Rafael Shimunov ✡️ 🍉 Profile picture
Host @BeyondThePaleFM 99.5 FM @WBAI. Bukharian Jewish HIAS refugee via former Soviet Uzbekistan. #FreePalestine #NotAnotherBomb

Nov 17, 2023, 8 tweets

When you tell me to trust the testimonies of Zionist forces, as a Mizrahi Jew, I say pass.

Zionism had Israeli Jews dress up as our Iraqi neighbors and friends to massacre us, fellow Jews. Why? So that Mizrahi Jews would flee Iraq and help settle Palestinian homes cleared of Palestinians.

middleeasteye.net/news/iraq-jews…

As a Mizrahi Jew, you can skip me with Zionist government testimonies about anything.

The same ideology that took in my Yemeni Mizrahi cousins for good press, then had their "savage" babies stolen at birth and given to white Jewish families.

jewishstudies.washington.edu/israel-hebrew/…

As a Mizrahi Jew, I can't hear any facts the Israeli government tells me without deep, total suspicion.

As I imagine the thousands of Ethiopian Jews the Zionist ideology had secretly sterilized in ethnic cleansing of our own people.

jstor.org/stable/26554851

The word Mizrahi, which we're conditioned to use, is a colonialist invention. We once called ourselves Iraqi Jews, Iranian Jews, Egyptian Jews, Palestinian Jews... Mizrahi literally is modeled after how British colonialists said Oriental. To erase us.

aljazeera.com/opinions/2017/…

So my question to people who believe anything good about the political zionist ideology, or anything true about the far right government enacting it, if they lie and treat fellow Jews this way, imagine what they would do to Palestinians.

One great modern example of Jews rejecting Zionist fear mongering was when Netanyahu visited France after antisemitic violence. He told them they would only be safe in Israel. They responded by singing La Marseillaise, the French National Anthem.

Caveat to this thread: Yes, I know Jewish safety across North Africa, Middle East and Central Asia had been both wildly safe and successful and also dangerous. The point of this is not to whitewash anything, but to highlight political Zionism as deeply antisemitic and racist.

Palestinian safety in these regions was also mixed, and often dangerous. As is Bahai, Kurdish, etc. Oppression of minorities isn't unique to us. And the solution to it is multifaith, multiethnic democracy, not the Jewish theocracy being built at the expense of others.

Share this Scrolly Tale with your friends.

A Scrolly Tale is a new way to read Twitter threads with a more visually immersive experience.
Discover more beautiful Scrolly Tales like this.

Keep scrolling