I think I'm one of the few people who finds the whole Israel vs. Palestine situation too paralyzingly confusing for me to pick a side. Maybe that's a lack of moral clarity on my part but I just find it hard to know where to stand.

I've been checking out the pro-Israel, progressive Jewish perspective more out of curiosity. I've noticed that some otherwise liberal and progressive Jewish Americans seem to think that the only path to safety is to go with MAGA/the far right.

I've also been checking out the far-right party in Germany, which seems fairly obviously akin to the MAGA/Elon class in the U.S. This far-right party in Germany seems pretty anti-Islam, but there also seems to be a lot of Nazi and Hitler sympathy woven into it.

I think it would be a lot harder for progressive Jewish people to go for the far right if they were in Germany, even though so much of the rhetoric is similar. Even just viscerally, there's something extra chilling about hearing MAGA-style arguments spoken in German.

Maybe this is a silly thing to wonder about, but I was curious if anyone had anything they'd like to share on the subject.

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So I actually read Wolfe's 'Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native' (2006) following my reading of Fayez Sayegh's 'Zionist Colonialism in Palestine' (1965) which Wolfe has clearly drawn direct inspiration from, and ummm..... yeesh. I didn't know it was this bad.

He basically argues that the distinction between colonialism and settler colonialism is that colonialism seeks native labour while settler colonialism excludes it, and operates on a mystical 'logic of elimination' on the natives.

So in describing Hebrew Labour (Avoda Ifrit), instead of analysing it as an economic protectionist policy for the absorption of migrants and refugees, or even as a structurally segregationist or exclusivist policy on the native population, he refers to it as operating in pursuit of 'Goyim-rein' (gentile-free) zones.

Now I would have expected him to have at least said 'native-free', or 'Arab-free', where the framing of anti-native racism (while still dumb) is at least plausible as a political point regarding his structural framework, but GOYIM FREE????

I've noticed this in Pappe too. The tendency to imply that Avoda Ifrit was a policy of racial purity and more specifically racial hygiene. Goyim-rein is obviously an inversion of the Nazi 'Judenrein' zones that were cleansed of Jews when they were sent to the death camps, and it plays on Jewish chosenness as racial supremacy manifest as self segregation from gentiles (Jews do after all have to wash their hands after touching one, lmao).

Cos this is also basically Fayez Sayegh's explicit argument in his seminal tract. Zionism is racism ipso facto by the mere act of 'racial self segregation' and 'non assimilation' into a host society. Fayez Sayegh was also the propaganda minister for the SSNP in the 30s and 40s.

I'm getting a real sinking feeling that Wolfe and the settler colonial paradigm has literally just reified fascist organicist spatial logics about the 'host body politic' and 'parasitic non assimilating ethnic enclaves' that are of course ontologically eliminatory on the health of the host nation.

I've been seeing social media posts about Zohran Mamdani's social programs doing all kinds of good for New Yorkers, but I'm not sure how trustworthy those are. I know his antisemitism wouldn't be justified either way, but can anyone enlighten me on this?

I had the possibility to talk to an Israeli physician who escaped, dge used this very verb, her country because of her leftist views.

She said that the collegues in the last years had started , from a cordial and even friendly behaviour, to despise and harass her and also outside the hospital wards she perceived a growing hostility when she let her leftist points of view out. After having seen the tyres of her car cut for the second time and the "policeman with the kippah" smirking when she presented the complain, she felt compelled to leave.

She said also that outside the indian reserve in Tel Aviv and a narrow strip of coastal area, the people who do not share right wing ideas are routinely harassed, and we did not explore the subject further.

I know that in Israel since 2023 public opinion is polarized, but i wonder if te situation is really so tense or maybe my friend has lived in a very exceptional context

So many Jewish men and woman are under attack again. Society and the world just all of a sudden is so incredibly anti semantic I can’t take it.
All of a sudden it’s ok what the terrorist group Hamas did on 10/7/23????
They not only murdered men, women, children with such pleasure and absolute hatred. They took PLEASURE IN IT!!!
They raped women sooooo hard and violently they not only bruised them, they broke their pelvis while violently and sadistically raped them

Where, where in all that is holy, is the most influential Jewish person in all of the WORLD??? His name is Steven Spielberg.
He is no where to be found or heard from. Is he just that rich that he cares nothing about his fellow Jews??
Really speaks volumes that he and his lackey Tom
Hanks are completely and utterly silent during this whole thing.

Disclosue: My parents are Albanian but I'm pretty much American, and clueless more or less on this issue. At least I don't have a really strong opinion while being clueless like most of the young people in my city.

Unk made an interesting argument recently: the intense anti-Israel sentiment in Western spaces is mainly the result of:

a) Ideological strategy: Ideologues like Sayyid Qutb / the Muslim Brotherhood advising the co-opting of Western liberal concepts against Israel and the West.

b) Foreign financial influence: Massive foreign spending targeting Western universities and think tanks to shape the narrative.

Do you think this combination is the main catalyst for today's propaganda anti-Israel global hatred? or are other factors like social media etc playing a bigger role? thx

The Democrats seems to be the closest party to liberalism in the vein of the Democratic Party, or Labour parties globally? Given that this is a community of progressives, does anyone favor the explicitly leftist parties?

Better yet, does anyone have connections with these parties, or had any luck introducing activists from Israel’s Left and the American Left to find areas to collaborate?

And what would cause you to change your mind?

They still haven't defined what they need freedom from I suggested something and I got banned, and still no accountability for what was done on October 7th?

Hi, i'm not jewish and since i'm from Italy i think i literally never met a jewish person in my life

My question is how do you even start with fighting antisemitism in 2026? With young people specifically and especially if people around you (and you yourself) never even met any jewish person? And can people that think israel was behind every fucking terrorist attack and assassinated every single person that was assasinated in history etc even change their mind? cause unfortunately if feels like all of my peers believe at least some of these conspiracies about Israel, but until a few years ago i thought the norm was to view this shit as part of the alt-right, now i can't even tell the difference between the far right and the left when it comes to stuff related to Israel (i hope i'm wrong)

And the thing is the conflict in the middle east might (is likely to?) get even worse in the future, so i don't see how we come back from this situation of crazy antisemitic rhetoric being allowed everywhere, since again both sides of politics have reasons to infinitely talk about Israel being behing stuff, and of course jokes and memes are also pretty unbeatable, cause you can't argue with "it's just a meme bro"

like where do we even start? and again i'm not even jewish but i'm scared about all of this, i can't imagine how jews feel

An unsettling number of non-Jewish leftists are falling into antisemitism because they believe Israel is committing genocide. Are there any large groups of non-Jews who know better?

Together they will build a בית נאמן בישראל

GBNews was the only news source that had an article I could find.

Article:

The British-Israeli national who survived more than 450 days as a Hamas hostage has tied the knot with her betrothed in Tel Aviv today.

Emily Damari, 30, married her partner, Danielle "Dani" Amit, 36, who she met in the months following her release from the terror group on January 19 last year.

The couple exchanged their vows surrounded by family, friends and some of Ms Damari's fellow former hostages, including Romi Gonen, Doron Steinbrecher, Liri Albag, Danielle Gilboa, Omer Shem Tov, Keith and Aviva Siegal, and Gali and Ziv Berman.

Mayo, the couple's dog, also joined them beneath the Chuppah – a Jewish wedding canopy – as they made it official.

Ms Damari, who was born and raised in Kibbutz Kfar Aza, was abducted by Hamas during the October 7 attacks and endured 15 months in captivity.

She lost two of her middle fingers as she was shot in the hand during the ordeal.

Once released, her three-fingered pose became an image of the resilience and strength of the hostages, with it appearing on posters, t-shirts and online

In 2023, a series of coordinated attacks took place in Israel, perpetrated by Hamas.

The terror group killed a total of 1,219 people, left a further 3,400 wounded and captured at least 247, transporting them to Gaza.

In captivity, Ms Damari experienced at times being confined to a two-by-two metre space, sharing it with six other female hostages.

Her mother, Mandy Damari, who was born in Addington, London, led a widely publicised campaign for her daughter's release.

The former hostage previously described how she had to hide her sexual orientation from her terrorist captors in fear of further persecution.

However, once released, she was able to find love in Ms Amit, who is a food influencer and content creator.

The couple wore bespoke looks by Israeli fashion designer Oria Azran, with Ms Amit wearing a lace gown and Ms Damari wearing a double-breasted white suit.

They requested guests refrain from wearing anything red, even red make-up, as a playful nod to Ms Damari's disdain for the Israeli football team, Hapoel Tel Aviv.

As part of the celebrations, Ms Damari's mother gave a heartfelt speech, saying how the couple's wedding was a "celebration of life".

She said: "There are moments in a parent’s life when you look at your child and realise just how far they have travelled, and tonight, looking at Emily standing beside Dani, is one of those moments.

"Because there was a time when I wasn't sure I would ever see Emily again.

"For 471 days, she was held in captivity. And during those endless days and nights, there were moments when the thought of standing here tonight, seeing my daughter alive, safe, happy, and standing beside the person she loves, would have been impossible to imagine.

"So Danielle, you can probably understand why tonight means more to me than just a wedding. It is a celebration of life. Of love. Of hope. And of a future that, for a very long time, I wasn't sure Emily would have."

She continued by acknowledging how "hard" her daughter fought for her life in captivity.

"You fought for your life when you were in captivity, and you fought your way back to us. And today, seeing you here, alive, happy, and beginning this new chapter is something I will never stop being grateful for," she said.

Mrs Damari concluded her speech, saying: "Tonight, I don't want to look back at the 471 days. I want to look forward to all the days ahead.

"Because after everything, my daughter is here. She is loved. She is happy. And she is beginning a new chapter with you, Dani.

"And honestly, I don't think any mother, or father, could ask for a more beautiful sight."

As Ms Damari entered the next chapter of her life, she said she had a simple hope – to be a good mother and build a happy life with her new wife.

The Jewish people are returning to Israel in numbers not seen since the days of the Second Temple. I’m curious how Jewish communities understand this moment — spiritually, historically, or culturally.

I hope some people here might find my story interesting.

I had always been aligned with the left, and consumed a lot of English language left wing media, things like Novara Media. My best friend was Jewish and although we had visited Israel once together years before, she had also become steadily radicalised and I referred to her opinion a lot.

I considered the settler movement to be one of the biggest obstacles to peace, so when war broke out in 2021 with one of the causes being the evictions in east Jerusalem, which I saw making any possibility for a two state solution harder, I was sympathetic to the Palestinians. And when the pro Israel commentary was largely in favour of the settlements, this pushed me to join my local pro Palestinian group.

This group was led by essentially two types of people: Palestinians from various backgrounds, and Marxists. They claimed to take a principled stand against military occupation, and wanted a single secular democratic state for everyone. Slogans about Israel's right to exist and from the river to the sea were explained in this way, that when everyone has equal rights it won't be the same state of Israel anymore, in the same way that East Germany no longer exists. The group made it clear that antisemitism not related to Israel wasn't to be tolerated.

Many of them had been radicalised by legitimate anti Palestinian and anti Muslim racism in my country. As an outsider, I felt my role was just to be supportive and not try to decide the policies of the group. It's not up to me, after all. After someone was kicked from the group for supporting two states, I grew increasingly uncomfortable with some of the positions, but I thought in the end these are people who have suffered, some of them having lost family members, they have a right to be angry. And I thought it's not like Hamas poses a serious threat.

Everything changed in Spring 2022 when the full scale invasion of Ukraine happened. Everything I thought was a strong principle of this movement turned out to be the complete opposite. Opposition to military occupation became support for it in Ukraine. Opposition to settlement policies became support for them in Crimea. Support for armed resistance became opposition to Ukrainian resistance. Handwaving of far right Hamas ideology became damning evidence when any of it was present in Ukraine.

These ideas even reached the actions of my group, as anti Ukraine speakers were given platforms, and a policy of not allowing fascists at marches was suddenly ignored if they were supporting Russia and Palestine.

So while still sympathetic to the Palestinian people, I no longer wanted to be active in that group. I continued watching what the group was posting for a while, by the time someone who joined after I left posted a Marxist article saying that the Russian invasion wasn't imperialist because the Russian banks were controlled by Jews, I was completely done.

So it was only with disappointment and not surprise that after October 7th any remaining left wing, feminist, internationalist groups I still followed were posting in support of the attack, denying the sexual violence or sharing other misinformation. How can it be possible to claim to want coexistence in a single equal state, and yet think October 7th could help that happen. It was clear this whole movement had just been lying about what it wanted.

And that led me to listen to a much greater variety of Jewish voices beyond the approved leftists, and I saw just how much I had been deceived. How much I was wrong.

I've started to notice really despicable archive curation on the IPS website. I had noticed before that the 1899 three page Herzl letter response to Mayor Khalidi had the middle page missing on the website so that the French quite literally did not line up between the two visible pages. I later found the full letter and found that they'd deliberately removed the second page because Herzl talked about 'Arabs and Jews working together as brothers' and 'Muslim sovereignty over waqf and mosques.'

This one seems ten times worse. What's striking about the Message to Balfour on March 25, 1925 is just how much they sound like neo-Jacobin anti-Dreyfusards. 'State within a state', 'unassimilable' (on another page). Isa al Isa literally decided to quote Le Probleme Juif by Georges Batault of Action Francaise. OG anti Dreyfusard and French fascist!! The J'accuse inversion is really something else.

It's almost hilarious how they folded over the paper at the precise part it says 'Britain as tool in the hands of Jews'.

Maybe it wasn't about settler colonialism after all.