Fair enough, all good. I’m leaving mine up because I think the point about the conflation of anti-zionism and anti-semitism being in itself antisemitic bears repeating.

oh no, statistics that challenge my world view! Quick, let’s not look into it at all and move the goal posts!

Could you at least try to engage in this discussion? Or maybe come up with any evidence supporting your world view?

There’s about 100 million evangelical christians in the US, and a LifeWay poll in 2017 showed that about 80% essentially considered themselves zionists. That’s 80 million. There’s 15.8 million jews worldwide. So the non-Jewish zionists outweigh Jewish zionists by a fair margin. Heck, they outweigh the zionist and the non-zionist jews taken together by a beefy margin, even.

If you’re equating the Jewish people with zionism, or conflating being in favor of zionism as somehow being benevolent to the Jewish people as a whole, you are treating the Jewish people as a monolith and are yourself being anti-semitic. Zionism is perfectly compatible with anti-semitism (see for example all those anti-semitic christians who enthusiastically support zionism), and anti-zionism is in itself not anti-semitic (cf Jewish voice for peace).

So making “zionist” a slur has nothing, absolutely nothing to do with being anti-anti-semitic or not.

The same way I don’t think we should capitulate to framing “cracker” as a slur, or to framing “black lives matter” as a racist thing to say, I don’t think we should capitulate to framing things like “from the river to the sea” or “zionist” as antisemitic.

But, as a thought experiment, let’s indulge in this doublespeak trash. What is a good alternative? So far I’ve got:

• Israeli colonizers
• Jewish supremacists
• genocidal sacks of shit
• Israeli apartheidists
• Isreal expansionists
• Israeli warmongerers
• people in favor of the genocide and apartheid committed by Israel (in full, every time you need to say zionist)
• modern day nazis
• zionazis (technically not zionist!)

So all of this liberal crybaby nomenclature trash aside, I actually do think “zionist” is in itself a fairly useless term for the Israeli apartheid question (as Norman Finkelstein and Judith Butler do too). While one faction of zionism pursued the nakba and massacres from fairly early on, and while this faction has been quite successful, there are other notions of zionism which do not entail murdering children or colonizing a country. When Netanyahu and Chomsky can both legitimately refer to themselves as zionists, I think it’s clear that zionism is too broad a term to be useful in the current ongoing genocide and the ethnic cleansing that has been going on for the better part of a century.

Oh my goodness you are in for a treat! Pourover coffee is in my opinion the best way to prepare a cup. Get yourself a v60, and the paper filters that go with it, watch a James Hoffman video on proper v60 technique, and enjoy. It should actually give a cleaner cup (less residue) than the French press.

Not probably. “Erase the memory of them. Erase them, their families, mothers and children.” says the head of their air force.

I guess the point you’re making is that this essentially shows that Israel is targeting any palestinian, not just hamas. That’s genocide.

You should read up on some history. I will briefly recapitulate:

• Israel started a war in 1967. Israel would argue it was in self defense, but their argument is basically the same as that of Russia for invading Ukraine. They (Russia and Israel) felt “threatened”, but they shot first. This war is known as the six day war.

• One outcome of this war was that 400k Syrians and Palestinians were displaced (something the western media has referred to as a form of ethnic cleansing in the context of the Russian invasion of Ukraine), and the Golan heights, Sinai peninsula (this might be another conflict), and the Gaza strip were occupied by Israel. Two of these are occupied to this day, a violation of international law (you’re not supposed to steal land by war). Here, I mean occupied in the sense that both Israeli troops, as well as Israeli settlers were present in the Gaza strip.

• In 2005, in an effort to improve their standing in the international community, Israel decided to disengage from Gaza in a very specific way. There would no longer be any troops or settlers present inside the Gaza strip. However, Israel would maintain complete control of the airspace, borders, and its shoreline. That is, anything or anyone going in or out of Gaza needs to be approved by Israel. That sounds bad, but to really appreciate the impact this has, it helps to know some figures. Gaza is twice the size of Washington DC, or about the size of Rotterdam, and it has about 2 million citizens. That’s three times as much as Rotterdam, so it’s very densely populated. That means it cannot feed itself, and relies on imports. Imagine a city in your country being completely cut off from the outside world beyond its borders. How long would it survive? At any rate, it is hopefully clear that Israel maintained its occupation of Gaza in 2005, despite not having boots on the ground. It is this version of the Gaza occupation that even David Cameron (who is not a progressive) called a prison camp. Do you know another word for a prison camp where you keep people of one ethnicity? Starts with a “c”.

• in 2006, two years after the death of Arafat, elections were held in Gaza and the West Bank for the legislative council of the Palestinian Authority. These elections were monitored by the Carter foundation, which found them to be fair. The Palestinians elected Hamas, which had a much less collaborationist attitude than the ruling Fatah. This upset Israel and the US. Hillary Clinton is quoted saying “we should have made sure that we did something to determine who was going to win.”

This describes the status quo up until October 7th. Some choice facts about the 2006-2023 period:

• in 2008, Israel calculated how many calories Gaza needs to survive and used this to limit the amount of food allowed into Gaza. This mass starvation policy ended after two years through international pressure. In the meantime, Hamas dug tunnels to smuggle more food in so that Palestinians could eat.

• Construction materials are not allowed into Gaza. This means that necessary repairs to crucial civilian infrastructure such as desalination plants cannot be done.

• Israel conducts regular bombing campaigns in Gaza, which they call “mowing the lawn”. This has killed thousands of Palestinians.

• At the march of return, a recent peaceful rally by Palestinians to be allowed back in their homeland, Israeli snipers deliberately shot people in the knees maiming dozens. In total 183 Palestinians were murdered, and thousands injured. Hospitals were overwhelmed.

There’s much, much more. So no, Gaza was not a joyful place to live before October 7th, and yes, it is because of religious terrorists, just not the ones you’re referring to.