Comment by woodruffw | Hacker News Reader

Comment by woodruffw | Hacker News Reader

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I think there are a few noteworthy components to this:

* Kamau's post conflates Jews with Israel, which is simultaneously a common, innocent mistake and a rhetorical strategy used by Zionists and the far right. Having read the actual post[1], I'm inclined to believe that Kamau falls for the aforementioned strategy.

* One of the Twitter accounts linked in the article, "StopAntisemitism," is a Zionist organization. They've been outspoken in their attempts to conflate Israel (and Israel's Jews) with Judaism as a whole, and to generally delegitimize the faith and politics of the millions of diaspora Jews who reject Zionism and do not support Israel.

I am a Jew, and I thought that Kamau's blog post was tone-deaf. But it's also over a decade old, and its chief fault is that it falls for a rhetorical conflation that countless organizations have dedicated extraordinary resources too (that Jews are fundamentally foreigners, that we all belong in Israel, that to be an anti-Zionist is to be an anti-Semite). I don't think he deserves blame for falling for that dirty trick.

[1]: https://web.archive.org/web/20210601160519/https://www.kamau...

Excellent point!

But it's not a rhetorical strategy just used by Zionists and the far right. Zionists, as you say, wish to conflate Jews with Israel, so that any criticism of the latter will appear to be an attack on the former. Anti-Semites wish to conflate Israel with all Jews so that criticism of the former can be made to be an attack on the latter.

It's a mess.

> They've been outspoken in their attempts to conflate Israel (and Israel's Jews) with Judaism as a whole

But let's not pretend that the connection between Israel and US Jews is simply a prejudice. Here's an article from the Times of Israel quoting a recent Pew research:

"More than 80% of American Jews said caring about Israel was an important or essential part of what being Jewish means to them." [1]

If this is how important is Israel to American Jews identity ("important or essential part of what being Jewish means to them") then it makes sense to ask them, as a group, how do they reconcile this identity with the violent actions of Israel.

[1] https://www.timesofisrael.com/as-gaza-conflict-escalates-her...

The actual poll[1] paints a substantially different picture: less than half of American Jews polled said that Israel was "essential" to them; the 80% figure comes from a separate group that explicitly said "important, but not essential."

That could mean any number of things. For example: I have family members in Israel. Their health and happiness is important to me. Does that make caring about Israel's affairs important to me? It would probably depend on how the question was framed. But it would be incorrect to conflate that with support for the Israeli state.

Other important numbers from the poll:

* Only a minority of American Jews (34%) oppose the BDS movement, and believe (33%) that the Israeli government's peace effort is "sincere"

* Only 32% believe the core doctrine of Zionism, i.e. that Israel was is the land of the Jews by birthright.

In other words: I don't think it's correct to conflate the American Jewish identity with any positive or dispositive interest in Israel. We're a big group, and our national identity is overwhelmingly American. Asking us to reconcile our ethnoreligious identity with an unrelated national identity is bewildering at best, and insulting (cf. canards about Jewish loyalty) at worst.

[1]: https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2021/05/21/u-s-jews-ha...

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