I only want an emoji to burn the Israeli flag. Not the Star of David which happens to be on the flag.

That’s just the nasty thing about it, because you can’t just burn the flag and not burn the Star. Incidentally, unlike the current orthodoxy, I’m fine with burning a white flag with blue bars and no star, that’s whatever to me.

Again, in agreement. But there is nuance. Take the slogan “there is only one solution, Intifada revolution” that is a little more ambiguous. If I was to believe what you said: “communication is about intention and reception” then we should be getting rid of this slogan, no? It’s not being received well. No one knows what an Intifada is in the west and thinks it means something like a Jihad. It’s a pain in the neck correcting people, but I do it anyway. Because it’s what the Palestinians want to say.

Let me start with:

If I was to believe what you said: “communication is about intention and reception”

How can you possibly dispute this? It’s the only way to define communication. If you didn’t have regard for reception, then why bother with language? Language is useful because it is a system of ordering and articulating ideas so that someone else can have the idea in their head that you have in yours, even if, for example, their attitude toward that idea is very different. If you were to disbelieve what I said, why not save energy by writing “vvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvv” while thinking about your opinion? It’s because you want me to understand ideas that you have and so you are using a system of common reference to do that.

Regarding the broader point, I think whether a slogan is worth using is entire contingent on the social situation.

I don’t actually think “Intifada” has been that bad a term to use, because obviously many reactionaries say it’s a call for the Islamist Jihad slaughter of every Jew on the planet, but most people just understand that it’s a foreign word that they aren’t familiar with and are at least somewhat receptive to the very simple explanation of what it is. Even when he was “standing his ground,” I think that Zohran was kind of a coward on this issue, because the Intifada is not merely a “struggle,” it is a specific group of anti-zionist movements. If you want to support these movements, I don’t think there’s a way around using their actual name, so it is therefore necessary to defend the use of the name and explain its meaning if that is part of your political project.

That necessity does not carry over to flag-burning, because unlike needing to name a group to support it, it’s not necessary to burn a country’s flag to call for its government to be completely dismantled and its politicians and military imprisoned (etc.) You can a) just say those words, b) say things like “from the river to the sea,” etc. and you can even c) pick other extremely provocative messages that don’t involve burning religious symbols, like “Death, Death to the IDF”. That’s one that is not just worth defending but, from what I can tell, important to defend, because the destruction of the IDF really is critical to the movement’s success and we can’t pretend that it doesn’t need to be destroyed. “From the river to the sea,” likewise, I view as necessary to defend, even more so, because it expresses the need for all of historic Palestine to exist freely and not as just a pair of ethnostates like liberal zionists suggest. It expresses the necessity that the zionist ethnostate not just retreat, but stop existing completely. If you cannot say “from the river to the sea,” you cannot express anti-zionist ideology almost at all.

Flag-burning is not remotely critical in the manner of these slogans. That doesn’t make the people who do it antisemites (mostly they are not), I just think it’s not the best route for anti-antisemites to communicate their correct desire for the annihilation of Israel.

It’s annoying how often it comes up, but you have to admit it’s staying power throughout the decades in the forms of “PC” and such has to mean something. ADL and Canary mission wouldn’t be given loads of resources to root out resistance if it didn’t do anything. That’s why I and Norman Finklestein (who also had issues with the “there is only one solution, Intifada revolution” until corrected by a nearby protester, IIRC) talk about cancelling.

You’re jumping at shadows, because nothing I have said is consistent with “canceling” anyone, and I have rejected moralizing and totalizing notions like that at every instance where it even vaguely came up. The idea was contained nowhere in my writing, it existed in your head and then you accused me of it, and that’s shitty behavior.

You see, this backing off of strong rhetorical positions of support to move to weaker ones is exactly how we get weaker figureheads in the Left, ones that don’t fully back a Palestinian state until its too late like Bernie (or i guess he’s a downright Zio now I honestly haven’t been following him), or ones that are forced to say in interviews “Israel has a right to exist, but here’s a catch” like Mamdani. Soft Language is the first domino that leads to a lack of commitment to strong positions that the general public supports.

I think that I have made it clear by the foregoing statements that my problem isn’t about language being softened, I completely agree with you that we need strong language, stronger than what is even in the mainstream pro-Palestine protests currently. My argument is that with this strong language, we need to be very deliberate and very precise with what we say, and to pick our battles correctly because we only have so much time and capacity for dealing with stupid bullshit. If you think debates like this are a waste of time (and I kind of agree with you), using defective messaging at a huge scale entitles also doing a huge amount of labor to litigate with potentially tens of millions of people about the stupid fucking flag. It’s much better to use extreme language that, when explained, is an open-and-shut case without room for squishiness like is introduced by attachment to the Star of David here, and we have no shortage of that, as discussed earlier.

In my mind yes. Just as a white cross on a red background is entirely separate from a red on on white, and both are separate from a normal cross. The blue bars turn the star of David from a religious symbol into a national one

A symbol is a symbol. I don’t think that the bars completely change how the flag-burning is received, though they do change it significantly. But I think there’s overlap in the reception because it is still a Star of David. I think over time, if we can communicate to the relevant audiences that the Star of David is literally used in Israel as a hate symbol in a way extremely similar to the Swastika (tagging buildings, carving it into stolen fields, carving it into people’s skulls), then that might change things.

Honestly, I’m not as deeply invested in this general subject (burning Israeli flags) as it might come off from me making this thread and bickering with people, I just hate the bad arguments people make for it. Go burn it at a rally if you really want, I will neither call you an antisemite nor even think it, I just don’t think it’s a good way of communicating what you want compared to other slogans and symbols already in use.

Ah, I see. Well, I can’t imagine what I’d be accomplishing with this performance by playing both accounts, since I don’t think this is that powerful of a wedge issue.