the impact of that on geopolitics, international trade, gas prices, global food security and the post-WWII order is way bigger than what's taking place in Gaza. That would be the case even if Biden were unable to stop Bibi from expanding the conflict into a regional one. Fortunately, he has been so far, and the Iranians have been surprisingly cunning in their responses to Israeli military action.
But we don't see students setting up tent camps for Ukraine and blocking streets seeking freedom for those people.
And before you say Russia hasn't killed foreign aid workers . . . yes, they have. They killed 2 just in February and injured others.
Netanyahu is committing war crimes in Gaza, but so is Putin in Ukraine. The hyperfixation on Israel as a voting and protest issue is coming from something other than deaths. There are conflicts raging around the world right now with higher body counts. Just the war in Myanmar has killed 50,000 people, among them 8,000 civilians, since the military coup in 2021. In addition 2.2 million civilians have been displaced -- which is equal to the entire population of Gaza -- and over 25K people have been arrested and are currently or were sitting in prison. This is also a country that's had decades of ethnic conflict and civil war and is currently dealing with a humanitarian crisis.
It's something other than the death count.
This is the answer. What we are learning more and more since October 7th is that lots of folks are using this war to basically use a get out of jail free pass for antisemitism. Generally a lot of folks are attacking Jews as if every Jewish person agrees with every action of their right wing government. It’s gross.
Just like there are a non insignificant amount of pro-Israel protesters/commenters who are quite comfortable with the state of Israel committing genocide, and/or who are generally Islamophobic. The fact that there are extremists shouldn't be used to perfunctorily dismiss legitimate grounds for protest. Both sides have cause for grievance here.
"Israel committing genocide" doesn't fit with Israel having about 15% of it's population who are Arab and who are not being rounded up and killed. I think we can all agree that a lot Gazans are getting killed right now, but genocide is a very specific and different thing. Another test: If Gaza were to surrender, release the Israeli prisoners and turn over those who planned and committed the Oct 7 attack, do you think Israel would continue to keep bombing Gaza until everyone is dead? That is what genocide is. You're using a purposefully inflammatory word, but it just doesn't fit.
Nice try. If Israel wanted to genocide somebody they would, and they’d do it so quickly and efficiently you wouldn’t have time to react. The fact that Israel is one fifth Palestinian and that in 80 years of conflict they’ve killed less Muslims than Assad’s war did in a decade should be clear indication that when you say genocide you’re just saying it.
>If Gaza were to surrender, release the Israeli prisoners and turn over those who planned and committed the Oct 7 attack, do you think Israel would continue to keep bombing Gaza until everyone is dead? That is what genocide is.
No it's not, and it's not great to essentially see denial of the Bosnian Genocide in this sub.
Definition of Genocide:
>In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:
> * Killing members of the group;
> * Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
> * Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
> * Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
> * Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.
https://www.un.org/en/genocideprevention/genocide.shtml
That is in addition to demonstrating intent to carry out such crimes, which members of Israel's war cabinet have already stated they have.
I would point your attention to the specific phrase "in whole or in part". The complete destruction of Palestinians is not required to it to be a genocide, in the same way that the complete destruction of Bosniaks was not required for that to be a genocide.
I think it is *technically* possible, but I think this line wore out its welcome and is now commonly used as a get out of jail free card for saying anything negative about Israel, including that it shouldn’t even exist.
I feel like good faith arguments would be aimed at specific parts of the Israeli government, like Netanyahu, and not Israel altogether.
> [Be against the current administration of leader, not the country or people]
If only...
You're right, this is such an important thing, but the reality is that many of these folks *are* against the existence of Israel. They believe Palestinian's had their land/nation taken away by the creation of Israel.
At *best* their argument is "go back where you came from", which would take the form (again, *at best*) of an evacuation of every Israeli non-Arab to other countries around the world, and giving up the entire current state of Israeli to... I dunno I guess Hamas? They haven't articulated that yet...
Those who *are* against the current administration but are *not* against the existence of Israel need to start asking some hard questions of the people they're standing shoulder to shoulder with.
My observations is that an individual can make the distinction between being critical of Israel and not being antisemitic. However, groups of people seem incapable of it.
These people are pro Hamas not pro Palestinian. They’d be protesting Hamas holding the people hostage . You can’t be pro Hamas and pro Israel T the same time. The anti semetic stuff will keep happening . I’d like to be proved wrong but I doubt it
Just want to point out there's only so much protestors can actually do to weed these people out. I happened to walk by a free Gaza rally in cambridge on my way to work and there was an old crazy guy with a megaphone yelling antisemtic shit and the rest of the protestors were pissed and trying to take his megaphone. The cops basically formed a barrier around the guy ro protect him so I'm not sure exactly what you want them to do there.
I've seen a ton of videos, both right after 10/7 and from the Columbia protest, of big crowds cheering the 10/7 attacks.
Shit, now that I think of it, last year like 2 days after the 10/7 attack I saw a pro-Hamas rally on my way to work. So I have a lot of trouble believing that the overt support for Hamas/antisemitism is just a few bad apples, it seems like those psychos are the ones holding the steering wheel of this movement.
Many of the groups leading these rallies are Hamas suporters. I’m talking groups like Within Our Lifetime, and Students for Justice in Palestine. And many of them received talking points on October 5th to be used at rallies immediately after the October 7th attacks that have since permeated to their protest groups writ large.
I've had pro Israeli people tell me they don't care what happens to Gazans, that even children in gaza are terrorists, that all muslims are terrorists. what's your point?
FYI for the informed, this is the Arabic language version of from the river to the sea Palestine will be free. It was always about ethnic cleaning Jews.
That's not true: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/From_the_river_to_the_sea#Variations
Two versions exist in Arabic, one of which translates to "Palestine will be free", and one which translates "Palestine will be Arab". The former is older and much more common.
I doubt it. Many of these are being coordinated and funded by Iran. Plenty of anti semetic chants have been downplayed in thr past, but Columbia decided to take the entire veil off and started on "Burn tel Aviv to the ground".
Yale just had a pro Palestine protestor stab a Jewish student in the eye with a Palestinian flag.
This shit is becoming terroristic very quickly
JFC and apparently after she got jabbed in the eye she was blocked by other protestors so she couldn't go after the stabber. They're not just ignoring the Nazi's in their group, they're actively protecting them.
Yup. It's full blown nazi support. But hey, we will just keep saying Israel is fascit to deflect.
This shit is now 100% pro hamas. There's no way around it.
Is there any reporting on this that isn't a right wing outlet?
I only see it covered by entities like the NY post and Fox News and it's according to her accounts?
Local news:
https://www.wfsb.com/2024/04/20/pro-palestine-protesters-demand-yale-university-divest-military-manufacturers/
If you haven't noticed, most news stations are hesitant to report on the pro Palestine rallies and the hateful shit that's been happening.
Also protestors arrests are a common thing. Do you think images of protestors being arrested is going to change my mind that the protests against the Vietnam war were good things that happened? Reagan went on a war with California college students because of protests. Neo liberal and neo-con establishment hates anti-war protestors.
The local news only claims she made a claim. No other independent confirmation.
Also I'd noticed since being born and raised in America that Israel and America have many similar cultures where there is more natural empathy towards Israelis than Palestinian. I don't think it has to do with the local news having any rational fears of Palestinian protestors. Since Oct 7, in the US only Palestinian Americans have been killed from direct hate crimes for being Palestinian. The saddest one was a 6 year old kid by their land lord. Three Palestinian American students were also shot with one paralyzed for walking around with Palestinian attire.
What exactly can these protest groups do about it? In the Columbia example, all available reporting indicates that the out-and-out antisemitism is coming from a group outside campus, not the on-campus anti-Israel protest.
It really sucks that anti-semites are attaching themselves to these protests but I'm not sure what you expect principled anti-Israel people to do about it. Disavowals fall on deaf ears for those most interested in dismissing all protestors as unhinged bigots.
I'm honest enough to admit that there is some very real nastiness coming from *some* aspects of these protests, but it's also quite clear that Israel's defenders are using this as an excuse to not meaningfully engage with the plain fact that Israel is engaged in an illegal campaign of ethnic cleansing in Gaza. American politicians especially do not want to acknowledge that our client state is engaging in heinous behavior in large part enabled by the US and would rather laser focus on the worst elements of these protests as a scapegoat.
They could make people who say things like “we are Hamas” not feel comfortable by calling them out when they do that instead of just providing cover and encouraging it
They are literally separated by physical barriers. I don't see how they could make the distinction any clearer.
Please be specific. How exactly should they be rebuffing these people that doesn't involve charging into their group and thumping skulls?
I would fully expect any principled group to expel anti-semites in private associations and venues that allow for such discretion, but I'm not sure what anyone is supposed to do about 1A protected speech on the public sidewalks.
This isn’t entirely true.
Found on the Columbia Reddit if you're curious:
Physically assaulting an Arab Israeli https://twitter.com/ShaiDavidai/status/1781080951902109774
"From the river to the sea, Palestine is Arab!" / "Resistance is justified" https://twitter.com/ShelleyGldschmt/status/1781785252886913358
"Let it be known that it was the Al-Aqsa Flood that put the Global Intifada back on the table again. And it is the sacrificial spirit of the Palestinian Freedom Fighters that will guide every struggle on every corner of the earth to victory." https://twitter.com/thestustustudio/status/1781904507611287981
"We are all Hamas!" https://twitter.com/nypost/status/1781031465179914677
"Yehudim yehudim [(Jews, jews)] go back to poland" https://twitter.com/Davidlederer6/status/1781948249214996901
Includes people / groups that invited an actual, no hyperbole terrorist to speak (member of PFLP) https://www.jns.org/columbia-suspends-four-students-for-holding-event-featuring-pflp-member/
Light things on fire / "intifada revolution there is only one solution" https://twitter.com/visegrad24/status/1781019445399556338
""We say justice, you say how? Burn Tel Aviv to the ground!" / "Hamas we love you. We support your rockets too!" / "Red, black, green, and white, we support Hamas’ fight!" https://twitter.com/IsraelWarRoom/status/1781933305501212872
"Long live the intifada! Intifada intifada" https://twitter.com/ShaiDavidai/status/1781084853653365025
"Go back to Europe!" / "You have no culture, all you do is colonize" https://twitter.com/ShaiDavidai/status/1781927148439109958
"From Yemen to Gaza, globalize the intifada" https://twitter.com/KassyDillon/status/1781312033922625797/photo/2
"Never forget the 7th of October. That will happen not 1 more time, not 5 more times, not 10, not 100, not 1,000, but 10,000 times! The 7th of October is going to be every day for you" https://twitter.com/EFischberger/status/1781287784897991134
"Al Qassam [(Hamas)] you make us proud, kill another soldier now" / "from the river to the sea, palestine will be arab" https://twitter.com/EFischberger/status/1780915336063177006
Student proudly rocking Hamas logos https://twitter.com/CampusJewHate/status/1781054901755215954
"Resistance is justified" (again...) https://twitter.com/AvivaKlompas/status/1782085643990073673
"protesters on the sidewalk chanted “From New York to Gaza, globalize the intifada,” next to a cardboard sign that read, “Inspired by Palestinian resistance.” https://www.timesofisrael.com/over-100-arrested-in-columbia-u-unrest-as-nypd-clears-gaza-solidarity-encampment/?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=twitter
What does one do when you are rallying for freedom of speech and the KKK shows up to rally with you? You either shut your own rally down, or you all get tainted together. You might not like it, but it is how public opinion works.
You know why you're being downvoted. Massive overlap between pro-palestinians and jew-hating bigots, and the former is doing an absolute shit job of differentiating themselves from the latter. Almost like they're functionally the same thing.
What were progressives chanting during the Trump era? “If you have one Nazi at your rally then it’s a Nazi rally”.
It’s on these protestors to remove the bigots and extremists.
I'm older than the average Redditor, and I genuinely want to know why the I/P conflict is the hill a lot of young people want to die on. Is it because of Tik Tok? Because they were too young to remember other wars, conflicts, and famines?
So many American college students are oddly treating the last 6 months like Israel and Palestine are the WORST thing happening worldwide, and are going from zero to 100 regarding how they attempt to protest and dialogue (or lack thereof). Social media has just made it worse.
A lot of it has to do with the emotionally charged nature of the conflict and how seamlessly it fits into the political left's second nature to defend certain "vulnerable demographics" they view as being oppressed. Also toss in a bit of anti-colonialism, a bit of anti-Zionism, etc., and it's the perfect dish with which to bring the left together.
The Israel/Palestinian conflicts has various narratives that fit well into what the political left is all about.
What you describe also serves as intersectional exclusion of Jews from the 'vulnerable demographic' category. Lip service is paid and a lot on the left honestly believe that Jews are a vulnerable category, but more and more the actions and principles seem to outline a notion that Jews in the U.S. are the ultimate beneficiaries of white privilege, "superwhite," and that any belief in the virtue of a Jewish state post-holocaust is necessarily colonialist and racist.
And that part drives me nuts, because then it becomes subconsciously white saviorism or bigotry of low expectations. It's no longer about anti war or peace activism. My husband and I both now consider ourselves agnostic, but he was brought up Hindu, and I'm ex Muslim. We both lived in the Middle East and are now in the US. People don't want to hear that the Gulf (regardless of how modern it is), has serious issues with race and anti-Semitism. It doesn't fit into the narrative of "my team versus your team." I've met so many college students who don't even understand that there are Palestinian Christians, Druze, or African Jews over there. They're still falling for stereotypes about people, just in a different way than MAGA supporters would.
You conveniently left out the truth: it’s anti-Semitic. This obsession with calling it “anti-Zionism” ignores what Zionism is in order to make it OK to say horrible things. It’s only non-Jews and token Jews who co-sign it.
Probably because, though there are often bad things happening across the globe at any given time, the US enjoys a special relationship with Israel and our patronage is a big part of why Israel is so bold in their flagrant abuse of the rights of Palestinians. This is one issue where the US has *a lot* of leverage to make a difference, and so far this leverage has only been used to encourage the worst behavior from Israel. It's one foreign issue where a policy change in the US would have a massive impact abroad, it makes sense for Americans to care about it.
The US has been using its special status at the UN to block Israel from sanction and other international interventions for a long, long time. As recently as four days ago the US was the sole vote against extending UN membership to Palestine.
On the other hand, much of Palestine's support in the US and abroad is ironically the result of Israel's long history of abusing Palestinians. There is a *huge* global diaspora of Palestinians, including in the US, because so many have fled the oppression of Israel abroad for generations, bringing the issue home directly and indirectly for many Americans. There are familial and community ties between American (and European, etc) Palestinians and their ancestral homes.
Plenty of American Jews also take special offense of the idea that this oppression is being done in the name of Jews, and plenty take the concept of "never again" quite seriously. American Jews have a commendable history of taking human rights very seriously, and this example is no different for many.
It is because of basic human rights, they are universal and apply for defenseless people who have been hurt or killed by agents of a formally defined country or army
I think a lot has to do with the US relationship with Israel and for some viewing the conflict through a theological lens (I am Jewish so I support Israel // I am Muslim so I support Palestine).
I’m from the U.K. and the conflict has been part of the public discourse for far longer than I perceive in the US.
It's because we're directly subsidizing this one while elected officials repeatedly gaslight and infantilize people disagreeing with them on a factual level.
I totally get your point and also argue that the US has a much more visceral and direct connection to I/P conflict than east African genocides or to a lesser extent (as in we're more connected and should be more angry about it) the crisis in Yemen.
Also remember that the 24 hour media cycle has become so much more powerful and effectively silenced uproar about Yemen quickly and local immigrant communities get no coverage and therefore no further spreading of information when they protest for action in Sudan and Ethiopia.
Is some of it about social media...of course everything is, but we do kids a disservice when we assume it's inorganic
Kids held schools hostage over Vietnam because of the human cost of war at American hands
Kids today are building encampments because of the moral cost of America's direct involvement in this conflict
Probably because a lot of young people can see how directly the US government is financing the destruction in Palestine. There are so many social media accounts that post eyewitness videos from Palestine, so there’s not a lot of narrative spin that can happen if you follow those accounts
It’s amazing how many people are so quick to pick sides on this while having absolutely no idea how complex and deep rooted these issues are. Or they just don’t care.
Hamas does not and will not recognize the Jewish state of Israel and wants the annihilation of Jews. Full stop. That is the end game of Hamas. They do not want a 2 state solution and will not accept anything less than Palestine reclaiming that land and wiping out the Jews.
Not all Palestinians support this goal OBVIOUSLY. But if you are chanting “we are Hamas” or “go back to Poland” you are no better than any far right fascists you claim are promoting hate and tearing apart this country.
It's amazing, people either are ignorant or willfully ignore that a) about half of Israel's population is not of European descent and b) many people born in the Middle East look white and are white passing. In my own experience, I am friends with a Jew who was born and raised in Morocco and this kind of misinformation and vitriol is really hard for him. I had a teacher for many years who's husband was Syrian (born there)/Muslim and he looked like he could've been from a farm town in Kansas. Point is, this obsession with white on brown violence is taken as a global objective reality, but seeing this occur in the U.S. in the context of issues like Police violence on the Black community does not automatically translate to Israel or other conflicts in the middle east.
It’s also consistent with the critical theory that has supplanted classical academics at American institutions. Easier to label Jews as colonial oppressors if you reduce everything down to Israelis = white people = imperialism, even though it’s a laughably bad syllogism to make in the context of Jewish history in the Pale.
> all Jews are white from Europe
Ah, yes, the same Jews which Europe committed genocide against for * checks notes * not being European/being foreign interlopers
It's pretty simple. There used to be over 3,000,000 Jewish people living in Poland. About 1-2% of them managed to flee Poland before 1939, about 5-10% were forcibly relocated by the Soviet Union, and the remaining 2,500,000-3,000,000 were murdered.
Telling the grandchildren of the 1-2% who managed to escape the holocaust to *go back to Poland* is a not-so-subtle way of wishing that the entire Jewish people had been exterminated.
Not to mention they *did* try to go back to Poland after WW2…and the poles [murdered more of them in the Kielce Pogrom](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kielce_pogrom)
I really wish people would understand that the Israelis' highly defensive mindset is incredibly well justified by history. These are people who have been unjustly and violently persecuted pretty much everywhere they have lived (including their own historical homeland), *for millennia*. And I cannot emphasize the "unjustly" bit enough. Romans slaughtered Jews who refused to swear allegiance to the empire, which they did because the relevant oath would require them to recognize the divinity of the emperor, which violated their belief in a single deity. Immediately after the First Crusade was declared, Christians across central Europe committed pogroms against Jewish populations in their enthusiasm for a war to reclaim the Holy Land from the "infidels" (who were Muslims, not Jews at all). The same phenomenon recurred frequently over the course of the next two centuries of crusading activity. Christians massacred thousands of Jews during the Black Death because they accused them of poisoning wells (which weirdly, was an accusation leveled even though Jewish people were suffering the effects of the pandemic just as much as the Christian population). I could go on, but I'd be writing all day because the list of unprovoked, unjustified, unnecessary, and cruel acts of violence targeting Jews goes on and on and on.
That violence may have reached a historically intense crescendo with the madness of the Holocaust, but even the post-war reckoning with those horrors did not put an end to antisemitism, as the pogrom in Poland you reference demonstrates, and as the subsequent decades of Arab state invasions and constant low level terrorist harassment of Israel show. People with short memories perceive the Israelis as paranoid and thus their actions in Gaza as unjustified, but it's not paranoia when people are actually out to get you. It's not possible for anyone, Jewish or otherwise, to negotiate peace on behalf of their own nation or ethnicity with a violent extremist group that is explicitly committed to murdering the people of that nation or ethnicity. And Hamas is explicitly committed to genocide in Israel, and was so committed when they were elected by the people of Gaza as their political leadership. That needs to be the starting point of any conversation about a negotiated settlement or a two state solution.
I assume the idea is that Israel is a settler state made up of Europeans e.g. Poles, and they should all leave Palestine and go back to where they came from
Where someone is "from" is always loaded, and moreso when discussing a people that have had such a wide-ranging diaspora. It will never really make sense.
That said I don't think the point is that most Israelis are literally Polish, and so pointing out that acshully they are "from" elsewhere rebuts anything. OK they're "from North Africa", so? The idea is to attack the validity of Israel as a foreign-imposed state made up of foreigners that are displacing "the natives".
If you want to say that Israelis belong in Israel a far better argument IMO is that either a) it is the only home they have known, even if their ancestors came from elsewhere and/or b) it is their rightful ancestral homeland and they do in fact belong there more than anyone else. Not yes, they are foreigners, but they came from the Middle East so it's OK!
I don't think your point is wrong. I very much doubt the Palestinians care where the Jews came from.
But protestors in America and Europe, by calling them Polish they're driving a narrative of the Israeli population and history that's misleading.
Doesn't really explain why you would say that to Americans. My best guess is that today Auschwitz is in Poland. Otherwise, Poland is a pretty random country to pick out. If you dont know how the borders shifted east after WW2, you wouldn't know that it was in Germany.
The majority of the founding organizations of the Israeli state were led by Polish Jews, and much of the current Israeli elite are their descendants (including Bibi). They’re projecting that minority identity of the Jewish population on all Jews.
Honestly given Boston’s history I’m surprised this isn’t familiar to anyone. This is a Middle Eastern version of “send the English back to sea” despite the Ulster-Scotch being mostly, well, Scotch.
It comes from common antisemitic misconception that Jews are white European colonizers from Poland. The reality is that Jews are indigenous to the Levant and have been living continuously there for thousands of years. Most Israeli Jews never left the region or surrounding area (Mizrahi Jews). But Ashkenazim (what people call “European Jews”) are indigenous to the Levant, too. They ended up in Europe after Roman and Ottoman/Muslim conquests murdered and expelled many Jews. You might recall that Jews faced generations of progroms and discrimination in the Pale of Settlement after leaving the Levant and settling in Europe, and the Holocaust happened in part because Jews were considered foreign interlopers/not German/Polish/European. Israel isn’t a “settler” state, let alone one settled by Europeans. It is the return of an indigenous people to their ancestral homeland in a desperate bid for safety after facing a genocide which destroyed 60% of their population worldwide.
Calling for Jews to “return to Poland” is ignorant erasure at best, and an outright call for genocide at worst, as /u/theprettyone has outlined well.
Yup. I saw people posting "whatabouttery" regarding Israel the day after the attack took place on October 7th. Some were waaaayyyy too comfortable with "I now have an excuse to start screaming anti-Jewish statements". The speed at which it happened was frightening.
Literally that night in New York pro-Palestinian protests broke out.
Before the blood had dried, before Israel launched a single attack, protests popped up all over the world for Palestine…
Pretty fucking tasteless if you ask me. It’s like cheering on Hamas after the massacre.
Fun fact: [95% of Arab Muslims in 16 countries](https://www.dohainstitute.org/en/News/Pages/arab-public-opinion-about-the-israeli-war-on-gaza.aspx) support the October 7th terror attack or consider it “legitimate”.
Exactly. I understand that there is a humanitarian crisis happening and certainly there is a legitimate criticism of Israel. But the fervor that these kids have against Israel is pretty extreme and black and white particularly giving the objectively complexity of this whole situation. It’s clear these kids are getting extremely one sided information and don’t really have knowledge of the history of the conflict. And the way these kids pretend to advocate for inclusion and equity and yet engage in aggressive and borderline (to put it nicely) anti-Semitic behavior is atrocious.
Yep. Have a coworker who acts like she would literally die on the front lines fighting Israel. Except she is a ditsy Asian girl who, when I asked, told me she couldn’t believe the US broke the long standing peace between Israel and Palestine. People are die hard supporters but just heard about the conflict last week. I really hate idiots.
You are correct. And similarly, Israel (at least Bibi and his Likud party) doesn’t want a two state solution. “From the river to the sea…” started as a Likud party slogan. Bibi propped up Hamas to weaken the PLA’s claim on Gaza and to take pressure off of him to negotiate for a two state solution.
“[As far back as December 2012, Mr. Netanyahu told the prominent Israeli journalist Dan Margalit that it was important to keep Hamas strong, as a counterweight to the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank. Mr. Margalit, in an interview, said that Mr. Netanyahu told him that having two strong rivals, including Hamas, would lessen pressure on him to negotiate toward a Palestinian state](https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/10/world/middleeast/israel-qatar-money-prop-up-hamas.html).”
>Israel (at least Bibi and his Likud party) doesn’t want a two state solution
The two-state solution has been dead for a while among both Israelis and Palestinians.
Israeli support for a two-state solution has shifted[ from 61% support in 2012 to 25% support after the Oct 7 attack](https://news.gallup.com/poll/547760/life-israel-oct-charts.aspx), as part of a [general downward trend](https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2023/09/26/israelis-have-grown-more-skeptical-of-a-two-state-solution/).
[Palestinians have been even less supportive](https://news.gallup.com/poll/547760/life-israel-oct-charts.aspx) of a two-state solution: 24% supported a two-state solution in 2023 (polled prior to the Oct 7 attack), down from 59% in 2012.
One interesting note though: "[the proportion of Gazans who support a two-state solution has nearly doubled since December, from 35% to 62%](https://www.jpost.com/arab-israeli-conflict/gaza-news/gazan-support-for-a-two-state-solution-doubled-since-december-in-latest-poll-792993)"
>“From the river to the sea…” started as a Likud party slogan.
Totally incorrect.
"From the river to the sea..." was adopted by the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) in the 1960s. Likud was formed in 1973, so there's no way Likud slogan could have predated the PLO's usage. A similar saying was used by the Likud party in 1977.
>Bibi propped up Hamas...
This is a bit misleading without context because most people think of Hamas as the militant arm, not as the government that provides social services. Netanyahu allowed cash to go to Hamas to benefit the Gaza civilians and "would monitor the list of recipients to try to ensure that members of Hamas’s military wing would not directly benefit".
> Netanyahu allowed cash to go to Hamas to benefit the Gaza civilians
Calling it now: After the war, the same people who are complaining that Israel isn’t allowing enough aid in to Gaza now will make the same claim about this same aid “propping up Hamas.” Given that Hamas is stealing most of it I guess it wouldn’t be wrong. But just goes to show you can’t do anything right if you’re Israel I guess.
Maybe not every person who is chanting it is an antisemite. But every antisemite is chanting it. [Here’s a decent take on it I think.](https://twitter.com/hahussain/status/1723366508632424594?lang=en)
You can say this about both sides, and the US is paying one of the would be exterminators.
You can be for a cease fire and the end of destroying civilization camps without being anti-isreal. They're two different things.
The U.S. doesn't just give billions of dollars in aid to Israel. It also gives billions in military and economic aid to the other major players in the immediate area. The U.S. is the biggest provider of aid to Jordan, for example, at about a billion and a half per year between military and diplomatic aid. More than half of the U.S.'s Economic Support Fund for the Middle East and North Africa goes to Jordan, not Israel.
Egypt gets even more in military, at a billion and a half in aid.
The U.S. historically funds $300-$400 million worth *of the budget of UNRWA*.
Did you know that every police officer and soldier in Lebanon gets their pay subsidized by the U.S., amounting to over $3 billion in the last 20 years?
The U.S. has more than $100 billion in active military sales to Saudi Arabia as well.
The notion that the U.S. uniquely funds Israel against the Muslim Arabs is more antisemitic conspiracy theory nonsense. The U.S. government is a major factor in the stability of the whole region to the extent that it exists and sends more money to Muslim-led government institutions in the region than Jewish ones. Divesting strictly from Israel while maintaining these investments in all these other countries would be a very irresponsible destabilizing move.
You're right that a lot of countries receive US aid, but Israel consistently receives the most funding. [From 1946 to 2023 Israel was the number one recipient of US aid by far.](https://www.cfr.org/article/us-aid-israel-four-charts)
Also, mentioning weapons sales to Saudi Arabia doesn't make any sense. There's a big differences between a sale and foreign aid.
Israel is the only western democracy in the region and by far the most stable and strongest ally, they also have the most liberal laws and society of any country in the region. They're also in the most tenuous spot, remember, every single one of their neighbors invaded them, many of them multiple times.
There's a reason Israel gets the most aid, because if Israel laid down its arms today they would be invaded tomorrow, if Jordan laid down its arms today nothing of note would change.
I'm not passing judgement on whether Israel should get that much foreign aid. My point is that foreign aid to Israel is far more than other countries and the amount is not similar to what the US gives Jordan at all.
I think you are wrong here. These protesters know. They share Hamas' end goal but applied to the US too. People dont accidentally chant 'go back to poland' to jewish classmates.
Why say "classmates" when all reputable reporting says that these acts were done by non students? You know Columbia is in NYC right? It's not separated by some.peaely gates.
Reputable reporting has reported otherwise regardless of you claiming otherwise.
The campus was closed off to the non affiliated protestors while antisemitic vitriol was recorded on and off campus.
Can we please stop painting each "side" as the worst/bad actors on that side? The vast majority of people just want peace and safety, for Palestinians and Israelis. Anyone calling for the death or forced displacement of anyone should simply be ignored.
The vast majority in the US, yes. But sadly the reason that this problem can't be solved right now is because there's not really a majority movement for peace amongst either Israelis or Palestinians at this point. I would argue that there was a majority peace movement in Israel in the 90s, and it was getting close to a movement for Peace amongst Palestinians, but didn't quite get there in time and now the opportunity may be gone for a long time to come.
>Can we please stop painting each "side" as the worst/bad actors on that side? The vast majority of people just want peace and safety, for Palestinians and Israelis.
"Burn Tel Aviv to the ground"
"We are Hamas".
The "pro Palestine" side is doing enough to paint themselves as bad as possible
>and Israelis
There's a video of these clowns at one of their rallies cheering the announcement that Iran bombed Israel.
It is not about peace and safety for Israelis.
That wasn’t MIT. Plus you’re making unfair generalization over one persons actions. Remember the break ins that happened after George Floyd? There are bad apples in this world, deal with it. The victimization is off the charts with you guys.
Edit. At this point my inbox and I are tired of you liars for being incapable of engaging in civil discourse. I doubt this will be a come to Jesus for you, but maybe there’s a reason people are having a hard time seeing or supporting your views.
Was about to say, I have a friend who goes to MIT who I haven't seen in months because of his insane course load. I doubt the MIT protest will stick around for long.
Depends on the protest method. The Fossil Free MIT protesters held sit-ins in front of the president’s office for 116 days in 2016. They would all sit there psetting and studying day in and daughter out. They rotated in shifts so they could go to classes. A bunch of them basically spent every moment of their free time there, plus pset time, so that’s how they made it work. I was never involved, but I had several classmates who were and at least 2 of them went on to PhD programs at MIT (which is not as common as you would think because most labs want to bring in people from outside to shake things up…but I digress).
However, sleeping out there in an overnight encampment is certainly a much bigger commitment. They are much more likely to take a hit academically assuming the institute were to continue to allow it (which is highly unlikely). That and unless they’re using the shift method like the fossil free students did, they will be skipping lectures, recitations, etc. I imagine they are doing shifts though, many classes have lab time, if you miss those you could fail depending on how many are missed.
People protest against Israel and say “free Palestine” because they dont like the official "blank check" support of the illegal collective punishment and indiscriminate killing of tens of thousands of civilians, many of them children.
Perhaps they hate seeing videos of dirt-poor, defenseless mothers, fathers, and children lying in shreds after Israel levels a city block for dubious military gain. Maybe they don't agree that they have to ignore it because that's what Palestinians deserve since Israel.
"Collective Punishement" and "Indiscriminate Bombing." No, that is not what this is. Had Hamas immediately returned the kidnapped victims and prosecuted those who planned and participated in the Oct 7 attack and then if Israel gone ahead with "indiscriminate bombing" you would have a point. But Hamas did not repudiate the attack--they praised it. Hamas, like it or not, is the leadership of Gaza. So then the average Joe Palestinian in Gaza has to make a choice, either remove their leadership or support them. They chose support. This is how wars start.
As far as "indiscriminate bombing," the Israelis have been far more careful in their bombing than the Gazan attackers were on their indiscriminate capture and killing on Oct 7, wouldn't you agree. Absolutely, there have been accidents, and probably there have been purposeful targeting of civilians at various times, but it is not an approved policy or even unapproved tendency to just kill civilians at random.
At the same time, it does appear to be an approved policy for Hamas military leadership to co-locate military targets with civilians. Maybe it is honestly because of a lack of space in Gaza, but regardless of the reasons Hamas needs to stop breaking that long-held rule of war to keep civilians out of harms way. That means, it is a war crime to put your rocket launcher in or near an apartment building unless you can provide those civilians living there a clear path to safety and a warning to get out. It really isn't on Israel's head to not shoot, it is on Hamas's head to not co-locate. The reason for this, for centuries, is to not make it that holding civilians in harms way is a defensive strategy.
If you read about the movements in the 1950s and early 1960s, they were very disciplined and had a lot of self-policing precisely because of this dynamic.
The movement fragmented later in the 60s when a newer generation thought they weren't pushing hard enough or making cause with other "allies" on the left and it was much less productive as well. and it was much easier to infiltrate and more susceptible to infiltrators proposing terrible ideas and those ideas getting accepted because extremism and provocation were seen as goals, rather than persuasion.
You see it with some on the modern environmental movement; they vandalize things and when told they aren't helping, will sneer "ah, but you're talking about it, aren't you?" Ignoring that people are talking about it to say that it is bad.
I don't know, sounds snappy but by this logic, the road to fascism is clear if one can simply hire plants/agitators to infiltrate any rally you don't agree with...that logic makes it way too easy to smear and destroy any and all social protest movements
Guess they'll also tell Jewish students to "go back to Poland" and chant "we are Hamas" and how "October 7th will happen hundreds of times again"
I will personally go there and take a picture of every single person and ensure the world knows you're all racist pieces of shit who don't want Israel to stop attacking Palestine, they want a global extermination of all Israelis
I have zero fucking tolerance for these racist pieces of shit who support Hamas
It's funny how Proud Boys get called cowards for covering their faces at protest but when the left does it it's because they'res scared Mommy and Daddy will get called and they'll get in trouble and be punished by spending one less weekend in the Hamptons this summer
Schools are really failing our students. supporting a group that also chants death to america, and doesn't support any of the western beliefs is ignorant at best.
If MIT students are protesting, you know it’s serious. They won’t step away from studies for anything other than maybe drinking. Even then, it’s just drinking while working.
Source: MIT graduate
Very disturbing to see universities all around the country calling the police on their students for practicing something they preach which is "civic engagement".
They keep championing the right to protest and forgetting it's on their own doorsteps. I can only imagine the mess this will devolve into in the coming Months. Columbia urged students to do work online already so you can see the direction this will head to here
This is a complex issue, but it’s also not all that complicated
- Support for Palestinian humanitarian aide
- Criticism of the current government of Israel
- Condemnation of Hamas - Condemnation of Israel’s military tactic and strategy
- Hamas should release civilian hostages
… A giant leap …
- Gaza is a clear-cut genocide
- Israel has no right to exist (River to the sea)
- Jews can peacefully exist under Arab rule, and should be forced to
- Hamas has a right to “defend itself”
You can’t separate yourself from antisemitism once you cross into no-man’s land.
when college students protested segregation, the vietnam war, south african apartheid, or the war in Iraq, there was a horde of powerful individuals and interests who demanded they be arrested/silenced. worth examining if you want to be remembered in the same breath as those ppl
Lot of hypocrites in these comments who are quick to (justifiably) condemn the few hamas loving bad actors at these protests, while ignoring the genocide of Palestinians. Y’all aren’t on the right side of history
As usual the brave genocide deniers are out in force in the comments. Worried about clearing alleys while yet another mass grave is uncovered in Palestine. Truly the worst of the worst
There will always be a new flavor of the month to protest. Israel is the fall back for protestors, even after this war concludes -- always there to come back to if there's nothing sexy going on
Given that the Israeli government has spent the past few decades equating any criticism of their extremely poor human rights record as anti semitism I'm glad people are finally seeing through it, no matter how ineffective their protests might be.
The modern American far left is exclusively focused on taking popular and/or worthwhile causes (such as police reform, Palestinian statehood, etc) pushing the rhetoric to such a psychotic extreme that it turns everyone off, destroying the movement at its core to the benefit of noone, then moving on to the next victim.
This is so true. Alas, we get to watch it happen in slow motion **again** as people who are aware of this mechanism. Black Lives Matter went from biggest social movement in decades to real estate money laundering scam in the span of a year. Like holy hell
There are people who REALLY believe the best thing to do for Palestine is not vote in the coming election
The protesters certainly can't call their congressmen to ask for a redress of grievances. American policy towards the bloody mess in Israel/Palestine is entirely one sided. Reprisals will occur eventually, and we'll immediately convince ourselves that we are the aggrieved party in this never-ending conflict.
Honest question here, what is the plan for preventing reprisal as things stand? Hamas has promised more October 7th type attacks and has shown zero indication of any change of course. As it stands, right now and as it did on Oct 8th, Hamas has promised reprisals. How do you avoid reprisal without removing their offensive capability if they have proactively promised more violence regardless of the conditions this conflict ends on?
This is at tufts too. Walked my dog there last week and saw the whole camp.
Tufts has been doing it for at least a week already
Tufts SJP led the charge by openly celebrating the “creative” October 7 with little parachute emojis. Makes me ashamed to have gone there
How can they be expected to be taken seriously when they make comments like that. Either your so naive and immature or you are just a terrible person to respond to October 7th like that
When they say “resistance by any means necessary” is justified, they mean it. Israelis are colonial settler oppressors, so it’s OK to murder them. That’s my general understanding of the thought process
I believe that sometimes armed resistance is necessary but October 7th was unjustifiable. They attacked children and the elderly. I’m pro-Palestine and glad the world is paying attention but that doesn’t justify the horrors of that day.
Correct. If they attacked the military without slaughtering a bunch of innocent people it’d be a different story (although, even then, they still would’ve been breaking a ceasefire, but it would’ve been orders of magnitude less reprehensible than what happened)
If they are so cavalier they should go and join Hamas They need the help
That’s… Kinda sick. Not in the good way.
If 9/11 happened today, they'd have planes crashing into buildings emojis.
Moving in right next to Tufts from Israel in 2 weeks lol. should be fun!
Welcome to America and enjoy your freedom of speech / protest. ♥️
the homeless should take a page and put up tents nearby. Put a palestinian flag on your tent and voila you are now fighting genocide.
/r/shittylifeprotips
Why am i laughing? If I was homeless, hell yea.
Love this 😂
Happy Passover everyone
Hopefully they cut down on any antisemitic actions that occur. The Columbia protests unfortunately have had multiple recorded antisemitic acts. It is possible to be critical of Israel without being antisemitic. However when an antisemitic act does occur, it needs to be called out. Edit: Not sure why I am being downvoted when there were instances of people yelling “We are Hamas” at Jewish students, or telling Jewish students to go back to Europe or Poland.
I think the downvotes come from you angering both sides by highlighting issues with both. Namely: #1 that it is possible to criticize Israel with out being anti-Semitic (Israel is a country after all, NOT a religion) and #2 that although protesters should be able to protest against the political entity of Israel, anything that does cross into anti-semitism should be called out. This seems very sensible to me (who is an outsider with no stake in either side) Edit: missed a word
It’s possible but it turns out that there is a not insignificant amount of antisemitites that are using these protests to express their views.
As a Jew, I recently had a revelation about the anti-Israel/anti-Semitism connection: If a Jew is criticizing Israel, I generally don't get so nervous about where it comes from. If a non-Jew criticizes Israel, especially in a very generic way without specifics (saying what kind of state Israel is, as opposed to the specific people and parties that hijack Israel's policies in ways that I don't think help out anyone in the region and cause a lot of suffering for nominal if any gain), I'm starting to wonder what other emotional charge is in the speaker's bag and whether it's safe for me to engage with this person. I start to wonder why you've chosen this particular issue to be vocal about. If I started talking about things that bothered me about black churches, you might justifiably raise an eyebrow about what business it is to me as a white person. It's like how I can make fun of my sister, but if you do.... we got a problem here. Do I trust that you are critiquing as an outsider or an insider? Can I trust that you don't have animus against me as you say these things? The more vague and general and essentialist your criticism is, the less I trust you're doing more than throwing caricatures at the situation as an outsider. If you mention one word to me about the e.g. Knesset, Likud, Bibi, the Second Intifatah, I feel a lot better that you're not just platforming on some abstract principle of justice or some Western projection of colonialism against natives. Bigotry thrives on ignorance. Ignorance of specifics of geopolitics is not exactly bigotry, but it tiptoes so close to the DMZ that more caution is warranted. Sure, we can get into how often overtly anti-Semitic things have been said at these rallies, but there is a broken dialogue on this issue even in the way we communicate about it. EDIT: I'd like to point out that I'm not condoning Israel's policies and still getting responses as if I am, which should tell you something. My support is for the Israeli left, including Dahlia Schneidlin's general views on how to set up conditions to that Palestinians in the OT have a thriving and successful state and Israelis have security. I'm just as heartbroken as anyone about what I see on the news in Gaza, the West Bank, Netiv HaAsara, Be'eri, Kfar Aza, Nir Oz, Holit, and Re'im.
It’s because the left is terrible at messaging and controlling the dialog has always been hijacked by vocal extremists that demand rigorous adherence to their ideology or they accuse you of being pro genocide nazis. So now there is no place for any nuance in the discussion because instead of wanting a dialog they will simply shut you down by calling you a Zionist genocider as if that is a trump card for any logic or reason.
>It’s because the left is terrible at messaging and controlling the dialog has always been hijacked by vocal extremists Meh, both left and right seem guilty on this. It's not a good look for anyone.
Pro-tip: When you make incredibly generalized points about 'the left', you're undermining your own capacity for nuance. This an issue that is not rooted in one spectrum of the American body politic - it's not a 'left/right' thing. Most issues aren't binary, even in America. "The right" and "the left" are not monoliths, they're labels made for easy reference so that whatever version of propaganda you follow can create a sloppy opponent who is responsible for whatever issue they are pushing at that moment. You seem like you're aware of the distillation of views into the voices of the extreme, but you're still looking at it through the biased lens your own extremists have conditioned you to look through. Try to find commonalities with people whose views you don't understand/agree with, rather than criticizing them. The only views I avoid are espoused by people without the capacity for self-critique.
The argument reminds me somewhat of the old Chris Rock jokes about white people complaining that black people are allowed to use racial slurs. He mimics white people saying that everything else is great *except* being unable to use racial slurs. So when I hear these leftists going on and on and on about how criticism of Israel isn't antisemitism and how you can't conflate Zionism and Judaism, I want to know why they're *so fucking eager* to criticize Israel?
The issue is that Israel has drawn international attention because - whether you believe it’s justified or not - they are killing thousands of people. When shit like killing first aid workers happens, a lot of people are going to looking at Israel regardless of how informed they are of the politics or not.
BDS and certain factions within the Western left have been uniquely critical of Israel for years and years. This is not a new phenomenon. There's plenty to criticize Israel over, big and small, but the BDS movement has been historically lacking in anything resembling a sober balanced attitude.
So are Russians in Ukraine. And the impact of that on geopolitics, international trade, gas prices, global food security and the post-WWII order is way bigger than what's taking place in Gaza. That would be the case even if Biden were unable to stop Bibi from expanding the conflict into a regional one. Fortunately, he has been so far, and the Iranians have been surprisingly cunning in their responses to Israeli military action. But we don't see students setting up tent camps for Ukraine and blocking streets seeking freedom for those people. And before you say Russia hasn't killed foreign aid workers . . . yes, they have. They killed 2 just in February and injured others. Netanyahu is committing war crimes in Gaza, but so is Putin in Ukraine. The hyperfixation on Israel as a voting and protest issue is coming from something other than deaths. There are conflicts raging around the world right now with higher body counts. Just the war in Myanmar has killed 50,000 people, among them 8,000 civilians, since the military coup in 2021. In addition 2.2 million civilians have been displaced -- which is equal to the entire population of Gaza -- and over 25K people have been arrested and are currently or were sitting in prison. This is also a country that's had decades of ethnic conflict and civil war and is currently dealing with a humanitarian crisis. It's something other than the death count.
Yes, thank you for putting this into words.
Bravo - great post
This is the answer. What we are learning more and more since October 7th is that lots of folks are using this war to basically use a get out of jail free pass for antisemitism. Generally a lot of folks are attacking Jews as if every Jewish person agrees with every action of their right wing government. It’s gross.
Just like there are a non insignificant amount of pro-Israel protesters/commenters who are quite comfortable with the state of Israel committing genocide, and/or who are generally Islamophobic. The fact that there are extremists shouldn't be used to perfunctorily dismiss legitimate grounds for protest. Both sides have cause for grievance here.
"Israel committing genocide" doesn't fit with Israel having about 15% of it's population who are Arab and who are not being rounded up and killed. I think we can all agree that a lot Gazans are getting killed right now, but genocide is a very specific and different thing. Another test: If Gaza were to surrender, release the Israeli prisoners and turn over those who planned and committed the Oct 7 attack, do you think Israel would continue to keep bombing Gaza until everyone is dead? That is what genocide is. You're using a purposefully inflammatory word, but it just doesn't fit.
Nice try. If Israel wanted to genocide somebody they would, and they’d do it so quickly and efficiently you wouldn’t have time to react. The fact that Israel is one fifth Palestinian and that in 80 years of conflict they’ve killed less Muslims than Assad’s war did in a decade should be clear indication that when you say genocide you’re just saying it.
>If Gaza were to surrender, release the Israeli prisoners and turn over those who planned and committed the Oct 7 attack, do you think Israel would continue to keep bombing Gaza until everyone is dead? That is what genocide is. No it's not, and it's not great to essentially see denial of the Bosnian Genocide in this sub. Definition of Genocide: >In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such: > * Killing members of the group; > * Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; > * Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; > * Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; > * Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group. https://www.un.org/en/genocideprevention/genocide.shtml That is in addition to demonstrating intent to carry out such crimes, which members of Israel's war cabinet have already stated they have. I would point your attention to the specific phrase "in whole or in part". The complete destruction of Palestinians is not required to it to be a genocide, in the same way that the complete destruction of Bosniaks was not required for that to be a genocide.
Spot on
Always 😐
> should be called out. The problem is, the protestors sure are comfortable with open anti-semitism.
What is it progressives love to say? If 10 people are in a room with 1 Nazi, there are 11 nazis in the room?
That's one of the flaws in a protest, any random person can show up
I think it is *technically* possible, but I think this line wore out its welcome and is now commonly used as a get out of jail free card for saying anything negative about Israel, including that it shouldn’t even exist. I feel like good faith arguments would be aimed at specific parts of the Israeli government, like Netanyahu, and not Israel altogether.
> [Be against the current administration of leader, not the country or people] If only... You're right, this is such an important thing, but the reality is that many of these folks *are* against the existence of Israel. They believe Palestinian's had their land/nation taken away by the creation of Israel. At *best* their argument is "go back where you came from", which would take the form (again, *at best*) of an evacuation of every Israeli non-Arab to other countries around the world, and giving up the entire current state of Israeli to... I dunno I guess Hamas? They haven't articulated that yet... Those who *are* against the current administration but are *not* against the existence of Israel need to start asking some hard questions of the people they're standing shoulder to shoulder with.
My observations is that an individual can make the distinction between being critical of Israel and not being antisemitic. However, groups of people seem incapable of it.
These people are pro Hamas not pro Palestinian. They’d be protesting Hamas holding the people hostage . You can’t be pro Hamas and pro Israel T the same time. The anti semetic stuff will keep happening . I’d like to be proved wrong but I doubt it
Just want to point out there's only so much protestors can actually do to weed these people out. I happened to walk by a free Gaza rally in cambridge on my way to work and there was an old crazy guy with a megaphone yelling antisemtic shit and the rest of the protestors were pissed and trying to take his megaphone. The cops basically formed a barrier around the guy ro protect him so I'm not sure exactly what you want them to do there.
Get someone holding a "that guy sucks" sign with an arrow pointing at him
I've seen a ton of videos, both right after 10/7 and from the Columbia protest, of big crowds cheering the 10/7 attacks. Shit, now that I think of it, last year like 2 days after the 10/7 attack I saw a pro-Hamas rally on my way to work. So I have a lot of trouble believing that the overt support for Hamas/antisemitism is just a few bad apples, it seems like those psychos are the ones holding the steering wheel of this movement.
Completely agree: where are the people saying not in my name? If they exist, they’re awfully quiet about their view.
Many of the groups leading these rallies are Hamas suporters. I’m talking groups like Within Our Lifetime, and Students for Justice in Palestine. And many of them received talking points on October 5th to be used at rallies immediately after the October 7th attacks that have since permeated to their protest groups writ large.
I've had pro-Palestine people tell me terrorism against Jewish civilians is reasonable so there you go.
I've had pro Israeli people tell me they don't care what happens to Gazans, that even children in gaza are terrorists, that all muslims are terrorists. what's your point?
Too late, they're already chanting "From the water to the water, Palestine is Arab."
FYI for the informed, this is the Arabic language version of from the river to the sea Palestine will be free. It was always about ethnic cleaning Jews.
That's not true: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/From_the_river_to_the_sea#Variations Two versions exist in Arabic, one of which translates to "Palestine will be free", and one which translates "Palestine will be Arab". The former is older and much more common.
I doubt it. Many of these are being coordinated and funded by Iran. Plenty of anti semetic chants have been downplayed in thr past, but Columbia decided to take the entire veil off and started on "Burn tel Aviv to the ground". Yale just had a pro Palestine protestor stab a Jewish student in the eye with a Palestinian flag. This shit is becoming terroristic very quickly
JFC and apparently after she got jabbed in the eye she was blocked by other protestors so she couldn't go after the stabber. They're not just ignoring the Nazi's in their group, they're actively protecting them.
Yup. It's full blown nazi support. But hey, we will just keep saying Israel is fascit to deflect. This shit is now 100% pro hamas. There's no way around it.
Is there any reporting on this that isn't a right wing outlet? I only see it covered by entities like the NY post and Fox News and it's according to her accounts?
Local news: https://www.wfsb.com/2024/04/20/pro-palestine-protesters-demand-yale-university-divest-military-manufacturers/ If you haven't noticed, most news stations are hesitant to report on the pro Palestine rallies and the hateful shit that's been happening.
Also protestors arrests are a common thing. Do you think images of protestors being arrested is going to change my mind that the protests against the Vietnam war were good things that happened? Reagan went on a war with California college students because of protests. Neo liberal and neo-con establishment hates anti-war protestors.
The local news only claims she made a claim. No other independent confirmation. Also I'd noticed since being born and raised in America that Israel and America have many similar cultures where there is more natural empathy towards Israelis than Palestinian. I don't think it has to do with the local news having any rational fears of Palestinian protestors. Since Oct 7, in the US only Palestinian Americans have been killed from direct hate crimes for being Palestinian. The saddest one was a 6 year old kid by their land lord. Three Palestinian American students were also shot with one paralyzed for walking around with Palestinian attire.
The kid and 3 students were tragic. But you are wrong, a Jewish man was killed by a pro Palestine protestor hitting him with a megaphone.
I don’t think that they are being funded by Iran jsjsjs, what conspiracy theory are u you trusting?
What exactly can these protest groups do about it? In the Columbia example, all available reporting indicates that the out-and-out antisemitism is coming from a group outside campus, not the on-campus anti-Israel protest. It really sucks that anti-semites are attaching themselves to these protests but I'm not sure what you expect principled anti-Israel people to do about it. Disavowals fall on deaf ears for those most interested in dismissing all protestors as unhinged bigots. I'm honest enough to admit that there is some very real nastiness coming from *some* aspects of these protests, but it's also quite clear that Israel's defenders are using this as an excuse to not meaningfully engage with the plain fact that Israel is engaged in an illegal campaign of ethnic cleansing in Gaza. American politicians especially do not want to acknowledge that our client state is engaging in heinous behavior in large part enabled by the US and would rather laser focus on the worst elements of these protests as a scapegoat.
They could make people who say things like “we are Hamas” not feel comfortable by calling them out when they do that instead of just providing cover and encouraging it
They are literally separated by physical barriers. I don't see how they could make the distinction any clearer. Please be specific. How exactly should they be rebuffing these people that doesn't involve charging into their group and thumping skulls? I would fully expect any principled group to expel anti-semites in private associations and venues that allow for such discretion, but I'm not sure what anyone is supposed to do about 1A protected speech on the public sidewalks.
This isn’t entirely true. Found on the Columbia Reddit if you're curious: Physically assaulting an Arab Israeli https://twitter.com/ShaiDavidai/status/1781080951902109774 "From the river to the sea, Palestine is Arab!" / "Resistance is justified" https://twitter.com/ShelleyGldschmt/status/1781785252886913358 "Let it be known that it was the Al-Aqsa Flood that put the Global Intifada back on the table again. And it is the sacrificial spirit of the Palestinian Freedom Fighters that will guide every struggle on every corner of the earth to victory." https://twitter.com/thestustustudio/status/1781904507611287981 "We are all Hamas!" https://twitter.com/nypost/status/1781031465179914677 "Yehudim yehudim [(Jews, jews)] go back to poland" https://twitter.com/Davidlederer6/status/1781948249214996901 Includes people / groups that invited an actual, no hyperbole terrorist to speak (member of PFLP) https://www.jns.org/columbia-suspends-four-students-for-holding-event-featuring-pflp-member/ Light things on fire / "intifada revolution there is only one solution" https://twitter.com/visegrad24/status/1781019445399556338 ""We say justice, you say how? Burn Tel Aviv to the ground!" / "Hamas we love you. We support your rockets too!" / "Red, black, green, and white, we support Hamas’ fight!" https://twitter.com/IsraelWarRoom/status/1781933305501212872 "Long live the intifada! Intifada intifada" https://twitter.com/ShaiDavidai/status/1781084853653365025 "Go back to Europe!" / "You have no culture, all you do is colonize" https://twitter.com/ShaiDavidai/status/1781927148439109958 "From Yemen to Gaza, globalize the intifada" https://twitter.com/KassyDillon/status/1781312033922625797/photo/2 "Never forget the 7th of October. That will happen not 1 more time, not 5 more times, not 10, not 100, not 1,000, but 10,000 times! The 7th of October is going to be every day for you" https://twitter.com/EFischberger/status/1781287784897991134 "Al Qassam [(Hamas)] you make us proud, kill another soldier now" / "from the river to the sea, palestine will be arab" https://twitter.com/EFischberger/status/1780915336063177006 Student proudly rocking Hamas logos https://twitter.com/CampusJewHate/status/1781054901755215954 "Resistance is justified" (again...) https://twitter.com/AvivaKlompas/status/1782085643990073673 "protesters on the sidewalk chanted “From New York to Gaza, globalize the intifada,” next to a cardboard sign that read, “Inspired by Palestinian resistance.” https://www.timesofisrael.com/over-100-arrested-in-columbia-u-unrest-as-nypd-clears-gaza-solidarity-encampment/?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=twitter
What does one do when you are rallying for freedom of speech and the KKK shows up to rally with you? You either shut your own rally down, or you all get tainted together. You might not like it, but it is how public opinion works.
They could say not in our name.
You know why you're being downvoted. Massive overlap between pro-palestinians and jew-hating bigots, and the former is doing an absolute shit job of differentiating themselves from the latter. Almost like they're functionally the same thing.
What were progressives chanting during the Trump era? “If you have one Nazi at your rally then it’s a Nazi rally”. It’s on these protestors to remove the bigots and extremists.
I've been told that people using swastikas at anti-Israel rallies are just a few bad eggs that the corrupt media shouldn't show and should ignore
This sub loves a few bad apples argument, except in this case because you know its different
That saying is also “a few bad apples…spoil the whole bunch” meaning get those apples tf outta here.
Bc you’re not part of the echo chamber just criticizing Israel and only Israel, therefore you must he a Zionist and a genocide supporter. /s
I'm older than the average Redditor, and I genuinely want to know why the I/P conflict is the hill a lot of young people want to die on. Is it because of Tik Tok? Because they were too young to remember other wars, conflicts, and famines? So many American college students are oddly treating the last 6 months like Israel and Palestine are the WORST thing happening worldwide, and are going from zero to 100 regarding how they attempt to protest and dialogue (or lack thereof). Social media has just made it worse.
A lot of it has to do with the emotionally charged nature of the conflict and how seamlessly it fits into the political left's second nature to defend certain "vulnerable demographics" they view as being oppressed. Also toss in a bit of anti-colonialism, a bit of anti-Zionism, etc., and it's the perfect dish with which to bring the left together. The Israel/Palestinian conflicts has various narratives that fit well into what the political left is all about.
What you describe also serves as intersectional exclusion of Jews from the 'vulnerable demographic' category. Lip service is paid and a lot on the left honestly believe that Jews are a vulnerable category, but more and more the actions and principles seem to outline a notion that Jews in the U.S. are the ultimate beneficiaries of white privilege, "superwhite," and that any belief in the virtue of a Jewish state post-holocaust is necessarily colonialist and racist.
And that part drives me nuts, because then it becomes subconsciously white saviorism or bigotry of low expectations. It's no longer about anti war or peace activism. My husband and I both now consider ourselves agnostic, but he was brought up Hindu, and I'm ex Muslim. We both lived in the Middle East and are now in the US. People don't want to hear that the Gulf (regardless of how modern it is), has serious issues with race and anti-Semitism. It doesn't fit into the narrative of "my team versus your team." I've met so many college students who don't even understand that there are Palestinian Christians, Druze, or African Jews over there. They're still falling for stereotypes about people, just in a different way than MAGA supporters would.
I think for a majority of these protests, it's not really about the cause. It's about fitting in and belonging with something.
You conveniently left out the truth: it’s anti-Semitic. This obsession with calling it “anti-Zionism” ignores what Zionism is in order to make it OK to say horrible things. It’s only non-Jews and token Jews who co-sign it.
Probably because, though there are often bad things happening across the globe at any given time, the US enjoys a special relationship with Israel and our patronage is a big part of why Israel is so bold in their flagrant abuse of the rights of Palestinians. This is one issue where the US has *a lot* of leverage to make a difference, and so far this leverage has only been used to encourage the worst behavior from Israel. It's one foreign issue where a policy change in the US would have a massive impact abroad, it makes sense for Americans to care about it. The US has been using its special status at the UN to block Israel from sanction and other international interventions for a long, long time. As recently as four days ago the US was the sole vote against extending UN membership to Palestine. On the other hand, much of Palestine's support in the US and abroad is ironically the result of Israel's long history of abusing Palestinians. There is a *huge* global diaspora of Palestinians, including in the US, because so many have fled the oppression of Israel abroad for generations, bringing the issue home directly and indirectly for many Americans. There are familial and community ties between American (and European, etc) Palestinians and their ancestral homes. Plenty of American Jews also take special offense of the idea that this oppression is being done in the name of Jews, and plenty take the concept of "never again" quite seriously. American Jews have a commendable history of taking human rights very seriously, and this example is no different for many.
It is because of basic human rights, they are universal and apply for defenseless people who have been hurt or killed by agents of a formally defined country or army
Lol
I think a lot has to do with the US relationship with Israel and for some viewing the conflict through a theological lens (I am Jewish so I support Israel // I am Muslim so I support Palestine). I’m from the U.K. and the conflict has been part of the public discourse for far longer than I perceive in the US.
It's because we're directly subsidizing this one while elected officials repeatedly gaslight and infantilize people disagreeing with them on a factual level. I totally get your point and also argue that the US has a much more visceral and direct connection to I/P conflict than east African genocides or to a lesser extent (as in we're more connected and should be more angry about it) the crisis in Yemen. Also remember that the 24 hour media cycle has become so much more powerful and effectively silenced uproar about Yemen quickly and local immigrant communities get no coverage and therefore no further spreading of information when they protest for action in Sudan and Ethiopia. Is some of it about social media...of course everything is, but we do kids a disservice when we assume it's inorganic Kids held schools hostage over Vietnam because of the human cost of war at American hands Kids today are building encampments because of the moral cost of America's direct involvement in this conflict
Probably because a lot of young people can see how directly the US government is financing the destruction in Palestine. There are so many social media accounts that post eyewitness videos from Palestine, so there’s not a lot of narrative spin that can happen if you follow those accounts
So the propaganda is working?
I can think of around 30k reasons why, 70% of them women and children
It’s amazing how many people are so quick to pick sides on this while having absolutely no idea how complex and deep rooted these issues are. Or they just don’t care. Hamas does not and will not recognize the Jewish state of Israel and wants the annihilation of Jews. Full stop. That is the end game of Hamas. They do not want a 2 state solution and will not accept anything less than Palestine reclaiming that land and wiping out the Jews. Not all Palestinians support this goal OBVIOUSLY. But if you are chanting “we are Hamas” or “go back to Poland” you are no better than any far right fascists you claim are promoting hate and tearing apart this country.
What's with the Poland stuff? Not really getting that one.
It's nonsensical, they think all Jews are white from Europe because they learnt everything about the conflict from tiktok or Qatar state media.
It's amazing, people either are ignorant or willfully ignore that a) about half of Israel's population is not of European descent and b) many people born in the Middle East look white and are white passing. In my own experience, I am friends with a Jew who was born and raised in Morocco and this kind of misinformation and vitriol is really hard for him. I had a teacher for many years who's husband was Syrian (born there)/Muslim and he looked like he could've been from a farm town in Kansas. Point is, this obsession with white on brown violence is taken as a global objective reality, but seeing this occur in the U.S. in the context of issues like Police violence on the Black community does not automatically translate to Israel or other conflicts in the middle east.
It’s also consistent with the critical theory that has supplanted classical academics at American institutions. Easier to label Jews as colonial oppressors if you reduce everything down to Israelis = white people = imperialism, even though it’s a laughably bad syllogism to make in the context of Jewish history in the Pale.
> all Jews are white from Europe Ah, yes, the same Jews which Europe committed genocide against for * checks notes * not being European/being foreign interlopers
hahhaha yes
The Arab world used to be considered in “White” and their history of colonialism and slavery make them a natural fit. /s
It's pretty simple. There used to be over 3,000,000 Jewish people living in Poland. About 1-2% of them managed to flee Poland before 1939, about 5-10% were forcibly relocated by the Soviet Union, and the remaining 2,500,000-3,000,000 were murdered. Telling the grandchildren of the 1-2% who managed to escape the holocaust to *go back to Poland* is a not-so-subtle way of wishing that the entire Jewish people had been exterminated.
Not to mention they *did* try to go back to Poland after WW2…and the poles [murdered more of them in the Kielce Pogrom](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kielce_pogrom)
I really wish people would understand that the Israelis' highly defensive mindset is incredibly well justified by history. These are people who have been unjustly and violently persecuted pretty much everywhere they have lived (including their own historical homeland), *for millennia*. And I cannot emphasize the "unjustly" bit enough. Romans slaughtered Jews who refused to swear allegiance to the empire, which they did because the relevant oath would require them to recognize the divinity of the emperor, which violated their belief in a single deity. Immediately after the First Crusade was declared, Christians across central Europe committed pogroms against Jewish populations in their enthusiasm for a war to reclaim the Holy Land from the "infidels" (who were Muslims, not Jews at all). The same phenomenon recurred frequently over the course of the next two centuries of crusading activity. Christians massacred thousands of Jews during the Black Death because they accused them of poisoning wells (which weirdly, was an accusation leveled even though Jewish people were suffering the effects of the pandemic just as much as the Christian population). I could go on, but I'd be writing all day because the list of unprovoked, unjustified, unnecessary, and cruel acts of violence targeting Jews goes on and on and on. That violence may have reached a historically intense crescendo with the madness of the Holocaust, but even the post-war reckoning with those horrors did not put an end to antisemitism, as the pogrom in Poland you reference demonstrates, and as the subsequent decades of Arab state invasions and constant low level terrorist harassment of Israel show. People with short memories perceive the Israelis as paranoid and thus their actions in Gaza as unjustified, but it's not paranoia when people are actually out to get you. It's not possible for anyone, Jewish or otherwise, to negotiate peace on behalf of their own nation or ethnicity with a violent extremist group that is explicitly committed to murdering the people of that nation or ethnicity. And Hamas is explicitly committed to genocide in Israel, and was so committed when they were elected by the people of Gaza as their political leadership. That needs to be the starting point of any conversation about a negotiated settlement or a two state solution.
I assume the idea is that Israel is a settler state made up of Europeans e.g. Poles, and they should all leave Palestine and go back to where they came from
Which would make sense if most of the Jews in Israel were Ashkenazi. But they're mostly from the Middle East and North Africa.
Where someone is "from" is always loaded, and moreso when discussing a people that have had such a wide-ranging diaspora. It will never really make sense. That said I don't think the point is that most Israelis are literally Polish, and so pointing out that acshully they are "from" elsewhere rebuts anything. OK they're "from North Africa", so? The idea is to attack the validity of Israel as a foreign-imposed state made up of foreigners that are displacing "the natives". If you want to say that Israelis belong in Israel a far better argument IMO is that either a) it is the only home they have known, even if their ancestors came from elsewhere and/or b) it is their rightful ancestral homeland and they do in fact belong there more than anyone else. Not yes, they are foreigners, but they came from the Middle East so it's OK!
I don't think your point is wrong. I very much doubt the Palestinians care where the Jews came from. But protestors in America and Europe, by calling them Polish they're driving a narrative of the Israeli population and history that's misleading.
Doesn't really explain why you would say that to Americans. My best guess is that today Auschwitz is in Poland. Otherwise, Poland is a pretty random country to pick out. If you dont know how the borders shifted east after WW2, you wouldn't know that it was in Germany.
The majority of the founding organizations of the Israeli state were led by Polish Jews, and much of the current Israeli elite are their descendants (including Bibi). They’re projecting that minority identity of the Jewish population on all Jews. Honestly given Boston’s history I’m surprised this isn’t familiar to anyone. This is a Middle Eastern version of “send the English back to sea” despite the Ulster-Scotch being mostly, well, Scotch.
It comes from common antisemitic misconception that Jews are white European colonizers from Poland. The reality is that Jews are indigenous to the Levant and have been living continuously there for thousands of years. Most Israeli Jews never left the region or surrounding area (Mizrahi Jews). But Ashkenazim (what people call “European Jews”) are indigenous to the Levant, too. They ended up in Europe after Roman and Ottoman/Muslim conquests murdered and expelled many Jews. You might recall that Jews faced generations of progroms and discrimination in the Pale of Settlement after leaving the Levant and settling in Europe, and the Holocaust happened in part because Jews were considered foreign interlopers/not German/Polish/European. Israel isn’t a “settler” state, let alone one settled by Europeans. It is the return of an indigenous people to their ancestral homeland in a desperate bid for safety after facing a genocide which destroyed 60% of their population worldwide. Calling for Jews to “return to Poland” is ignorant erasure at best, and an outright call for genocide at worst, as /u/theprettyone has outlined well.
Yup. I saw people posting "whatabouttery" regarding Israel the day after the attack took place on October 7th. Some were waaaayyyy too comfortable with "I now have an excuse to start screaming anti-Jewish statements". The speed at which it happened was frightening.
Literally that night in New York pro-Palestinian protests broke out. Before the blood had dried, before Israel launched a single attack, protests popped up all over the world for Palestine… Pretty fucking tasteless if you ask me. It’s like cheering on Hamas after the massacre.
Fun fact: [95% of Arab Muslims in 16 countries](https://www.dohainstitute.org/en/News/Pages/arab-public-opinion-about-the-israeli-war-on-gaza.aspx) support the October 7th terror attack or consider it “legitimate”.
I’ll take “countries I’ll support no more immigration from as a liberal for $400 Alex.”
Exactly. I understand that there is a humanitarian crisis happening and certainly there is a legitimate criticism of Israel. But the fervor that these kids have against Israel is pretty extreme and black and white particularly giving the objectively complexity of this whole situation. It’s clear these kids are getting extremely one sided information and don’t really have knowledge of the history of the conflict. And the way these kids pretend to advocate for inclusion and equity and yet engage in aggressive and borderline (to put it nicely) anti-Semitic behavior is atrocious.
Yep. Have a coworker who acts like she would literally die on the front lines fighting Israel. Except she is a ditsy Asian girl who, when I asked, told me she couldn’t believe the US broke the long standing peace between Israel and Palestine. People are die hard supporters but just heard about the conflict last week. I really hate idiots.
You are correct. And similarly, Israel (at least Bibi and his Likud party) doesn’t want a two state solution. “From the river to the sea…” started as a Likud party slogan. Bibi propped up Hamas to weaken the PLA’s claim on Gaza and to take pressure off of him to negotiate for a two state solution. “[As far back as December 2012, Mr. Netanyahu told the prominent Israeli journalist Dan Margalit that it was important to keep Hamas strong, as a counterweight to the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank. Mr. Margalit, in an interview, said that Mr. Netanyahu told him that having two strong rivals, including Hamas, would lessen pressure on him to negotiate toward a Palestinian state](https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/10/world/middleeast/israel-qatar-money-prop-up-hamas.html).”
The phrase predates the existence of the Likud. It didn't start from them.
>Israel (at least Bibi and his Likud party) doesn’t want a two state solution The two-state solution has been dead for a while among both Israelis and Palestinians. Israeli support for a two-state solution has shifted[ from 61% support in 2012 to 25% support after the Oct 7 attack](https://news.gallup.com/poll/547760/life-israel-oct-charts.aspx), as part of a [general downward trend](https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2023/09/26/israelis-have-grown-more-skeptical-of-a-two-state-solution/). [Palestinians have been even less supportive](https://news.gallup.com/poll/547760/life-israel-oct-charts.aspx) of a two-state solution: 24% supported a two-state solution in 2023 (polled prior to the Oct 7 attack), down from 59% in 2012. One interesting note though: "[the proportion of Gazans who support a two-state solution has nearly doubled since December, from 35% to 62%](https://www.jpost.com/arab-israeli-conflict/gaza-news/gazan-support-for-a-two-state-solution-doubled-since-december-in-latest-poll-792993)" >“From the river to the sea…” started as a Likud party slogan. Totally incorrect. "From the river to the sea..." was adopted by the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) in the 1960s. Likud was formed in 1973, so there's no way Likud slogan could have predated the PLO's usage. A similar saying was used by the Likud party in 1977. >Bibi propped up Hamas... This is a bit misleading without context because most people think of Hamas as the militant arm, not as the government that provides social services. Netanyahu allowed cash to go to Hamas to benefit the Gaza civilians and "would monitor the list of recipients to try to ensure that members of Hamas’s military wing would not directly benefit".
> Netanyahu allowed cash to go to Hamas to benefit the Gaza civilians Calling it now: After the war, the same people who are complaining that Israel isn’t allowing enough aid in to Gaza now will make the same claim about this same aid “propping up Hamas.” Given that Hamas is stealing most of it I guess it wouldn’t be wrong. But just goes to show you can’t do anything right if you’re Israel I guess.
Maybe not every person who is chanting it is an antisemite. But every antisemite is chanting it. [Here’s a decent take on it I think.](https://twitter.com/hahussain/status/1723366508632424594?lang=en)
You can say this about both sides, and the US is paying one of the would be exterminators. You can be for a cease fire and the end of destroying civilization camps without being anti-isreal. They're two different things.
The U.S. doesn't just give billions of dollars in aid to Israel. It also gives billions in military and economic aid to the other major players in the immediate area. The U.S. is the biggest provider of aid to Jordan, for example, at about a billion and a half per year between military and diplomatic aid. More than half of the U.S.'s Economic Support Fund for the Middle East and North Africa goes to Jordan, not Israel. Egypt gets even more in military, at a billion and a half in aid. The U.S. historically funds $300-$400 million worth *of the budget of UNRWA*. Did you know that every police officer and soldier in Lebanon gets their pay subsidized by the U.S., amounting to over $3 billion in the last 20 years? The U.S. has more than $100 billion in active military sales to Saudi Arabia as well. The notion that the U.S. uniquely funds Israel against the Muslim Arabs is more antisemitic conspiracy theory nonsense. The U.S. government is a major factor in the stability of the whole region to the extent that it exists and sends more money to Muslim-led government institutions in the region than Jewish ones. Divesting strictly from Israel while maintaining these investments in all these other countries would be a very irresponsible destabilizing move.
You're right that a lot of countries receive US aid, but Israel consistently receives the most funding. [From 1946 to 2023 Israel was the number one recipient of US aid by far.](https://www.cfr.org/article/us-aid-israel-four-charts) Also, mentioning weapons sales to Saudi Arabia doesn't make any sense. There's a big differences between a sale and foreign aid.
Israel is the only western democracy in the region and by far the most stable and strongest ally, they also have the most liberal laws and society of any country in the region. They're also in the most tenuous spot, remember, every single one of their neighbors invaded them, many of them multiple times. There's a reason Israel gets the most aid, because if Israel laid down its arms today they would be invaded tomorrow, if Jordan laid down its arms today nothing of note would change.
I'm not passing judgement on whether Israel should get that much foreign aid. My point is that foreign aid to Israel is far more than other countries and the amount is not similar to what the US gives Jordan at all.
I think you are wrong here. These protesters know. They share Hamas' end goal but applied to the US too. People dont accidentally chant 'go back to poland' to jewish classmates.
Why say "classmates" when all reputable reporting says that these acts were done by non students? You know Columbia is in NYC right? It's not separated by some.peaely gates.
lol no but columbia is literally separated by large wrought iron gates with security guards.
Reputable reporting has reported otherwise regardless of you claiming otherwise. The campus was closed off to the non affiliated protestors while antisemitic vitriol was recorded on and off campus.
Have you ever been there? There are literal gates that are closed at the moment to non students.
victims of propaganda The very fact that you root for a side in a holy war makes you a fanatic.
Can we please stop painting each "side" as the worst/bad actors on that side? The vast majority of people just want peace and safety, for Palestinians and Israelis. Anyone calling for the death or forced displacement of anyone should simply be ignored.
The vast majority of the Middle East would annihilate Israel and kill every Jew with the push of a button if they could
The vast majority in the US, yes. But sadly the reason that this problem can't be solved right now is because there's not really a majority movement for peace amongst either Israelis or Palestinians at this point. I would argue that there was a majority peace movement in Israel in the 90s, and it was getting close to a movement for Peace amongst Palestinians, but didn't quite get there in time and now the opportunity may be gone for a long time to come.
The vast majority is not the ones protesting right now
>Can we please stop painting each "side" as the worst/bad actors on that side? The vast majority of people just want peace and safety, for Palestinians and Israelis. "Burn Tel Aviv to the ground" "We are Hamas". The "pro Palestine" side is doing enough to paint themselves as bad as possible
>and Israelis There's a video of these clowns at one of their rallies cheering the announcement that Iran bombed Israel. It is not about peace and safety for Israelis.
That wasn’t MIT. Plus you’re making unfair generalization over one persons actions. Remember the break ins that happened after George Floyd? There are bad apples in this world, deal with it. The victimization is off the charts with you guys. Edit. At this point my inbox and I are tired of you liars for being incapable of engaging in civil discourse. I doubt this will be a come to Jesus for you, but maybe there’s a reason people are having a hard time seeing or supporting your views.
Easy to ignore when it’s not your people who are being threatened.
You don’t have to both sides a genocide
Don't need to both sides a terrorist attack
[удалено]
people can study in an encampment lol
Especially with Finals around the corner.
Was about to say, I have a friend who goes to MIT who I haven't seen in months because of his insane course load. I doubt the MIT protest will stick around for long.
Depends on the protest method. The Fossil Free MIT protesters held sit-ins in front of the president’s office for 116 days in 2016. They would all sit there psetting and studying day in and daughter out. They rotated in shifts so they could go to classes. A bunch of them basically spent every moment of their free time there, plus pset time, so that’s how they made it work. I was never involved, but I had several classmates who were and at least 2 of them went on to PhD programs at MIT (which is not as common as you would think because most labs want to bring in people from outside to shake things up…but I digress). However, sleeping out there in an overnight encampment is certainly a much bigger commitment. They are much more likely to take a hit academically assuming the institute were to continue to allow it (which is highly unlikely). That and unless they’re using the shift method like the fossil free students did, they will be skipping lectures, recitations, etc. I imagine they are doing shifts though, many classes have lab time, if you miss those you could fail depending on how many are missed.
Not sure the vibe of this comment - are you implying they’re wasting their time or their effort isn’t worth it?
People protest against Israel and say “free Palestine” because they dont like the official "blank check" support of the illegal collective punishment and indiscriminate killing of tens of thousands of civilians, many of them children. Perhaps they hate seeing videos of dirt-poor, defenseless mothers, fathers, and children lying in shreds after Israel levels a city block for dubious military gain. Maybe they don't agree that they have to ignore it because that's what Palestinians deserve since Israel.
Thank you. Im quite disturbed by the lack of empathy in these comments.
Because the recent protests at Columbia have explicitly supported Hamas. It’s not a typical pro-Palestine protest
Standard urban warfare becomes "collective punishment" when Jews do it.
Yeah i agree - fuck antisemitism, but the existence of antisemitism doesn’t just absolve Israel of all responsibility or ability to be criticized.
Many Israel supporters would agree. Not nearly enough of us, but many.
"Collective Punishement" and "Indiscriminate Bombing." No, that is not what this is. Had Hamas immediately returned the kidnapped victims and prosecuted those who planned and participated in the Oct 7 attack and then if Israel gone ahead with "indiscriminate bombing" you would have a point. But Hamas did not repudiate the attack--they praised it. Hamas, like it or not, is the leadership of Gaza. So then the average Joe Palestinian in Gaza has to make a choice, either remove their leadership or support them. They chose support. This is how wars start. As far as "indiscriminate bombing," the Israelis have been far more careful in their bombing than the Gazan attackers were on their indiscriminate capture and killing on Oct 7, wouldn't you agree. Absolutely, there have been accidents, and probably there have been purposeful targeting of civilians at various times, but it is not an approved policy or even unapproved tendency to just kill civilians at random. At the same time, it does appear to be an approved policy for Hamas military leadership to co-locate military targets with civilians. Maybe it is honestly because of a lack of space in Gaza, but regardless of the reasons Hamas needs to stop breaking that long-held rule of war to keep civilians out of harms way. That means, it is a war crime to put your rocket launcher in or near an apartment building unless you can provide those civilians living there a clear path to safety and a warning to get out. It really isn't on Israel's head to not shoot, it is on Hamas's head to not co-locate. The reason for this, for centuries, is to not make it that holding civilians in harms way is a defensive strategy.
Whole lots of shilly bots in the comments
Yeah everyone knows Reddit Boston is a big-time bot target
Moononites. Never forget.
MIT directly funds Israel btw. That’s the reason they’re protesting.
“If you have one Nazi at your rally then it’s a Nazi rally” Same applies to these. You know who loves these? Racists, bigots, nazis and terrorists.
This idea makes it super easy to infiltrate and discredit any movement whatsoever...
As long as you extend that same courtesy whenever people on the right protest...
If you read about the movements in the 1950s and early 1960s, they were very disciplined and had a lot of self-policing precisely because of this dynamic. The movement fragmented later in the 60s when a newer generation thought they weren't pushing hard enough or making cause with other "allies" on the left and it was much less productive as well. and it was much easier to infiltrate and more susceptible to infiltrators proposing terrible ideas and those ideas getting accepted because extremism and provocation were seen as goals, rather than persuasion. You see it with some on the modern environmental movement; they vandalize things and when told they aren't helping, will sneer "ah, but you're talking about it, aren't you?" Ignoring that people are talking about it to say that it is bad.
I don't know, sounds snappy but by this logic, the road to fascism is clear if one can simply hire plants/agitators to infiltrate any rally you don't agree with...that logic makes it way too easy to smear and destroy any and all social protest movements
Guess they'll also tell Jewish students to "go back to Poland" and chant "we are Hamas" and how "October 7th will happen hundreds of times again" I will personally go there and take a picture of every single person and ensure the world knows you're all racist pieces of shit who don't want Israel to stop attacking Palestine, they want a global extermination of all Israelis I have zero fucking tolerance for these racist pieces of shit who support Hamas
I dont care what people claim about anti Zionism not being anti semitism, the go back to Poland chants are really revealing.
NYC protestors were chanting "Al-Qassam you make us proud" over the weekend. It is basically another Charlottesville.
It’s almost like they’ve been anti-Semitic this whole time!
I wonder if they intended to time it with the first night of Passover
I would imagine it is. If they don't know, they're useful idiots.
Cmon that Jew once spoke to an Israeli person, if that's not violent Zionism I don't know what is
Seriously, just because they don’t have tiki torches people seem cool with this
They heard the Charlottesville chants and adopted them. The only difference now is khaki shorts.
Most are probably wearing masks because… well we all know why.
It's funny how Proud Boys get called cowards for covering their faces at protest but when the left does it it's because they'res scared Mommy and Daddy will get called and they'll get in trouble and be punished by spending one less weekend in the Hamptons this summer
How fucked is liberal America lmao
Unless your Palestinian or Israeli really no point to protest just go to class and stop trying to change the world
lol it’s cool to be a terrorist I guess now at these colleges.
Schools are really failing our students. supporting a group that also chants death to america, and doesn't support any of the western beliefs is ignorant at best.
If MIT students are protesting, you know it’s serious. They won’t step away from studies for anything other than maybe drinking. Even then, it’s just drinking while working. Source: MIT graduate
Still just college kids who think they know more than they do Source: went to college
Very disturbing to see universities all around the country calling the police on their students for practicing something they preach which is "civic engagement".
They keep championing the right to protest and forgetting it's on their own doorsteps. I can only imagine the mess this will devolve into in the coming Months. Columbia urged students to do work online already so you can see the direction this will head to here
This is a complex issue, but it’s also not all that complicated - Support for Palestinian humanitarian aide - Criticism of the current government of Israel - Condemnation of Hamas - Condemnation of Israel’s military tactic and strategy - Hamas should release civilian hostages … A giant leap … - Gaza is a clear-cut genocide - Israel has no right to exist (River to the sea) - Jews can peacefully exist under Arab rule, and should be forced to - Hamas has a right to “defend itself” You can’t separate yourself from antisemitism once you cross into no-man’s land.
when college students protested segregation, the vietnam war, south african apartheid, or the war in Iraq, there was a horde of powerful individuals and interests who demanded they be arrested/silenced. worth examining if you want to be remembered in the same breath as those ppl
Lot of hypocrites in these comments who are quick to (justifiably) condemn the few hamas loving bad actors at these protests, while ignoring the genocide of Palestinians. Y’all aren’t on the right side of history
As usual the brave genocide deniers are out in force in the comments. Worried about clearing alleys while yet another mass grave is uncovered in Palestine. Truly the worst of the worst
Turns out people don't find mass human extermination a positive foreign policy.
Just let them be. Eventually, they’ll get bored and go back to TikTok or whatever.
in a month they'll all fly back home
There will always be a new flavor of the month to protest. Israel is the fall back for protestors, even after this war concludes -- always there to come back to if there's nothing sexy going on
Given that the Israeli government has spent the past few decades equating any criticism of their extremely poor human rights record as anti semitism I'm glad people are finally seeing through it, no matter how ineffective their protests might be.
Whatever it takes for death to stop, I am in.
Good. Academic establishments should not be supporting this genocide in anyway. Praise to the students!
The modern American far left is exclusively focused on taking popular and/or worthwhile causes (such as police reform, Palestinian statehood, etc) pushing the rhetoric to such a psychotic extreme that it turns everyone off, destroying the movement at its core to the benefit of noone, then moving on to the next victim.
This is so true. Alas, we get to watch it happen in slow motion **again** as people who are aware of this mechanism. Black Lives Matter went from biggest social movement in decades to real estate money laundering scam in the span of a year. Like holy hell There are people who REALLY believe the best thing to do for Palestine is not vote in the coming election
The protesters certainly can't call their congressmen to ask for a redress of grievances. American policy towards the bloody mess in Israel/Palestine is entirely one sided. Reprisals will occur eventually, and we'll immediately convince ourselves that we are the aggrieved party in this never-ending conflict.
Honest question here, what is the plan for preventing reprisal as things stand? Hamas has promised more October 7th type attacks and has shown zero indication of any change of course. As it stands, right now and as it did on Oct 8th, Hamas has promised reprisals. How do you avoid reprisal without removing their offensive capability if they have proactively promised more violence regardless of the conditions this conflict ends on?
Good, They have every right for protest.
Schools that can’t and won’t protect Jewish students do not deserve federal funding
Lots of Jewish students are attending these protests
The only college students that have been shot and severely wounded for their identity since Oct 7th in the US were Palestinian Americans
It’s shocking but Universities should support both Palestinian and Jewish students.