\nThis was no secret. We lived under the rule of the self-proclaimed \u201cJewish State.\u201d Israeli politicians have exhausted this line, and their international peers nodded along. The army declared itself a Jewish army and marched under what it has called a Jewish flag. Jerusalem city councilmen boasted \u201ctak[ing] house after house\u201d because \u201cthe bible says that this country belongs to the Jewish people,\u201d and Knesset members sang similar tunes. These legislators weren\u2019t fringe or far-right: the Israeli nation-state law explicitly enshrines \u201cJewish settlement\u201d as a \u201cnational value \u2026 to encourage and promote.\u201d\n<\/p>\n
\nStill, though this was no secret, we were instructed to treat it as such, sometimes by our parents, sometimes by well-meaning solidarity activists. We were instructed to ignore the Star of David on the Israeli flag, and to distinguish Jews from Zionists with surgical precision. It didn\u2019t matter that their boots were on our necks, and that their bullets and batons bruised us. Our statelessness and homelessness were trivial. What mattered was how we spoke about our keepers, not the conditions they kept us under\u2014blockaded, surrounded by colonies and military outposts\u2014or the fact that they kept us at all.\n<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n
\nFor the sake of western optics, Palestinians are supposed to deny the reality of their oppressors. Because of the inherent antisemitist history of Europe and America, abny allusion as to why these oppressors feel entitled to their land is verboten and Mohammed El-Kurd is tired of it:\n<\/p>\n
\nHere is where I stand. There is a Jew who lives\u2013by force\u2014in half of my home in Jerusalem, and he does so by \u201cdivine decree.\u201d Many others reside\u2014by force\u2014in Palestinian houses, while their owners linger in refugee camps. It isn\u2019t my fault that they are Jewish. I have zero interest in memorizing or apologizing for centuries-old tropes created by Europeans, or in giving semantics more heft than they warrant, chiefly when millions of us confront real, tangible oppression, living behind cement walls, or under siege, or in exile, and living with woes too expansive to summarize. I\u2019m tired of the impulse to preemptively distance myself from something of which I am not guilty, and particularly tired of the assumption that I\u2019m inherently bigoted. I\u2019m tired of the pearl-clutching pretense that should such animosity exist, its existence would be inexplicable and rootless. Most of all, I\u2019m tired of the false equivalence between semantic violence and systemic violence.\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
\nI think he’s right to be tired. It’s impossible to dismantle the Israeli system of Apartheid if we dcontinue to close our eyes to the reality of it, that it is Jewish supremacist, that it justifies its existence through Jewish history. Again, that does not mean that Jews should be blamed for this just because they’re Jewish, but that we should challenge the idea that being Jewish means being in support of the existence of Israel as a Jewish state.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
We’re always told that we should be careful to distinguish between Israel and “the Jews” and rightly so, that any particular Jewish person or group of Jews cannot be held accountable for the actions of Israel just vbecause they are Jewish. That even as genocide is waged in the name of the Jewish State, we […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14,254],"tags":[2802],"class_list":["post-10425","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-israelpalestine","category-war-on-gaza","tag-mohammed-el-kurd"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cloggie.org\/wissewords2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10425","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cloggie.org\/wissewords2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cloggie.org\/wissewords2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cloggie.org\/wissewords2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cloggie.org\/wissewords2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10425"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/cloggie.org\/wissewords2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10425\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10426,"href":"https:\/\/cloggie.org\/wissewords2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10425\/revisions\/10426"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cloggie.org\/wissewords2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10425"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cloggie.org\/wissewords2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10425"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cloggie.org\/wissewords2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10425"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}