by pcthrowaway | 2025-04-21 20:36:57+00:00
To be clear, I was responding to the insinuation that being rude to someone at a bar due to "literally anything to do with Israel" is antisemitic if they're Jewish. Of course being specifically rude to Jewish people due to their support of Israel is antisemitic, but being rude to people who support Israel is not (we can debate whether it's productive or deserved separately).

But since you've gone out of your way to make your position here clearer, I'll offer my response:

> But the reason you're seeing a lot of conflation is that a lot of Jews were murdered, tortured, raped and kidnapped from their homes on 10/7

A lot of people, Jews and non-Jews were killed on 10/7 (perhaps you're unaware that the majority of casualties that day were not of Jews).

> and the world took that as an opportunity to blame Israel and to discuss whether these Jews should really have a country at all

"the world" really didn't jump to blaming Israel quite so unanimously on 10/7, though I'm sure those who were already fighting for Palestinian liberation, or who had a deeper awareness of the history surrounding the ongoing occupation, or who were already of the opinion that Palestinians were undergoing a genocide (prior to 10/7) likely thought it important to use the opportunity to raise awareness of the injustices Palestinians had faced since long before October 7.

My own opinion at the time was largely "I don't know too much about the history besides what I learned in my Zionist school and from clearly Zionist friends/family, but as someone who appreciated the separation of church and state in the U.S. and Canada growing up, I disagree with religious statehood and ethno-nationalism... but perhaps a lot of the criticism of Israel is driven by antisemitism also and Zionists seem very convinced that it's justified and necessary in this one specific instance because of antisemitism."

Since then, having spent much more time reading various narratives, I've come to entirely disagree with that. While yes, there is antisemitism, including among those who criticize Israel, it doesn't seem to me that it's any more common among anti-Zionists than it is among Zionists (believe it or not, many anti-semites support Israel).

Furthermore, Westerners "singling out" Israel is much more evidently explained by the Western financial and military support of Israel (in addition to tampering in other middle-eastern affairs) which has enabled a litany of horrifying atrocities inflicted upon Palestinians to continue unchecked.

> The destruction of Israel would involve the deaths of millions of Jews who don't have any other country to go to

The end of Zionism does not mean the deaths of millions of Jews, any more than the end of Nazi Germany meant the deaths of millions of Germans (incidentally, it did because so many chose to lay down their lives in its defense, or in some cases were compelled to). Beyond the casualties in the war (which if we're being honest was more about stopping Germany's expansion than about liberating people from concentration camps and death camps), only a few high-ranking Nazi officials were put to death after the fall of the third reich; beyond the executions of those convicted of war crimes, Germany was indeed able to continue existing as a state which didn't brutally oppress marginalized groups; there weren't widespread executions of ethnic Germans as some may have feared, merely an end to the unjust system of supremacy.

And this is exactly what so many who "single out" Israel are calling for; not "another genocide of Jews" as you're claiming, but a free Palestine for all.