I drive past this sign every morning on the way home from getting coffee. Considering what's happening with Palestine, I find it incredibly offensive. Protect Jews from whom? It seems that history repeats and oppressed have become the oppressor.
Unpopular opinion: I support the Israeli people and have no animosity toward them, but—much like our own—their government leading the Palestinian eradication has to go. Like, yesterday.
So this morning I stopped to snap a photo in order to make some changes. I had to do it manually because ChatGPT refused because of its built-in guardrails. My first thought was to ironically compare Jews to Nazis in this context. But not all Jews, obviously. I don't consider myself the least bit anti-Semetic and didn't want to come across that way. But at the same time, genocide is genocide, no matter what the group doing it is called.
But I didn't think what I was trying to express was clear with such a ham-fisted allusion that very people were likely to pick up on. So I went off in a slightly different direction and just called the fuckers out.
Calling out Israel explicitly—and by definition the Israeli government—I think I got my point across.
So now the question remains, how many readers will I lose with this post?
4 comments
As someone of Jewish descent (as is the case for almost all Spaniards, who carry a significant percentage of such ancestry but they ignore) I am, of course, not antisemitic. To be so would be akin to hating myself, my family, my ancestors, and the majority of the people around me.
There was a time when I, like you, believed that only a minority of Israelis were responsible for this horror, that there was a majority who had learned from history and of the Nazi´s Horror, a majority who found this situation intolerable, who supported the existence of a Palestinian state, an end to the Israeli invasion, and the integration of the Palestinian population with equal rights. Human Rights.
Well, over time, I have discovered—not through the internet, but via commentators and journalists on various television networks who can hardly be accused of lacking objectivity—that this is not the case. Recent polls indicate that even the vast majority of the most "liberal" Israelis want the Palestinians, at the very least, to be expelled from the land that belongs to them. Furthermore, most of these "liberals" view the "Palestinian problem" as unsolvable, with extermination being the only solution. Just imagine, then, what the Orthodox and the most hardline Zionists must think.
Imagine, too, a world in which Israel had never existed. Palestine would be part of Jordan, as it was following the Second World War. Consider the absence of all the religious extremism, whether in the name of Allah, Jehovah, or any other. Consider the amount of suffering, terrorism, death, injustice, tension, problems, and conflict, both within the region and involving all the surrounding countries, as well as the interference by foreign powers; none of this would have occurred. All of this has unfolded since 1947, with the proclamation of the State of Israel.
I like a circumcised penis, whether Jew or Muslim, or Christian.
I am still here!!
I hear you.
What I am expressing is that not all citizens of Israel hate the Palestians. It's the current Israeli govermnet, including Bibi, that are hellbent.
What is so sad and upsetting is the US is right there in the muck with them.
Another example is that not all Russian people are Putin. It's Putin who is an asshole. Always has been, always will be. And Diaper Don is in the mud. Full stop.
not this one