A group tracking antisemitism in Germany said Tuesday that it documented a drastic increase of antisemitic incidents in the country in the month after Hamas attacked Israel on Oct. 7.
The RIAS group said it recorded 994 incidents, which is an average of 29 incidents per day and an increase of 320% compared to the same time period in 2022. The group looked at the time period from Oct. 7 to Nov. 9.
Among the 994 antisemitic incidents, there were three cases of extreme violence, 29 attacks, targeted damage to 72 properties, 32 threats, four mass mailings and 854 cases of offensive behavior.
Many Jews in Germany experienced antisemitic incidents in their everyday lives and even those who weren’t exposed to any antisemitic incidents reported feelings of insecurity and fear, said RIAS, which is an abbreviation in German for the Department for Research and Information on Antisemitism.
Jews are people, Israel is a colonial entity. The abolishment of Israel as a state does not mean the death of its inhabitants.
So you people actually want Israel to be gone? Where shall all the Israelis go, in your opinion? And why do the Israelis have less of a right for a country than the Palestinians?
Well first generation settlers should definitely move back to their homes, wherever they have citizenship and it’s feasible (not refugees etc).
But as for the rest I never said expel everyone in Israeli occupied territory. I said abolish the state. They can still live there, but not under a genocidal ethnostate in which you have higher status for being a member of one faith.
Land will have to be redistributed, and reparations paid as well.
Who is supposed to pay those reparations if Israel doesn’t exist anymore and there are no Israelis?
How are the Jews supposed to protect themselves from the people who want them out of the country or dead (which is the reason why Israel came into existence in the first place)?
What kind of state do you think Palestine would be? Or is it okay to have a Muslim ethnostate but not a Jewish one?
Never said all the people currently there had to leave
Maybe when they’re not stealing Palestinian land and genociding Palestinians, there wouldn’t be so much animosity.
One representative of those that live there, a mix.
You don’t seem to know a lot about the area.
I am curious, how would genocide of non-muslims and LGBT individuals along with religious oppression of women be prevented in your suggested scenario where the state of Israel is abolished?
It is possibly the most diverse nation on planet Earth, and a beacon of personal liberties, stability and democracy when compared to other MENA countries (if you disagree here, please do give a counter-example!)
so threw all jews out of Israel got it.
You are the problem highlighted by this thread.
I think brainwashed circlejerkimg is the problem highlighted in this thread, but to each his own
I think they mean they just share the land with the Palestinians, the people who they threw out when they got there.
If the US can manage it with African Americans or Native Americans, or South Africa can manage it post apartheid, or the UK can manage it after the Troubles, I think it’s possible. It won’t be easy, but it’s worth the work to stop the violence.
People are really uneducated about how Israel came into existence. This is a country from a group of people who already lived there. It wasn’t external conquerers who came to the land.
It was external settlers generally, especially starting around the Law of Return being a thing. Wikipedia and other sources says about 50% come from Europe and Russia, and the other generally from the surrounding Middle Eastern countries once Israel became a thing and started calling people towards it. Even today, lots of people immigrate there from Europe or the US.
Are you talking from thousands of years ago? That’s a strange justification to kick people out of their houses in the last 70 years, but I am down to read other sources if you’ve got them. I am admittedly still pretty new to this whole subject.
Just calling them settlers would be ignoring a huge part of history, and missing out on a lot of nuance - as would calling them natives of the area. Some certainly were, but many, if not most were refugees to varying degrees.
To any reader, keep in mind this is not intended as a moral judgement in any direction, rather an important historic context to the situation. It’s a long read.
My writing of this context begins, loosely, in the 19th century. Jews are an almost omnipresent and incredibly diverse minority culture in Europe and have been persecuted to varying degrees for more than a millenia. This persecution has however usually been less systematic and more spontaneous. That changed with concepts such as nationalism, nation-states and more centralised governments.
Minority cultures were considered a detriment to national unity, and hence more “formalised” discussion of “the Jewish Question” (yes, the one the NSDAP in the 20th century attempted to “solve”) entered the European political discourse. Keep in mind, jews were far from the only persecuted group. Roma, for instance, was another, along with many local groups such as the Basque, Sapmi and Tatars.
It was in this enviroment that an idea sprung up among jewish intellectuals, that of Zionism. There are many different opinions on the motives behind it, but the goal was a jewish homeland, where they could be free from persecution. British Mandatory Palestine, heralded as the home of the jewish people in religious texts became the dream. Long before that “Shana Haba’ah B’Yerushalayim” (“Next year in Jerusalem”) had been a commonly used phrase during passover. Europeans invented and enforced nationalism, and Zionism became the jewish dream of their own nation, free from persecution. A trickle of jews to Israel would begin, but the events of the 20th century would turn that trickle into a flood.
Antisemitism continues to proliferate during the early 20th century and the German NSDAP (commonly known as the Nazi Party) would take things to the next level. Following 1933, Jews would attempt to flee Germany, sensing impending doom, yet be refused visas almost wherever they turned (with a few notable exceptions). The Western World was perfectly content to stand by and watch as Germany slowly commenced the horrors, and send back those desperate refugees who pleaded for their lives to their doom. On a personal note, I wonder if Germany would have been allowed to complete their genocide, had it not been for them starting yet another World War.
I will not elaborate on the Holocaust of WW2. I expect that you all are familiar, and if not, do yourselves a service and read about it.
The aftermath of it was just as gruesome. Nobody had wanted the jewish refugees before the war, and nobody wanted the “few” hundred thousands of survivors either. So, they were kept in camps. They had lost their homes, their posessions, most of their loved ones, along with any trust they had had for their local communities which had sent them off to die at the hands of Nazis.
Many of the refugees before, during and in the aftermath of WW2 would make their way to Israel, where burgeoning jewish communities would welcome them - pooling their resources along with using aid from mainly american jews to purchase land and build homes for them. The British were keeping the peace - and attempting to prevent the influx of people. This along with growing jewish communities meant freedom from persecution (mostly).
The British kept the peace, until they didn’t. I won’t elaborate on the details here as I would prefer to avoid controversy. Besides, I’d have to double the length of this text to just scratch the surface. The summary is that the State of Israel came into existence, born with a collective memory of the recent holocaust and a determination to never let it happen again, along with a huge dose of distrust against much of the Western World. Whatever the reasons, the law of return is implemented. I’d like to think it was an act of compassion, a reaction to the fact that jews had nowhere to go before, during or after the holocaust.
One would’ve hoped that the story ended there, but no.
In the aftermath of the war, and following other Arab-Israeli wars anti-semitism would blossom further in the Arab world, alongside Islamic Arab nationalism. With varied reasons, some of their own volition and some displaced, a mass exodus of jews occurred from Arab countries, some 80% of which moved to Israel, many without any of their possessions. By 2019 the number of Jews in Arab countries was less than 13’000 and 15’000 in Turkey, compared to a rough million people who were living there in 1948.
In the communist Bloc, antisemitism continued under soviet rule, continuing the ancient Russian traditions of pogroms. Despite efforts to prevent jewish emigration from Warsaw Pact communist republics, many managed to escape. When the bloc fell in the 90s, many more would find their way to Israel.
For those of you who read this far, thank you and I hope you found it informative and/or interesting. It is not the story of Israel, but rather that of a people who have been persecuted for a long, long time, and still, to a somewhat lesser degree, is being persecuted.
[Redacted]
The historical context makes the ongoing situation even more tragic, and I sincerely hope that there will be some sort of peaceful resolution.
E: removed some possibly personal info
Really good write up! I appreciate the effort put into it.
It is really sad the persecution of Jewish people, and I definitely sympathize. But the only part I want to clarify is that you kind of glossed over the nakba in that part where the British stopped holding the peace. If it was just a small continuous trickle of Jewish refugees into Palestine, no one would have a problem with it, except for the normal anti-immigration folks. But it’s that part where you decide to give part of the country away and then the violent disposession of people from their homes to enforce it that seems wrong, and should ring familiar with those who know about the genocide of the Indians in the US.
But I blame the British and UN, too. They’re the ones who offered to cut pieces away from a country to offer to the immigrants. It’s like if your landlord came in and said you’re going to have to rent one of your bedrooms to his nephew, and even though you’re the one who lives there and pays rent, you can’t argue because he’s the landlord.
And I even understand the desire to secure a homeland at all costs after such a huge, terrible event of the holocaust. But that doesn’t mean I agree with it, and the consequences continue to reverberate to this day show partly why. Working for peace and seeing the signs of fascism to prevent it from happening again is the answer, not a might makes right apartheid ethnostate. There’s some lesson here about violence leading to violence.
Black people have gone through their own shit here in the United States, and while some people have suggested just leaving the country and making their own place in Africa, I think Martin Luther King, Jr’s dream was a much better idea (seriously, read the history of Liberia, it’s filled with violence and oppression towards the natives followed by them rising up, and then civil wars even into the 2000’s). Just make the place here the kind of place that’s better. And while it’s not perfect, it’s way better than it used to be, and I think he was proven right.
Yes - in fact, I didn’t write about it at all. The history of the jewish people is but one part of the context to the conflict, which is more complex than most people realize. I intentionally limited myself to the situation outside Israel, given that there are very heated opinions on what happened within.
Some further reading on the situation in Mandatory Palestine is linked below. Of note is that the british often attempted to include Arabs in their decisionmaking processes, but were met with refusal and violence. Even so, the British would implement the White Paper of 1939, significantly restricting jewish migration to mandatory Palestine and effectively forbidding jewish purchases of land in 95% of the area.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mandatory_Palestine
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_Paper_of_1939
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balfour_Declaration
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peel_Commission
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antisemitism_in_the_United_Kingdom
Ah I see. Thanks again!
What about the approximately 20 % Palestinian Israelis? And do all of the Israelis have to disappear somehow and look for a place to live in other countries? Or only those who are first generation immigrants? Are you against immigration in general, btw?
“Kick people out of their homes”, so are you talking about the illegal settlements in the Westbank now?
You could start reading about in on Wikipedia.
Holy strawman! I never said all the Israelis have to leave. I said they should share the land, like every other developed country in the world that has black people and white people that live in the same areas, or natives and immigrants, etc. I’m not against immigration, I’m against using it as manpower to violently disposess natives and sweep people from their homes, then giving the immigrants better rights while pushing the people who lived there to smaller and farther areas until you get all their land. You know, settler colonialism. Just give everyone the same rights and protections.
There’s a reason there’s only 20% Palestinian Israelis. They were all violently kicked out, then kept in these small, dense settlements of Gaza and the West Banks, and they need special citizenship and passports to travel to Israel or even from one to the other.
I was talking about the nakba, but the West Bank settlements also applies, I suppose. We can call them illegal, but Netanyahu has christened a bunch of them despite what the international community thinks, and it’s still happening.