Like Lauren, I am a Jewish radical feminist and share her commitment to rooting out antisemitism and supporting all women across lines of ethnicity and religion. But I strongly disagree with her conflation of anti Zionism with antisemitism and her belief that criticizing of Israel as an apartheid state is antisemitic.
Palestinians and Jews share common ancestry that goes back to the time of ancient Israel and Canaan. We are genetic cousins yet this does not change the fact that a grave injustice was done to the Palestinian people in the Zionist settlement of European Jews to Palestine, nor that Israel has continued to carry out continued patriarchal violence and injustice against Palestinians through apartheid, exappropriation and occupation since that time. For those interested, i recommend a history put together by an Israeli peace group, Gush Shalom. http://zope.gush-shalom.org/home/en/channels/downloads/truth/Truth%20Against%20Truth%20-%20English
It is not surprising that women including Jewish women in Israel have been in the forefront of the efforts against occupation and for peace, justice, equality and coexistence between Jews and Palestinians. See https://womeninblack.org/vigils-arround-the-world/middle-east/israel/. In addition, it is not surprising that a large majority of the members and leaders in Jewish Voice for Peace, a Jewish anti Zionist group that envisions a shared future of equality , justice and peace between Jews and Palestinians in Israel/Palestinian, are in fact women.
As feminists we should not forget the nature of war and militarism as a particularly horrific form of femicide. Indeed, there is nothing more patriarchal than war, especially the ethnic war happening right now in the middle east. We should care anout sll women both Jew and Palestinian. We should oppose all slaughter of innocent civilians, whether by Hamas through terrorist attacks or by the far more powerful and destructive Israeli Army. Never again should mean for everyone. Feminists should be in the forefront of voices for an immediate ceasefire in the current conflict, an end to the bloodshed snd negotiations to reach a just settlement if the conflict.
I am linking to an article I wrote on the FIST website.
Very well said! It is frustrating that more people don’t seem to highlight how many of us support Israel’s right to exist and thrive, but also oppose occupying Palestinian lands and overstepping on sensitive boundaries around access to water and other essential things that need to be shared fairly or there will never be peace.
I love the jewish culture and probably spend more time with jewish people than anyone else, by nature of where i live and for my work. I love their humor, intellect, food and most of all how present they are when it comes to demanding human rights.
So that is why it frustrates me that there is such a strong, seemingly trauma based grip of fear that leads so many to have a glaring blind spot for the rights and needs ot their neighbors in Palestine.
I understand full well how complicated things are in that region, but i also feel strongly that we all must move past identity into a realm of common recognition of one another and try to find love for each other because war does not improve anything. Living with a threat of war or in the shadow of war keeps us all prisoners of those who would control us using threats and promoting fear.
I often think about how people of all cultures and ethnicities identify so strongly with who they think they are, when at the end of the day we are all just humans, just animals on earth, all of us made from the same thing. To keep ourselves separate based on a name, a skin color, the food we eat, or an imaginary border seems as much a problem as the people claiming to be the opposite sex. At the end of the day it’s just people clinging to a belief, and beliefs are subjective. Believing a thing does not make it a fact.
I feel bad for all the women embroiled in the conflict between Israel and Palestine, but also for the children and the men as well, as they watch everything crumble and everyone they love running, injured, or dying.
I had to listen to a client call all arabs ”sub-human animals who have contributed nothing to the human race except a death cult” and she believed they should all be killed. And somehow it is ok to say that, but not to say that I believe Israel should stop occupying Palestine and stop any actions that cut off access to things Palestinians need to live? How is my sentiment anti-semitic?
I’ve lived through my own government bringing great devastation to the Middle East and i was openly vocal about my opposition to that as well. I will never support obliterating a place or it’s people. I think it is my obligation as a person who desires a peaceful world to oppose all violence and war. However, I do see self defense and a natural human reaction to being under attack.
I don’t support the violence committed by Hamas, but the reaction of israel is as cruel and will not improve things but rather will create a deeper rift. So violence begets violence and women and children pay the highest price.
My opposing Israel’s invasion is just that. It is not a hatred of jews, nor do I equate it with jewish people. I don’t understand why people always assume that the citizens of any nation are in line with their government’s actions. I have rarely been in line with my government in the US. I have far more often been totally at odds, and usually the people who do support the bad policies or actions are more often than not just being fed lies that cause them to believe something that is not true.
Just like not believing a man can suddenly be a woman because he identifies as one, i don’t think a person is anti-semitic for voicing opposition to the occupation of the west bank or the policies regarding that land and it’s people.
And considering Irael’s military might and it’s ability to participate in a global economy versus Palestine having virtually nothing but poverty and problems, this full on assault of all Palestinians seems all the more vicious.
Ann, thank you for weighing in, and I look forward to reading the article and the opportunity to become further informed. My response was actually not intended to address Zionism per se (though I realize looking back it might be taken that way), as I know far too little about that issue and don’t feel qualified to weigh in, but rather my concern that many well-meaning non-Jewish friends do not realize or remember, if they knew, what Jews in Europe, and other places, faced, which is that we all, and I put the US at the top of the list, did not let Jews in when we could and should have done.
Ann, just read this, and have a practical question for you. Bernie Sanders and others have noted that you need two parties to get a cease fire, and Hamas will never come to the table for that. (Nor will Netanyahu, I would think.) This does not excuse by any means any wrongdoing by Hamas or Netanyahu and his government, to say the least, it's more a question of what your thoughts are about how best to get past this horrible logjam.
There is such international pressure for a ceasefire that without the US blocking it and giving Israel free rein to do what it likes with US weapons and aid, it would have happened. As far as Hamas, the cry for a ceasefire is too great among Palestinians for Hamas to ignore it. It is the US which is the lynchpin here, allowing a genocide to unfold in our name and with our tax dollars.
I sincerely hope you are right on this, especially with regard to Hamas. I’ll admit to being skeptical about that, but I really do hope it’s true. Thanks so much for taking the time to respond.
No matter our race or ethnicity or religion, fighting the patriarchy means preserving our rights to vote and to be represented in our governing bodies. Government without female representation is male dictatorship.
Thanks to Lauren for this work. I don’t feel well enough informed to express an opinion on the complexities of Israel & Gaza but I’m pleased to hear from Jewish women with expertise in the area. I am a woman first (in terms of other tribes) and I notice that Hamas is a brutally violent, hateful, patriarchal death cult so not sure why I would believe anything they say? Of course I pity all the Gaza women and mothers living in a hell scape.
As is the Israel government -right wing extremist fundsmentalists and racists have huge influence in Israel - that has killed 11,000 Palestinians, mostly women & children, denying food, clean water and medical care. Hamas is a terrible leadership for the Palestinians, but the Israeli leadershio is equally horrific and has far more power to do even more harm, as we can see with the genocide & ethnic cleasing unfolding before our eyes. You don’t have to believe Hamas, to see what’s been done, a small crowded urban area reduced to rubble, with no fuel to dug up the bodies.
Articulate and powerful, thank you. I want to underscore a parenthetical included. It has become all too apparent to me in talking with well-meaning friends who (like me) are not Jewish, that this critical fact is not recognized: “(Bear in mind that the existence of just one Jewish nation in the 1930s could have averted the attempted genocide of Jews in the Holocaust; because before Hitler targeted Jews for extermination, he tried unsuccessfully to deport Jews to any nation that would take them in. But not one nation on earth would take us in.)” I want to underscore that last phrase again, “not one nation on earth would take us in.”
Zionism has not made Jews safer. Quite the opposite. Israel is one of the least safe places to be Jewish in the world. The conflation of Zionism - the actions of a government - with Judaism means that those angry with Israel’s killing of children and the attacks on and shutting down of hospitals in Gaza may target Jews for being Jewish. And do we not think that if Jews were all concentrated in one small country, that Nazis whose plans were to the rule the world and saw Jews as an existential threat, wouldn’t have turned around and attacked that country, like one big ghetto, & attempted to annihilate everyone? Jews can only find safety and security in a world that is safe and secure for everyone.
You know, I’ve experienced the lifelong results of being enslaved and trafficked by white collar trash here in California, and no one wants to hear about it, let alone help me sue the White supremacist perpetrator organizations who committed it and are still in operation. I certainly don’t appreciate having my well-formed and balanced opinions on the Middle East situation being called “hateful.” I’m surprised by that coming from you! Group narcissism is the most dangerous threat to all of us, and I refuse to support anyone in their promotion of it. ☹️
Where did you present your views and who called them "hateful"; I'm not seeing your name among the comments. The article is just an explanation of the problems Jews have, and exhorts us all to be sensitive of each others' group identities, while prioritizing the struggle on behalf of women and girls. I didn't see any views being called "hateful"; through obviously correct me if I'm wrong.
If we say that we’re working on behalf of women and girls, then we should never side with colonizers against the colonized. It’s disconcerting to see so much mental illness among the supposedly educated people in this world, their actions careening us directly towards WWIII. I also (with at least one other commenter here) disagree with the claim that the BDS movement against the apartheid regime of Israel is “hateful.” It’s the kind of political pressure which ended the apartheid regime in South Africa! Here’s the quote from the article: “According to popular Jew-hating rhetoric, there could hardly be a more morally corrupt nation on earth than the only Jewish one. The Left’s stated agenda of BDS — to “Boycott, Divest, and Sanction” Israel out of existence as an “apartheid, genocidal” state of “European colonizers” — is unique to Israel. No other nation is consistently lied about and targeted in this way.’ These statements are false. Zionism is a worldwide cult belief with more Protestant adherents in the USA alone than there are Jews in the world, and as a survivor of the Satanic Panic as a child in a Pentecostal household, I’ve seen firsthand how dangerous the effects of this group narcissism can be and are. It cost me everything socioeconomically speaking, so that I don’t have an advanced university degree from which to be taken seriously. There’s a strong urge on the part of White (Protestant, in particular) westerners to expiate their genocidal guilt from the Nazi’s Final Solution of WWII, but Zionism and the state of Israel has been and is endangering Jewish and Muslim people worldwide. White supremacists want their Armageddon to happen. I’m not an expert, yet as a Gen X American, “voting with one’s dollar” is as democratic a thing that an individual citizen unaffiliated with any religious group can do, and I recommend that those who want to exercise their freedom of association as American citizens do not allow false, shallow claims of antisemitism to stop them.
In what sense is the idea that a displaced nation should be able to return to its homeland a "culture belief" akin to the "satanic panic". It is well-documented throughout history, and by disinterested parties, that the area covered by Israel/Judah (or, more recently than that, Judea/Galilee) is the homeland of the Jews. There has also been a continuous presence of Jews in that land, including the Palestinian descendents of the rural Judean/Galilean/Idumean population, who were NOT exiled, but were retained to farm and tend the olive groves, etc. Israel is largely made up of the descendents of Mizrachi Jewish refugees who had lived in Arab countries for hundreds of years, but were thrown out. The only reason Jews did not return to the land earlier was a) the strength of the Arab prejudice against them ever since the Arab conquest (which was likely when the rural Jews became crypto and at first only nominally practiced Islam. ) and b) the belief that only a messiah (a new king from the line of David) could bring that about. Though in fact, there were several attempts by self-proclaimed "Messiahs" who did try to reclaim the land. It was only after the Enlightenment, when there came to be such a thing as "secular Jews" who did not believe in a coming Messiah, that a serious attempt for Jews to return there in any number could be made without mixing it with religion. It is true that (besides the Jews who were already there), the first emigres were from Eastern Europe, and it was largely to escape pogroms. And they didn't take the land from the local people, they bought it. Much of it was swampland, which they drained to make arable. The next influx were Jews escaping Hitler. There were only two places such a large number of them could go: Palestine (the Roman name for Judea/Galilee) or the U.S.A., and the US had strict quotas. For large numbers of them, they really had no choice. And then when the State was declared, all the Arab nations threw out their Jews, with no compensation or right of return.
Those are your "colonialists". They're not "white" and the original emigres were never actual citizens of the countries they fled from. The problem is, that they've a) been successful and b) put measures in place to keep the Palestinians (who ironically have been taught to hate Jews by their radical Arab Islamist-influenced "leadership") from blowing up Israeli citizens. It is absolutely true that there are SOME Israelis who hate Palestinians. And it is true that the security ensures have led to abuses of the Palestinians. But the origin and continued existence of the "Apartheid" way of treating Palestinians arises from the Palestinian leadership's insistence that Jews, by virtue of being Jews, are a blight on their Muslim landscape, and that (Hamas, and the like) have the right to render that entire area Judenrein, from the river to the sea "by any -violent- means necessary", And Hamas' idea of the appropriate way to do that was demonstrated on October 7.
BDS is not a grass-roots "anti-apartheid" movement, it's one piece of a many-pronged attempt by Hamas (which is, among other things, a propaganda generator) to delegitimize Israel in public opinion. And for is own reasons. It isn't interested in the Palestinians' right to their own nation -- it's aim is extermination of Jews. Read Hamas' charter sometime.
That you probably knew very little of this is exactly my point. Actually knowing the history and the context, rather than relying on anti-Israel propaganda makes a difference. Are some Israelis bigots? Yes. Are they currently in high positions in the Israeli government? Yes. But do most Israelis favor peaceful coexistence with an acknowledged Palestine? Also yes, yes, yes. Will boycotting Israel do a single thing to help Palestinians, (whose money is stolen by its own leaders, in order to build upcovert military operations)? No.
I disagree. We in the USA tend to understand the concept of voting with one’s dollar, and I support anyone who lives their life consciously and expresses concern for others by not doing business with corporations/business entities they disagree with about humanitarian (or any other political) issues. The USA orders other countries to do as it says or economic punishment is the result, which is anti-democratic domination, and I certainly don’t find that acceptable. The State of Israel would not exist without UK/USA financing, and this is what the currently un-democratic USA oligarchy desires to do, against the wishes of most Americans.
The reason I mentioned the Satanic Panic is because my father died when I was ten, and my birth mother and her mother (who was a White supremacist Okie from Muskogee, circa 1916) in 1984 (!) voluntarily placed me into a facility that claims to “provide counseling support to emotionally troubled teens” and had a licensed special education school on their premises here in California. The facility was owned and operated as a “non-profit” by the fraternal organization they were members of which is headquartered in the American South. In flagrant contempt of California law, this organization held me in extrajudicial punishment (which is on the UN’s list of “crimes against humanity”) for a year and a half before they trafficked me to another “non-profit” organization that pretends to be protective of children. Even though I had qualified for Gifted and Talented Education, they refused to allow me to attend the on-grounds school and forced me to repeat the schoolwork I had completed the year before with top grades. After residing there for one year, birth mother says (I had refused to go on “home” visits to her residence since my placement there) she wants me to return to live with her, the prospect of which absolutely terrified me. See, she had remarried to a man (he turned out to be a bigamist) who had convinced her that he would make her pregnant again, even though by then she had only one ovary and no uterus. One of my elder sisters, the last one who could tolerate living in her residence, came home after work at age seventeen to find a stranger had been gifted the bed that the government was paying for her to be sleeping in. She appealed to the Okie who helped her obtain her first apartment. This level of felonious criminality was not something I expected, as I was told later by practitioners in the psychological services industry that I had simply “fallen through the cracks” of society. I remember decades ago finding disagreement with this claim, as it’s really more like chasms that some are being kicked into, indicating active, not passive “happenings.” Turns out, none of these lovely, university-educated “professionals” cared to disparage any of their colleagues, so their utter denial of what had been done to me kept me coming into their offices with steadily increasing (and eventually becoming disabling) symptoms of extreme anxiety, which disappeared literally overnight once the acknowledgment of this heinous abuse at the hands of “child experts” with advanced university degrees was made by a forensic psychologist in January 2019.
I’ve been studying subject matter that I didn’t want to study, in the effort to understand the Okie, and her husband (no blood relation to me), who was revealed after his death in 2013 to have been a literal Nazi from Germany. She was raised by Pentecostal sharecroppers on stolen Indigenous American land, and was a Pretendian (Pretend Indian) who dressed up in Redface to attend her stupid fraternal organization’s lodge meetings. As a child, I knew her to be a liar, and that the “way she was” resulted from her material deprivation and the sadistic abuse she suffered as a child at the hands of her father. Know what else? I finally figured out that birth mother was likely a product of incest, and am trying (so far, unsuccessfully) to convince my two living siblings to allow me to privately submit our DNA samples to a laboratory who can analyze the genetics and tell us whether the likelihood of incest is high or low. She was so obviously mentally retarded, with obvious congenital abnormalities evident (such as blindness in one eye since birth, partial deafness, etc.), that little children could tell that something was deeply wrong with her, yet the “social” workers enabled her criminal abuse of the welfare system and felonious child endangerment.
Sadism is an interesting study to make. Did you know that sadists rape their sons as well as their daughters, even into adulthood? I didn’t until I had reason to study the subject in an effort to understand the phenomenon. The Okie had a colonizer’s mentality, yet was a migrant to California herself during the Great Depression, with her product of incest in tow. The woman was most likely diagnosable with Narcissistic Personality Disorder, and targeted my father for her vile manipulations, since her first husband had beaten her so severely that she could not give birth to any more children of her own. She used her daughter as her ovaries, and when my compounding pharmacist and businessman father (Second Generation Luso-American) refused to allow her to control him and his family, she set out to destroy him, because as a White Anglo-Saxon Person, she could do that to my father in the state of his birth because the racism in Los Angeles County is such that even though we’re called White, my dad had Black hair and olhos negros, so he might as well have been directly from Africa to the White supremacists in control of that county. I now understand that the horrifying false accusations my father had to face in divorce court were in fact the things that her own father did to her.
I consider myself to be a displaced Hawaiian, as my paternal great-grandmother was born in Hawaii during the reign of their last regnant, Queen Lili’uokalani. When the USA White dominators stole their country, she was married off at age fifteen to a Portuguese rancher here in California, who divorced her after she gave birth to her second daughter. So, I am a descendant of displaced Galego-Portuguese Hawaiians, and of incestuous colonizer WASPs as well. Your condescending comments, as though I am incapable of thinking for myself and am instead parroting someone else’s propaganda, reveal you to be engaged in a group narcissism which prevents your objectivity on the matters of which you speak. Most likely, you have a graduate degree (or two or three) from one or more universities, as the condescension of the white collar crowd (some refer to them as the Professional Managerial Class) is clearly evident in your missive. Grow yourself up emotionally and act like a truly civilized person, instead of promoting the domination of others. Narcissism (as in pathological self-love) is rampant on the individual and group levels at this time, and needs to be recognized as such, before the PMC starts WWIII.
I am sorry if I sounded like I was being condescending. My aim was to present you with some information -- about how Israel came about -- because the current popular view omits the history.
It is difficult to claim that a group of exiled and persecuted people who have been trying to return to their ancestral homeland for 2000 years, are "colonialists". Indeed there are problems with moving back into your house when the relatives who stayed behind no longer recognize you. But calling it "colonialism" doesn't solve the problem for either side.
Between Hamas (which is a propaganda mill as part of its 'job description' as the Palestinian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood) and Anticolonialism, Israel is being dragged through the mud for being something it is not. Lots of smart people think what you do, and that's understandable. But if they had more information, they might understand that this situation doesn't fit the colonialist model.
So I'm not insinuating you "can't think for yourself". If I thought that, I wouldn't bother talking to you about this; the main characteristic of people who cannot think for themselves is that they are indoctrinated, rather than informed, which means they can't reconsider their position.
And actually, it is the university crowd you resent who are most likely to believe that Israel is a colonialist, Apartheid state. They are the ones marching in pro-Hamas demonstrations. I'm actually rejecting that position. Just because someone is smart, that doesn't necessarily mean they look at the evidence.
If it's partly the way I write that makes you think I'm looking down on you, it's probably that I have an old-fashioned way of saying things -- because that's how my parents talked.
The only "graduate degree" I have is ordination.
I'm very sorry for all you've been through. You must be very strong to have survived all that.
Revering men’s writings as the inerrant “word of god” is the main problem that I see here. I’ve seen zero demonstrations in support of Hamas, but have seen many worldwide in support of the innocent Palestinian civilians who are being systematically slaughtered, which certainly qualifies as war crimes, and at the very least an ethnic “cleansing.” So, you’re unaware that the state of Israel and the Netanyahu crowd have promoted Hamas by funding them directly? Why do you pretend to be knowledgeable when you are displaying ignorance about this, or is this just manipulation? I am a far less biased observer than yourself, as a believer in the writings of men. I wonder why so many radical feminist-identifying women participate in these expressions of group narcissism. I cannot support filthy child rapers who think themselves to be civilized, wherever they are located, now or in the past. Israel is primarily a colonialist project of WASP antisemitism. Western powers tried multiple times in the Middle Ages to “reclaim” the area and failed miserably. The abuse of language in recent decades which has attempted to erase the Semitic identity of Arabs is completely evil. Don’t you realize that The Nana and Her People (WASPs) despise ALL Semites? I have witnessed their condescension towards Jews and Judaism, but they are rabidly hateful towards Arabs and Muslims in general because of their refusal to submit to the domination of Rome. European Jews (and their descendants) are expressing the largest portion of the noxious element in Israel from what I can see, and isn’t surprising to me, since the Nazi Third Reich was an expression of group narcissism as well. I don’t understand why or how one could be a radical feminist and support expressions of group narcissism like what is being expressed from Israel right now. My own wholistic insight is that these “father god in heaven” religions are a solar phenomenon directly produced from the consumption of unsprouted seeds of domesticated annual grasses. Hey, Ezekiel bread! Anyone who cares to see clearly into spiritual realms and know peace needs to wash their cereals and legumes before eating them! Much ancient wisdom like this has already been discarded, and it feeds the turmoil and eventual expressions of individual and group violence. Please focus on the peace of your religion, not the narcissism, fear, and hatred. There’s plenty more of these spiritual writings (scriptures) of all kinds that emphasize peaceful, egalitarian relations between differing people groups than those that advocate for genocide. The Late Bronze Age Collapse had a profound effect on civilizations at that time, and it is up to us now to make sense of it all. The latest Jewish scholar I’ve heard from that makes sense to me is Dr. Jacob L. Wright. I’m pretty sure that alphabet was innovated by Hebrews and passed to the Phonecians, so I’m not surprised that their scriptures have been as influential on world religion as they’ve been! I might mention also that Dr. Immanuel Velikovsky was a genius and produced a profoundly seminal hypothesis that has been derided long enough. Peace on Earth! Goodwill to All People! ☮️❤️🐾
Like Lauren, I am a Jewish radical feminist and share her commitment to rooting out antisemitism and supporting all women across lines of ethnicity and religion. But I strongly disagree with her conflation of anti Zionism with antisemitism and her belief that criticizing of Israel as an apartheid state is antisemitic.
Palestinians and Jews share common ancestry that goes back to the time of ancient Israel and Canaan. We are genetic cousins yet this does not change the fact that a grave injustice was done to the Palestinian people in the Zionist settlement of European Jews to Palestine, nor that Israel has continued to carry out continued patriarchal violence and injustice against Palestinians through apartheid, exappropriation and occupation since that time. For those interested, i recommend a history put together by an Israeli peace group, Gush Shalom. http://zope.gush-shalom.org/home/en/channels/downloads/truth/Truth%20Against%20Truth%20-%20English
It is not surprising that women including Jewish women in Israel have been in the forefront of the efforts against occupation and for peace, justice, equality and coexistence between Jews and Palestinians. See https://womeninblack.org/vigils-arround-the-world/middle-east/israel/. In addition, it is not surprising that a large majority of the members and leaders in Jewish Voice for Peace, a Jewish anti Zionist group that envisions a shared future of equality , justice and peace between Jews and Palestinians in Israel/Palestinian, are in fact women.
As feminists we should not forget the nature of war and militarism as a particularly horrific form of femicide. Indeed, there is nothing more patriarchal than war, especially the ethnic war happening right now in the middle east. We should care anout sll women both Jew and Palestinian. We should oppose all slaughter of innocent civilians, whether by Hamas through terrorist attacks or by the far more powerful and destructive Israeli Army. Never again should mean for everyone. Feminists should be in the forefront of voices for an immediate ceasefire in the current conflict, an end to the bloodshed snd negotiations to reach a just settlement if the conflict.
I am linking to an article I wrote on the FIST website.
Very well said! It is frustrating that more people don’t seem to highlight how many of us support Israel’s right to exist and thrive, but also oppose occupying Palestinian lands and overstepping on sensitive boundaries around access to water and other essential things that need to be shared fairly or there will never be peace.
I love the jewish culture and probably spend more time with jewish people than anyone else, by nature of where i live and for my work. I love their humor, intellect, food and most of all how present they are when it comes to demanding human rights.
So that is why it frustrates me that there is such a strong, seemingly trauma based grip of fear that leads so many to have a glaring blind spot for the rights and needs ot their neighbors in Palestine.
I understand full well how complicated things are in that region, but i also feel strongly that we all must move past identity into a realm of common recognition of one another and try to find love for each other because war does not improve anything. Living with a threat of war or in the shadow of war keeps us all prisoners of those who would control us using threats and promoting fear.
I often think about how people of all cultures and ethnicities identify so strongly with who they think they are, when at the end of the day we are all just humans, just animals on earth, all of us made from the same thing. To keep ourselves separate based on a name, a skin color, the food we eat, or an imaginary border seems as much a problem as the people claiming to be the opposite sex. At the end of the day it’s just people clinging to a belief, and beliefs are subjective. Believing a thing does not make it a fact.
I feel bad for all the women embroiled in the conflict between Israel and Palestine, but also for the children and the men as well, as they watch everything crumble and everyone they love running, injured, or dying.
I had to listen to a client call all arabs ”sub-human animals who have contributed nothing to the human race except a death cult” and she believed they should all be killed. And somehow it is ok to say that, but not to say that I believe Israel should stop occupying Palestine and stop any actions that cut off access to things Palestinians need to live? How is my sentiment anti-semitic?
I’ve lived through my own government bringing great devastation to the Middle East and i was openly vocal about my opposition to that as well. I will never support obliterating a place or it’s people. I think it is my obligation as a person who desires a peaceful world to oppose all violence and war. However, I do see self defense and a natural human reaction to being under attack.
I don’t support the violence committed by Hamas, but the reaction of israel is as cruel and will not improve things but rather will create a deeper rift. So violence begets violence and women and children pay the highest price.
My opposing Israel’s invasion is just that. It is not a hatred of jews, nor do I equate it with jewish people. I don’t understand why people always assume that the citizens of any nation are in line with their government’s actions. I have rarely been in line with my government in the US. I have far more often been totally at odds, and usually the people who do support the bad policies or actions are more often than not just being fed lies that cause them to believe something that is not true.
Just like not believing a man can suddenly be a woman because he identifies as one, i don’t think a person is anti-semitic for voicing opposition to the occupation of the west bank or the policies regarding that land and it’s people.
And considering Irael’s military might and it’s ability to participate in a global economy versus Palestine having virtually nothing but poverty and problems, this full on assault of all Palestinians seems all the more vicious.
Thank you!!!
Here is the article I authored and posted to the FIST website. https://feministstruggle.org/2023/10/29/no-more-femicide-in-our-name/
Ann, thank you for weighing in, and I look forward to reading the article and the opportunity to become further informed. My response was actually not intended to address Zionism per se (though I realize looking back it might be taken that way), as I know far too little about that issue and don’t feel qualified to weigh in, but rather my concern that many well-meaning non-Jewish friends do not realize or remember, if they knew, what Jews in Europe, and other places, faced, which is that we all, and I put the US at the top of the list, did not let Jews in when we could and should have done.
Ann, just read this, and have a practical question for you. Bernie Sanders and others have noted that you need two parties to get a cease fire, and Hamas will never come to the table for that. (Nor will Netanyahu, I would think.) This does not excuse by any means any wrongdoing by Hamas or Netanyahu and his government, to say the least, it's more a question of what your thoughts are about how best to get past this horrible logjam.
There is such international pressure for a ceasefire that without the US blocking it and giving Israel free rein to do what it likes with US weapons and aid, it would have happened. As far as Hamas, the cry for a ceasefire is too great among Palestinians for Hamas to ignore it. It is the US which is the lynchpin here, allowing a genocide to unfold in our name and with our tax dollars.
I sincerely hope you are right on this, especially with regard to Hamas. I’ll admit to being skeptical about that, but I really do hope it’s true. Thanks so much for taking the time to respond.
No matter our race or ethnicity or religion, fighting the patriarchy means preserving our rights to vote and to be represented in our governing bodies. Government without female representation is male dictatorship.
Thanks to Lauren for this work. I don’t feel well enough informed to express an opinion on the complexities of Israel & Gaza but I’m pleased to hear from Jewish women with expertise in the area. I am a woman first (in terms of other tribes) and I notice that Hamas is a brutally violent, hateful, patriarchal death cult so not sure why I would believe anything they say? Of course I pity all the Gaza women and mothers living in a hell scape.
As is the Israel government -right wing extremist fundsmentalists and racists have huge influence in Israel - that has killed 11,000 Palestinians, mostly women & children, denying food, clean water and medical care. Hamas is a terrible leadership for the Palestinians, but the Israeli leadershio is equally horrific and has far more power to do even more harm, as we can see with the genocide & ethnic cleasing unfolding before our eyes. You don’t have to believe Hamas, to see what’s been done, a small crowded urban area reduced to rubble, with no fuel to dug up the bodies.
Articulate and powerful, thank you. I want to underscore a parenthetical included. It has become all too apparent to me in talking with well-meaning friends who (like me) are not Jewish, that this critical fact is not recognized: “(Bear in mind that the existence of just one Jewish nation in the 1930s could have averted the attempted genocide of Jews in the Holocaust; because before Hitler targeted Jews for extermination, he tried unsuccessfully to deport Jews to any nation that would take them in. But not one nation on earth would take us in.)” I want to underscore that last phrase again, “not one nation on earth would take us in.”
Zionism has not made Jews safer. Quite the opposite. Israel is one of the least safe places to be Jewish in the world. The conflation of Zionism - the actions of a government - with Judaism means that those angry with Israel’s killing of children and the attacks on and shutting down of hospitals in Gaza may target Jews for being Jewish. And do we not think that if Jews were all concentrated in one small country, that Nazis whose plans were to the rule the world and saw Jews as an existential threat, wouldn’t have turned around and attacked that country, like one big ghetto, & attempted to annihilate everyone? Jews can only find safety and security in a world that is safe and secure for everyone.
You know, I’ve experienced the lifelong results of being enslaved and trafficked by white collar trash here in California, and no one wants to hear about it, let alone help me sue the White supremacist perpetrator organizations who committed it and are still in operation. I certainly don’t appreciate having my well-formed and balanced opinions on the Middle East situation being called “hateful.” I’m surprised by that coming from you! Group narcissism is the most dangerous threat to all of us, and I refuse to support anyone in their promotion of it. ☹️
Where did you present your views and who called them "hateful"; I'm not seeing your name among the comments. The article is just an explanation of the problems Jews have, and exhorts us all to be sensitive of each others' group identities, while prioritizing the struggle on behalf of women and girls. I didn't see any views being called "hateful"; through obviously correct me if I'm wrong.
If we say that we’re working on behalf of women and girls, then we should never side with colonizers against the colonized. It’s disconcerting to see so much mental illness among the supposedly educated people in this world, their actions careening us directly towards WWIII. I also (with at least one other commenter here) disagree with the claim that the BDS movement against the apartheid regime of Israel is “hateful.” It’s the kind of political pressure which ended the apartheid regime in South Africa! Here’s the quote from the article: “According to popular Jew-hating rhetoric, there could hardly be a more morally corrupt nation on earth than the only Jewish one. The Left’s stated agenda of BDS — to “Boycott, Divest, and Sanction” Israel out of existence as an “apartheid, genocidal” state of “European colonizers” — is unique to Israel. No other nation is consistently lied about and targeted in this way.’ These statements are false. Zionism is a worldwide cult belief with more Protestant adherents in the USA alone than there are Jews in the world, and as a survivor of the Satanic Panic as a child in a Pentecostal household, I’ve seen firsthand how dangerous the effects of this group narcissism can be and are. It cost me everything socioeconomically speaking, so that I don’t have an advanced university degree from which to be taken seriously. There’s a strong urge on the part of White (Protestant, in particular) westerners to expiate their genocidal guilt from the Nazi’s Final Solution of WWII, but Zionism and the state of Israel has been and is endangering Jewish and Muslim people worldwide. White supremacists want their Armageddon to happen. I’m not an expert, yet as a Gen X American, “voting with one’s dollar” is as democratic a thing that an individual citizen unaffiliated with any religious group can do, and I recommend that those who want to exercise their freedom of association as American citizens do not allow false, shallow claims of antisemitism to stop them.
In what sense is the idea that a displaced nation should be able to return to its homeland a "culture belief" akin to the "satanic panic". It is well-documented throughout history, and by disinterested parties, that the area covered by Israel/Judah (or, more recently than that, Judea/Galilee) is the homeland of the Jews. There has also been a continuous presence of Jews in that land, including the Palestinian descendents of the rural Judean/Galilean/Idumean population, who were NOT exiled, but were retained to farm and tend the olive groves, etc. Israel is largely made up of the descendents of Mizrachi Jewish refugees who had lived in Arab countries for hundreds of years, but were thrown out. The only reason Jews did not return to the land earlier was a) the strength of the Arab prejudice against them ever since the Arab conquest (which was likely when the rural Jews became crypto and at first only nominally practiced Islam. ) and b) the belief that only a messiah (a new king from the line of David) could bring that about. Though in fact, there were several attempts by self-proclaimed "Messiahs" who did try to reclaim the land. It was only after the Enlightenment, when there came to be such a thing as "secular Jews" who did not believe in a coming Messiah, that a serious attempt for Jews to return there in any number could be made without mixing it with religion. It is true that (besides the Jews who were already there), the first emigres were from Eastern Europe, and it was largely to escape pogroms. And they didn't take the land from the local people, they bought it. Much of it was swampland, which they drained to make arable. The next influx were Jews escaping Hitler. There were only two places such a large number of them could go: Palestine (the Roman name for Judea/Galilee) or the U.S.A., and the US had strict quotas. For large numbers of them, they really had no choice. And then when the State was declared, all the Arab nations threw out their Jews, with no compensation or right of return.
Those are your "colonialists". They're not "white" and the original emigres were never actual citizens of the countries they fled from. The problem is, that they've a) been successful and b) put measures in place to keep the Palestinians (who ironically have been taught to hate Jews by their radical Arab Islamist-influenced "leadership") from blowing up Israeli citizens. It is absolutely true that there are SOME Israelis who hate Palestinians. And it is true that the security ensures have led to abuses of the Palestinians. But the origin and continued existence of the "Apartheid" way of treating Palestinians arises from the Palestinian leadership's insistence that Jews, by virtue of being Jews, are a blight on their Muslim landscape, and that (Hamas, and the like) have the right to render that entire area Judenrein, from the river to the sea "by any -violent- means necessary", And Hamas' idea of the appropriate way to do that was demonstrated on October 7.
BDS is not a grass-roots "anti-apartheid" movement, it's one piece of a many-pronged attempt by Hamas (which is, among other things, a propaganda generator) to delegitimize Israel in public opinion. And for is own reasons. It isn't interested in the Palestinians' right to their own nation -- it's aim is extermination of Jews. Read Hamas' charter sometime.
That you probably knew very little of this is exactly my point. Actually knowing the history and the context, rather than relying on anti-Israel propaganda makes a difference. Are some Israelis bigots? Yes. Are they currently in high positions in the Israeli government? Yes. But do most Israelis favor peaceful coexistence with an acknowledged Palestine? Also yes, yes, yes. Will boycotting Israel do a single thing to help Palestinians, (whose money is stolen by its own leaders, in order to build upcovert military operations)? No.
I disagree. We in the USA tend to understand the concept of voting with one’s dollar, and I support anyone who lives their life consciously and expresses concern for others by not doing business with corporations/business entities they disagree with about humanitarian (or any other political) issues. The USA orders other countries to do as it says or economic punishment is the result, which is anti-democratic domination, and I certainly don’t find that acceptable. The State of Israel would not exist without UK/USA financing, and this is what the currently un-democratic USA oligarchy desires to do, against the wishes of most Americans.
The reason I mentioned the Satanic Panic is because my father died when I was ten, and my birth mother and her mother (who was a White supremacist Okie from Muskogee, circa 1916) in 1984 (!) voluntarily placed me into a facility that claims to “provide counseling support to emotionally troubled teens” and had a licensed special education school on their premises here in California. The facility was owned and operated as a “non-profit” by the fraternal organization they were members of which is headquartered in the American South. In flagrant contempt of California law, this organization held me in extrajudicial punishment (which is on the UN’s list of “crimes against humanity”) for a year and a half before they trafficked me to another “non-profit” organization that pretends to be protective of children. Even though I had qualified for Gifted and Talented Education, they refused to allow me to attend the on-grounds school and forced me to repeat the schoolwork I had completed the year before with top grades. After residing there for one year, birth mother says (I had refused to go on “home” visits to her residence since my placement there) she wants me to return to live with her, the prospect of which absolutely terrified me. See, she had remarried to a man (he turned out to be a bigamist) who had convinced her that he would make her pregnant again, even though by then she had only one ovary and no uterus. One of my elder sisters, the last one who could tolerate living in her residence, came home after work at age seventeen to find a stranger had been gifted the bed that the government was paying for her to be sleeping in. She appealed to the Okie who helped her obtain her first apartment. This level of felonious criminality was not something I expected, as I was told later by practitioners in the psychological services industry that I had simply “fallen through the cracks” of society. I remember decades ago finding disagreement with this claim, as it’s really more like chasms that some are being kicked into, indicating active, not passive “happenings.” Turns out, none of these lovely, university-educated “professionals” cared to disparage any of their colleagues, so their utter denial of what had been done to me kept me coming into their offices with steadily increasing (and eventually becoming disabling) symptoms of extreme anxiety, which disappeared literally overnight once the acknowledgment of this heinous abuse at the hands of “child experts” with advanced university degrees was made by a forensic psychologist in January 2019.
I’ve been studying subject matter that I didn’t want to study, in the effort to understand the Okie, and her husband (no blood relation to me), who was revealed after his death in 2013 to have been a literal Nazi from Germany. She was raised by Pentecostal sharecroppers on stolen Indigenous American land, and was a Pretendian (Pretend Indian) who dressed up in Redface to attend her stupid fraternal organization’s lodge meetings. As a child, I knew her to be a liar, and that the “way she was” resulted from her material deprivation and the sadistic abuse she suffered as a child at the hands of her father. Know what else? I finally figured out that birth mother was likely a product of incest, and am trying (so far, unsuccessfully) to convince my two living siblings to allow me to privately submit our DNA samples to a laboratory who can analyze the genetics and tell us whether the likelihood of incest is high or low. She was so obviously mentally retarded, with obvious congenital abnormalities evident (such as blindness in one eye since birth, partial deafness, etc.), that little children could tell that something was deeply wrong with her, yet the “social” workers enabled her criminal abuse of the welfare system and felonious child endangerment.
Sadism is an interesting study to make. Did you know that sadists rape their sons as well as their daughters, even into adulthood? I didn’t until I had reason to study the subject in an effort to understand the phenomenon. The Okie had a colonizer’s mentality, yet was a migrant to California herself during the Great Depression, with her product of incest in tow. The woman was most likely diagnosable with Narcissistic Personality Disorder, and targeted my father for her vile manipulations, since her first husband had beaten her so severely that she could not give birth to any more children of her own. She used her daughter as her ovaries, and when my compounding pharmacist and businessman father (Second Generation Luso-American) refused to allow her to control him and his family, she set out to destroy him, because as a White Anglo-Saxon Person, she could do that to my father in the state of his birth because the racism in Los Angeles County is such that even though we’re called White, my dad had Black hair and olhos negros, so he might as well have been directly from Africa to the White supremacists in control of that county. I now understand that the horrifying false accusations my father had to face in divorce court were in fact the things that her own father did to her.
I consider myself to be a displaced Hawaiian, as my paternal great-grandmother was born in Hawaii during the reign of their last regnant, Queen Lili’uokalani. When the USA White dominators stole their country, she was married off at age fifteen to a Portuguese rancher here in California, who divorced her after she gave birth to her second daughter. So, I am a descendant of displaced Galego-Portuguese Hawaiians, and of incestuous colonizer WASPs as well. Your condescending comments, as though I am incapable of thinking for myself and am instead parroting someone else’s propaganda, reveal you to be engaged in a group narcissism which prevents your objectivity on the matters of which you speak. Most likely, you have a graduate degree (or two or three) from one or more universities, as the condescension of the white collar crowd (some refer to them as the Professional Managerial Class) is clearly evident in your missive. Grow yourself up emotionally and act like a truly civilized person, instead of promoting the domination of others. Narcissism (as in pathological self-love) is rampant on the individual and group levels at this time, and needs to be recognized as such, before the PMC starts WWIII.
I am sorry if I sounded like I was being condescending. My aim was to present you with some information -- about how Israel came about -- because the current popular view omits the history.
It is difficult to claim that a group of exiled and persecuted people who have been trying to return to their ancestral homeland for 2000 years, are "colonialists". Indeed there are problems with moving back into your house when the relatives who stayed behind no longer recognize you. But calling it "colonialism" doesn't solve the problem for either side.
Between Hamas (which is a propaganda mill as part of its 'job description' as the Palestinian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood) and Anticolonialism, Israel is being dragged through the mud for being something it is not. Lots of smart people think what you do, and that's understandable. But if they had more information, they might understand that this situation doesn't fit the colonialist model.
So I'm not insinuating you "can't think for yourself". If I thought that, I wouldn't bother talking to you about this; the main characteristic of people who cannot think for themselves is that they are indoctrinated, rather than informed, which means they can't reconsider their position.
And actually, it is the university crowd you resent who are most likely to believe that Israel is a colonialist, Apartheid state. They are the ones marching in pro-Hamas demonstrations. I'm actually rejecting that position. Just because someone is smart, that doesn't necessarily mean they look at the evidence.
If it's partly the way I write that makes you think I'm looking down on you, it's probably that I have an old-fashioned way of saying things -- because that's how my parents talked.
The only "graduate degree" I have is ordination.
I'm very sorry for all you've been through. You must be very strong to have survived all that.
Revering men’s writings as the inerrant “word of god” is the main problem that I see here. I’ve seen zero demonstrations in support of Hamas, but have seen many worldwide in support of the innocent Palestinian civilians who are being systematically slaughtered, which certainly qualifies as war crimes, and at the very least an ethnic “cleansing.” So, you’re unaware that the state of Israel and the Netanyahu crowd have promoted Hamas by funding them directly? Why do you pretend to be knowledgeable when you are displaying ignorance about this, or is this just manipulation? I am a far less biased observer than yourself, as a believer in the writings of men. I wonder why so many radical feminist-identifying women participate in these expressions of group narcissism. I cannot support filthy child rapers who think themselves to be civilized, wherever they are located, now or in the past. Israel is primarily a colonialist project of WASP antisemitism. Western powers tried multiple times in the Middle Ages to “reclaim” the area and failed miserably. The abuse of language in recent decades which has attempted to erase the Semitic identity of Arabs is completely evil. Don’t you realize that The Nana and Her People (WASPs) despise ALL Semites? I have witnessed their condescension towards Jews and Judaism, but they are rabidly hateful towards Arabs and Muslims in general because of their refusal to submit to the domination of Rome. European Jews (and their descendants) are expressing the largest portion of the noxious element in Israel from what I can see, and isn’t surprising to me, since the Nazi Third Reich was an expression of group narcissism as well. I don’t understand why or how one could be a radical feminist and support expressions of group narcissism like what is being expressed from Israel right now. My own wholistic insight is that these “father god in heaven” religions are a solar phenomenon directly produced from the consumption of unsprouted seeds of domesticated annual grasses. Hey, Ezekiel bread! Anyone who cares to see clearly into spiritual realms and know peace needs to wash their cereals and legumes before eating them! Much ancient wisdom like this has already been discarded, and it feeds the turmoil and eventual expressions of individual and group violence. Please focus on the peace of your religion, not the narcissism, fear, and hatred. There’s plenty more of these spiritual writings (scriptures) of all kinds that emphasize peaceful, egalitarian relations between differing people groups than those that advocate for genocide. The Late Bronze Age Collapse had a profound effect on civilizations at that time, and it is up to us now to make sense of it all. The latest Jewish scholar I’ve heard from that makes sense to me is Dr. Jacob L. Wright. I’m pretty sure that alphabet was innovated by Hebrews and passed to the Phonecians, so I’m not surprised that their scriptures have been as influential on world religion as they’ve been! I might mention also that Dr. Immanuel Velikovsky was a genius and produced a profoundly seminal hypothesis that has been derided long enough. Peace on Earth! Goodwill to All People! ☮️❤️🐾