Shulem Deen 🎗️

Writer, editor, translator. Won some fancy awards for a book way back when. Scribbles in @nytimes @newrepublic @salon @jdforward

[Shulem Deen 🎗️ @shdeen]

This is ridiculous. Albanese is no Raoul Wallenberg. What’s more, Albanese is backed by a worldwide campaign of MILLIONS. You can say all you want about Zionist propaganda, but apples to apples, pro-Palestine activism is gargantuan, while pro-Israel activism is minuscule by comparison.

What the latter do have is focus, which the Zionist movement had from the beginning, even when Zionism was fringe even among Jews. Pro-Palestine activists like yourself can learn a thing or two from that. Sappy faux-lyricism doesn’t compare to doing work on the ground for people’s actual lives.

With all the millions backing her worldwide, how many lives has Albanese impacted? How many has she saved? Appearing on global TV and acting the martyr is hardly the stuff of heroes and legends.

[Shulem Deen 🎗️ @shdeen]

A perfectly reasonable view were this conflict actually about that. But it's simply not.

It is and ever has been: one side wants a state for Jews, the other side wants no state for Jews ("by any means necessary").

Contrary to popular wisdom, it's not all that complicated.

[Kenneth Roth @KenRoth]

"If one accepts that Jews constitute a people entitled to self-determination, how can one deny the same principle to Palestinians? If one believes Israelis deserve security, freedom and dignity, one should want the same for Palestinians." https://t.co/fgUybUdXcd

[Shulem Deen 🎗️ @shdeen]

@ggreenwald You saying it's inconceivable that a country might just ban two bigots on their own?

[Shulem Deen 🎗️ @shdeen]

@johngall__ @RachelMoiselle @loi_talk In a country with such deep antipathy towards Israel? Yes, "people **can** use their good sense..." **Can** but won't. And by every indication, never have.

[Shulem Deen 🎗️ @shdeen]

@chirurgus84 @IanCarrollShow No one has ever said "criticism is antisemitism." Literally no one—except for Jew-haters, that is.

[Shulem Deen 🎗️ @shdeen]

@_pblanknews "THE Jews"? How many Jews are there in America and how many of them live in Crown Heights, Brooklyn?

[Shulem Deen 🎗️ @shdeen]

@gingerjayhawker @sentdefender As has long been observed: "The antisemite does not accuse the Jew of stealing because he thinks he stole something. He does it because he enjoys watching the Jew turn out his pockets to prove his innocence."

[Shulem Deen 🎗️ @shdeen]

This is an ahistorical flattening of the Jewish experience across MENA that varied widely between time and place. “Better than Christians” is a low bar to begin with. But “we only hold one pogrom every now and then” was true for plenty of European countries, but that didn’t make them great places for Jews.

[Shulem Deen 🎗️ @shdeen]

Fun fact: most Jews who ended up in Palestine/Israel were on the spectrum of “meh” to decidedly opposed to Zionism. Whether it was assimilated German Jews fleeing the Nazis or the fiercely anti-Zionist Orthodox from Hungary/Romania, they ended up in Israel anyway. Ask why.

[The Economist @TheEconomist]

Jews in the diaspora who want to celebrate their heritage without tying themselves to Israel might look to the Bundist concept of “hereness”, which a new book by Molly Crabapple celebrates https://t.co/TcrH3lg9zX

[S Sebag Montefiore @simonmontefiore]

The Bund is fascinating but this review like Bund itself is a triumph of wish over reality. Bundists who werent killed by Hitler were shot by Stalin inc Alter Erlich Feffer Markish Bergelson many in the Night of Murdered Poets 1952. A dangerous world. Yet oddly the review just says: ‘Bund ceased operating in 1949.’

[Shulem Deen 🎗️ @shdeen]

This is ridiculous. Albanese is no Raoul Wallenberg. What’s more, Albanese is backed by a worldwide campaign of MILLIONS. You can say all you want about Zionist propaganda, but apples to apples, pro-Palestine activism is gargantuan, while pro-Israel activism is minuscule by comparison.

What the latter do have is focus, which the Zionist movement had from the beginning, even when Zionism was fringe even among Jews. Pro-Palestine activists like yourself can learn a thing or two from that. Sappy faux-lyricism doesn’t compare to doing work on the ground for people’s actual lives.

With all the millions backing her worldwide, how many lives has Albanese impacted? How many has she saved? Appearing on global TV and acting the martyr is hardly the stuff of heroes and legends.

[John Aziz @aziz0nomics]

There are more Muslims living in Israel as full-citizens than there are Jews living (as citizens or not) in the 49 Muslim majority countries put together.

This should be the only argument you need to debunk the false claim that Israel is an ethnostate.

[Shulem Deen 🎗️ @shdeen]

@turdducken @WEschenbach It means bullshit in the way that “govt press office” or “PR dept” means bullshit—which, yes, it is that, and also there’s a curious lack of hissing against “press-office-ists” of the non-Israeli kind. PR isn’t a clean business anywhere but it’s literally all hasbara ever meant.

[Alyssa Miller-Hurley🎗️ @alyjo85]

I lost a cousin on 10/7.

I didn’t go attack a mosque.

Stop excusing antisemitism

[Shulem Deen 🎗️ @shdeen]

I first learned Ohr Hachaim on Parshat Yitro 37 years ago, but these words remained indelible:

הגיע חשוק ונחשק לחושק וחשוק...

All kinds of theological knots to unpack, but the raw power of the passage encapsulates the 3000-year-old story of one people.

[Shulem Deen 🎗️ @shdeen]

Herodotus mentions it as a much broader region called Syria Palestina. Not a land of a specific people.

What IS notable about Herodotus’s description is that that *among its inhabitants* are the Phoenicians, who practice the “odd custom of circumcision,” which <wait for it…> they got from the Egyptians(!)

Modern scholars generally believe the ancient Israelites largely originated among the Canaanites (with some possible admixture of Egyptian). And the Phoenicians, of course, referred to themselves as the “kanaani.” As is clear from the sarcophagi of the kings of Sidon, Phoenician and Biblical Hebrew were virtually the same language.

Ultimately, history is complicated and fascinating and makes mincemeat of *everyone’s* sacred cows. Whatever your dogma, it doesn’t survive first contact with the enemy: those who bring primary sources not as a Twitter gotcha but as genuinely interesting insights into the past, even if many end up confirming no one’s favorite narratives.

[Shulem Deen 🎗️ @shdeen]

Not saying it’s chiefly religious. There were prominent Muslims who were suspicious of Zionism but took a “wait and see” attitude (e.g. Emir Faisal ibn Hussein, though that’s it’s own story…)

And plenty of Arab Palestinian nationalists were Christians (e.g. founders/editors of “Falastin” فلسطين—the El-Issa family).

But the greatest animating force against the Jewish state, in the 100+ years of opposition, was always rooted in a strong Islamist component. The religious rhetoric was always there, ready to be exploited. A distorted version of Islam perhaps, but still claiming to be in its name.

It’s true that a countervailing religious extremism exists among Zionists, but it was historically a fringe component. And the ascendancy of right-wing religious Zionism to real power is largely post-Intifada 2. On the whole, Zionism isn’t and wasn’t a religious movement.

But religious factors can’t be discounted, is my point. (Not an opinion about Islam at all.)

[Shulem Deen 🎗️ @shdeen]

Arab Palestinian leaders like Hajj Amin al-Husseini, who led Arab Palestinian nationalist movement, explicitly framed it as a religious issue.

It was definitely NEVER about “freedom,” because Arab and Muslim Palestinians would’ve had their own state under the UN plan.

It was the Arab world rather than Israel that prevented the establishment of such an Arab Palestinian state post-1948 (despite Husseini’s pleas). Jordan explicitly disallowed it in the West Bank, annexing the territory immediately for themselves. Even Egypt, which allowed Husseini a nominal “All-Palestine government” as an Egyptian protectorate in the Gaza Strip, insisted its government be located in Cairo(!)—and the whole thing lasted effectively all of three months.

It was simply NEVER about Palestinian “freedom.” Never, ever. Not once, not for a moment. Not in 1948, not in 1967, not in 1973, not during Intifada 1 or 2, and it still isn’t now.

Palestinians could have had a state today, right now, and many times in the past, if that was all they ever wanted. Except it simply isn’t and wasn’t ever the goal.

[Shulem Deen 🎗️ @shdeen]

@Palestinia12961 Which part?