Karina R. Tabacinic

Jewish Argentinean translator . ישראל, ראשית צמיחת גאולתנו

[Rawan Osman روان عثمان @RawaneOsmane]

I grew up in a Hezbollah stronghold in Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley. Israel was not a country in my education. It was a crime. A wound kept open on purpose. Every funeral, every slogan, every sermon pointed in the same direction: there, across the border, is the source of your suffering. Believe it. Repeat it. Pass it on.

I believed it. I repeated it. For years.

Then I moved to France. And I met Jews.

Not the abstraction. Not the enemy. People. Neighbors. Colleagues. And the collision between what I had been taught and what I was seeing in front of me was so violent — so intellectually embarrassing — that I had no honest choice but to start over. To read. To ask. To dismantle, brick by brick, everything I had been given as truth.

What I found on the other side of that dismantling was not just the absence of hatred. It was something I had not expected: admiration.

Let me be precise about what I am defending and what I am not.

I am not defending every Israeli policy. I am not defending any government unconditionally. I am not asking anyone to check their critical faculties at the door.

I am defending what Israel is. What it represents. What it has built, against every conceivable pressure, in a region that has largely failed its own people.

Israel is a democracy in a neighborhood of autocracies. It is a state governed by law in a region where law is routinely weaponized against citizens. It is a country where Arabs sit in parliament, where women lead, where dissent is not a death sentence. It is imperfect — as every democracy is — but it is genuinely, structurally different from everything surrounding it.

That difference is not incidental. It is the point.

The so-called Palestinian cause, as it is prosecuted today, is not a national liberation movement. I say this not to dismiss Palestinian suffering; suffering is real, and real people pay its price. I say it because the infrastructure of the “cause” — its funders, its ideologues, its loudest champions — has never been interested in Palestinian statehood. It has been interested in Jewish elimination.

Look at who built the movement’s international architecture. Look at the 1997 Tehran OIC summit, where the language of “apartheid” was first systematically attached to Israel, not by Palestinians, but by the Iranian regime, for export. Look at Durban. Look at who profits when the conflict continues and who loses when it resolves. The answer is never the Palestinian family in Gaza. The answer is always the regime, the militia, the ideological infrastructure that needs the wound open.

The Palestinian cause, as it functions on the world stage today, is a tool of an anti-western civilizational project. Its goal is not a state alongside Israel. Its goal is a world without Israel, and, by extension, a world where the values Israel represents are defeated. Liberal democracy. Jewish self-determination. The idea that a small people can survive, build, and insist on their own dignity against the will of those who would erase them.

When western progressives march under that banner, they are not marching for freedom. They are marching for the annihilation of the only thing in the Middle East that resembles what they claim to value.

I came to Judaism slowly, the way you come to something true, not in a rush, but in accumulation.

It was not the politics that moved me first. It was the texts. The insistence, running through thousands of years of Jewish thought, that the human being is created in the image of G-d, and that this is not a metaphor but an obligation. An obligation to see the other. To argue. To question. To hold power accountable, including your own.

I had grown up in a culture where the highest virtue was submission. To the leader, the militia, the narrative. Judaism confronted me with the opposite proposition…

Read the rest of the essay on my Facebook page.

[Samuel J. Hyde סמואל ג'י הייד @SamuelJHyde11]

When you understand that settler-colonial theory was invented by Fayez Sayegh in 1965, and that he had served as a senior figure in the SSNP — the Arab movement openly modeled on Nazism — the entire nativist fetish that settler-colonial theorists possess begins to look rather different. Suddenly, the obsession with soil, authenticity, roots, and the distinction between the native and the foreigner (who should be expelled), appears less like a language that passes for leftist liberation and sounds far closer to Nazi theory than its adherents would ever care to admit. Should we still then be expected to believe that is a mere accident that “Zionist colonialism” is the center piece of
settler colonial thought?

[Karina R. Tabacinic @KariTaba]

Spot-on. A must-read. Failure is not an option.

[Judea Pearl @yudapearl]

Why Do Societies Turn Against Jews? Dr. Gad Saad’s Psychological Explanation https://t.co/JiKx5SCzk0

[Heidi Bachram @HeidiBachram]

The sleight of hand that Marwan Barghouti is some unifying, peace-loving, wrongly accused victim is abhorrent. A lie that erases his many victims. I will not allow it. Here I lay out every crime he was convicted of, all the dead lost to their families. How dare those who are elected in a liberal democracy flirt with this violent fascist. ⬇️

[Eli Afriat 🇮🇱 @EliAfriatISR]

If you forgot this picture, then you forgot the morning of October 7th. 💔

[Haviv Rettig Gur @havivrettiggur]

.@Wikipedia has been transformed into a blunt instrument of propaganda in the deliberate effort to erase a nation and its history.

Read this thread before shouting at me that it ain't so.

[Karina R. Tabacinic @KariTaba]

@havivrettiggur @Wikipedia LLM are fed with Wikipedia. This is very concerning

[David Collier @mishtal]

Elderly grandmothers spreading lies about the Jewish state, demanding its boycott, and pressuring it to surrender to people who openly call for its destruction.

Rarely has antisemitism dressed so sweetly.
Rarely has it been so dangerous.

Full story here: https://t.co/05ToQNCBUp

[Jew in a Canoe ✡️🇨🇦 memoir now available! @WillieHandler]

People believe that because 700,000 Palestinians were displaced in an Arab war 80 years ago that today they're entitled to wage massacres, bomb busses, hijack planes, and recruit activists for a global intifada.

People also believe that because 9 million Jews were displaced in WW2 and 6 million of them were exterminated and nearly another million were ethnically cleansed by Arabs, that they're entitled to no self defense or sovereignty and that “their victim card expired."

This is the confluence of the racism of low expectations and raw antisemitism.

[Michael Shurkin @MichaelShurkin]

Dear @theeconomist, Actual Jewish history PhD here.

1. Crabapple is an ignorant dilettante whose book is an insult to real historians who labor to publish legitimate scholarship.

2. The Bundists were all murdered.

Ps. As for what Jews should or should not do: piss off. Thank your for your attention to this matter.

[Karina R. Tabacinic @KariTaba]

@SpencerGuard What can you expect from a school that has the current mayor as a commencement speaker?

[Angela Van Der Pluym @anjewla90]

Manny’s Deli is a staple of Chicago.

This is horrific.

[Gad Saad @GadSaad]

Please share.

[Casey Babb @DrCaseyBabb]

In Toronto, a young Jewish girl named Esther has been missing for over a week. To make matters worse, people have been ripping down posters about her disappearance, just like they did with the hostage posters after 10/7—one of the more appalling things I've ever seen in my life.

[Adam Louis-Klein @adam_louis52328]

The title chosen by the New York Times to release these hand-picked letters designed to make the dog rape libel look "serious" is very revealing. By naming it "Palestinian accounts of Israeli rape," the @nytimes tries to exploit a legitimate epistemic principle, namely, that minority groups deserve to be taken seriously in their accounts of oppression. However, in this case, naming these sources simply Palestinian obscures that they come from highly specific individuals and terrorists who are associated with militias who committed genocide and mass rape on October 7.

The equivalent would be publishing accusations of rape against the Tutsi by members of Hutu Power—the regime that committed the Rwandan Genocide, which also involved sadistic mass rape— and then claiming these were simply "African Accounts of Rape." Since the witnesses were "African" or "Black" they should be viewed with sympathy, despite the fact that the individuals in question were associated with committing genocide and mass rape themselves.

These dynamics of exploitation, inversion, and weaponization of legitimate moral frameworks to encourage evil is typical of antizionism.

[Karina R. Tabacinic @KariTaba]

This, over and over, and over again.

[Bill Maher @billmaher]

People say the left and the right can’t agree on anything these days. But there is this one thing:

[Movement Against Antizionism @maazaction]

Learn about the three core libels of antizionism across its three phases.

[Nikki Haley @NikkiHaley]

Claiming Israel trains dogs to rape Palestinians is modern day blood libel — propaganda pushed as more horrific details emerge about Hamas’ systematic torture on Oct. 7.

For being Jewish — Hamas raped a woman and burnt half of her face off in front of her husband; shoved nails, metal, and sharp objects into Israeli women; forced family members to sexually assault each other so that if they survived they would be traumatized by the sight of each other; raped corpses; the list goes on.

Distracting from these atrocities and smearing Israel while victims still fight for acknowledgment is sickening.

[Diego Elman @diegoelman]

"El antisemita no acusa al judío de robar porque piense que robó algo. Lo hace porque disfruta viendo al judío vaciar sus bolsillos para probar su inocencia." Jean-Paul Sartre

Intentar razonar con un antisemita es caer en su juego. No se debate con el prejuicio, se lo expone.

[Karina R. Tabacinic @KariTaba]

@AvivaKlompas @nytimes That first false report was enough for me to stop reading it and cancelling my subscription. And I was right.