Wolfe Silver

Earlier this month, a family of five was attacked by a taxi driver here in the city where I live. Two middle-aged parents, two kids aged 10 and 13, and an older woman aged 75, were accused of being child-murderers, cursed at, forced by the driver to get out of the vehicle on a street corner, and one of them physically attacked by the driver ^[Archived].

The reason that a taxi driver saw the need to kick a family on their way to a birthday party out of the car, being, of course, that some of them are from Israel.

Now, before you fire up Outlook Express to email me about how I'm wrong to complain about any of this: Yes, I am well aware of all the awful things Israel is doing ^{[Archived links: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5]}. No doubt about it. I am not here to defend the actions of the government of Israel.

What I would like to bring to your attention, however, is the fact that none of the people in that taxi were, in fact, engaging in crimes against humanity; or members of the Israeli government. For that matter, the driver hadn't asked about their opinions on anything. It was enough for him simply that some of the passengers were from Israel, to justify kicking them out in the middle of the ride, and physically attacking one of them. And this is no isolated incident.

Incidents

Last month, three Israeli musicians visiting the city were refused service at a pizza place for speaking Hebrew ^[Archived]. Not for taking part in a genocide. Not even for refusing to condemn a genocide. They were kicked out of a restaurant for speaking in their own language.

And in case you think I'm just cherry picking one-off, isolated incidents, I can point you to countless examples from just the past two months ^{[Archived links: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8]}.

These incidents against Jews and/or Israelis have been growing in frequency since October 7th, 2023. In case you missed it, on that day, armed thugs invaded random villages and towns in Israel, murdered innocent people indiscriminately, and took hostages with them back to Gaza (Source, if you must). Or maybe it was just decolonization and a counter-offensive against a settler-colonial oppressor? We'll never know!!!! But what's certain is that ever since the disproportionate retaliation by Israel that followed the October 7th Massacre, Jews and/or Israelis have been targeted more and more. And that's what I would like to get at.

I personally agree that yes, Israel is currently perpetuating a humanitarian crisis in Gaza, and that yes, the Israeli government is violating international law, and that yes, this must be stopped. I am, may I remind you, a leftist from Israel. Not only do we exist, but we are well aware of the bloodshed, human rights violations, apartheid, that are being perpetuated by our country, and have been talking about it, protesting it, and trying to resist it for decades.

Complicit

All of that doesn't seem to matter at all to non-Jewish, non-Israeli people who care about the Palestinian cause. To them, it seems, we are all complicit. We are all perpetrators of a genocide, whether we live in Israel or not. Whether we protested the government's actions or not. Never mind that some of us put our lives and livelihoods at risk by writing about Palestine ^[Archived]. None of that matters to them.

Being Israeli, or sometimes even just being Jewish, is a permanent Mark of Cain, that could never be cleansed off our dirty souls. We are automatically and permanently associated with every action taken by whatever current government rules Israel. All Jews are the government of Israel, and the government of Israel is all Jews.

Does the same apply to Russians? Iranians? Serbs? Americans? No, of course not. They're all seen as victims of their respective countries' atrocities. No American in Europe, even if they voted for Trump — even if they campaigned for Trump — would ever be seen as personally responsible for ICE's kidnappings. No Russian living in the EU, even if they personally support Putin, would ever become a target of violence because of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. None of the Serbs who share the city of Vienna with me seem to ever get asked what their stance on Kosovo is, or on the Balkan Wars, or on Srebrenica.

But Jews and Israelis are, by default, seen individually and personally as perpetrators of violence in a far-off land on a different continent, in a country that some of them have never been to. Guilty until proven innocent.

The more merciful leftists sometimes just ask us to denounce the very concept of the existence of the country where our friends and families still live, but sometimes we're not even afforded that. Israelis get harassed, excluded, or even attacked, for the actions of a government that most of us actively despise and resist.

Existence

The best-case-scenario I outlined, by the way, where leftists (especially online, but not only) ask Israelis and Jews to denounce the concept of Israel's existence, is not something I'm making up. In fact, it literally happened to me personally in an in-person interaction in 2016! Ever since then, I'm from Michigan if a stranger asks. And while some might think that this is a legitimate and worthy line in the sand for leftism, I argue that it is severely lacking.

Most Jews in the world are, in fact, some form of Zionist. Sure, your one Jewish mutual on the Fediverse might be a staunch anti-Zionist who firmly believes that the very idea of Zionism is the epitome of racism and colonialism; but most Jews who live out there in the world, would be included under a broad definition of Zionism, at the very least.

Most Jews hold the belief that, just as every other people is afforded the right to self-determination and independence, so should the Jewish people be afforded these same rights. Most Jews believe that there should exist a country in the world for the Jewish people, whose territory would include some amount of the land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. This is, at its broadest definition, a form of Zionism.

Careful readers might also note that this also includes what is widely known as the Two-State Solution: the belief that Jews and Palestinians should each have their own state, side-by-side, and hopefully live in peace — a widely-accepted position (fantasy? 😢) in the world at large, and among Jews.

So, practically speaking, by deciding that the new litmus test for leftism is "do you think any form of a Jewish state in the levant should exist?", and that anyone who gives the Wrong Answer is a certified pure evil fascist, we are, in fact, automatically excluding most Jews from our movement. But worse than that, we are also denying the Jewish people as a whole its right to self-determination.

State

Another absurd aspect of this, at least in my interactions online, is when accusations against Israel get thrown around by online anarchists, who actually believe that no states should exist.

This could be a failure of understanding on my end, but I just don't get why — if we assume that the very concept of a nation-state is a brutal monopoly on violence, an illegitimate use of power, racism towards anyone who's not part of the majority ethnic group, etc. — people choose to consistently accuse Zionism of all these things, without ever mentioning that they apply just as much to Germany, Japan, and Egypt?

Insisting to every Israeli and Jew you meet that a country for the Jews is a racist and exclusionary concept, hides within it a form of hypocrisy: no one insists to every German that a country for the Germans is a racist and exclusionary concept; no one insists to every Japanese person that a country for the Japanese is a racist and exclusionary concept; no one insists to every Egyptian that a country for the Egyptians is a racist and exclusionary concept.

If someone already thinks that the very idea of the nation-state as an institution is illegitimate, why would Israel's existence be a worse crime than all other nation-states' existence? I am actually genuinely asking. For real. If you have an answer to this that you think makes sense and isn't just a trite comment, please email me! (But in order to avoid useless Internet Discourse that'll just make us both angrier, I won't reply.)

Ideology

I think the most grating aspect of all of these anti-Zionist(?) incidents though, is the fact that Zionism is an ideology that could theoretically be held by just about anyone — and yet, anti-Zionist rhetoric and violence never seems to be directed at non-Jews.

I could, so far in my lived experience and in my very depressing research for this post, only ever find Jews being derogatorily called Zionists online. Non-Jews who believe a nation-state for the Jewish people should continue to exist, don't ever seem to get called that? They're said to sympathize with Zionists, they're said to have a soft spot for Zionism, they're said to be normalizing Zionism. But they don't seem to be referred to as Zionists?

When people draw images or make graffiti or stick stickers with anti-Zionist rhetoric, somehow they tend to use symbols that apply to all of Judaism, not just to the State of Israel. In the name of anti-Zionism, people revive old tropes like "controlling the world" and "controlling the banks", then just find-and-replace the word "Jews" with the word "Zionists" and call it a day (Example). Sometimes I wonder when I'll finally encounter a Fedi post about how Zionists have big noses.

Resistance

There's another aspect of ideology that I touched on before, and that is: leftism.

Leftist Israelis exist. And liberal Israelis exist in even greater numbers. And so do Israelis who oppose Israel's actions in Gaza. And hundreds of thousands of them ^[Archived] , out of a country of ten million or so, were willing — are willing — to protest in the streets of Tel Aviv. If anyone can resist the Israeli government's actions and maybe bring some kind of end to all of this, it's these people. These people, who want to make the leaders of their country change course.

And they're all Zionists. Each and every one of them.

Excluding these hundreds of thousands of Israelis who want an end to the war from the wider anti-war cause, simply because of where they were born, is an awful way to resist anything. Some leftists outside of Israel might not realize it, but these people are, at least in this specific struggle, their allies.

Some people I've encountered online didn't realize that leftist and liberal Israelis even exist! They act as if a country of 10 million people is a uniform monoculture with no variation and no political opinions other than the one that's the most convenient strawman.

Genocide

Now let's address the elephant in the rom: throughout this text, I've tried to avoid using the G word. I have... qualms with it. I'm uneasy with this definition. I have some issues.

I am, personally, uncomfortable with using the word genocide to describe what is currently going on in Gaza. The crime of genocide is first and foremost a legal term, and deciding whether or not something qualifies as a genocide is generally the job of the International Court of Justice — and so long as no official verdict on this has been given, I will probably personally feel like there is a certain problematicness to using this word.

Make no mistake, I am not trying to deny or minimize what is going on in Gaza. My distaste is for the word choice; a disagreement over semantics and nothing else. And I'm far from the only one.

You see, us Jews, we have a... history with genocides. Specifically with one very, very big genocide. Specifically, the largest genocide in recorded history, specifically carried out mostly against us. It started out with propaganda and incitement, continued with sporadic violence and dispossession, escalated with concentration camps and forced labor, and culminated with mass shootings and gas chambers. You can read all about it here on this handy website I found!

During the Holocaust, six million Jews were murdered in Europe. That's two thirds of Europe's Jewish population at the time, and a third of all Jews in the world at the time. Those are some pretty significant numbers there. This is a course-of-history-altering, demographics-altering, unprecedented event in human history.

So it's natural that some of us are not very willing to throw the word genocide around too lightly. For a lot of Jews, when we think of what the word genocide means, we see it as implying a certain scale and magnitude that the crisis in Gaza doesn't have. (And hopefully will not have.)

But I think that this, at the end of the day, is a semantic kerfuffle, and is largely unimportant. We don't have to call it a genocide, to agree that what's going on is a horrifying humanitarian crisis that must be stopped.

Disclaimer

Every text you have ever read, will ever read, and are currently reading, bears upon it the mark of the person who wrote it: their worldview, their background, and their biases. I am Jewish. I am Israeli. No amount of time spent outside of Israel will change the latter, and no amount of distance from Jewish communities will change the former. This text is inevitably and invariably shaped, among other things, by these aspects of my background.

Am I a Zionist? Probably, for some definition of the word. Am I a leftist? Probably that too, for some definition of the word. I don't particularly like using -isms to define myself, because I believe ideology is mostly a fiction we tell ourselves when we ignore our own cognitive dissonances. But when the shoe mostly-kinda-fits, I may as well.

Additionally, this text is incomplete. No matter how many more words, paragraphs, sections, chapters, and volumes I may try to add to it, it never can be complete. The history of conflict and violence between Jews and Palestinians is long and complex enough to be nearly impossible to reckon with at this point; and the history of antisemitic violence is even longer. There is only so much nuance, so many angles, so many arguments I could bring up here, and no amount will suffice for these topics.

But I'll leave you with this:

I believe that freedom and equality are values worth striving for in our societies. I believe everyone should have the right to a roof over their head, to food in their belly, to education in their brain, to healthcare and physical and mental well being, and to live the life they wish to live.

I believe Israel is currently responsible for perpetuating an awful humanitarian crisis in the Gaza strip; and I fully believe the far-right ministers in the Israeli government when they tell me who they are and what they intend to do.

But I believe that so long as we live in a world of nation-states, it's probably appropriate for the Jewish people to be afforded the same right to self-determination as other peoples; even when the state of Israel that currently exists is far from perfect and in serious need of change. I believe the same about Palestine.

I do not know how it would ever be possible for these peoples to truly coexist, after having spent the past century (if not longer) inciting violence and waging wars and terrorizing terrorism and military ruling and misinformation campaigning against each other. But I hope that despite the odds, the cycle of violence and hatred may one day be broken.