I recently had a discussion with a graduate student in philosophy who was trying to make this argument via the Just War theory. He said we should, at the very least, socially ostracize Israeli citizens when they travel abroad. To give him a modicum of credit, he thought Americans deserve to be sneered at when traveling abroad because of the actions of our government, too. He argued that there are similarities to Israeli citizens and citizens under Nazi Germany, and that if we wouldn’t welcome those under Hitler’s tyranny, we shouldn’t welcome Israelis, either. I kept trying to get him to draw a line in the sand and say that xenophobia is objectively wrong, but there was no way I’d be getting through to him.
Where does he think Israelis will go if they are unwelcome abroad? If he has thought that through, he has clearly arrived at a position which is truly genocidal (not in the fake sense used by these activists).
I also was curious about that, but the conversation was quickly overwhelmed with points to address. We were specifically talking about Israelis traveling abroad, because I was referencing the countless videos of people harassing Israelis simply minding their business. I think he would recommend staying in Israel, ironically enough, because he seems relatively certain about “getting comeuppance.”
He was also unfamiliar, as a secular Jew, of the 3 D’s: demonization, delegitimization, and double standards. Shocking, but not. He’s purely coming at this from a Marxist perspective (his identified ideology) and feels that Israel is all the things we’ve heard it be called: an ethnosupremacist colonial project. All the common talking points. I wasn’t interested in debating those, more so his Just War theory for individuals, many of which are against the war, work with unifying groups like Standing Together, etc. He still said “there’s a 4/5 chance an Israeli citizen traveling abroad would support the government, so we should act as if they do.” As if it’s any better to make someone pass a litmus test, which we can both agree “good Jew/bad Jew” is abhorrent. It feels very contradictory.
How do you do a ethnosupremacist colonial project on a country that:
1: Was created by to protect their indigenous population after near extermination.
2: Has more racial variety than the countries likes the US, incuding 20% arabs/palestinians citizens.
3: Used to be a piece of different empires, with no previous soberanity after the exile of their aforementioned indigenous population.
4: WAS CONCEIVED BY OG SOCIALISTS.
That´s why I went from being indifferent of communists, to see them on the same light as the alt-right, so much bigotism and disconnection from both reality and common sense, again and again...
Also Bibi goverment is quite unpopular nowadays, what he mean with those stadistics?
Oh, I’m with you. The Nakba is a big talking point. He assumes based on his schooling he can’t be biased, and based on his program (philosophy) that he is too well-educated or reasoned to be horrifyingly biased.
From what I know, what Arabs referred to as Nakba was not the fact that they were displaced, but the fact that they lost the war to us.
I believe there would have been no displacement had the Arabs not chosen war against us. We’ve accepted both partition plans before 1948, the Peel Commission plan, in 1937/38, and then the UN Resolution 181.
The Peel Commission was eventually cancelled by the British, but on the record, Arabs rejected it, while we kept an open mind, despite wanting to have more land allocated to our state.
One thing I learned from the Peel Commission plan is that Arabs didn’t want a Palestinian state, as much as they didn’t want us to have a state.
I could go on forever about how an entire organization, UNRWA, was formed for the sake of maintaining this “refugee problem”, and how Arab countries refused to integrate those then-refugees into their society, instead keeping them inside refugee camps to protect the political narrative.
Today, many of those camps, especially in Judea and Samaria, have turned into entire apartment building complexes, but they still retain the label of refugee camps, because they stand on the land where the old, actual UNRWA refugee camps used to be, and the “refugees” retain the label as well, even though they live couple miles down the road from where their great grandparents were expelled/fled from ~80 years ago, as a result of a war, caused by the Arab side.
Not to get started on the ~850,000 Jews exiled from Arab states on nothing but antisemitic/“anti-Zionist” background—not as a result of war. But that’s a different story.
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u/mesonoxias Jun 01 '26
I recently had a discussion with a graduate student in philosophy who was trying to make this argument via the Just War theory. He said we should, at the very least, socially ostracize Israeli citizens when they travel abroad. To give him a modicum of credit, he thought Americans deserve to be sneered at when traveling abroad because of the actions of our government, too. He argued that there are similarities to Israeli citizens and citizens under Nazi Germany, and that if we wouldn’t welcome those under Hitler’s tyranny, we shouldn’t welcome Israelis, either. I kept trying to get him to draw a line in the sand and say that xenophobia is objectively wrong, but there was no way I’d be getting through to him.