Gut Shabbos to all my fellow "tokens," fuck you to the vile creeps dedicated to erasing Jewish voices. pic.twitter.com/X2nU7vNUvd— Eli Valley (@elivalley) August 2, 2019
I'm always amused when people who manage to get an outsized amount of media coverage compared to their numbers complain that they are somehow being silenced or tokenized.
They dominate the Forward's entire site; they dominate the NYT's editorial and news sections, JTA gives them plenty of coverage.
But pointing out that they are only a tiny minority among Jews makes them very, very upset.
As I was thinking about this, I calculated that nearly 4% of all Jews alive today are "settlers." Not supporters of Israeli settlers, but actual people who chose to risk their lives in order to live in their ancestral homelands, knowing that the entire world is against them and regard them as illegal squatters and thieves.
This means that there are probably roughly as many Jewish "settlers" as Jewish anti-Zionists.
Now, how many headlines in the Forward or NYT treat them as normal human beings, as people whose opinion on Israel matters? The Times will have a token op-ed every once in a while by a "settler," mostly to make them look extreme and absurd. But in reality, do NYT or AP or Reuters reports ever treat them as regular people whose opinions matter?
Almost never. They are treated as outliers, as not representative of anyone - even though if you add their numbers to their supporters, there are far more people supporting Jews living in Judea and Samaria than Jews who oppose Zionism altogether.
Who gets more press, and who gets silenced?