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Cake day: June 6th, 2023

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  • (I am excluding illegal settler communities here)

    Israel isn’t, you fucking idiot. There can be no removal of settlers unless we have the destruction of the state of Israel. That doesn’t mean pushing Jews into the sea, that means the former Israelis who don’t flee (as many will) are now living in a restored, non-ethnonational Palestine.

    Palestinians don’t want people’s apartments!

    Those in diaspora don’t want someone’s garden!

    Broadly speaking, assuming they don’t need to live under siege conditions, they want their land back. That’s what movements like the March of Return were about. If it was your family’s house, then whatever mockery of the human condition was built on it by settlers is logically also yours. Talking about stealing gardens is especially goofy since it’s materially just a pile of fertilizer and dirt.

    The fight is more about freedom than land.

    This is such a convenient story because it lets you ignore all the historical injustice and Israel’s role as a settler-colonizer and look only at what is happening right now – Palestinians being penned in and bombed, where of course their first concern is not being bombed – and make that the whole issue. Remove siege conditions and suddenly they aren’t as concerned with their ability to migrate to Egypt, what a funny thing!






  • Most of the camps were liberated by the Red Army. I don’t see why you feel the need to say “Evil Nazis” unless it is to mock the idea of Nazis being very evil.

    The Soviets did actually have a plan to move the Jewish refugees who were refused homes abroad into a designated Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic, but the plan fell through for reasons that I don’t really understand. Maybe just because the land they chose wasn’t good or there was just more momentum behind the project to colonize Palestine (which the USSR supported at a critical juncture before going back to opposing for some reason).

    In the modern day, I hate the idea of injecting such a reactionary population of millions into a country that has a more lively left than most (though yes, the left has never controlled the Federation and has its own issues besides) when the Israelis could either carve out a part of Germany for themselves or be put in some of the other reactionary shitholes in Europe like England and Italy, where they probably wouldn’t make the politics any worse than they already are.


  • The highly racial framing you are using is one that even Hamas rejects. Palestine is an Arab country in the sense that it’s mostly Arab, it is not Arab in the sense of being an ethnostate like Israel. Likewise, the point of conflict here is not that the Israelis are Jews, but that they are former colonizers, aside from the second-class citizen Arab (etc.) Israelis. Jews do alright in Palestine right now.

    Even if it just stopped there, the fact that there would be some hate crimes as blowback from the genocide committed by Israel is a much smaller and more manageable problem than having a rogue state launching hellfire missiles indiscriminately at cities.

    But I think there are other factors to consider, first among them being that people of Palestine have the much more important jobs of a) reconstruction and b) the extensive trials that will be required, along with their associated fact-finding missions. There’s a lot of shit to do and most of it is for the direct benefit of Palestinians, plus any spite they have can be satisfied by the just convictions of countless Israeli criminals. It’s not like they are some racist savages who won’t be satisfied until the last Jew has been bled dry, contrary to their hasbara depiction. Overwhelmingly, what they want is to live in peace, because so many of them have spent their whole lives living under violence.

    So nothing about this seems like it would be an equivalent problem to leveling one of the most densely populated cities in the world, plus all the other shit that is going on. It is, in function, just a refusal to allow any blowback Israelis caused to actually hit them, no matter how many Arabs get slaughtered in the meantime.

    I do agree with the other commenter that it would be good for some NATO-sphere country or countries to set aside land and migrate out those non-criminal Israelis who want to leave, but that’s almost certainly not ever going to happen. I acknowledge that it’s possible, but the use of Israelis to these states is as a ranks of a militarist state terrorizing its neighbors. What use would Israelis be to the imperial project in Alberta, Canada?


  • Dissolving Israel doesn’t mean kicking every Jewish person out. There are Jewish people in Palestine already, and the point is to make a multiethnic state, not replace one ethnostate with another. Many Israelis would definitely leave for a number of reasons, very much like how a meaningful part of the white population fled South Africa in the wake of Apartheid being defeated, but there are houses where there are no other claimants and, God forbid, the remaining former Israelis can also just buy or rent homes instead of stealing them. There would be a big population shift, but there is absolutely no need to build a 10-million-person-ark.


  • Bibi is evil, but he’s absolutely a scapegoat for the evil of the Israeli government and even the people, as it is basically never reported in the west how his approval went up after escalating against Lebanon, and he generally is pushed to take more severe (and heinous) action by the bulk of the Israeli people. That’s not to say every one of them is a bad person or Bibi is less evil, but every single one who is good is an anti-zionist.

    Destroying the state of Israel, contrary to Zionist propaganda, does not mean killing all the Israelis, nor imprisoning them or otherwise punishing them. It means destroying the government apparatus that, from the beginning of its very existence, has been a racial-supremacist settler-colonial entity, and investigating what evidence is turned up in its records and punishing the actual criminals accordingly. Oh, and returning stolen homes where there’s anyone still surviving to reclaim them.






  • And good Marxists should know - he wasn’t a huge fan of ideology or respecting it as causal or desirable.

    He was very practical, hence concrete historical materialism.

    This is what happens when you don’t read Marx and just sort of assume what Marx said based on a literal interpretation of his ideological labels.

    Marx was not, like liberals, laboring under the delusion that ideology is something that can simply be escaped. Paraphrasing Zizek (who I hate, but he has some good points), it is when you believe that you are free of ideology that you are most firmly under ideological control, because in such circumstances ideology is necessarily acting on you without your awareness of it. To be aware of your ideology allows you to engage with it and modify it and so on.

    He also recognized, like anyone who spends a few seconds thinking about what would become sociology (it wasn’t really around in his time) that ideology does cause things. His distinction is that ideology is superstructural, it was an abstract product of the concrete base that is material conditions, but the two of them exist in a dialectical relationship with each other. Any base will produce a superstructure so long as that base has people who relate to each other, and this superstructure, in essence, is ideology.

    What Marx hated with respect to ideology, and this is the closest you are to being even superficially right, is the idea that was and is popular among liberals (and others, such as utopian socialists) that ideology alone is enough to transform the world, that it acts independently of material circumstances and people will just freely be moved by what is “right” in a completely absolute sense irrespective of their historical or current conditions. Again, these things have a dialectical relationship, and the superstructure cannot fly freely, unbounded by the base, any more than the base can fly freely (by human hands) when the superstructure stays in place. They will only make progress in the context of each other.

    Edit: For the sake of being more complete, I will say more explicitly that the base has primacy, which is why the superstructure comes from it – there can be no culture in out in space where no one is. It has primacy and its change – e.g. by scientific inventions – tends to drag the superstructure along with it, but those inventions are only created thanks to the superstructural elements of preserved and transmitted knowledge and the desire to, for example, develop production.

    It’s very difficult to talk about dialectics because I often want to address both sides simultaneously even though it can’t really be done.


  • Whether the podcast is relevant or not has nothing to do with what I said. Whether it is credible or not has nothing to do with what I said. Whether you are justified in feeling offended over it? Nothing to do with what I said.

    For my own mental health I’m going to just not take the bait which is that parenthetical. Instead, I would like to focus on how “I refuse to listen to even two minutes of this podcast because I don’t like its pedigree” is not actually a go-ahead to blindly presume things about it like the conspiracy theory I initially pointed out. You can refuse to listen to it, that’s fine, but that puts you in a position of lacking a lot of information for making assertions about it. What that means is that what you can do is ignore it, or say you don’t want to engage with it for such and such a reason that you actually have good reason to believe and then leave it there. That’s how epistemology works.