Off Topic Politics Thread

That fact has been pointed out many times across all media but there are those that choose to ignore and label any criticism of the Israeli government's actions in Gaza or the ultra zionist settlers west bank atrocities antisemitic.

 

• Mistakenly released prisoner Brahim Kaddour-Cherif has been arrested for being unlawfully at large on Blackstock Road in Islington, north London
• He was detained at 11:30 GMT after a member of the public called the police to report a sighting of a man they believed to be the 24-year-old Algerian
• Kaddour-Cherif had been released in error from HMP Wandsworth on Wednesday, 29 October
• He had been convicted in November of indecent exposure relating to an incident in March that year, police said

• Kaddour-Cherif is the second mistakenly released prisoner to return to custody in as many days - William "Billy" Smith handed himself into HMP Wandsworth on Thursday

 

So very true, but some just won't have it. This came up recently.

"Criticising Zionism is not the same thing as hating Jews’? Stop it. I’m tired."
Brendan O'Neill.

Unfortunately there is systemic discrimination against Jews across Israel itself - supporters of Maccabi Tel Aviv being a noticeable spearhead - towards Mizrahi Jews. Estimates suggest that over 50% of Israel's Jewish population is of at least partial Mizrahi descent, making them the largest Jewish ethnic group.

Mizrahi oppression refers to discrimination and marginalization faced by Jewish people originating from the Middle East and North Africa, both before and after their immigration to Israel. While there were occasional antisemitic incidents before the 20th century, tensions surrounding Zionism and conflicts in Mandatory Palestine led to growing antisemitism in the Arab world. The violence and brutality of the Nakba - Israel's displacement of Palestinians - created a backlash that endangered Mizrahi Jews throughout the region, forcing many Arab Jews to flee to Israel where they faced a different form of oppression.

In Israel, this oppression materialised as systemic discrimination by the dominant Ashkenazi (European Jewish) establishment, which viewed Mizrahi culture as inferior and imposed its own norms through policies in housing, education, and employment. This led to socioeconomic inequalities and the erosion of Mizrahi identity, disparities that persist in Israeli society today¹ with Mizrahi communities continuing to face lower average incomes, educational gaps, media presence and a stark underrepresentation in positions of power.

Forms of oppression:

• Cultural: The Ashkenazi-led state sought to create a European-centric society, leading to the dismissal of Mizrahi culture, language, and traditions. Arab Jews were never part of the original Zionist vision, which was fundamentally a European nationalist project.

• Social and economic: Mizrahi immigrants were often directed to live in overcrowded and impoverished areas, experience segregated educations, their cultural background was seen as a hindrance to success in a society that favoured European norms.

• Political: The ruling establishment exploited and marginalized Mizrahi communities, leading to a lack of representation in political and economic systems.

• "De-Arabization": Many Mizrahi Jews felt pressured to abandon aspects of their identity, particularly their connection to Arab culture, to be accepted into Israeli society. This pressure was codified in the 2018 Nation-State Basic Law, which stripped Arabic of its official language status, reducing it to merely having 'special status' - a symbolic and practical erasure of Mizrahi linguistic and cultural heritage.

If the Zionist state discriminates among Jews - creating a hierarchy of “kinds of Jews,” what Mizrahi scholars call the paradox of Jewish racism - then Zionism cannot be equated with the protection of Jews from antisemitism. Criticizing Zionism is not inherently antisemitic, and defending Zionism is not the same as defending Jews as a people

Both Zionism and European antisemitism emerged from the same historical context of 19th-century European nationalism and racial thinking. It is deeply bad faith to project European frameworks of antisemitism onto Arab and Palestinian resistance to Israeli occupation and expansionism - conflating opposition to specific state violence with the racial hatred that characterized European antisemitism erases the material reality of dispossession and systemic oppression,.

“If I were an Arab leader, I would never sign an agreement with Israel. It is normal; we have taken their country. It is true God promised it to us, but how could that interest them? Our God is not theirs. There has been Anti-Semitism, the Nazis, Hitler, Auschwitz, but was that their fault? They see but one thing: we have come and we have stolen their country. Why would they accept that?”

David Ben-Gurion (Founding father of Israel and first Israeli Prime Minister)
Le Paraddoxe Juif . pp121.

Ben-Gurion could discuss, quite openly, that “we have come and we have stolen their (Palestinians) country,” while describing the later unforeseen Arab Jewish immigrants as being “two thousand years behind us*,” implying they needed to be remade as modern Israeli citizens, modeled on European Ashkenazi norms.

Tom Segev, 1949: The First Israelis


1. Gender, ethnic, and national earnings gaps in Israel: The role of rising inequality (Haberfeld & Cohen)