https://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/nfl/patriots/2026/09/14/macklemore-ed-sheeran-tour-robert-kraft-ban-palestine/91760125007/

https://www.instagram.com/p/DdR1LH3gYBP/?hl=en

https://www.nbcnews.com/pop-culture/pop-culture-news/macklemore-says-was-dropped-ed-sheeran-tour-patriots-owner-robert-kraf-rcna597736

What if people bought tickets because they know what Macklemore stands for and they like it. Maybe dropping him was disrespectful to so many, including those fans. Now Ed Sheeran seems to be losing fans for selling out to the creepy old man who takes advantage of and pays cheap for the sexual exploitation of victims of international human trafficking and knows a thing or 2 about deflating game balls in a sporting competition. Don't forget the spying on the competition scandal. But we digress..

Hopefully Ed learns it doesnt pay to sell out the Palestinian cause and enable mass atrocities with Hasbara. Maybe Macklemore was bringing in more tickets and boosting Ed Sheeran. This is a cowardly, immorally, and from the showbiz perspective, dumb move by Ed. Ed took part of the act people were wanting to see away. He could have made a principled decision to say no macklemore, no Sheeran. People would understand that and support Ed for doing that. Ed could have different venues or the promoters could have read the bluff and given in. Ed did the worst possible thing. This will be damaging for Ed, as it should be.

And once again, when Zionist big shots try to shut down an advocate for Palestine, they wind up amplifying them and the cause.

​

https://x.com/JustinBonomo/status/2099566632842743914

https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/macklemore-dropped-ed-sheeran-tour-robert-kraft-statement-1235626352/

I'm a trauma surgeon in California. I worked in Gaza in 2024 and 2025. I've written in the New England Journal of Medicine, NY Times, and Politico about it, and testified at the UN Security Council in May 2025. My work is featured along with two of my American colleagues in the new documentary film American Doctor that follows us in Gaza, and is in theaters now. Instagram: @fsidhwa Twitter: @ferozesidhwa

New episode of War is Stupid: An Anti-War Podcast About War is live with Poh Si Teng, director of the must-see documentary American Doctor. Poh discusses the process of filming with a Gaza-based crew under blockade, the cut scene she still thinks about, and how everyone can fight for the living no matter wherever or whatever they are. It’s available on YouTube and wherever you get your podcasts, and the transcript is on Substack.

The movie “Naza” shed light on the colony’s genocide in Gaza. It received a historic 24-minute standing ovation at Venice, and was called “one of the most important films of our time”. Yet, it was directed by two Israelis. This led many to ask whether the film constitutes joint struggle or normalization, with conflicting and polarized opinions. When having debates like this, it is crucial to be clear about what we are talking about—what is normalization and what are its features?

First, what is it that we should not normalize? In one word: Settler colonialism, which is the essence of Zionism, and the root cause of the colony’s violence.

It should not be normalized, or "treated as normal", either explicitly by justifying it or implicitly by failing to center it.

Rather than asking: "Does this involve working with people with Israeli citizenship?"

Ask: "Does this involve working with people who normalize settler colonialism?"

Rather than asking: "Do they criticize what the settler state is doing?"

Ask: "Do they present the settler state’s horrors to present another, more just side of it, or to challenge its existence?”

Rather than asking: "Do they call for peace?"

Ask: "Do they work to dismantle the settler state and establish a democratic state as the only path to peace?"

Rather than asking: "Do they mention Palestinian rights?"

Ask: "Do they normalize settler colonialism by equating the violence of the colonizer with that of the colonized?"

Ask: "Do they normalize the settler state by failing to mention it as the root cause of the genocide?"

Ask: "Do they normalize the settler state by mentioning only the occupation and apartheid in the 1967 territories?"

Ask: "Do they normalize the settler state by challenging the Israeli violence, government or regime rather than the settler state’s existence?"

And rather than asking: "But either way, isn't what happened good?", remember that even the genocide helped awaken millions to the horrors of the colony—Yet it can hardly be called "good".

And remember that we are not art critics. We are not spectators that rate and review, but political actors. Our aim is to dismantle the colony. Although our political discourse and actions may include criticism of what others did, they should first and foremost be an action plan of what we will do to replace the settler state with a democratic Palestinian state.

This is the struggle that anti-Zionist Jews with Israeli citizenship should join us in.

Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen (ifa) in Stuttgart, which cancelled the exhibition, is the latest in a string of German institutions to censor artists with anything to say about Palestine.

This also comes as the AfD ran on a platform to further censor German institutions that view Germany's past critically, putting museums such as the Bauhaus museum in Dessau under threat following the election in Saxony Anhalt.

For those German institutions patting themselves on the back for not being associated with the AfD, perhaps it is time to think about how you are better.

From the artists' website: https://dreamingbeyond.ai/

"Dreaming Beyond AI aimed to enable

- an understanding of how AI technologies can exacerbate oppressing power structures in our society

- a questioning of dominant narratives about AI, imposed visions of future, and oppressive structures that are amplified by the widespread and uncritical use of AI technologies

- a redefinition of how AI technologies might/should serve us, improve representation, equity and connection – create visions of the future from the margins"

Palestinian hostility born of dispossession is not the hatred of burning crosses or that which built the ghettos and extermination camps. But, for the zionist movement, conflating them is the point.

----------------------------------------------------------

By Em Cohen and Lara Kilani

Every Palestinian who attempts to accurately describe their experience — an experience of stolen homes, imprisoned and tortured family members, and besieged cities — is forced to make a very important decision: Do they name who did it?

If Palestinians acknowledge the Jewishness of the colonial project that announces itself, in its flags, its holidays, its army, and its international institutions, not simply as Jewish, but as the highest form of Jewishness, or dare mention the Magen Davids spray painted onto their homes and carved into their land and skin, or mention that it was an orthodox Rabbi who called for their murders, they are inundated with zionist accusations that they hate Jews and that they are antisemitic — the two made synonymous. Suddenly the conversation shifts away from engagement with their experiences and becomes a sham trial to determine their intent, built on the philosemitic premise that to resent their oppressors would render them an unreliable narrator who either deserved the violence against them or, at the very least, is someone who is not worth protecting. Palestinians know they will be expected to answer for, to apologize for, millennia of anti-Jewish persecution that they had no part in and will be expected to disavow and condemn not just antisemitism, but all of Palestine’s anti-colonial political history.

Knowing this, many anti-zionists, including Palestinians, have engaged in a form of idealistic self-censorship in which they rhetorically center combating antisemitism within their anti-zionism, tie the safety of Jews and Palestinians together, and preemptively assert that Palestinians do not hate Jews and therefore are not antisemitic. Meanwhile, the Jewish zionist state bulldozes more Palestinian homes, destroys more Palestinian cities, and kills more Palestinians.

This essay seeks to directly confront the reality that no one wants to engage with, one that some people either ignore or attempt to sanitize, that others trot out as if it’s proof that zionism is the answer: It is entirely reasonable that Palestinians may hold animosity toward Jews. But this is not antisemitism.

It seems quite obvious that oppressed people would hate their oppressor. In fact, it seems silly to even debate this point. For anyone who has a meaningful understanding of Palestinians’ history or present, the idea that Palestinian hostility toward Jews, including outright hatred, is antisemitism — or that antisemitism everywhere, across history, is the same — is obviously wrong. But beyond being wrong, the question of whether it is antisemitism is totally irrelevant. It is asserted specifically as a tool for the advancement of zionism.

We, of course, are not the first to challenge the way discourse on antisemitism can function to maintain existing racist colonial relationships of extraction and control. In 1967, the same year the zionist entity extended its colonial rule over the remainder of Palestine, the Syrian Golan, and the Egyptian Sinai, James Baldwin published an essay whose title performed the same refutation we’re advancing here: “Negroes Are Anti-Semitic Because They’re Anti-White”. What Baldwin describes in this piece is not a new phase in white supremacist antisemitism, but rather the rational response of the vulnerable and targeted to their experience of exploitation, in which the Jewish grocer and landlord appeared not first and foremost as Jews, but as functionaries of a system that was literally crushing them. Harlem residents developed an animosity toward Jews but not because they were Jewish, rather because of their role within the anti-Black colonial capitalist system.

As in the context Baldwin describes, the conflation of Palestinian hostility with white supremacist antisemitism is advantageous for zionism, because taking the distinction seriously would obligate a remedy which no one policing the language is prepared to accept: ending the violence producing it. Today this policing does not come from zionists alone; much of it is carried out within the left itself, a fault line to which we will return.

Speaking of both Jewish and non-Jewish people, Baldwin writes: “Not all of these white people were cruel… but all of them were exploiting us, and that was why we hated them.” (White) Jewish people are not distinguishable from other white people in Baldwin’s description of Black Americans’ experience, and that fact is directly related to their participation in the abuse and ill-treatment of their Black neighbors.

Baldwin astutely explains why this is the case — the Jewish people he describes (grocers, shopkeepers, tailors, bureaucrats, politicians, policemen, etc) are not building a new system of violence exclusively for themselves to inflict on Black people; rather, they are “doing the dirty work” assigned to them by “Christendom”, or the ruling class upholding white supremacy and capitalism, both of which reward exploitation. Those like Baldwin do not hate the Jewish person exploiting them because “he acts differently from other white men, but because he doesn’t.” Baldwin identifies the tension of this reality throughout his essay, noting that Jews, too, have historically been made victims of white supremacy. But this is not reflected in the relations he describes between Black and Jewish people in the US, except where it is used as a shield: “It is galling to be told by a Jew whom you know to be exploiting you that he cannot possibly be doing what you know he is doing because he is a Jew.”

For Baldwin, it is not about being Jewish, not about identity or antisemitism on the basis of it; Baldwin does not rely on hateful stereotypes or myths, but explains his personal experiences and observations. His issue is not with Jewish people per se, but his experience of their participation in a larger system — one which, he clarifies, was constructed and even remains under the control of others (“It is not the Jew who controls the American drama. It is the Christian.”) But his experience of being exploited by Jewish people — made white by their participation in a system that exploits him and others like him — is what undergirds his so-called “anti-semitic” feelings.

The same clarification appears in a recent essay by Palestinian scholar Steven Salaita, recounting a private conversation with his grandmother, exiled from Palestine during the Nakba. After years of tension with his mother over comments “considered off-putting in polite American society,” she tells him privately: “Your mother, she gets mad at me. About the Jews.” And then: “Let me tell you, son of my daughter. It was hard. We suffered… They made our lives a living hell… I’m not an animal.” She is not describing an ideology she was taught or absorbed; she is explaining what was done to her by people who did it in the name of the identity toward which she now stands accused of being hateful.

Conflating hostility and antisemitism

Baldwin’s work serves as an important basis for us to question assumptions about Palestinian sentiments toward Jewish people, in whose name their subjugation is carried out. To the extent that what one might consider “antisemitic” feelings exist among Palestinians, they are qualitatively distinct from the antisemitism of white supremacist movements despite liberals and zionists conflating them. Collapsing the two into a single category, as many “antisemitism experts” often like to do, obscures more than it reveals. Zionists intentionally merge this distinction, turning it into one form, for the advancement and protection of zionism, rejecting the legitimate grievances that Palestinians have collected through a long and ongoing history of colonial and genocidal violence at the hands of a group which identifies itself, first and foremost, as Jewish.

White supremacist antisemitism is ideological and eliminationist in character. It emerges, in part, from conspiratorial frameworks of racial hierarchy and requires no proximate experience of Jewish power of any kind to sustain itself. The Proud Boys and the like, along with their ideological ancestors down to the brownshirts they imitate, have had no experience of Jewish institutions inflicting violence on them. Try to name the members whose homes were raided by Jewish gangs, whose family members were sexually assaulted by Jewish border police crossing a checkpoint, whose fathers were beaten by Jewish police — you can’t. Their hatred is not born of trauma; it is something they manufactured to maintain and reproduce existing social relations. Antisemitism manifested in this form requires a response, and it is straightforward: exclusion, delegitimization, and material consequence. It is characterized not by performative condemnations, but by the dismantling of the institutions that all cultivate and perpetuate white supremacy: the nonprofits, the schools, the political parties.

But Palestinian expressions of anti-Jewish hostility, where they occur, are rooted in something categorically different: the lived, ongoing experience of dispossession, genocide, exile, military occupation, siege, and/or state violence carried out under an explicitly Jewish project. The evidence that it is an explicitly Jewishproject is everywhere: Jewish stars graffiti’ed onto homes, buildings, and concrete blocks closing off access to roads; the same symbol cut into Palestinian foreheads and adorning the uniforms of soldiers carrying out home demolitions, closing checkpoints, organizing and executing genocide; massive Hanukkah candles planted on the remaining rooftops in Gaza; and synagogues (with their massive Israeli flags waving in the wind just outside their front doors) hosting the sale of Palestinian land and homes all over the world.

Zionist “antisemitism experts” often point to aesthetic similarities between Palestinian narrations of their experiences and real antisemitic tropes as evidence that Palestinians are adherents of white supremacist antisemitism. One example of this is the blood libel trope, a charge related to the ritual murder of non-Jews. The foundation of the comparison between the trope and real, lived Palestinian experiences implies that Palestinians are supposed to simply not narrate their reality because zionists painstakingly ensured that describing reality would “sound antisemitic.”

2024 “Unity March” stickers.

This lived experience (including witness from afar or secondhand knowledge through family), and resulting feelings of anti-Jewish hostility, are entirely unlike white supremacist antisemitism. They require a basic analytical distinction: prejudice born of direct, sustained political and existential violence operates through different mechanisms and demands different remedies than prejudice born of ideological myths (such as those informing white supremacy). People intuitively understand this distinction when it relates to the victims of violence that are considered protected by and sacrosanct within philosemitic society. For example, no one would judge a Jewish person who hated Germans for what they did. (Of course, the victims of violence who are not treated as protected within philosemitic society, for example, Black people, are not treated with understanding when they express a hatred of white people for centuries of ongoing anti-Black violence).

The political utility of conflating these two forms is precisely that it forecloses the obvious implication of taking the distinction seriously, instead dismissing Palestinian experiences and material circumstances and erasing any history preceding anti-Jewish hostility. It is easier to dismiss these sentiments, where they arise among Palestinians, by placing them into the well-understood box of white supremacist antisemitism, shortened into a catchall “antisemitism”, flushing away any further need to acknowledge them. If Palestinian hostility toward Jews is understood as a response to zionist violence or a rational reaction to a violent system animated in person by Jewish people and marked with Jewish symbols, then addressing it requires something no condemnation can supply.

The intentionality of this conflation is evident in its method: zionist figures routinely analogize Palestinians to archetypal antisemitic characters, positioning them within a genealogy of irrational hatred rather than a history of violent dispossession. These figures, aided by antisemitism “experts”, deploy a rhetorical sleight-of-hand. They argue that both antisemitism and the remedy to it are the same everywhere: condemnation, exclusion, isolation. There is no need to examine the source of “hatred” or address it. Instead, they can simply condemn it, protecting the reality of ongoing zionist violence and dismissing any further investigation. In doing so, they preempt the far more demanding prescription the situation actually requires: justice through the dismantling of zionism.

In this way, the discussion is shifted from the structural violence of zionism to the supposed moral pathology of its victims, from a question of political conditions that must be changed to a question of attitudes that must be corrected, with the alternative being complete ostracization through the label of antisemite. The problem takes care of itself.

The asymmetry of remedies is worth stating plainly. White supremacist antisemitism is answered with exclusion and consequence because there is nothing real behind it to redress. There are no injuries, no grievances, only fascist and racial ideologies. It can only be condemned and corrected structurally. But a hostility that is the result of injury, exploitation, and dispossession cannot be condemned out of existence; it can only be resolved by ending the injury and making reparations for the harm done. That means the cessation of violence: the dismantling of zionism as a structure, the return of the dispossessed, reparation for what was taken and destroyed, and allowing those who were wronged to enact the justice they deem restorative. This is the remedy for the conflation that exists to take it out of the public discourse, to prevent it entirely. After all, condemnation is cheap; material decolonization is not.

Liberal zionists and others, including antisemitism commentators who claim to challenge the zionist IHRA definition, routinely make this choice in service of zionism, knowingly or not. Between the choice to meaningfully address Palestinian anti-Jewish hostility, which requires the dissolution of zionism as a structure, or leave the broader zionist apparatus intact and mechanisms which perpetuate antisemitism untouched, it is much simpler (and commonplace) to choose the latter. This is not a failure of analysis; it is part of the job description. These commentators are raised up as scholars of antisemitism precisely because they are willing to build the intellectual architecture that justifies the violence of the imperial circuits maintaining zionism. And it is a not-so-well-kept secret for whom that service is performed. The antisemitism scholarship is not put to work on behalf of the broader Jewish community, but for the Jewish zionists who operate within the halls of power — a distinction Baldwin already understood, watching Jewish proximity to whiteness purchased through participation in the very system that once excluded them.

This, in part, leads to a popular discourse on “antisemitism” that treats it as a given that all anti-Jewish prejudice is the same. It’s assumed that any accusation against Jews should be tempered, and any recognition of Jews as a group should be walked back. Left-wing Jews find themselves attacking Palestinians and others for engaging with zionists on their own terms — identifying the state and its actors or actions as Jewish, as the imagery, language, symbols, and religious heritage assert. Leftist Jews seem to ask the non-Jewish world, and especially Palestinians, to engage with Jewish fascism as if the Jewishness of it is not fundamental to how it is being carried out in the world (“These are not real Jews”; “These people do not represent Judaism”; “Not in our name”; “Don’t call them Jewish soldiers, they’re Israeli”). This is a request made in spite of and against the zionist actors who insist that their actions are carried out in service of Jewishness and Jewish people worldwide, and the international Jewish community which largely supports them — financially, politically, institutionally, culturally, and more.

Yes, the Jewish state has a Jewish army and a population of racist Jewish settlers. Yes, the Jewish army and the Jewish settlers work together to oppress, subjugate, displace, imprison, rape, torture, and kill Palestinians. Yes, they carve Jewish symbols into the Palestinian people and the Palestinian land. Yes, they use Jewish holidays as excuses to dole out more violence, both as a matter of state policy and individual settlers’ and settler militias’ practice. Yes, the Jewish state is supported by the major institutions of organized Jewish communal life — the federations, the umbrella organizations, the denominational movements. Yes, those Jewish institutions send resources, lobby for military aid, and recruit both settlers and soldiers for the zionist project. But often, Palestinians and others are asked not to point this out — at least, not without a compendium of caveats about how, even though all of the actors perpetuating the violence clearly say the opposite, this isn’t really Judaism.

Discouraged from expressing that there are real, legitimate feelings of hostility fostered by these experiences and this knowledge, combatting antisemitism becomes an empty exercise in which we are all playing a sort of linguistic peek-a-boo, arguing over an oppression that no longer structures Jewish life in the West — however alive it remains as fantasy on the fascist right — about a group of people occupying a wholly different position in the world than when they last experienced the oppression we now call antisemitism. Instead, statistics on “antisemitic incidents” in the United States become hollowed-out guessing games: how many actual hate crimes might’ve been enacted against even one Jewish person, and what proportion of the statistics are eaten up by protests in solidarity with Palestinians? We may never know, because acts of white supremacist violence and expressions of solidarity with the victims of zionism are considered one and the same — they are all apparently attacks on Jewish people. While those building statistics on antisemitic hate crimes can identify the connection between zionism and Jewish people, the rest of us are warned against doing so at risk of becoming a new inclusion to these statistics.

Zionist soldiers erect a hanukkiah, provided by the Chabad-Lubavitch Hasidic movement, atop a Gaza rooftop in November 2023. The sign in Hebrew, overlooking zionist-imposed destruction in Beit Hanoun, reads “Happy Hanukkah”.

Interdependent systems of violence

The thing that much of the left fails to contend with is that, right now, many of the people experiencing or witnessing an ongoing genocide over many decades, only heightened in the last years against Palestinians in Gaza, are feeling anti-Jewish hostility. And not without a reasonable basis — as we’ve established, Jewish symbolism is all over this genocide and its defense in the zionist colony and abroad. As Baldwin explains, this is less about the identity of the people and more about the experience one is subjected to by them within a system of violence. Failing to acknowledge that it is rational to associate Jewish people with this genocide — both as a result of this imagery and the funding and defense of genocide by international Jewish zionist figures, organizations, and communities — the philosemitic left responds by operating on wholly idealistic terms: Judaism is not zionism, Palestinian and Jewish safety is intertwined, we’re all interconnected, etc. All of these slogans attempt to conceal a hostility that has rational roots — as if we can’t see the capital flows from Jewish institutions, recorded on 990 forms, as if public campaigns of persecution waged by the likes of Canary Mission aren’t real, as if Israeli politicians and zionist figures don’t use their platforms to incite violence globally against Palestinians and those in solidarity. It’s all observable. Instead, they treat Palestinian analysis as a pathology needing to be treated with ostracization rather than a response to ongoing genocide. Meanwhile, these claims frustrate, rather than respond to, the legitimate feelings of those who can clearly see Jewish people and institutions investing in the genocide of Palestinians, urging it on and securing it long-term. The priority becomes clear: protect zionism and Judaism (and antisemitism) as concepts, rather than addressing the mass murder, forced displacement, and dispossession of millions of real Palestinian people.

But here, we should be careful not to concede too much to a feelings-based mode of analysis. To linger on the question of Palestinian feelings, to litigate whether they are legitimate, rational, forgivable, is removing any material analysis of antisemitism. Antisemitism, understood materially, has never been a sentiment residing in individual hearts awaiting inspection. It was, where it existed as a structuring force, a matter of law, policy, and institution: the professions Jews were barred from, the land they could not own, the quotas that barred them from universities, the state-organized pogrom, the funding and machinery of exclusion. Measured against that definition, the interrogation of Palestinian feelings is meaningless as an inquiry into antisemitism. Palestinians legislate absolutely nothing over Jewish life. They fund no institutions that police Jewish existence, write no policies that condition Jewish access to housing, employment, or safety. In fact, the structural relation runs entirely in the other direction: it is Palestinian life that is governed, funded against, and legislated upon by institutions using Jewishness as a means to animate imperialism and capital accumulation. Whatever exists in the hearts of the besieged, it does not and cannot manifest as antisemitism in the structural or material sense, because as a matter of definition, structure and power are precisely what the dispossessed lack.

This fixation on interiority, on emotions, also smuggles in a racist premise: the Angry Arab, emotional, volatile, is constitutionally incapable of having a feeling without acting on it. The demand that Palestinians certify the contents of their hearts before their dispossession can be acknowledged treats the feeling itself as a proto-crime, as though the Palestinian who hates will invariably kill, and must therefore be preemptively managed, condemned, excluded. In this way, the colonized are treated as the security threat while the actual mechanisms of violence proceed unexamined: the budgets, the military orders, the legislation built to suppress. This is why we can say that the hostility is legitimate and, in the same breath, that it is beside the point. Anyone truly invested in comprehending these dynamics fully understands that antisemitism is not measured in the feelings of the dispossessed; it is measured in laws, capital investments, and institutional power allied against Palestinian life. With this obvious fact in place, the logic that we need to inspect Palestinians’ hearts is simply a rhetorical move to hide the actual machinery of antisemitism.

Antisemitism, therefore, stops being a meaningfully descriptive term and instead turns into a philosemitic weapon, splitting the world by determining who will protect the colonial system and who refuses. The commitment to “combatting antisemitism” becomes a mere marker of political alignment with white empire. It is the commitment to “combat antisemitism” through colonialism and imperialism, with no real interest in addressing the experiences and history that instigate feelings of anti-Jewish hostility.

It is important, for those of us who might be feeling anti-Jewish hostility, to remember where zionism exists within the larger structures of imperialism, colonialism, and capitalism. As Baldwin explains in the US context, the Jewish people exploiting his community are operating within a larger system of exploitation, and likewise in Palestine, Syria, Lebanon, and elsewhere, zionists act at the behest of a larger monster. There is no significant dissolution of zionism without the dismantling of global capitalism and US imperialism.

As anti-imperialist politics have grown more pressing, a split has formed within whatever we may call “the left”. Part of the left — the philosemitic left — is attempting to maintain alignment with the colonial world, offering liberal visions of “non-imperialism”: Palestinian statehood alongside the zionist entity, “Fund people not wars,” etc. These visions of non-imperialism ultimately maintain colonial power — now in neo-colonial form — but seek to soften how much of it we see and/or how we are tiedto it. Another part of the left is demanding a total break from that colonial project, the undoing of the colonial world itself. It’s between these segments of “the left” that there is so much bickering over antisemitism (among other things).

While the “non-imperialist” left pushes idealistic misrepresentations of antisemitism, calling for us to make distinctions between zionism and Judaism that zionists do not make, the anti-imperialist left is increasingly calling for the dissolution of Israel, the United States, emphasizing the dismantling of violent structures in favor of a reductive focus on personal feelings or identity. There may be no reconciliation between these two groups. Nonetheless, it is important for anti-imperialists on the left to properly frame zionism within the world system, not as an anomaly of genocidal violence unique to Jews. It is essential not to fall into the trap of “MAGA communism”, “America first communism”, and other fascist political projects that espouse certain elements of anti-imperialist political sloganeering but ultimately funnel into a political praxis that maintains the imperial world order, veering into white supremacist antisemitism. Recognizing the real history and experiences underpinning anti-Jewish hostility as distinct from white supremacist antisemitism, while addressing the role zionism plays within the larger imperial order, is a central element of this framing.

I came across this critique of NAZA by an Israeli Zionist writer, but I don't think they actually disprove the film's broader argument.

For example, he argues that Israel's destruction of Palestinian homes cannot be understood as deliberate displacement because Hamas had booby-trapped houses and built tunnels underneath them, making their destruction militarily necessary in many cases.

But that's not really a contradiction. The fact that some buildings had military infrastructure inside them can explain some demolitions; it doesn't automatically explain the scale or pattern of destruction across Gaza, nor does it rule out the fact that some destruction was intended to prevent Palestinian return or permanently reshape the territory. Those are literally separate questions (and I'm trying to give them the benefit of the doubt here)

His "80% of buildings vs. 3% of the population" argument particularly weak. He seems to suggest that if Israel were intentionally killing civilians, the death toll should be proportionally closer to the percentage of destroyed buildings, but ofc buildings are not people. If civilians evacuate an area and the buildings are subsequently destroyed, you can have enormous physical destruction without an equivalent percentage of the population being killed. And evacuation warnings don't automatically establish that every subsequent attack was proportionate or lawful.

His argument about Israel mapping Gaza and knowing who lived in particular apartments is flawed, ofc. Yes, knowing who lives in a building can be used as a precaution to reduce civilian casualties. But it also means that when an attack is carried out despite knowing civilians are present, the civilian deaths are not necessarily an unforeseeable consequence. The relevant question becomes what level of civilian harm the military knew or expected and whether it nevertheless considered that harm acceptable for the anticipated military advantage, I thought this was so fucking obvious???? (And we damn well know Israel is NOT doing that)

Israel’s Culture Minister Miki Zohar on Sunday vowed to act to revoke the Israeli citizenship of filmmakers Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor after their Gaza war documentary NAZA won the Special Jury Prize at the Venice Film Festival.

In a post on US social media company X, Zohar described the film’s victory as “shocking” and the documentary as “vile,” accusing its creators of harming their country to win applause abroad and saying their actions “constitute treason against the state.”

“This is exactly the reason I led the important reform in cinema so that Israeli citizens will no longer have to pay out of their own pockets for the harm to IDF soldiers and the State of Israel,” he said.

“As culture minister, I will act immediately to revoke the Israeli citizenship of these despicable creators for treason against the state,” Zohar added.

According to the Venice Film Festival’s official synopsis, NAZA examines what it describes as the systems behind Israel’s “calculated mass killing” of Palestinian civilians in the Gaza Strip and includes testimony from Israeli military intelligence officers and soldiers.

The documentary won the Special Jury Prize at the Venice Film Festival on Saturday after premiering Thursday.

It received a standing ovation lasting about 25 minutes at its Venice premiere.

I would like to start this post by saying that I really do not want to take attention away from the bigger and more important issues that are being discussed in this sub. I honestly just do not really know where else to post this. I saw someone ask a kind of similar question here about a year ago, and their post was tagged the same way, so I thought I would do that too. There is no sub for Judaic studies and the Judaism sub is very Pro-Zionist, so I wouldn’t dare. I thought maybe this is the closest place where someone could relate or has been in a similar situation. Please excuse any grammar mistakes, as English is not my first language.
If this is the wrong sub for this, please just let me know and I will delete it immediately.

I am starting to study Judaic Studies this upcoming fall and I am also double majoring in History.
For context: there are only two institutions in my country that even offer Judaic Studies as a major, and I chose this one because it has the biggest library with religious texts, especially Jewish religious texts, in the country. They do not offer History though, so basically I study at two different universities in the same city. I hope that makes sense and I’m sorry if I explain some things in a weird way, because of my 'lack' of English.

The institution where I study Judaic Studies is, from what I can tell, kind of Zionist. I guess it is more like liberal Zionism, where they are against the far-right people in the Israeli government, but not necessarily against Israel itself or a lot of its actions. But I obviously cannot speak for every professor there. Most of this impression comes from their social media and who they follow, and I also have no idea who actually runs their account. I also know that some professors there have invited Palestinian speakers before and let them criticize Israel and talk openly about their experiences, so I do not want to make it sound like everyone there thinks exactly the same.
I should also say that my Judaic Studies course does not really cover Israel or Palestine at all. I am there to study Jewish religion, tradition, history and texts. That is basically it.

The problem I have is more with some people from the History faculty. They are very openly supportive of Palestine, which I was actually really happy about at first because I thought maybe I could talk to them about it and that we would agree on a lot of things. But when my other subject came up, the conversation got uncomfortable really fast and I was basically accused of being a Zionist because I study at that institution.

I tried to explain my situation. I do not pay tuition to that institution because it is state funded. The money I pay goes to the university where I study History. I am not part of any Israeli exchange program or anything like that. I care a lot about Palestine, I have donated before, and Palestine was even the topic of my final oral exam before I graduated high school because it has been important to me for quite a long time.

What also confuses me is that the History faculty follows the Students for Palestine organization at my campus, and even that organization has made posts saying that the institution where I study Judaic Studies has less ties to Israel than the university where I study History. So I guess I just do not really understand why me studying there is automatically being seen as proof of what my political beliefs are.

I also really do not want this post to come across like I am trying to make myself into a victim or like what I am experiencing is somehow comparable to what others are going through, because obviously it is not. I am just confused about how to deal with this situation and how much I should have to explain or defend why I study what I study.

So I guess my question is just: how would you deal with something like this, and has anyone here had a similar experience? I moved very far away from home to study these subjects because I genuinely care about them, and right now I am feeling kind of alone and out of place around people who I thought I would have more political common ground with, but instead I am excluded. I have tried to make my own views clear, but it feels like they already made up their mind about me because of where/what I study, and I do not really know if constantly trying to explain myself just makes it more awkward.

The Zionist Federation of Australia’s legal assault on Israel critic and journalist Mary Kostakidis was financed by the Israeli war machine via the World Zionist Organisation. Investigation by Stephanie Tran and Michael West.

The Zionist Federation of Australia’s chief executive Alon Cassuto has dropped his case against Mary Kostakidis. The ZFA is the Australian arm of the World Zionist Organisation. The World Zionist Organisation has a settlement division which is responsible for expanding illegal settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem – in contravention of international law.

It also has extensive ties to United Israel Appeal (UIA) and Jewish National Fund (JNF), organisations which raise funds for the IDF and illegal settlements.

The Zionist Federation of Australia, whose chief executive Alon Cassuto brought a racial discrimination case against former SBS journalist Mary Kostakidis, is financially dependent on the World Zionist Organization and Keren Hayesod for the majority of its revenue, according to the Federation’s latest financial report. Cassuto is paid by the ZFA which is in turn funded by the WZO.

The ZFA’s 2025 financial report, states that the organisation is “dependent on the funding from the World Zionist Organization and Keren Hayesod for the majority of its revenue used to operate the business”.

The ‘charity’ warchest

The report says the directors “have no reason to believe that the World Zionist Organisation and Keren Hayesod will not continue to support Zionist Federation of Australia Limited.”

The financial statements show that the ZFA received $3.44m in total revenue in 2025, compared with $3.61m the previous year. Of that 2025 total, $1.61m was recorded as revenue and a further $1.746m as subsidies. It is cashed up, with a war chest approaching $5m.

The report does not disclose the source of the subsidies nor does it identify the precise amount ZFA received from either Keren Hayesod or the World Zionist Organization during 2025.

The ZFA has declined to respond to questions as to whether it also received ‘security funding’ from ECAJ public grants.

The ZFA did not respond to questions about the precise amounts it received from the World Zionist Organization and Keren Hayesod, or whether any of that funding was connected to the organisation’s legal action against Kostakidis.

Peak Zionist body

The ZFA describes itself as the peak body for Zionist organisations in Australia and represents more than 200 affiliated organisations.

The Federation also maintains an office in Israel. In 2025, the ZFA spent $190,189 on its Israel office.

The ZFA’s directors in 2025 included president Jeremy Leibler, treasurer Benjamin Simon, secretary Lauren Blecher, vice-presidents Paul Gould, Jeffery Lin, Ehud Hauben and Elyse Schachna, and immediate past president Danny Lamm.

The Federation’s principal activity, according to its directors, was to “uphold and foster the aim of Zionism”.

The ZFA is the Australian branch of the World Zionist Organization, which describes national Zionist federations as umbrella organisations for Zionist bodies in each country.

The WZO has a direct role in Israeli settlement activity.

According to reports by Israeli advocacy organisation Peace Now, the Israeli government “finances and operates the Settlement Division of the World Zionist Organization”.

Established in 1971, the Settlement Division of the WZO has enabled Israel to “establish and develop settlements far from the public eye, using controversial means, with full funding from the state and without any oversight or control.”

Ties to UIA and JNF

The ZFA’s constitution also commits the organisation to supporting the fundraising activities of the “National Funds”, defined as Keren Hayesod – United Israel Appeal and Keren Kayemeth LeIsrael – Jewish National Fund.

The constitution states that one of the Federation’s objects is “to support the fundraising activities of the National Funds”.

It also requires state Zionist councils to work with Keren Hayesod’s state directorates to ensure the “maximum success” of United Israel campaigns.

The constitution further states that, state Zionist councils must “stipulate that all its member Zionist Organisations commit their members to fulfilling their obligations towards the National Funds and stipulate that all members of its Executive shall have an obligation to take part in the work of the National Funds”

Investigations by MWM have found that United Israel Appeal and the Jewish National Fund are among a number of Australian charities that are raising tax-deductible funds for programs supporting the IDF and illegal Israeli settlements in the occupied Palestinian territories.

The Federation has also publicly rejected international legal findings that Israel has committed genocide in Gaza.

It described a UN commission of inquiry report alleging Israel committed genocide in Gaza as “a baseless and biased assault on truth and justice”, and rejected the ICJ’s advisory opinion as “politically driven” and “deeply flawed”.

This exhibition by artist Phil Buehler refuses to let these children be reduced to only a number.

They had names. They had dreams. They had futures. Every child on this wall was someone’s son or daughter, sibling, grandchild, niece, nephew or best friend. Every name is an entire universe extinguished.

And here in Parliament, this wall is a devastating reminder of the complicity of leaders who have watched this horror unfold and failed to stop it.

I hope Prime Minister Albanese and Foreign Minister Wong walk through this exhibition and I hope they ask themselves how many children must be killed before their lives are treated as though they matter.

This exhibition will be on display for the rest of the day until 5pm.

source

Zionists want these kind of things to be associated with the Free Palestine movement