A continuum in which, right now, Israel is engaged in an active, intentional, and meticulously planned act of calculated genocide, in response to a past, ambitious, but poorly planned (and never capable of actual success given the unacknowledged but publicly known nuclear status of their occupier) act of genocide. That, and the subject of the original post, is what I’m focused on this conversation on these two opposing tribalisms.

A bit of a nonsensical nonsequiter on your part, but America’s invasion of Iraq should absolutely be talked about, as the historical act that it is… Guantanamo should also be addressed, although it’s vastly less impactful in terms of the number of lives affected than either of the other two, but neither of these is an active and ongoing war in the now. THAT, not antisemitism, is why it’s getting talked about more right now. And sure, Chinese extra-territorial ambitions are also worth talking about, but also not actively an ongoing and immediate and public genocidal act (that’s the Uighur)… this forum is a thread after a post on Hamas’s idiotically overreaching ambitions, but sure try to make it about Taiwan or South Sudan or, I dunno, the plight of Canada’s more isolated Inuit communities if you want, it’s kind of fascinating to see where you’ll dodge next.

Though that said we weren’t actually speaking about Israel, we were speaking about the fact that one group of ethno-nationalists-whose-“ethnicity”-is-a-religious-tribe believes it could conquer another, and why they thought they could do so. They thought they could do so for precisely the same reasons… you just apparently happen to feel that comparing Hamas’s ambitions in using terroristic acts of intended conquest and displacement to Israel’s past and current ambitions in using terroristic acts of ongoing (belated, really, as they’re just finally trying to finish the job) conquest and displacement is, somehow, antisemitic. Which is ridiculous. Just as ridiculous as saying that a critique of the actions of Hamas (or Saudi Arabia or Iran if you don’t like comparing state and would-be-state actors) is antiarabianism.

According to rabbinical tradition I am a Jew. My family is, historically, Jewish, with line straight back to Moses… a hundred years ago if I’d been around with most of my not-very-many-generations-distant relatives I’d have died in the Holocaust, the pogroms, or the Holodomor alongside them. Many members of Hamas — especially the ones furthest from the tenets of the religion they purport to love so much — would happily kill me just for the circumcision that I didn’t exactly consent to, were they to discover it. I love Jews, both the religion and the socially-constructed ethnicity, for much the same reason I love Muslims, Arabs, Sikhs, Indians, and for that matter Zoroastrians… I’m a humanist by default, I love humans, for all their [many] faults. I don’t love the countries they’ve organized into, or the groups they’ve formed that are trying to organize such countries. Critiquing the state of Israel when it engages in actions that are antithetical to decency (and for that matter Judaism) isn’t antisemitic, anymore than critiquing the actions of the USA when it has (and no doubt will continue) to engage in atrocities and war crimes isn’t anti-Americanism (or for those on the right who are particularly confused about the actual origins of the Constitution, anti-Christianism).

But yes, I agree, no countries. Certainly no countries based on something as ephemeral as ethnicity… if two people across a given border can produce a baby they’re not different species and they should be allowed to cross the border and make that baby if they want to… what that baby shouldn’t automatically be entitled to is a country of their own because they’re now, suddenly, a third ethnicity.