Toxic Behaviour Part II

 

In Part I I mentioned how I saw a similarity between genocidal zionists and scumbag oil executives.  How could these human beings be such complete, entitled assholes?

It seems to me that they both share the same gross sense of entitlement and the same contempt for "others" and this is what allows these people (and others who possess their psychosis) to do what they do.

How could right-wing, zionist, Israeli politicians and racist IDF goons act with such inhuman barbarism, blurt out idiotic rationalizations for their barbarism, and then shriek about "antisemitism" whenever their barbaric actions and racist talking-points are criticized?  Could it be explained by the shamelessness of arrogance?  Which is to say: They know that we know that they're fabricating when they say that condemnations of their crimes is "antisemitism."  And they're grinning in our faces daring us to do something about it.

That might actually be the case with some of these individuals.  However, on the other hand, I know personally of a few instances of North American Jewish people who feel genuinely threatened by antisemitism and who feel that criticism of Israel is inherently antisemitic.

The first I'll mention is a guy I know as an acquaintance here in Toronto.  We only interact once in a while on social media nowadays but we used to drink in the same social circle a few years ago.  Young children at home and approaching forty years of age is preventing him from getting outside as often as he used to.  His being Jewish was just something that came out in conversation at some point.  He's not practicing so far as I know.  He doesn't give off an Adam Sandler or even a Jerry Seinfeld kind of vibe.  But it's part of who he is.

When this recent nightmare started, on October 8th he posted how, as a Jewish person, it rubs him the wrong way when people say they're not antisemitic "BUT" and then they start to criticize Israel.  He hasn't posted anything on the subject since, and I don't know how he's feeling about it.  I didn't get into it with him at the time because I don't know him that well and I was already dealing with someone else I knew who was having a genuine meltdown on zookerbook.

But before I mention that person, I'll discuss a woman I knew back in Hamilton several years ago.  She was one of two Jewish women who worked at this non-profit human rights organization.  (There were about eight people working there at any one time.  I'd say that half of the people or one-third were always white people of Western European ancestry, with the rest being individuals (often female) from the rest of the world.  The woman in question sent her kids to Hebrew school.  Being Jewish was a very big part of her perception of who she was.  When I knew her she was very concerned about subconscious antisemitism in people.  For instance, even discussing the factual basis of the Jewish presence in Hollywood, was always (in her eyes) a hair's-breadth away from being a raving genocidal nazi. This was especially the case when it came to criticism of Israel.  But she was genuine in her concern about human rights and social justice in general.  Not surprisingly she REALLY disliked Noam Chomsky, whose stance on Israel was always "simplisitic" or "slanted" or "distorted" or "not the whole picture" in some always unspecified way.  A year after my life took me to another city I'd heard from people that she'd resigned in anger condemning them all as antisemites for their criticisms of Israel. (I can't remember what year this was, or what recent violence had compelled the organization to speak out against Israel.  It was sometime around the turn of the millenia.)

The point is that she was an intelligent, moral person who had a personal connection to Israel as a Jewish person and she stood by Israel regardless of its behaviour despite her sincere concerns about human rights elsewhere.

Which brings me to this young woman (well, late-thirties now I guess) who I also knew in Hamilton, but who was still a frequent participant in "activist" social media discussions I was participating in, up until the present time.  A mutual friend of ours was posting criticisms of Israel's slaughters in Gaza and articles for information and news about an upcoming teach-in and this young woman told him that some people reading his stuff were Jewish and he should be more sensitive.  Nothing he'd posted was at all relevant to her criticism.  He'd spoken only of the acknowledged actions of the state of Israel.

My friend replied that Israel wasn't immune to being criticized when it acted in violation of international law.  She replied that antisemitism was a real problem and for him to be careful.  I read this exchange and noted her remark about "some people" in my friend's social media community were Jewish and I wondered if she, herself, was Jewish.  I figured that since she'd said that that she probably was.  But I didn't care one way or the other because it was entirely irrelevant to the issue of Israel's obligation to not slaughter an entire people.  I think antisemitism is stupid and disgusting and even though I've educated myself out of the propaganda system's conflating criticism of Israel with antisemitism, I nonetheless am still sensitive when I see actual antisemitism pop up in discussions of Israel-Palestine or when Israel is discussed anywhere.

Obviously, since the genocide continued, my friend continued to post about it.  The young woman became increasingly unhinged and got closer and closer to calling my friend an antisemite.  Having already been called a "Jew-hating nazi" on a pro-Democrat blog's comments section earlier in the week, I decided to intervene before this argument between my friends got out of hand.  I typed a slightly more formal and concise summary of the Israel-Palestine conflict as I've typed here over the years, about the origins of Zionism, the trauma of the Holocaust, the history of Palestine, the abuses of the Palestinians since 1967, the Israeli violations of Oslo, the origins of Hamas, the brutality of the IDF against the peaceful "March of Return" in 2018, only to have it all dismissed as a simplistic hash-job.  (As usual, how and why it was simplistic and botched was left unsaid.  I can't believe that I'm immune from the desire to perceive a thorough demolition of my point-of-view as "failed" without engaging with it.  If anyone pointed my having done this out to me, would I even be able to recognize it?)

In the end, all of our efforts to explain to this person that the mass-bombardment of hospitals, refugee camps, houses, places where the IDF told civilians to gather, is mass-murder, and that remains true even if the IDF says the magic words "human shields" were wasted.  We were both irredeemable antisemites and she left the conversation ranting about [the now debunked] stories of beheaded babies.  (For all I know she's now having conniptions about other bullshit atrocity tales. While ignoring Israel's slaughter of its own people and assassinations of Palestinian doctors and deliberate destruction of hospitals and universities and cultural centers and places of worship.)

The thing is, these three individuals aren't cynical agents of hasbara.  They're all decent people who have built an irrational emotional bond with Israel.  And they've so "othered" people who don't adhere to this conflation of Israel with Jewishness that they can't bring themselves to accurately perceive when Israel goes off the rails.  I don't watch Jimmy Dore regularly anymore, but occasionally YouTube will put something on my side-bar from him and I'll check it out.  This story about a Jewish woman in Montreal yelling at another woman who was flying a Palestinian flag from her car is the same sort of stuff I've been talking about here.  This woman obviously believes in the ridiculous lies about Hamas fighters taking time out, while Israeli tanks and helicopter gunships are firing at them, to gang-rape a Jewish woman and then play soccer with her body parts.  Her belief in this garbage caused her to become so enraged at the sight of a Palestinian flag that she yells at the woman (whose children were in the car with her) that she'd like to see her raped and killed in front of her children, since, by flying that flag, she obviously celebrated that [fake] atrocity.  This level of derangement is the opposite of cynicism.  People like her have wholly embraced the one-sided world-view of a "team" and their team can do no wrong and will brook no criticism.

This sort of disgusting tribalism isn't inevitable.  I've personally met many Jews here in Toronto who are actively opposed to Israel's behaviour over the past decades.  In the USA perhaps one-quarter of young Jewish people don't see Israel as important to them.  Just as there are Canadians who take it as a personal affront if Canada is criticized, and who are enraged by First Nations protesters, Quebec separatists, or opposition to our occupation of Afghanistan, while other Canadians think that actions that deserve criticism SHOULD be criticized.

We are all at risk of embracing this self-interested, self-righteous, self-pitying, persecution complex, hypocritical view of the world.  Perhaps our "team" is just ourselves as individuals.  Or it's our family or friends.  Or our city or sports team or our nation.  And, depending on what we perceive to get out of this alignment, and how we see opposition to it as detrimental to our self-interest, we can become quite violently defensive.  Do you think refugees and immigrants threaten you economically?  Do you rely on the oppression of minorities to build yourself up?  Do you rely on the theft of Palestinian land and their exploitation for your own prosperity?  Are you a greedy, selfish fuck-face who puts your own material prosperity above humanity?  The more of an asshole you are, the more people will hate you and the more you will hate them.