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cyb3rd4ndy wrote (edited )

Ok, thanks - but I'm using myself as an example for how this becomes complicated... not just to express that I have a personal stake in the matter.

As an anarchist, that is, someone with a complicated theory about why I want anarchy and how to achieve anarchy, I'm opposed to all forms of nationalism. That includes the nationalism that created the United States, the nationalism that created the State of Israel, etc. but it also includes the other nationalisms in the Middle-East and Islamism. So as an anarchist, Jewish or not, that means I don't give nationalism a free pass just because it is the nationalism of an oppressed group of people. Palestinian nationalism doesn't get a free pass. Nor does Islamist nationalism. Not Zionism, not ISIS, not Fatah, not the PLO, not Hamas. So who exactly, as an anarchist, am I in solidarity with? Who am I an ally to, or an accomplice with? It isn't any generic ethnic, religious, racial, tribal, or national group. It is with others who are anarchists or at least whose goals aren't fundamentally against my own goals.

Now, as someone against colonization, that also means I aim at some kind of decolonization. That seems to be the logical conclusion. But what does decolonization look like if you are a diaspora Jew? Well, if the Left, anti-Zionists, etc. start calling you "white" and they deny that you are actually from a people indigenous to the place you're from, then what are you left to do? There is some ways that Jews have become white, but the way that this is used in anti-Zionist discourse is to deny that Ashkenazim are also indigenous to Palestine/Eretz Yisrael. Accepting the status of whiteness in the United States and in some European countries, to whatever extent that has happened, doesn't disqualify Jews from their claim to descend from people in Israel. So anyway, it's a real question what relationship with colonization is. Are American Jews participating in settler-colonialism more than Israeli Jews? That's the question. American Jews have no claim to indigenous ancestry in America, but they do in Israel. That's a big problem for how this discourse is framed. If Jews in America are participating in colonization more than Jews in Israel are, then a big piece of the story is missing from the anti-Zionist discourse.

I also think that anarchists in the United States should be paying at least as much attention to what the United States is doing to indigenous people here as it does to what Israel does to Palestinians. Here is one place news can be found about that:

https://www.indigenousaction.org/news/

So oddly enough, as an anarchist this is less infuriating for me than it would be if like most people in the entire world, I was a nationalist. Then I'd have to get into even more weeds when it comes to Israel policy, I'd have to look at international law, I'd have to compare Israel with other nation-states and their practices of colonization/ethnic cleansing/assimilation/etc.


I think that as anarchists, our fundamentals should apply to the United States, to Israel and Palestine, and to other places. Two especially relevant and related situations are Russian and Ukraine, and Turkey, Syria, Rojava. Anarchists should be able to take coherent positions related to all of these situations. Example...

https://www.autistici.org/tridnivalka/whats-new-in-anarchism-national-self-determination-and-the-coincidence-of-interests-with-capital/

This logic should also apply to Zionism, to Islamism, to Palestinian nationalism.

It should also reflect our solidarity with Rojava against Turkey, against ISIS, and against other nationalists opposed to Rojava.

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