Things Aren’t Peaceful in Palestine - Page 495

On November 04 2025 21:33 Jankisa wrote:
My point is that your "of course you would say that you are Polish" is more bigoted then anything that's been written in this thread is anti-Semitic.

The people who have contributed the most to the rise of anti-Semitism in the 21st century (you know, the one we live in) are Nethyanahu and his merry band of extremists, maybe if you focused on that instead of being focused on using many words to be bigoted it would be worth doing anything other then rolling eyes at you.

On November 04 2025 14:12 Ze'ev wrote:
He dismisses, with an eye roll, the idea that antisemitism could have a structural basis in Western culture while coming from a society with one of the deepest and most documented histories of pogroms, discrimination, complicity, and slaughter. It’s like a white southerner today mouth agape in shock at the mention of racism. I’m not criticizing him for being Polish, I’m pointing out that failing to recognize how cultural antecedents shape perception is exactly what implicit bias means. Poland’s history is steeped in the normalization of antisemitism, and today it remains one of the most antisemitic countries in Europe. Not noticing that doesn’t disprove its existence, it’s how it persists.

The irony of him brushing off any mention of antisemitism while proving the point as he talks. That kind of disinterest, the lack of any real concern, is exactly how it slips by unnoticed. It doesn’t need to be loud or obvious to exist. Of course it isn’t obvious, implicit bias and normalization make prejudice feel expected, even natural. That is the whole point of deconstructing a culture shaped by white supremacy. The people who think it’s gone are the ones normalizing an insidious version of it. Oh come off it. I was talking about implicit and structural bias hidden in cultural tropes, and his response was that he “rolls his eyes” and tunes out anyone who mentions antisemitism. If you can read that and still claim he wasn’t dismissing it as a dead issue, you’re either not paying attention or you’re being deliberately obtuse.

edit: This whole thread feels like a rerun of the early 2000s colorblind arguments. What do you mean there are white supremacist tropes in culture? I don’t see race! It’s bizarre how reactionary so many of you so-called progressives sound, recycling the same rhetoric that once belonged to the people you claim to oppose.

On November 04 2025 22:22 Billyboy wrote:

Except he never said what you are accusing him of, and I explained that to you. Hell his post is still here you could go read it again.

@wombat, this was the BS I was trying to stop with a post that just explained what I hoped was a misinterpretation. And this is the major problem with this thread and bunch of people who like to pretend they are the victim and others are mean to them. Of course people are going to respond angrily when they are misrepresented in the most awful way and people continue to do it after being corrected.

I often wonder how many of the angry crew on here would react if they actually read the words and not the really awful ones they make up. I can't even imagine what it is like in real life with spoken word, which is easier to mishear and you can't go back and check.

On November 04 2025 14:49 Sent. wrote:
Looks like antisemitism is not enough and we need to add racism and white supremacy to make sure we can avoid talking about Palestine. It's totally going to work this time.

On November 04 2025 22:44 WombaT wrote:

Where do you live? Location can be quite critical to one’s take on this issue I would imagine. One can’t untether experiences and observations while attempting to look at one’s biases.

You’ve got your day-to-day experiences, then above that, the vague political/media culture of where you reside. Which yes, outsiders can access, but generally aren’t subsumed in it or have it bleed in as would a native.

And floating above all that is your kinda international, cosmopolitan internet.

I think the latter is certainly a vector for all sorts of anti-Semitism, and it can show up almost anywhere. I was watching a video on the 90s FPS series Marathon that Bungie made before doing Halo, and you had some bloke rambling in the comments about the World Economic Forum and the Jews.

It can crop up apropos of nothing, almost anywhere, kinda hard to avoid. And I’m sure for the multitude of people who scoff, dismiss or find it repugnant, there are people who start jumping down the anti-Semitism rabbit hole. I would presume people who live in more anti-Semitic environments generally would be more susceptible on average, but that’s a best guess.

To those other layers, well I’ve feet in two countries, the UK and Ireland.

In the UK, plenty of politicians, or prominent figures of the Jewish community frequently conflate criticism of Israel with anti-Semitism. Not always, but quite often fallaciously to the sensibilities of many. Which is also rather infuriating for many. It’s somewhat split on sentiment towards either side of this conflict. Across the country, the Muslim population is pretty sizeable, but it’s not distributed evenly, so you have areas where the Muslim population hold a lot of political sway.

While on average the UK is reasonably down the middle, there are places where being anything other than pro-Palestine is political suicide. We’ve also seen an increase in recorded anti-Semitic hate crimes, presumably at least somewhat boosted by the feelings elicited by this current conflict. I think it’s fair to say this isn’t a good sign, although it may not indicate a broader rise in anti-Semitic views. The existing anti-Semites may be more driven to actually act, or perhaps people are more willing to report these acts and be taken seriously, or a combination thereof. Wherever the truth lies, it sure ain’t good if you’re Jewish, or indeed if you care about people not being subject to hate crimes.

Ireland’s more monolithically pro-Palestine, although as I said previously it’s mostly viewed through a colonial analogue lens. Catholicism rules the roost at around 69% of people (nice), followed by no religion at 14%. There’s only about 2% Protestants in Ireland, slightly more than Orthodox Christians. Islam is approaching that range but isn’t quite there yet. Ireland’s Jewish population? About 2500-3000.

I’d contend that while it appears counter-intuitive, having a population that small can actually insulate from bigotry. You’re simply too small and irrelevant a group, people may not even be aware of stereotypes that pertain to your group, be they positive or negative ones. Northern Ireland has much more religious tension precisely because it’s split basically 50/50 down the middle between Catholicism and Protestantism.

It’s not all sunshine and rainbows of course. Ireland has, in my humble opinion been less bigoted than other European nations because of this, and not some superiority of culture. And many Irish think it is the latter and are quite complacent. We’re already seeing early echoes now of what we’ve seen elsewhere, as the numbers approach a certain threshold so too comes reactionary politics. Although, Jewish people aren’t going to be the target, but brown folks and especially Muslims.

This is just going to differ elsewhere. Unless one goes full orthodox, or wears a kippah or yarmulke or whatever, or has a surname ending in ‘stein’, chances are most in the British isles wouldn’t pick up on any other signifiers that would denote Jewishness. It just wouldn’t register. They’d just be a white bloke or blokette, and part of the white privilege bloc. ‘Oh I didn’t know x was Jewish’ is a pretty common refrain.

This would contrast a bit with the US, where you have a media tradition of prominent Jewish figures who are very overtly Jewish, and happy to own that. Not something we really have over here.

Anyway getting into rambling territory, but that’s my broad-brush observation about certain attitudes and the background in my two vague locales.

Anti-Islamic sentiment absolutely dwarfs anti-Semitism, it ain’t even close. One could extrapolate that out to Palestine but I think we just end up in the weeds. As indeed we do with anti-Semitism when it’s brought to the table a lot of the time around this subject.

More broadly, when does an observation invoke a trope? And when does that spill into anti-Semitism? It’s why I have a problem with some of these anti-Semitism rankings, because it feels those lines end up getting blurred.

I’ve got two blokes, Dave1 and Dave2, who are both Jewish. Dave is just living his life, isn’t super political but has his views as all of us do, he’s not a fan of Israel’s conduct in Gaza. Dave2 is massively into politics and his Jewish identity, defends Israel all the time and is planning to emigrate there with his family.

Now, the trope that Jews are loyal to Jews versus whatever nation they’re in, historically has been a justification for atrocity, I doubt any here would dispute that.

For me in this hypothetical, Dave2 is literally doing just that. The anti-Semite may go ‘Well Dave1 is secretly like that too, you know what Jews are like’ and I think that’s kind of the line in this hypothetical where observation and tropes move into bigoted territory, where the actual actions cease to matter, merely the identity.

I had a brief scan of some of these surveys and I think the questions were a bit ambiguous at times, one could extrapolate multiple meanings from them.

More broadly again, Israel is quite a sui generis entity to begin with. Attitudes will reflect that. I think we’re in an epoch where simultaneously you’re seeing a desire for ethno-nationalism in big chunks of Western populations, but where the other big chunk is vehemently opposed to such conceptions. Given Israel is basically explicitly that as a state, it’s only natural for the latter types to have issues there

On November 04 2025 14:12 Ze'ev wrote:
Poland’s history is steeped in the normalization of antisemitism, and today it remains one of the most antisemitic countries in Europe. Not noticing that doesn’t disprove its existence, it’s how it persists.

On November 06 2025 11:19 Ze'ev wrote:
Already condemned Israel for war crimes and abuses in Palestine. That was never the question. The point is that political conflicts do not happen in a cultural vacuum. The war on terror was driven by geopolitics and Islamic extremism, and it was also driven by American xenophobia and white supremacy. Both things were true. If you only acknowledge one half, you are lying to yourself.

Same here. You cannot separate how people talk about Palestine from the cultural stories they inherit about Jews. To pretend you can discuss this purely on material terms while ignoring the psychological and historical baggage in the room is childish. If you want to have an adult conversation, you have to be able to hold more than one cause in your head at once. If your reaction to the mention of antisemitism is to roll your eyes and opt out, you are not doing analysis. You are defending your emotional comfort

edit: I'll be clear as crystal so no one can cry later that im trying to distract from anything: Israel is a society woven with religious extremism and racism, Netanyahu and his Government have committed war crimes and ought to be punished with the death penalty.

Not trying to be an asshole, but this post is meandering and relies almost entirely on personal anecdotes while ignoring the actual cultural and historical structure that shapes attitudes toward Jews. It treats your own experience as evidence of how society works, instead of recognizing that European culture has over two thousand years of antisemitism woven into it, and that those patterns do not disappear just because they are invisible to you. That invisibility is the mechanism.

What you are doing is choosing the interpretation that feels emotionally comfortable to you, rather than the one supported by history, sociology, and polling. It is a psychological defense, not an analysis. You are not engaging with the argument about cultural inheritance and implicit bias. You are retreating into “well, I personally haven’t seen it.” That is not insight. It is avoidance.

What you all need to accept is pretty simple:

A) The Western world has a long history of antisemitism.

B) Culture shapes how people think and what they notice.

C) implicit biases are usually invisible to the people who live inside them. It’s like a fish not noticing water. What feels “neutral” is often just what you grew up with.

D) This does not mean that criticism of Israel is inherently racist, or that any of you are personally being called racist.

E) It means that if you do not pay attention to the cultural backdrop you inherited, you are more likely to miss how certain narratives frame Jews, how they get repeated, and how your “starting position” is already shaped by that history.

If you don’t look at that, you won’t see the emotional tone that guides your interpretation of events. You won’t see how threats are downplayed or how real harm can be dismissed. You end up unable to understand your own society or your own reactions. You blind yourself to the very dynamics you think you are analyzing. This is why minority groups routinely report different political perceptions and threat assessments than the majority. Their vantage point is structurally different. Their accounts deserve greater epistemic weight because they are the ones who experience the edge of the bias directly.

On November 06 2025 22:15 Razyda wrote:


Dude, you do realise that Poland was literally safe heaven for Jewish people through nearly its entire existence. To credit my country Poland was generally chill when it came to religion. (except arians for some reason, go figure)

On November 06 2025 23:22 WombaT wrote:

Both things can be true, no?

Even today, a lot of countries with big immigrant/non-indigenous populations are simultaneously the most tolerant, and the most bigoted.

As per a previous post I made on Ireland and Jews today, being such a small minority can be an insulator from bigotry. Not always of course, but you’re so small a cohort to really elicit much feeling. There’s about as many Jews in the Republic of Ireland as there are pupils and staff in my son’s school.

I don’t know enough about Poland’s history to assess this, I’d be interested to learn more on the topic!

On November 10 2025 12:49 Billyboy wrote:
Hello anti-racists, is the above post alright or not? Why or Why not?