After calls for Twitch to address antisemitism on the platform, the site’s hateful conduct policy now includes “Zionist” as a potential slur. Twitch specifies this is conditional: you’re allowed to discuss the political movement of that name, but not “attack or demean another individual or group of people on the basis of their background or religious belief.”
The same way I don’t think we should capitulate to framing “cracker” as a slur, or to framing “black lives matter” as a racist thing to say, I don’t think we should capitulate to framing things like “from the river to the sea” or “zionist” as antisemitic.
But, as a thought experiment, let’s indulge in this doublespeak trash. What is a good alternative? So far I’ve got:
Israeli colonizers
Jewish supremacists
genocidal sacks of shit
Israeli apartheidists
Isreal expansionists
Israeli warmongerers
people in favor of the genocide and apartheid committed by Israel (in full, every time you need to say zionist)
modern day nazis
zionazis (technically not zionist!)
So all of this liberal crybaby nomenclature trash aside, I actually do think “zionist” is in itself a fairly useless term for the Israeli apartheid question (as Norman Finkelstein and Judith Butler do too). While one faction of zionism pursued the nakba and massacres from fairly early on, and while this faction has been quite successful, there are other notions of zionism which do not entail murdering children or colonizing a country. When Netanyahu and Chomsky can both legitimately refer to themselves as zionists, I think it’s clear that zionism is too broad a term to be useful in the current ongoing genocide and the ethnic cleansing that has been going on for the better part of a century.
the problem is that about 75% of people have no idea what happened during the partition plan and 20% who do think what the Zionists did were justified (even pre partition/pre war/war time(
The same way I don’t think we should capitulate to framing “cracker” as a slur, or to framing “black lives matter” as a racist thing to say, I don’t think we should capitulate to framing things like “from the river to the sea” or “zionist” as antisemitic.
But, as a thought experiment, let’s indulge in this doublespeak trash. What is a good alternative? So far I’ve got:
So all of this liberal crybaby nomenclature trash aside, I actually do think “zionist” is in itself a fairly useless term for the Israeli apartheid question (as Norman Finkelstein and Judith Butler do too). While one faction of zionism pursued the nakba and massacres from fairly early on, and while this faction has been quite successful, there are other notions of zionism which do not entail murdering children or colonizing a country. When Netanyahu and Chomsky can both legitimately refer to themselves as zionists, I think it’s clear that zionism is too broad a term to be useful in the current ongoing genocide and the ethnic cleansing that has been going on for the better part of a century.
the problem is that about 75% of people have no idea what happened during the partition plan and 20% who do think what the Zionists did were justified (even pre partition/pre war/war time(
These are indeed very good alternatives
I wish I could upvote this more.
Edit: a word
I’m partial to three, m’self.
Izan - Nazi backwards Iz A Nazi or IzrAeli Nazi