Conservative activists, led by a local pastor and outspoken Israel advocate, pushed the district, Mission CISD, to excise books mostly about gender, sexuality and race. Their demands represented an extreme version of a nationwide culture war over books that has played out in recent years ā and ensnared a number of books with Jewish themes.
In Mission, the long list of books on the chopping block includes a recent illustrated adaptation of Anne Frankās diary; both volumes of Art Spiegelmanās Holocaust graphic memoir āMausā; āThe Fixer,ā Bernard Malamudās novel about a historical instance of antisemitic blood libel; and āKasher in the Rye,ā a ribald memoir by Jewish comedian Moshe Kasher.
I sense the morass of an ever widening pointless argument opening up beneath me.
Iāll say my feeling on it and be done, and youāre free to disagree: No one should be hated for where they were born, or for wanting a home or a safe place to be. Not a Palestinian, or a Russian, or an Israeli citizen, or someone who was born and grew up in Nazi Germany. If you got born in Israel and managed to penetrate through a significant haze of propaganda and groupthink to realize that what your country is doing on the world stage is a monstrous crime, what should you do?
Advocate for the destruction of your home?
Move away, never to return, renounce your citizenship and want nothing to do with your evil of a country? Yeah, maybe.
But I can also see someone who sees it as their duty to resist Netanyahuās government, tries to set their country back on the right course, advocates for the ICC, and turns out for protests against the government and gets brutalized and arrested for it. That stuff happens too. āPro Israelā isnāt really the right word for those people, no. I actually donāt fully disagree with what youāre saying, that in the modern world if you are āpro Israelā youāre probably a piece of shit (or just totally propagandized / misinformed about whatās actually going on, which thereās a lot of also). So maybe I shouldnāt have phrased it in those terms. But definitely, I think there is a type of Israeli person who is trying to support their home, the only place theyāve ever known to live, by resisting the Netanyahu government, and is ashamed of Israel but not like āagainstā them in the sense of, I hate my home and all the people here. You can love the town you grew up in, you can have friends and allies (hopefully, ones who are also horrified by the death and destruction in Gaza) there. You can be āproā that part of it while still hoping that Netanyahu somehow gets whatās coming for him, soon, and all of the killing thatās being done in your name stops.
Like I say, I donāt think anyone should be hated for where they were born.
(Oh, and also the far ends of the scale have 0 overlap, yes. You cannot be a Zionist and a human rights advocate, if my way of saying it made it sound like I thought you could.)
No one in Israel is out there protesting the genocide.
All the protests have been because not enough was done to rescue hostages or some other dislike of Netanyahu.
Overall polling shows Israel supports what is happening to Palestine or thinks not enough has been done.
Yes they are. Itās the same groups that have been campaigning to end the occupation since before October 7th. Itās not a majority or even close to - two-thirds of Israelis support the continuation of the war. But saying āno oneā is an absolute falsehood. And, I think propaganda and misunderstanding of the situation on the ground is also a large part (in addition to, yes, some large amount of pure racism and violent vindictiveness that says itās okay if Palestinians are dying because they are bad.)
The wheel youāre currently cranking on, is the same wheel that was turning right at the beginning of Israel, and managed to turn its way from āall the Nazis are wrong and evilā around to āthe Jews are always the victims about everythingā and has now arrived itself at āIsrael can do anything it decides to and will still be the victimā and now, on the other side, āall the Israelis are always wrong and evilā is emerging into view coming in the other direction. I am telling you that no matter how hard you crank that wheel, on whichever side, your activity will never crank you around to arrive at a world that is peaceful or just.
(I know I said Iād stop after saying my bit; I just wanted to say a little more on it and shoot down the absolutely false idea that no one in Israel opposes the war on humanitarian grounds.)
That whole article talks more about protestors pushing for returning hostages and other dislikes of Netanyahu far more than it does generic āanti-warā protestors.
So thanks for that really, just further solidifies my point.
Likewise life is not a fucking wheel, it doesnāt travel in some predetermined path youāve created. Let me tell you something, no matter how hard you centrist ādonāt do anything at allā approach it, you will never arrive at a world that is peaceful or just.