I’m going to make this post and kick off this reading group to get it moving. If I try to plan it perfectly, it will never get done, so let’s just start and see how it goes, adjusting if needed.
The first book for this reading group will be Perfect Victims, by Mohammed El-Kurd. I’ve pasted the summary below.
Perfect Victims is an urgent affirmation of the Palestinian condition of resistance and refusal―an ode to the steadfastness of a nation.
Palestine is a microcosm of the world: on fire, stubborn, fragmented, dignified. While a settler colonial state continues to inflict devastating violence, fundamental truths are deliberately obscured—the perpetrators are coddled while the victims are blamed and placed on trial.
Why must Palestinians prove their humanity? And what are the implications of such an infuriatingly impossible task? With fearless prose and lyrical precision, Mohammed El-Kurd refuses a life spent in cross-examination. Rather than asking the oppressed to perform a perfect victimhood, El-Kurd asks friends and foes alike to look Palestinians in the eye, forgoing both deference and condemnation.
How we see Palestine reveals how we see each other; how we see everything else. Masterfully combining candid testimony, history, and reportage, Perfect Victims presents a powerfully simple demand: dignity for the Palestinian.
This book touches a lot on how Palestinians are constantly expected (especially by Europeans, who invented anti-semitism) to apologize for being Palestinians, and for being victimized by Jewish people.
We’ll start this week by reading and discussing the following article by the same author, which introduces some of his perspective on anti-zionism as a Palestinian.
https://mondoweiss.net/2023/09/jewish-settlers-stole-my-house-its-not-my-fault-theyre-jewish/
This article is just over 2000 words. Let’s discuss in the comments. I’ll keep this post up until next weekend, then we can move on to Perfect Victims. Please let me know in the comments if you think any changes are needed to this plan.
This is absolutely something I’ve also noticed. To say someone is a Jew often seems like a slur in and of itself, even when it’s relevant, correct, and simply used as a neutral descriptor. Of course, there are people who use it to imply Jews secretly control everything (or other such nonsense), but I feel that often it can be very easy to tell that that’s not the case with a particular situation, yet the situation will still be treated as though it is.
I tend to say and write “Jewish people” in place of “Jews” because otherwise it feels like I sound like a Nazi. I suppose I do this with most ethnic groups though, on reflection. Eg referring to black people as “blacks” parses as racist and reminds me of how white south Africans spoke about their indigenous populations.
Reminds me of “transwomen” vs “trans women” discourse in a lot of ways vis-à-vis othering or in the case of ethnicity, dehumanization.
That’s a good point. I actually do this as well (for the same reasons), but I will point out that it isn’t universal. I think people commonly say “Kurds”, “Arabs”, “Iranians”, “Afghans”, and “Turks” for example. Maybe it’s just a linguistic historical context issue, or maybe it’s because these are West and Central Asian people who are generally otherized in the west and that bleeds into the language used in general.
Regardless, I think people still do usually get treated the same for describing someone as Jewish using the word “Jewish”, they’re often assumed to be or treated as antisemitic even when it’s used as a neutral descriptor and the actual things they are saying are not antisemitic at all.
Beyond that, I find there’s a focus (even in this comment I’m making myself about this exact issue) on antisemitism as the primary issue when the actual issue is zionist genocide, which is perverse in and of itself.
Let me know your thoughts!
Sorry for the delayed reply. Been struggling to find the right way to respond to this, but I agree with your perspective.
My intuition is that there’s an important distinction between labels that primarily denote nationality vs labels that denote ethnicity (and another distinction again for religious labels like Muslim.) Identifying somebody by their nationality (eg Afghani, Iraqi, etc) shouldn’t necessarily imply ethnicity - except often it does, at least rhetorically, to the exclusion of diverse ethnic groups that exist within a nation. But none of this is actually useful except to try and untangle why a subset of these group identity labels “feel icky” or something. A racist does not care about precision and there are many people who, to take my country as an example, intend to imply “white” when they say “australian.”
(edit to add:) Jewishness is a tricky thing since it does not fit neatly into a single category. But Zionist and Jewish Israeli are both terms which mean exactly what I intend them to when I use them. If an argument I make using those terms is attacked as anti-semetic at least I have a fighting chance at defending myself.
The conclusion I’m circling around, I think, is that there’s an ambiguity and imprecision in language that is easily exploited and zionists take full cynical advantage of it. Where this becomes hard to combat is that these arbitrary rules / conventions that benefit zionists are (in the appropriate context) necessary to distinguish anti-zionist speech from anti-semetic speech. The game is rigged, either you play by the rules, which benefit of zionism, or you ignore them and create space for bigotry.
I can only settle on the idea that I (we) have to continue to be precise with our speech and essentially meet Zionists on their terms when speaking from a place of relative privilege compared to the people being oppressed, but we shouldn’t let other privileged people take advantage of the ambiguity to ignore and/or co-opt the voices of people oppressed by Jewish supremacists.
By staying precise (israeli rather than jew, jewish person rather than jew, etc) we hold ground against bigotry and make our arguments a little bit harder to ignore. I don’t think it’s hypocritical to say that the people directly oppressed by Israel should not be expected to tread as carefully, since the context of their speech is very different to our own.
It’s fucking maddening though. Propagandists for Israel willfully (gleefully, imo, tbh) play semantic games and misinterpret critical speech in the most bad faith way possible.
Good point. “Afghan” being on the list was my mistake, I was adding names of groups as they popped into my head and that one slipped through despite being a national demonym and not an ethnic group. “Iranian” is a national demonym too, but I’ve commonly seen it used to refer to ethnic Persians.
All excellent points. The only thing I would say is that when a comrade is imprecise with language in a clearly non-malicious way and zionists (including gentile zionists) try to exploit that to shift the focus from genocide of Palestinians to feelings of Jewish people, it’s important to reject that reframing wholly. Minor imprecision of language, even when it sounds bad and even when it’s not coming from a Palestinian, is no excuse to pivot away from the actual issue at hand, though zionists love doing so.
Of course, as you say, we should still always make efforts to be as precise as possible in our own speech.
This is true too, and something we should guard against. However, I feel that it’s often fairly easy to spot actual antisemitism fairly quickly. There’s a common idea I see people state that antisemites are very sneaky, but I think that’s not the case in the overwhelming majority of cases.
Yeah I was just trying to list nationality labels rather than ethnicities without putting much thought into it, thinking of examples we’re used to using and hearing that don’t raise the “is this some nazi shit?” eyebrow. Didn’t intend to make a point about your use of Afghan, I just got to thinking about it in the context of my country and how there shouldn’t be an ethnic implication when referring to a fully colonial nationality.
Good point, we’re carrying water for Israel when we police the speech of well meaning comrades. There’s a deeper thing here with taking things in good faith that goes well beyond the scope of this discussion, but I’m glad you made this point because it’s such a waste of time and good will when leftists start spiraling with each other over semantics.
Agreed again. They aren’t clever or sneaky, as a rule, just disingenuous and all that shit Sartre pointed out about reveling in ridiculousness and rhetorical game playing.
It’s difficult, while being jacketed as an antisemite is so risky in society, to just shrug off those accusations and stick to the points, but perhaps that’s in flux too. Maybe simply refusing to play defense and ignoring those accusations is appropriate more often than we’re conditioned to think.
Great reply, thanks!
Yes, I agree. I think it’s tough in practice when the stakes can be quite high. It definitely depends on the situation. However, I think many “average” people are being worn out on the constant accusations of antisemitism towards people saying things that are as incredibly controversial as “all children deserve to live”.
While it’s certainly still a huge risk to be labeled an antisemite in many cases, I think refusing to play defense is the best defense more often than we expect, because (IMO) the zionist strategy of centering (fake) antisemitism partially depends on being able to keep the focus on it as long as possible, which is made harder when the target refuses to entertain the accusation and stays on message.
Of course, in many cases they have the zionist media empires to turn to where they can focus on whatever they like for as long as they like, but as I said, I think people in general are getting tired of that kind of thing.
Yeah I’ve been half-arsed job hunting and so have had to go on linkedin a lot over the last couple of years and I’ve seen so many professionals posting under their real names and photos promoting the plight of Gazans, it has been quite astonishing and encouraging. So yeah I suspect the old zionist tactics aren’t anywhere near as effective anymore.
This has been a really stimulating chat, thank you. :)
Especially in israel, they chose to divide their society along religious lines! I may not like the term “judaization,” but that’s what they named the ethnic cleansing policy! The “Jewish state” prioritizes Jews over Arabs, so yes, I will be specifying Israeli Jews when I talk about the colonial oppressor just as I would say white Americans when discussing America