For the past 1000 years, Jews have fled antisemitic Europe for the relative safety of Muslim countries. The British turning Palestine over to Europe's Jewish refugees and its subsequent transformation into an ethnostate eventually changed this, but ideological antisemitism in the Muslim world is almost entirely imported from Europe and translated European/American writings.
Europe may not have a deeper shared value than its antisemitism, extended from late Rome. Even with the Reformation, one of the main things Protestants were protesting (other than indulgences) was the Catholic church allowing Jews who refused to convert to remain alive. Whereas Islamic countries just imposed a tax on Jews and Christians alike.
Even during the run-up to WWII, America and Britain minimized and ridiculed the complaints of European Jews, and refused people running for their lives entry into their countries. It's psychologically obvious why Europeans and Americans collectively want to locate the source of antisemitism in the Middle East, rather than the continent Jews were forced to flee from.
The Romans weren't particularly antisemitic, unless you define antisemitic as "opposing Jewish interests." There was a lot of bad blood between them and the Jews in that sense.
In one of the Jewish-Roman wars, Kitos War[1], here's what happened:
> 32 Meanwhile the Jews in the region of Cyrene had put one Andreas at their head and were destroying both the Romans and the Greeks. They would cook their flesh, make belts for themselves of their entrails, anoint themselves with their blood, and wear their skins for clothing. Many they sawed in two, from the head downwards. Others they would give to wild beasts and force still others to fight as gladiators. In all, consequently, two hundred and twenty thousand perished. In Egypt, also, they performed many similar deeds, and in Cyprus under the leadership of Artemio. There, likewise, two hundred and forty thousand perished. For this reason no Jew may set foot in that land, but even if one of them is driven upon the island by force of the wind, he is put to death. Various persons took part in subduing these Jews, one being Lusius, who was sent by Trajan. [2]
It's not intellectually honest to mention Roman "antisemitism" and not mention that the Jews were very deliberately genocidal. They were absolutely not just innocent victims.
Wait, so in another words, if a bunch of people from come on over from Europe, set themselves up in an aggressive manner, proceed to kick out Palestinians, and then also say that hey all Jews that still live outside of Israel are welcome to come, you are surprised that local Arab populations don't feel super happy about that?
What exactly did you expect would happen? You know that 12 Million Germans got kicked out post-WW2 out of the entirety of Eastern Europe for an analogous reason?
I say this as a Red Town Juhuri, some of the arguments used by Ashkenazis/Sephardics are beyond insane. Your original comment(to the GP) that you since edited literally suggests that the Holocaust(done by Europeans) gives Israel the right to do whatever the fuck it wants to protect "the last stand of Judaism".
I don’t think Israel has carte blanche to do whatever it wants. I think the point of GP’s comment is that the situation is substantially more complicated than the settler-colonial framing (although it does include settlers and political Zionists who have repeatedly ignored international law).
Concretely, Israel is the product of (1) both political and religious Zionist movements, (2) a massive refuge movement by Jews who could no longer live in Europe, (3) a similarly sized refugee movement of Sephardim and Mizrahim from the Middle East, and (4) people (both Muslim and Jewish) already living in the borders of Israel. These divisions deserve consideration for the same reason that the Palestinian people do not deserve collective punishment or blanket association with terror by Israel and its military.
(This is my viewpoint as a non-Zionist American Jew.)
>I think the point of GP’s comment is that the situation is substantially more complicated than the settler-colonial framing
Did you read his original comment? He was talking about how the Jews got chased out of their homeland by a "pedophile warlord" and how Jews have to make a last stand for Judaism. If they weren't both dead, it might as well have come from Baruch Goldstein or Meir Kahane themselves.
I don't disagree with anything you say, but if you look at his own numbers of Jews that had to flee Muslim countries after the establishment of Israel they are in the ballpark of what Palestinians went through with the Nakba. There were a lot of massive ethnic cleansings and deportation events post-WW2 based on the "ethnostates are good" / "minorities are the fifth column" ideas that were all fucked up and Sephardi/Mizrahi don't have a privilege in saying theirs was uniquely evil.
(If it was edited away from what you’ve said, then I’m not going to defend the original comment. And I agree that what happened to middle eastern Jews is not uniquely evil; only that it ought to color our understanding of the overall situation.)
>(2) a massive refuge movement by Jews who could no longer live in Europe
This one is a head-scratcher.
Europe, European crimes, European antisemitism, European pogroms, Europe Europe Europe. Also European double-dealing of the mandate of Palestine after Lawrence of Arabia, Sykes-Picot, all of that stuff.
A lot of the Middle East’s problems can be identified with European meddling (and domestic atrocities), yes. But that meddling is not a necessary or sufficient condition (there’s plenty of ancient religious and ethnic hate, irredentism, etc. to go around).
Well, equating IBM selling to Nazis with Google (or whoever) selling to Israel could be considered antisemitic. For some reason, people love to bring up Nazi comparisons with Israel, but not with other nations. I wonder why that is. Even people who hate the idea of Google doing business with the US government haven't(as far as I've read) used the comparison of IBM selling to Nazi Germany.
What do you imagine the outcome of the conversation would be?
If someone never explicitly said anything bad about black people, but always lamented the crime rate in America when black people came up, I would guess that the person is racist.
And I claimed that hyperbolic Nazi comparisons are far more common when dealing with Israel than with any other nation. That is not saying that people don't protest other nations.
You are giving too much credit to the "people". The "people" are stupid and parrot the garbage they consume. The organizations/nations that push that agenda are more interesting to look at and investigate.
I mean, FWIW, yes: internally and externally, people compared Project Maven to IBM doing business with Nazi Germany. There was significant concern among engineers that Google was going down a path of repeating the mistakes of a prior generation.
No one is quelling the conversation. You are omitting details in your comment to get readers to agree with a false premise. Workers faced consequences for illegally occupying their boss’s office and spending 10 hours screaming and refusing the leave after being trespassed.
Edit: the irony of ironies is you taking this stance, because this submission is now flagged, whereas the AI targeting submission was discussed on hn.
