IT IS IMPORTANT TO SITUATE THAT THE FOLLOWING IS NOT A CONDEMNATION OF PRACTITIONERS OF JUDAISM. I WANT MY JEWISH FRIENDS AND FAMILY TO PRACTICE THEIR FAITH SAFELY WHEREVER THEY GO, WITHOUT HINDERANCE OR DISCRIMINATION ALL DAY EVERY DAY.
TO CRITIQUE AN ETHNONATIONALIST STATE IS NOT ANTISEMITIC. IT IS NOT ANTISEMITIC TO RECOGNIZE THAT THE NATION STATE OF ISRAEL IS AS TRIGGER HAPPY AS THE UNITED STATES.
THE MEDIA DOES NOT CARE THAT THEIR FRAMINGS OF ANY CRITIQUE OF ISRAEL AS A NATION STATE AS ANTISEMITISM IS EXTREMELY DANGEROUS.
They want this. The need this.
We cannot forget that many countries, AND ESPECIALLY THE UNITED STATES) rejected and/or LIMITED the entrance of Jewish refugees from Germany and Poland prior to and after the second Worlds War BECAUSE of white supremacy and the disturbing antisemitism of the American population. It can and will be easy to dismiss what I have to say but please stay with me to unpack this. My words are not the only words worthy of listening to or reading. But I am asking you to identify the white supremacy embedded within Israel’s war on Gaza and pause, even for a moment, at your first impulse to reduce these words to antisemitism.
Nazis WERE antisemitic. They were Christians. Biden uttering that he is a Christian Zionist…is him quite literally admitting to being a white supremacist, maybe even a nazi, and in doing so he equated Zionism with Nazism. We have to be careful not to allow these cunty ass politicians an inch of space to take this aggression further. Trump DID say he wanted to turn Palestine into a Riviera of the Middle East. And that is alarming.
Palestinian student, Mohsen Mahdawi, a co-president of Columbia university’s Palestinian Students Union, dared to display what Elon Musk and other members of the Trump administration would consider a weakness—empathy. He, along with countless others, have a simple request: an end to Palestinian genocide along with their freedom from Israeli occupation and their colonial project. One would think that a request as simple as “stop killing” would be met. However, since October 7, 2023, the bombardment of Palestinians in Gaza has been relentless. Asking for dignity and the ability to live has been labeled as antisemitic, grounds for arrest, and revocation of citizenship status—as is the case for Mahmoud Khalil who is currently in U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention in Louisiana.
ICE lured Mohsen Mahdawi to one of their facilities for a supposed interview to meet the civics portion of the pathway to citizenship and instead arrested him. In December of 2023, Mahdawi appeared on 60 Minutes where he elaborated on how he firmly stood against antisemitism. He elaborated that while at a Free Palestine demonstration at Columbia, a protester, who has no affiliation to Columbia university, shouted “death to Jews.” He recounted how he immediately told the person that their views did not align, took a megaphone, and then said that they (the protestors) where “conscious and educated students who know how to separate right from wrong” pointing out how morally wrong the unaffiliated persons statements were. Mahdawi, rightfully, continued on to say that the fight for Palestinian freedom is a fight against antisemitism. More, the response to dissent of United States foreign policy resulting in deportation, surveillance, and/or violence is not necessarily new; it is, however, emblematic of a system functioning as it is intended to.
The Palestinian struggle for liberation is one that is inherently anti-colonial and anti-imperial. Because of this, it is easier to identify the crimes against humanity being committed to Palestinian people by the nation state of Israel while the U.S. funds it. And the similarities between both nation states treatment of racialized bodies, and I am standing ten toes down on this, is eerily similar. The façade of U.S. democracy is fading. We are quickly descending into a dictatorial fascistic state—again, as it was always intended to be. Due process has been denied for students such as Mahdawi, Khalil, and non-student permanent resident Kilmar Abrego Ortiz, who was deported to CECOT, a notorious for human rights violations “super” prison in El Salvador.( First the Trump administration stated it was an administrative and then a clerical “error;” however, DHS released a “bombshell” report on Abrego Ortiz, claiming he was involved in MS-13 gang affiliated activities. The states participation in biopolitics is not an original iteration of state sanctioned terror for the United States. It is instead engrained into the very fabric of this country.)
In 1976 Yi-Fu Tuan wrote that ethnocentrism is characteristic of people everywhere, that it would be difficult for any culture, or in this case country, to not see itself as the “center of light” casting out darkness. Tuan states that for a period during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the self-indulgent glorification was “temporarily reversed” when Europe was “afflicted with the blight of tyranny and superstition.” Most interestingly, he continues that this romantic view of the self continues to afflict the West today while Westerners “wont [sic.] to contrast their own aggressive, exploitative attitude to nature with the harmonious relationships of other times and other places” (Tuan, 1976).
Palestinian liberation, deportations, racialized bodies, and ethnocentrism may seem like a swath of words strung together for woke points, they are all interconnected. In this case Tuan’s ethnocentrism should be read as white supremacist (or white supremacist adjacent) and not a faith based ethnocentrism masquerading as a moral and just democracy the Israeli state claims. It is clear that the Israeli governments actions mirror Western attitudes of aggression lacking in harmonious relationships with their Palestinian neighbors. Their blatant disregard for human rights, the enforcement of biopolitical hierarchies, bombardment, and war tactics to obtain the land is akin to tactics utilized in the Americas and other European colonies—all of which inherently unnatural and out of sync with the natural world. The brutality of Israel’s tactics is forcing many of us to sit with our unhealthy lack of a relationship with nature and each other.
The actions on behalf of colonialism can be seen today, in real time, on social media platforms if you know where to look. The nation state of Israel proclaims it has the right to self-defense—but is self-defense bombing Palestinian children’s bodies in half for nearly two years? If the actions of Israel are not viewed as either white supremacy or ethnocentric, what chance do Palestinians have to make it through what Nick Estes calls “twenty first century colonialism”? To ignore the enactment of ethnocentrism via white supremacy would not only be negligent, but also incredibly lazy.
This willingness to look away, to ignore a genocide, and to ignore the extremely calculated manipulation of using ethnonationalism renders Tuan’s assumption about Westerners relationship to nature true. This is not to say that all Americans and all Israeli’s deflect the roots of the system, this is, however, to say that all of us, Americans and Israelis alike, have the tendency to carry on and look away at something else as our militaries slaughter entire populations. If anything, the U.S. normalized an uncanny level of violence on a global scale that started the moment the first boatload of Europeans arrived on the shores of what was to become the United States of America.
Understanding that colonialism is always accompanied by brutality is essential to digest Estes’ comment on twenty first century colonialism. The actions of displacement and genocide by way of militarization were fundamental in establishing the United States as it exists today, and they have been replicated and upgraded as technology has advanced. Within the past few years, we have witnessed an extreme change in warfare. For example, while friends of mine were deployed to Afghanistan in 2008 and onwards, their experiences were virtually invisible to me. Maybe because I did not ask, or maybe because I did not even think to ask. Only when I began to understand what happened in Afghanistan did it occur to me to open my eyes, to look, to really see. Many friends of mine came home with severe PTSD, traumatic brain injuries, and other debilitating and disabling injuries.
I am not afraid to recognize my failures or where my American privilege and exceptionalism propelled me to exist as every (in)action I took was a contribution to the war machine. By chance, social media has allowed Palestinian people to share the effects of colonialism directly with the global population, including those of us who fund it willingly or not. It is my belief that the direct-to-public imagery of the war Israel has waged against Palestinians has assisted to garner an anti-war stance unlike anything I thought I would see in my lifetime. It is not enough to stop bloodthirsty politicians. And that alone horrifies me.
It is my belief that Netanyahu and Trump are one in the same. And even worse—this is just the American way. It is so American that it is reduced to media in the form of news and not life and death. In my mind and heart, typing out that reporting is news instead of a report on life, feels like I am “crazy.” I don’t even know how to phrase this statement because it is quite literally life and death in Palestine, Sudan, Congo, Kashmir, and other places.
I feel like I have lost my damn mind even saying that we should care about these issues because almost everyone around me is moving through life as if everything is fine. It isn’t JUST about the ongoing genocide. It is about the parasitic nature of white supremacy and its capital complex. And I do not mean that in a pretentious ass academic way (or attempt at academic) I mean it in the collective our most literal and analogical understanding of parasites. It is everywhere and it is in everything, and it corrupts all it encounters including our faiths. And just saying this sound so fucking crazy. It feels like it could absolutely be misconstrued as antisemitism or “un American” (and most likely will) but truthfully how—in 2025–are we using bunker busting bombs and starvation for nearly 2 years FOR…land?
I have seen bodies ripped apart by bombs.
Heads and limbs carried by loved ones in sheets and bags.
None of this is godly.
How could it be?
I want to understand how this is justifiable. How can this be explained and accepted by anyone? How are we so accepting of this? Americans have not recovered from the events that took place on September 11 in 2001. We have supplied the United States government with the funds for Israel to commit the murders of like eighteen 9/11’s.
What is a homeland if there is no one to share it with? What is a home without community? There is only a very small numbers of people who are able to live in their ancestral homelands and even then, they are only able to at the discretion of others in conditions of pollution and horrors we are barely starting to uncover.
Colonial projects are unnatural, inhumane, relentless, and their consequences are everywhere .
