The haters parroted Students for Justice in Palestine and claimed that every single Israeli has no civilian status - they are all illegal settlers and therefore fair game for being killed.
[She wrote] "What you're saying that any person (including babies, children, elderly, etc.) who lives in Israel within the green line is a colonizer who deserves to be massacred?" They responded, "I'm not saying they deserve to be massacred, just that Israelis are not simply civilians. Every single Israeli exists on land violently stolen from Palestinians within the lifetime of the average grandma. Simply just existing as an Israeli makes you a weapon of violence against Palestinians bc you are living on land that was stolen from them & their parents/grandparents, etc. If you don't want your baby killed in the process of people liberating their own land from their oppressors, maybe don't be one of their oppressors."I could feel hate and anger in those postings, which scared me, even though I had no idea whom I was dialoguing with. But I decided to continue trying. "But what if you happened to be born there and your entire family lived there?" I wrote, "Would you all be fair play to be murdered? Israel needs to end the war, leave the illegal settlements, end apartheid, and stop oppressing Palestinians. I'm not defending what they're doing. But to mark them all as colonizers (including within the green line) who are fair play to be murdered just because of where they were born is a step too far."
Notice that saying that Jewish civilians who live across the Green Line are deserving of being murdered is not a step too far for this professor. But that's isn't enough for the bloodlust of the haters:
My persistence was in vain. They answered in bold letters, "They ARE all colonizers. So, to answer your question, yes. Nobody in Israel is unaware of what's happening; every person in that illegal apartheid state is 100% aware of what their living there means. There are no legal settlements bc Israel itself is not legal. These are mostly Europeans that colonized Palestine in the modern age. They don't just get to keep a little sliver for themselves. Palestine should be ruled by Palestinian ppl & if Israelis want to stay, they have to abide by Palestinian laws......Here's a tough one to digest for ppl raised under intense liberal propaganda. Sometimes justice is not peaceful. "
At that point she gave up, but she then defends the haters being called antisemitic:
This conversation brought home how inadequate our terminology has become at capturing the essence of the current debates.Antisemitism is a term that emerged in the 19th century to refer to political and racial hatred of Jews. It reached its apogee under the Nazis, who believed Jews were a separate and evil human race that had to be exterminated. Since then, not only has racial science been debunked as pseudo-science, but Jews are far more likely to be described as a religious or ethnic group. Moreover, people who express antisemitic ideas often have Jewish friends.For example, pastor John Hagee, a popular televangelist who once said that God "sent Hitler to help Jews reach the promised land," is a friend of the State of Israel and was invited to speak at the rally against antisemitism in Washington in November 2023.Students in the pro-Palestine tent protests at Columbia University sang slogans that glorified Hamas and the killing of Israelis, yet welcomed Jewish students for a Passover seder. Nazis never would have joined a march against antisemitism or welcomed Jews in their tent to celebrate a Jewish holiday. These contradictions highlight why the term antisemitism generates so much confusion. How can a term that evokes the mass murder of all Jews without exception be used to label those who hate some Jews but not others?
How can someone who says "some of my best friends are Jewish" be antisemitic?
Instead, Cassen tries to come up with a new term for rabid anti-Zionists that cleanse them of the charge of hating Jews: "Eliminationists."
Eliminationists derive their worldview from post-colonial theory and see the State of Israel in this framework. ....Eliminationists also understand racism and inequalities as the outcomes of the colonial and white supremacist structures persisting in our societies. Their life's goal is to fight for justice and against all racism and inequality, and they always include antisemitism among the racisms they fight.
To the extent that eliminationists call for the "removal" of the State of Israel, but not for harm against Jews as a racial or even ethnic group, they are not antisemitic. However, an ideology does not need to be antisemitic to be cruel and built on flawed intellectual foundations.
Cassen makes two major mistakes.
That is a very strange mistake for a professor of history and Jewish studies.
Her other mistake is to believe what the modern antisemites are saying. They claim that they are against antisemitism, and are only against Israelis.
Yet she didn't bring up the obvious rejoinder to the haters she wasted time with on Reddit. When they say that "Israelis" are legitimate targets, they only mean the 80% of Israelis who are Jews. They don't want to eliminate 100% of Israelis - they want to eliminate 100% of Israeli Jews. They want a genocide of seven million Jews.
If that isn't antisemitism, what is?
Obviously, Cassen isn't defending the haters, but she believes their lies that they don't hate Jews. She could have asked the next obvious question: what should be done with the 95% of Jews worldwide who support Israel's existence? Are they also the enemy, that should be destroyed? That was the opinion of the many Muslims who have attacked synagogues in America and worldwide over the past couple of decades.
Yet Muslims are just as adamant that they are not antisemitic as the Reddit posters Cassen encountered.
I once coined a term for the irrational, rabid hate of Israel, "misoziony." The intent was not to say that haters of Israel are not antisemitic but to stop the term antisemitism from being a distraction when pointing out that rabid anti-Zionism is just as illogical, just as irrational, just as hateful and just as impossible to justify as antisemitism is. Maybe Dr. Cassen would prefer that term. But it doesn't mean that the misozionists aren't antisemitic - because when you dissect their beliefs, that is exactly what they are.
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