Thread by @itamarst

1/ Some of the Jewish community in #CambMA are afraid of antisemitism. I know what fear feels like. My grandmother's barely escaped from the Nazis. In Israel I sat in bomb shelters wearing a gas mask during the Gulf War, lived there when suicide bombers blew up buses and cafes.

2/ When you are attacked for who you are, you have two options. You can unite:

1. With those who share your identity, even if they're responsible for violence against others.
2. In solidarity with all victims of violence.

Growing up in Israel, option #1 was the default.

3/ And as in Israel, significant sections of the Jewish community in #CambMA showed up in support of the first choice. It's an understandable outcome: you feel threatened as a Jew, so you defend a Jewish state.

But consider what the Zionist Jewish state means—

4/ Israel, as a Jewish state, is deliberately designed to separate Jews and non-Jews. Jews can't marry non-Jews. The school system for citizens in segregated between Jews and Palestinians. And Palestinians under military occupation are separated by an apartheid system.

5/ Jewish violence against Palestinians begets Palestinian retaliation. And from a Zionist perspective this is a good thing. Intermarriage and assimilation destroy the Jewish nation—what better to way to stay separate than the fear of violence?

6/ The reason some Zionists embrace a two-state solution is because they worry that higher population growth among Palestinians will lead to a Palestinian majority west of the Jordan. Palestinians might then push for a one-state democracy, the end of Zionism.

7/ A US in which Trump triumphs would be awful for American Jews. Israel has no problem with that vision, and happily embraced Trump. So long as the US supports Israel, that's what really matters. If American Jews suffer, that will motivate them to make aliyah and move to Israel.

8/ Even if the horrors of the military occupation of the West Bank ended tomorrow, even if Gaza wasn't a massive prison, even if Israel's military violence stopped—even so Zionist Israel would still be akin to the US of anti-miscegenation laws, segregation, and white supremacy.

9/ A Zionist state is fundamentally immoral. The best even liberal Zionists can do is conceive a Jewish state where Palestinians citizens are separate and somewhat less equal. (And to be clear, an ethnic nationalist Palestinian state would in the end be just as bad.)

10/ From what I heard this week, large parts of the Jewish community in #CambMA would welcome Jews like me, even as they reject human solidarity and equality—because they're afraid.

I'm afraid too. But my community will be those who use fear as motivation to help all who suffer.