I appreciate what you're saying, but plausibility is a funny way to put it, since such a motivation would not have been plausible prior to Oct 7. Before that, I was a curious minority, and they liked to congratulate themsleves on welcoming minorities. Since no one had any problem with me before Oct 7th and then within days of seeing a lot of Jews killed, they apparently all got the bloodlust, I can only conclude that what makes this "plausible" is that they innately have some quantum of racism that, having been forced to suppress themselves so long and not criticize anyone, they're overjoyed to find a group of people to unleash it on. Particularly if they can call those people "white" like themselves, as a way to offset the shame they've been taught. Of which external group I'm probably the only one they've ever met. My only other Jewish acquaintance in the area - who is an absolute pacifist - has also been almost equally shunned out of every place. Except again, strangely, the Arabic-owned places. He works at one.
So if by "plausible" you mean that, yes, you can imagine someone doing that, then you're right. If "plausible" means that you think it's justified, then that's another issue.
I want you to think about how you would feel in a hypothetical about Chinese people.
In this timeline, after a group of Hong Kong democracy activists planted bombs that killed a few hundred low-level people at the annual Chinese Communist Party meeting, China responded by announcing plans to bomb Hong Kong into rubble, rid themselves of the menace of democracy once and for all.
And then when they heard this, your country announced that they unconditionally supported China in this effort, and would supply them all the bombs they needed to take down these Electoral Terrorists, eliminate every last one who wasn't an enthusiastic proponent of single-Party rule. That local democracy advocates in your country had long been concerned with the Hong Kong situation, had long protested the government's inexplicable support for China in this matter, but were shouted down by every political party and called racists by a consensus that seemed to really be interested in using China to counter the prospect of Indian international ambitions. That watching the bombs drop, and watching your national media invite Chinese people on air for segment after segments, your democracy activists found in discussions online that they weren't actually some kind of radical fringe, that basically everyone outside the media+government was tired of the CCP and tired of our unending support for it.
There is a lot of nuance there, but what happened after Oct 7 is basically that Netanyahu & AIPAC, finally seeing an opportunity to answer the Gaza Question once and for all, jumped into their role as the villains in a pre-existing anti-semitic conspiracy theory, and proceeded to play the US like a puppet in order to effectuate a genocide.
I can have a nuanced view here; I can separate Jewishness and Zionism. I can talk to you about all the Jewish students at those protests who were holding signs supporting Palestine. I can note the extreme divergence between age cohorts within the Jewish community in the US, I can point out that the US is the largest Jewish population in the world (larger than Israel), who are coexisting perfectly well with gentiles, and that this isn't to Netanyahu's benefit at all. But these people constantly tell us that there is no separation there, that it is antisemitic to be against Greater Israel, that these concepts are one and the same. If that's the case, and you still disfavor genocide, there are Implications.
I can understand when some people misunderstand the situation; Antisemitism abroad is what Likud wants and needs to survive.
> I want you to think about how you would feel in a hypothetical about Chinese people.
I'm not the person you are asking this question of but, after reading your comment carefully in full, I would like to answer on behalf of myself:
I would feel absolutely no differently about any individual person of Chinese ethnicity or citizenship than I did before.
Personally, I try to distinguish between the individual and perceived collective associations. And I try not project my personal opinions about global politics or my personal prejudices about a country onto individual friends and acquaintances that I hang out with at a local pub in a completely different country than the one we're discussing.
My operating definition of "racism" is:
"The religious belief that you can know the contents of an individual's mind and heart based on superficial characteristics - such as their skin colour, ethnicity or country of origin."
You can bring your "nuanced" opinion of Israel into it all you want to. But to project that onto an individual in the context of hanging out with a group of friends fits my definition of "racism" exactly. And this would hold even if one were to, hypothetically, concede your opinion of Israel's actions entirely.
Your post is a great example of why people so often brand attacks against Israel as "antisemitism." There is nothing wrong with being critical of a government and its policies, or of how a war is conducted. But to project those opinions and feelings onto an individual who is living in a completely different country and who has nothing to do with that conflict other than the fact that they hold citizenship or ethic affiliations is another matter entirely. One is "nuanced" opinion, possibly even objective if the individual is trying to be. The other is trying to mask and justify bigotry and prejudice behind an heir of intellectualism.
Disclaimer: I'm trying to help GP understand the way they were being seen, and why that worldview might have arisen, not defending/endorsing that worldview.
A bit more than a century back, one branch of my family tree stems from somebody with the surname "Berlin".
Sometime in the vicinity of WW1, their ~dozen children each chose a different spelling variation and changed their names so that they wouldn't be directly associated with that city. Being seen as "German" went out of style.
You can call this some unique type of racism, or you could call it being dumb, or you could call it being... not nuanced. But generalization is a fundamental mode of human thought, and you shouldn't be surprised when something awful happens attributable to a group you happen to be a part of, that some significant fraction of the population generalizes their attitudes as your attitudes. This isn't some defensible ethical position I'm staking out, it's an observation that people were prone to make this ethnic generalization in the first place, and unlike in most cases in a liberal democracy, every authority figure in their lives have EMBRACED the generalization as a direct equivalence, at the request of the foreign ethnostate. Netanyahu wants to SPEND DOWN any social capital that the term "Antisemitism" has accrued, for short-term political gain, and both US political parties and media ecosystems have complied with this plan. If this causes harm abroad to non-Israeli Jews, Netanyahu only benefits because it drives Jewish refugees to seek Right of Return to the self-proclaimed Jewish ethnostate and its strongman leader who will provide you security.
J-Street and similar groups need to be out there on the streets, frankly, not just as a normative moral stance, but to protect themselves from Israel's blowback.
October 7th was many things, but the narrative these particular people focused on was of a prison break, by a prison gang, who was imprisoned by act of military conquest in a concentration camp, which has been periodically bombed and starved for as long as they've been alive. Israel's ruling coalition had grown increasingly right wing, incorporating people who were actively discussing a final annexation of this land and expulsion/extirpation of its people. It has also accelerated "Settlement" activity on Palestinian land. These acts drew harsh condemnation from the rest of the world... but not the US. The US has bent over backwards to support Israel despite any ideals it might have; We have sacrificed relationships with other nations and given away diplomatic priorities to extort them to support Israel. It's done so because Israel has corrupted the US legislature in a top-down fashion, going back to the 60's, using a combination of Cold War logic, captive military-industrial ties, espionage (Among the most salacious examples, Epstein/Maxwell), racism, evangelical rapture, and cold hard... uhh... lobbying. They dumped a hundred million dollars on our political establishment's primary campaign system this past election to secure their consent, and we are told growing up that this isn't something a foreign state actor would ever be allowed to do.
In the _days_ after October 7th, before the bombing started, those of us with a lot of exposure to media were watching nonstop war propaganda about things like hundreds of babies being beheaded, much of it in an Israeli accent; There was talk of the immediate urgent need to Solve the Hamas Problem by any means necessary. And we've watched this happen with Iraq/Afghanistan after 9/11 - we've seen these characters say these things before, played by an earlier generation but making the same "mistakes" to appeal to the same urges. But Iraq & Afghanistan are not one of the most densely populated cities on Earth, which was on the verge of starving in the best of times.
We were told growing up that "dual loyalty" was some kind of warped Nazi idea, while it was marketed to impressionable young American Jews by Israel as an ideal in all-expenses-paid Birthright tours. My largely apolitical friend in high school with an American sports scholarship staring him in the face ended up doing his IDF term of service in the Second Intifada instead because that was just what was expected of him in his family, and because of how Israel treats dual citizenship & Return. I don't think we should be surprised if some people just choose to believe what Israel says about Jews, and conclude that they should be generically opposed to Jews. It takes _effort_ to understand perspectives and _exposure_ to Jews that aren't ethnonationalists, to avoid these sorts of conclusions.
Hamas is not a pro democracy group. It's a radical jihadist group. Its mission is not to free Gaza, but to destroy Israel and kill all Jews. The people it killed on 10/7 were not low level government officials, they were civilians, including children. The method of killing was extremely brutal.
Moreover, Hamas is not some tiny group within Gaza. It is the elected government of Gaza.
You set up this whole false narrative that has no relation to reality. But I will tell you this: I know a Russian who is pro-Putin. I find his politics despicable. But I still treat him with courtesy and am willing to discuss things with him. I don't believe in cutting off people you disagree with. It's bad form and it doesn't serve to change anything. How much more so, someone whose politics I don't even know. Why would I make an assumption based on someone's national origin or race?
If you queried a hundred random people who knew this same Russian and were similarly opposed to his politics, do you believe that one hundred of them would share your perspective? Or would a handful give that guy dirty looks at the bar because they were not in the exact same headspace you are in?
I struggle with comparisons because I'm trying to illustrate for you what those people are seeing when they spontaneously start acting that way that is different from what you're seeing. It's difficult to find any comparable situation as lopsided as Israel's relationship with Palestine, and the almost inscrutable international response to that relationship. Liberal tolerance ethics takes deliberate effort (generalization is a natural cognitive bias), and all of the people who would typically provide guidance on normative ideals suddenly took on the unprecedented position that we should exterminate a couple million people in what is effectively a concentration camp because of a violent outburst against the people who put them there, that this was Good and Righteous Justice, that anybody who didn't want to exterminate them were dangerous fringe actors. People who rejected this propaganda storm found themselves ideologically adrift, latching on to whatever floats.
> if you think it's okay to be rude to a Jewish person at a bar because of literally anything to do with Israel
Look I don't have full context here, but more generally there's recently been a lot of conflating Judaism with "support of Israel". If a person is at a bar and you know they support Israel and you're "rude to them" (a subjective statement which can include telling them to re-calibrate their moral compass), then many people, myself included, think that's perfectly OK, regardless of whether that person is Jewish or not. To suggest it's somehow suddenly not OK if that person happens to be Jewish (but presumably it's fine if they're not Jewish?) is kind of ridiculous.
I say this as a Jewish person with family in Israel also, who is completely over people (many in my family included) reducing criticism of Israel or intense disapproval of Israel to "antisemitism"
You're talking about a political conversation in which people are discussing ideas. I'm talking about experiencing a situation in which people I've never even met are actively rude to me because someone told them I "support Israel". I'm perfectly willing to have a conversation about its faults and mistakes. That's not what's going on here.
One can be Jewish and not support Israel. One can condemn Israeli policies without being an antisemite. 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, 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 singling out of Israel as an illegitimate state, out of all countries in the world, is antisemitic. Taking issue with its policies is one thing; taking issue with its right to exist is quite another. If only because the inescapable reality is this: The destruction of Israel would involve the deaths of millions of Jews who don't have any other country to go to. The world may not care, and you may not care, but they care, so they're not going to lay down and die.
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.
This is the second time in this thread you've made an unfounded assumption that I must have acted a certain way or said certain things to deserve being treated badly.
As I said above, the only other Jewish person I know in the area is an absolute pacifist and he also started being treated badly by the same people, immediately following 10/7.
So gee whiz, maybe they don't like the cut of our gib for some reason other than our personal politics. This would occur to you if I told you we were the only two black people in the neighborhood right after George Floyd was murdered. I think you have a blind spot to the fact that the war has been an excuse for people to go after Jews, just like 9/11 was an excuse for America to go after Muslims, just like MS-13 is an excuse to violently deport immigrants.
The abuse started immediately after 10/7, before there was any military response from Israel, in fact while they were still trying to find missing and dead people at the music festival. The very first thing I heard from most of the antifa people was some variation of "They had it coming."
I'm not a complete pacifist like my friend. But I'm consistent in my beliefs, and I would say the same things in an Arab-owned place as I would in an all-white antifa place. The reason I say it's ironic that I'm accepted at a Lebanese place is that the owner and son have much closer personal experience with Israel and the history of the Levant, being literally from right next door and having at one point actively supported a certain jihadist organization. And with them, I can have a real conversation about the facts without any hatred or heated tempers. The irony is not that they're Arabs, it's that the overeducated yet completely ignorant white Americans down the street, who have never been to the region or had any connection to it, and who claim to be full of love and acceptance, should be the ones to turn their backs on me.
Love and acceptance, apparently, do not equate to basic tolerance. Or they don't extend to Jews.
And to clarify for you: Israel's intrinsically Jewish like Greece is Greek, or Japan is Japanese. It's indigenous homeland of the Jewish people. It's actually just less of an ethnostate in that regard, because "Jewish" is broader than a single ethnicity. I don't need to sit here and explain to you what Jewish is or who's a Jew, you can look it up. The fact that you have a problem with one particular ethno/religious state out of all the states in the Middle East and the world says plenty about your personal biases.
>I think you have a blind spot to the fact that the war has been an excuse for people to go after Jews
I don't think antisemites have ever needed excuses to justify their conduct to themselves or others. And I have yet to see any outcomes for Jews in the US or UK that even approach the consequences that Arabs and those who have vocally opposed Israel's actions have faced.
>The very first thing I heard from most of the antifa people was some variation of "They had it coming."
Imagine asking some Jewish friends in 1944 in Poland what they thought about the victims of the Home Army during the Warsaw Uprising. You have to put yourself in other peoples' shoes if you want to understand their perspective.
>And with them, I can have a real conversation about the facts without any hatred or heated tempers.
You actually can't. Arabs know very well that they are being racially scrutinized when it comes to their views about this conflict, and they all know that the best course of action is to be as loudly and visibly Not Mean To Jewish Or Israeli People. It's not a real conversation because the power balance is way off; you have the state apparatus behind you (assuming US or UK) as well as a wide range of doxxing and terrorizing organizations like Betar. There is no free speech when it comes to opinions on Israel in either country I mentioned.
>It's indigenous homeland of the Jewish people.
I'm well aware of the Blut und Boden narrative about it, and settler colonialism has made fantastic use of it many times in the past (Liberia for example). It is absolutely an ethnostate however, per its own government's legislation (the 2018 Nation-State Bill). An ethnostate can include preferential treatment to a variety of types of Jews (though not all, as many African ones are excluded or subjected to scrutiny not faced by European ones).
>The fact that you have a problem with one particular ethno/religious state out of all the states in the Middle East and the world says plenty about your personal biases.
I don't, and hell it ain't even just the Middle East. Ask me what I think about the Azeris...
>Firstly, this thread is exactly about how I've felt racially scrutinized and suspect
I'm actually not talking about thoughts and feelings at all. I'm talking about domestic murders, deportations, and similar violence both from the state and from vigilantes.
>any pro-Israel opinion which is verboten in my neighborhood
This, and the massive shift against Israel among every demographic, is a result of a well publicized series of atrocities, a series that dwarfs the 725 civilians killed during the Gazan military's Operation Al-Aqsa Flood operation in both scope and cruelty.
>Extra points for simultaneously taking away the agency of all Arabs everywhere.
It's not a matter of agency, it's a matter of power. They still have agency, and the power structure I am talking about isn't contingent; it's categorical given its racialized nature.
>You seem to understand them so well.
I do, yes.
>Tell us what they all think.
None of my categorical statements have concerned the subjectivity of Arabs, only the objective contingencies with which they are presented. Plenty of them have chosen not to hide their opinions, and they are currently being tracked and rounded up in the US as a consequence.
The clique on pub B might talk down on the clique on pub A without any motivation but not B.
Someone that doesn't notice that he is "hated" might also be susceptible to such low key social manipulation to be made believe he is hated.
But ye, as I am not in clique A or B there is a lot of guesswork on my part and I cam't argue against someone else's story. I am just trying to bring up the possibility of bad mouthing.
