as I am writing this, I am currently listening to Muna el Kurd’s live on instagram (@muna.kurd15 on ig). Go watch it and see what the Israeli forces are doing to Palestinians, we’re literally watching ethnic cleansing taking place.
At approximately 3 am in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood in Occupied East Jerusalem, the Salhiya family home was stormed by Israeli forces and the Salhiya family was violently forced from their home. This comes after the Salhiya family resisted Israeli attempts to execute an eviction order on the property, despite the fact that the family had been living in the home for years. After resisting for more than 10 hours on the roof of their home and threatening to set both themselves and the home on fire, the Salhiya family was successful in initially driving Israeli forces from their home. But a few hours ago, Israeli forces returned to take the house and drive the family from their home.
The Israeli military stormed the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood at 3 in the morning, arresting Mahmoud Salhiya and two other family members and physically brutalizing anyone who was present. At 5:40 am in the morning Jerusalem time, Israeli forces began to destroy and demolish the home using bulldozers. The daughter of Mahmoud Salhiya, Yasmine Salhiya, says that her father had not slept in days and he was sleeping for the first time in days when Israeli forces broke into their home. She also reports that her 9 year old sister and her aunt were brutally beaten by Israeli forces and are currently unable to move as a result.
Israeli forces refused to allow any type of medical help/emergency service into the area around the Salhiya home, barricading any roads around the home despite multiple reports of screams for help being heard from inside the barricade. Journalists are also prevented from entering the barrier, with one journalist reporting that Israeli forces threatened to beat him if he approached the barrier.
The Salhiya home is DESTROYED there is nothing but rubble and destruction left. They were forced from their home with only the clothes on their back, they couldn’t even get their daughter’s pink schoolbag or her toys, they didn’t have a chance to collect anything. This is active ethnic cleansing that is being committed against Palestinian people by the Israeli government. This is what forced displacement looks like, the Salhiya family lost their home once before in 1948 and they have lost their home again in 2022. This is what generational trauma looks like, Israeli forces brutalized a child as young as nine years old.
If you support Israel, this is what you support. You support forced evictions in the middle of the night, you support destroying homes, you support the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people. If you support Israel, you are a fascist.
Here is a list of people to follow on Twitter to keep up with what is currently happening and what happens in Palestine:
Do not stay silent about Palestine, the Israeli government and military is counting on the world staying silent about Palestine
Hey @eurythmix Gene, I’m going to address you, because as one queer Jew to another, I am truly baffled by why you are reblogging posts that uphold antisemitic people and content? I’ll first demonstrate to you that we are talking about content coming from antisemites, then I’ll show the content itself is upholding anti-Jewish discrimination and violence. If you’d like to have a civilized discussion over this post, I’m open to that.
Let’s start with Muna El-Kurd. Here she is showing support for a terrorist responsible for the murder of 38 Jewish civilians, including 13 Jewish kids, on two different occasions.
Here’s a summary of what Dalal Mughrabi did, you can see it’s the same picture and the same name in Arabic.
“Dalal Mughrabi (دلال المغربي; c. 1959 – 11 March 1978) was a Palestinian militant who was a member of the Fatah faction of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and participated in the 1978 Coastal Road massacre in Israel. The attack resulted in the death of 38 Israeli civilians, including 13 children. Mughrabi and eight other militants were also killed in the course of the operation. While she has been hailed as a martyr and a national hero among many Palestinians, Israel and the United Nations have described her as a terrorist.”
What was the goal of this terrorist attack? According to one of its planners, to damage the peace talks between Israel and Egypt.
Muna El-Kurd’s activism is also intrinsically linked to that of her twin brother, Muhammad El-Kurd. He has repeatedly spread on social media antisemitic tropes of Jewish bloodlust. He gets a “pass” because he attributes those antisemitic tropes to Israelis, but we all know that when he says “Israelis” he isn’t speaking of the Muslim or Christian Israelis. He’s talking about the Jews.
Here are two tweets that El-Kurd posted on the 12th of May 2021, when Jews and Arabs in Israel were in the middle of Hamas attacking them with over 4000 rockets, while several Jews were being lynched across the country, including two dying from their injuries (one in Lod and one in Acre) and one 12 year old Arab boy in Jaffa being burned across his entire body because the Arabs who threw a Molotov cocktail into his house mistook it for a Jewish home:
Gene, take a second to appreciate what it means when a non-Jew is telling a queer, non-Israeli Jewish Holocaust educator that “YOU” (this would have to mean “Jews” and not “Israelis” since he’s talking to a non-Israeli) are Kristallnachting Arabs, while El-Kurd is simultaneously questioning the Jewish man’s “nerve to make Holocaust analogies”. I guess El-Kurd believes only Arabs get to politicize the Holocaust and use it as a weapon against Jews, but Jews aren’t allowed to speak about their experiences if those include at the same time Holocaust education and having relatives in Israel bombarded.
How factual is El-Kurd’s Holocaust analogy? During Kristallnacht, over 1000 Jewish synagogues were destroyed, Jewish owned buildings were looted and countless Jewish people were murdered. Nazi Germany had roughly 50m citizens, Israel has roughly 9m, so in order for El-Kurd’s analogy to hold water, there should have been roughly 200 mosques burned down during the May 2021 riots across Israel (I’m putting aside the fact that the riots were started by Arabs, the country’s minority. According to El-Kurd’s analogy, if the two scenarios are the same, that should have meant that the Kristallnacht riots were started by Jews). In reality, during the May 2021 riots there were 10 synagogues which were burned down and 0 mosques harmed. Despite the Arabs making up only 21% of Israel’s population (meaning the Arab minority is 4 times smaller than the rest of the population), it was Arabs who caused the overwhelming majority of damage to property and human lives documented during the riots.
BTW, attacks on synagogues in Israel happen far too often. It’s not just the May 2021 fighting that inspires these antisemitic attacks. Here’s just a small fragment of these attacks’ timeline:
Since I mentioned the rockets, here’s a reminder that this is what it looks like when a single rocket hits:
And before you say “but Israel has Iron Dome!” consider whether you’d be willing to sit quietly and take someone shooting 4000 bullets at you and claiming it’s OK because you’re wearing a bullet proof vest. Not to mention that when Hamas started firing rockets at Israel in 2001, there was no Iron Dome yet (it only became operational in 2011). 4000 rockets being fired at Israeli civilians is essentially 4000 murder attempts. A part of the reason why these murder attempts were carried out when they were was because of the lie about Sheikh Jarrah being ethnically cleansed (even though it’s just a property dispute centering on a small number of homes in that neighborhood). Gene, you’re helping to spread (and thus perpetuate) the lie that condonesthese murder attempts and the 13 successful murders (including two Israeli Bedouin Arabs, Khalil and Nadine Awad) that occurred due to the May 2021 fighting.
“This comes after the Salhiya family resisted Israeli attempts to execute an eviction order on the property, despite the fact that the family had been living in the home for years”
How is this even an argument? “Sir, I may have illegally settled in this property that I know is owned by others and have refused any possible compromise, but I shouldn’t be evicted from it because I have been doing it for years.” I guess by that logic, the Jewish settlers should get to have every piece of land in Judea and Samaria that they’ve built on regardless of whether it’s owned by Palestinians, because they have been living in those homes for years.
And before you jump and claim that Jews don’t own the homes in Sheikh Jarrah, their ownership was already proven in court since they bought the land fair and square before the State of Israel was even established. The Palestinian families living there failed to do the same, despite at one point faking documents on the matter. Here is one of the best summaries I’ve seen on the legal background of the Sheikh Jarrah case:
Issues this link summarizes: Jewish ownership (both Ashkenazi and Sephardi) of land in Sheikh Jarrah pre-1948, the ethnic cleansing of Sheikh Jarrah’s Jews, the legal background through which both Jews and Arabs were compensated equally for property lost in the war, and the reason why the Sheikh Jarrah land is treated differently (because rather than being sold, it was leased out). Here’s the part about a Jordanian document proving it was leased, not sold:
Here’s also a brief prepared by a law professor familiar with the dispute:
Something this brief highlights is that if the Israeli court were to deny the Jewish owners their rights due to being Jewish, it would have constituted a violation of international law:
In other words, every post on Tumblr that ignores Jewish owners’ rights and opposes the legal eviction in Sheikh Jarrah isn’t just going against Israeli law, it goes against international law and constitutes a call for illegally discriminating against Jews. It is antisemitic content.
Going back to the eviction of this particular family, I love that OP cares so much about the brutality that had to be employed when evicting people who are refusing to follow the law and evict the homes the law dictates they must evict. I’m sure OP also has many posts lamenting the brutality that was used against Jewish Israeli settlers in 20 Gaza Strip and 4 northern Samaria communities as that same type of brutality was turned against them when evicting them, including children who were born into those communities and have never known any other home, right? It’s not like OP would treat Jews and Arabs in a discriminatory fashion, right? I’m sure OP writes a ton of posts about how their houses were – and I quote – “DESTROYED there is nothing but rubble and destruction left.”
By the way, OP doesn’t mention that the family’s father is a Muslim Arab, but his wife is an Israeli Jew (Lital Salhiya). What’s the matter, OP? Afraid that those who routinely reblog anti-Zionist content won’t have any compassion for a Jewish mother and her kids who, according to Halacha, are also Jewish? Scared that this proves the dispute as addressed by Israeli courts is about legal ownership, not about ethnicity?
Gene, OP is clearly against the right of Israel to exist (which is implied by telling people that if they support Israel – i.e its right to exist – they are a fascist), are you also against the right of Israel to exist? What about the right of Germany to exist? Do you also constantly reblog posts that demonize Germans, claiming that they have a bloodlust and calling for the destruction of Germany? If not, then why is Israel being treated worse by you than a country that has started a world war and tried to carry out the extermination of every Jew on the face of the earth? Whether you like it or not, aligning yourself with antisemites does not make you a “good Jew” (unlike the “bad Zionist Jews”). Being Jewish does not excuse aiding in the harming of other Jews. There have sadly been plenty of antisemitic Jews, such as Otto Weininger and Bobby Fischer (just like every minority has self-hating members, I’m sure you know such people in the queer community too). None of them are excused by virtue of being Jewish. There have even been notorious Jewish Holocaust deniers like David Cole.
Like it or not, the majority of Jews are Zionists, they believe in the right of Israel to exist. Many are Zionists who are critical of certain Israeli policies, but they’re still Zionists. Between Israel and the United States, the two biggest Jewish communities in the world today, which are both mainly composed of Zionists, it is clear that you can be critical of Israel without harming the Jewish people, but you cannot be an anti-Zionist without putting a target on the backs of the majority of Jews worldwide. Are you truly Jewish, meaning Jewish in your values and not just in name? Then where is your understanding and compassion, your care for your fellow Jews? Jewish solidarity has always been one of the most important Jewish values, alongside a connection to the Jewish ancestral homeland (a major component of most indigenous faiths). Whenever you uncritically reblog anti-Zionist posts, you might be doing it without malice, but you are still a part of a mechanism putting Jews in harm’s way as evidenced by attacks on Jews in the U.S (as one example) due to fighting between Hamas and Israel.
Social justice does not exclude Jews. Just like you wouldn’t reblog posts that put other minorities in jeopardy, you shouldn’t be doing it to your own people either. There are many ways to support Palestinians without harming Jews. Reblogging anti-Zionist antisemitic content is not one of them.
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