this post was submitted on 02 Dec 2023
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Israel the state does not represent Judaism nor ethnic Jews (just ask what happened to the Ethiopian Jews), it represent Zionism a movement fomented and supported by the Western colonial super powers before and after the World Wars as a means of creating a nationalistic foothold into the Middle East and thereby create monopolies of resources needed for the imperial cores at the time (and as a geopolitical soft/hard power for now). Saying someone wishes Israel as a state to no longer exist is not anti-semetic, it's like saying someone that wishes for the dismantling of the US is wishing for genocide or something similarly overreaching and ignorant of materialistic context.
I am aware and agree.
I agree.
What I believed was that the use of "dog" was an anti-semitic dogwhistle with historical use as a call to oppression and genocide of Jews.
Calling for the dismantling of Israel but using an anti-semitic dogwhistle with a history of calling for genocide blurs the line between legitimate criticism of Zionism and calling for anti-semitic genocide.
As it turns out, I had falsely believed that calling Jews “dogs” was a long anti-Semitic tradition. I did more research and discovered that actually historically they were called rats and lice and very few examples exist of anti-semitics tropes comparing Jews and dogs.
The most salient example of that was an American trend to hang a sign on your shop that said “No Jews or dogs allowed”, but that doesn’t meet the standard of what I had believed.
Had the commenter said “Israel is a plague of rats that needs to be exterminated”, I believe I would have been justified in calling it out as using a dogwhistle. As it stands, however, I was wrong.