Hey all. I’d like to open an official discussion regarding the upturning of the prior Hexbear party line on an :israel-cool: emote proper with the unambiguous Zionist flag.
I want to preface this by saying this is not in a ‘ceding the issue’ way. Over the past year I’ve been trying to engage in self-crit w/rt the chauvinism I’ve internalized growing up in a Liberal Zionist household, and my personal viewpoint on it did a 180 some months back, so I want to reopen this discussion proper in my personal capacities as Self-Appointed Emote Czar.
The reason it’s taken long enough beyond that is prior to July, I was essentially half-engaged with the site in order to finish out my degree. After that, it’s been mostly inertia of confirming with the admins and other /c/Judaism mods, as well as having to be rigorous about my job search personally giving me little free time to coordinate this.
I do not want to center myself in this conversation more than I inadvertently already have, so I will leave my own opinion on the issue as a comment rather than explaining further here.
The consensus we’ve roughly come to is to open up the discussion in an official manner for a day or so. After that, I’ll weigh the discussion in an entirely vibes-based manner (sorry Dean Norris enjoyers) and we’ll alter Hexbear party line on it accordingly.
You’re good imo, I don’t think you have anything to apologize for on this one because there’s serious intergenerational trauma involved and that doesn’t just go away overnight.
User hello hello made a hilarious version that has the resistance red arrow over the star, sort of a graffiti aesthetic: https://hexbear.net/post/5886556
But someone else pointed out that adopting anything other than the Zionist entity’s national flag is a tacit concession to the fascist conflation of Judaism with Zionism, and I think that’s correct. If Israeli Zionists really want their genocidal project to be recognized as a political entity then it should at least be open to all the same acts of condemnation that any other oppressive nation-state is exposed to.
Otherwise yeah, it’s Jewish supremacy/exceptionalism, and if anti-Zionist Jewish people such as yourself and Norm Finkelstein openly recognize it as such, then what’s stopping us? I think we’re discerning enough to recognize when burning something with the star of David on it is an act of anti-Jewish hatred versus a condemnation of the settler-colonial project that claims to speak for all Jewish people.
The most reasonable argument I can see for not changing this position is that there could be legal repercussions on the site depending on how things go in legislation, but that’s a distant hypothetical, and why would there suddenly be repercussions now? I think it’s more important to make the site less hostile to Palestinian and other Arab users anyway. Since people do use this site for mutual aid, I think we can’t hide behind the excuse that it’s a non-serious shitposting site forever, and besides, I want it to be less of a white western echo chamber anyway, but I digress. I’m in favor of changing the emoji to the actual flag of the hateful, antisemitic Zionist entity.
And as to the potential for legal repercussions, didn’t some German instance get clowned to shit by our users for using that as an excuse to protect zionism?
You’re right, they did catch a bunch of derision for it and rightfully so, it’s a liberal move and if hexbear is to be anything other than a bunch of liberals I think this is a fantastic growth opportunity
I might be conflating them with the transphobia incident on the UK feddit, but I thought that the additional wrinkle there was that the potential legal repercussions were also way overblown if they existed at all, which it seemed like they didn’t.
If this was a situation where we knew or it was highly likely the site would actually get promptly shut down for this, rather than speculation we might be targeted in the future maybe, you could make arguments about what the course of action should be (and it still shouldn’t be “just fold and self-censor”), but the actual circumstances rn just don’t necessitate even having that conversation.