Marc Harris ✡️

Duktig Jude

[Marc Harris ✡️ @Harris_Marc]

@KeithWoodsYT Jews reacting to Christians talking about Jesus the last 2000 years.

[Moderaterna @moderaterna]

Nooshi Dadgostar behöver städa upp i
Vänsterpartiet och rensa ut antisemiterna.

[Tōma 🐎 @NationOfEldia]

There are more Arabs serving in the IDF, than Jews livings in Arab countries

[Marc Harris ✡️ @Harris_Marc]

@adamcwejman Du har såklart helt rätt om vänsterpartiet och din analys av antisemitismen som kommer från det hållet är spot on. Men det är svårt att ta dig på allvar i denna fråga efter din rehabiliteringsintervju med rektor Hamid.

[Rabbi Poupko @RabbiPoupko]

Because they were not raised by a Beijing algorithm.

[Emily Schrader - אמילי שריידר امیلی شریدر @emilykschrader]

Ah the socialist wants a list of Jews. How original.

[Prof. Math & CS @Zeev81309559]

Funny how all I hear about is Islamophobia but all I see is antisemitism.

[Andrew Fox @Mr_Andrew_Fox]

The Gaza war was fought with proportionality, outstanding protection of civilian life, and was started by Hamas.

[Rachel Moiselle @RachelMoiselle]

This is where we are at in Ireland apparently.

[Marc Harris ✡️ @Harris_Marc]

Går bra i London nu

[Hen Mazzig @HenMazzig]

This Jewish Londoner’s family has lived in England for hundreds of years.

Now, he is the last one to leave for Israel.

Why? He’s sick of getting threatened in the street.

A society that has given up on protecting Jews is not a healthy society.

[Marc Harris ✡️ @Harris_Marc]

@BillyKelleherEU You’re not fooling anyone. Save the Jews from the Irish.

[Marc Harris ✡️ @Harris_Marc]

@piersmorgan Why are you presuming it’s because he’s been deemed antisemitic? Has there been any reasoning provided that is public information? Sounds like you have a guilty conscience Piers.

[Marc Harris ✡️ @Harris_Marc]

@HowardDLeigh Save the Jews from the Irish

[Andrew Fox @Mr_Andrew_Fox]

I had the same thought. The glee of Judenhass knowing you can get away with saying it’s “just anti-Zionism”.

[Marc Harris ✡️ @Harris_Marc]

@johngall__ @RachelMoiselle @loi_talk Unabashed self-regard and racist antizionism, the only Irish claims to relevance on the world stage.

[Matthew @Lux1090]

The attempt to revive the Bundism vs Zionism debate is frankly really bizarre. One of the main reasons why the Bundism vs Zionism debate ended in the 20th century is because the leaders of various European countries, from Antonescu to Hitler, killed pretty much all the Jewish Bundists, and the Zionists more or less survived it, and the Jews who survived the Holocaust all became Zionists, i.e. committed to the creation and maintenance of a Jewish state.

The Bundists and Zionists placed different bets on how the 20th century would play out for European Jews.

The Bundists bet that Europe would not become existentially inhospitable to Jewish life, and that instead European Jews could remain valued and safe members of European societies, especially by falling in with the prevailing trends of socialism and secularism, and that building a distinct Jewish collective identity in Europe would be compatible with all these changes. Fundamentally the bet was that European modernity would not prove incompatible with organised Jewish social and religious life.

The Zionist bet (which you can read in Herzl's Die Judenstaat and in his published diaries) was that industrialisation, European nationalism and mass society would lead to the destruction of European Jewish life, and that the only option was to try and escape while there was still time, and create a state of their own where they could defend themselves.

Herzl wrote in Die Judenstaat in 1896, "I cannot imagine what appearance and form this will take. Will it be expropriation by some revolutionary force from below? Will it be proscription by some reactionary force from above? Will they banish us? Will they kill us? I expect all these forms and others."

By 1945, as a rule of thumb, Europe's Jews either spoke English (i.e. lived in the United States, Britain, or the Anglophone world) or they were Hebrew- and Yiddish-speaking Zionists in Israel (or Mandatory Palestine at the time).* Europe pretty much killed off all the rest.

It's helpful to remember that what the Jews call the 'Righteous Among the Nations', i.e. those who risked their lives to save Jews from the continent-wide Holocaust, are notable in part because they were so few in number.

That's why the debate over Bundism ended after the War: both groups placed their bets on what the 20th century would mean for European Jews, and it turned out that the Zionists were right and the Bundists were wrong, and the consequence is that the former survived and the latter mostly died. It was a very high-stakes and tragic bet!

* The one exception to this are French Jews, but as usual it is the exception which proves the rule. About a third of French Jews are the descendents of the Jews of Algeria who had been there for over a thousand years, but fled to France when France ended its colonial rule over Algeria, since to remain behind under Arab rule would mean almost-certain death.

[Marc Harris ✡️ @Harris_Marc]

@estherzelda0514 ❤️

[Not a Good Jewish Girl✡️ @estherzelda0514]

I was an American Jew in the diaspora that did not want to tie myself to Israel. I was only tangentially aware of it, and in pure young adult fashion, rebelliously annoyed to be reminded of it by the Jews around me. I talked about Israel not at all. If you had asked me, I was opposed to it.

That changed with Operation Cast Lead. I had no idea what it was called at the time. I was checked out completely. I was starting my PhD, and had no idea that there was anything happening in Israel. If it was mentioned, I just kind of glazed over and forgot about it. I was American, what did I care?

But the people around me in academia? They knew. They cared. They saw my posts on Facebook spending time with a cousin who lived there; a trip to Tel Aviv five years ago.

This was all it took.

I was asked by other students about Israel, where I stood on it, what I thought. These questions carried an air of accusation that puzzled me. When I said I do not know, and I do not care, the questions became more pointed, more hostile. Was I a Zionist?

What is a Zionist, I asked.

I did not know. I heard the term only in circumstances of it being in the title of Jewish organizations mentioned in temple conversations. I wasn't there for that, though, I wanted a second helping of kugel and the ladies gossiping at the post-services buffet were in the way.

My ignorance and nearly complete disinterest in Israel did not matter. I was tied to Israel whether I liked it or not. My dark eyes, tan skin, long dark curly hair, Mediterranean features, my Jewish husband who wore a kippah to fancy occasions... inquiring minds needed to know, was a good Jew or a bad Jew?

It was a game, and I did not know the rules. Tails they win, heads I lose. I quickly learned that unless I verbally prostrated myself and proclaimed the most violent of antisemitic terrorists had a point, I had to answer for Israel. Even if I did that, I would still have to answer for Israel.

Israel did not make me a Zionist. My Judaism did not make me a Zionist. Antizionists, who have always been antisemitic, always been hostile, made me a Zionist. Because I was not allowed to be anything but that, not if I wanted to have any respect for myself.

[Marc Harris ✡️ @Harris_Marc]

När det kommer till den nygamla debatten om Bundism v Sionism (som inte förs mellan judar utan av icke-judar om judar) är utfallet ganska enkelt.

Man kan dö i sina fantasier eller så kan man leva i verkligheten.

[Marc Harris ✡️ @Harris_Marc]

Ping @ibncecilia

[Haviv Rettig Gur @havivrettiggur]

The Bund rejected Zionism. The Bund were all killed by Nazis and communists. For the vast majority of the Jews of the Eastern Hemisphere, the only survival and freedom they could find -- after trying every other imaginable option -- was Zionism.

Zionism is big and diverse and complex and beautiful. Zionism is also the product of a vast, unspeakable tragedy.

The Bund *should* have been able to build an interesting and flourishing Jewish world all its own, in the "hereness" of Eastern Europe. And in a better world, the Bund would have. But this isn't that world.

In this world, the Nazi war on the millenia-old European Jewish civilization was successful, the Jews of Europe were wiped out -- and old ideas that once animated Nazis and Stalinists in their murder of Bundists have now returned into fashion on left and right and gone looking once more for the Jews.

Is there a word that describes a Jew so pitiably afraid of the current whirlwind of hatred that they choose to build a fake past to live in, just so they can pretend that Jews ever had an alternative to Zionism?

The Bund's story, like Molly Crabapple's ahistorical polemics, is merely one more data point demonstrating that Zionism's case is actually -- tragically, in fact -- impregnable. That it is a story of the transformation of catastrophic annihilation into triumphant freedom and survival.

[dan linnaeus @DanLinnaeus]

Israel will defend itself indefinitely, the costs being what they are. If proponents of a two-state solution mean to suggest that a lack of a Palestinian state is the cause for that, then history simply flies in the face of that thesis — it is patently counterfactual.

On the contrary, a Palestinian state today under the current conditions would escalate the Palestinian-Israeli conflict to an interstate one, drawing regional and transregional actors into the fray and compromising regional and global security dynamics dramatically.

In plain terms, a Palestinian polity captured by a rejectionist religio-juristic posture, both financing and educating its population’s jihad against the Jewish state, is fundamentally incapable of maintaining peaceful relations.

Some western analysts suggest that the Abraham Accords are a realpolitik attempt couched in crude mercantilism to sidestep the issue. This fundamentally misunderstands the Accords.

The Accords are first and foremost an attempt to make normalization possible in the Muslim world by moving from hudna to Ahd — from temporary truce to true permanent covenant — through reconstituting religio-juristic doctrine that dissolves Muslim rejectionism to Jewish sovereignty.

It is a project that took form in bin Bayyah’s corpus of works back in the 90s and culminated in the Marrakesh Declaration on the rights of religious minorities in Muslim-majority lands in 2016 and the Document on Human Fraternity for World Peace and Living Together which was cosigned in 2019 by Pope Francis and Grand Imam Ahmed el-Tayeb of al-Azhar in Abu Dhabi.

The following year, a month after the Abraham Accords were signed in September, it was received and elaborated through papal magisterium in Fratelli Tutti.

The Abrahamic project is the most serious internal response to the doctrinal obstacle not only to Jewish sovereignty, but to integrating the Muslim world into the family of nations covenantally that has yet been assembled, and it is coauthored at the highest level of religious authority between the Sunni religious establishment and the Bishop of Rome.

The pathway to the unicorn Palestinian state solution is accordingly a Catch-22: without a covenantal basis for stable interstate relations, there is no viable pathway, while normalization with the Saudi kingdom legitimizes the very covenantal basis enabling that pathway. The gatekeeper of Palestinian statehood refuses to use its key.

What too many Western analysts fail to understand is that this is all trivial for the Saudis: they know this clearly; they are merely saying no in a roundabout way that perpetuates the conflict. Nothing more.

The Saudis are quite literally demanding the outcome they alone hold the key to making viable. And they are hiding behind the cloaks of opaque scholastic doctrinal realities to ensure no one can call them out for it. They are not unsophisticated people. They are fully aware what they are doing.

Put plainly, there will be no viable path to a Palestinian state until Saudi Arabia normalizes, and what is more, they know it all too well. This administration is likewise well apprised of the challenge.

The solution that is available is narrow and immensely unpopular on all sides. Normalization must take place on the basis of a commitment to operationalizing Oslo via local engagement, one community at a time, one interim reversible referendum at a time toward a final status that works around the current rejectionist posture of the PLO and Arab street.