Thread by @eslauritaa

I am not a Middle East expert nor a journalist.
I work for the social umbrella organization of Jewish communities in Germany.
I was active in various Jewish organizations.
I deal with the diversity of Jewish life realities and Jewish present in the context of German history,

I deal with Jewish feminist perspectives and I have worked on building alliances with other marginalized groups.
Last year, together with 12 other authors, I published a volume of essays that presents a fragment of these positions.

When I speak publicly, I refer not only to my individual experience „as a jew“. My expertise is built on the constant exposure to positions within the community in GER, IL and internationally that are not just my own.
So much for tokenism.

Based on this, I would like to give a brief insight into the state of Jewish communities since October 7, 2023:

The pogrom-like and genocidal massacres of Hamas and Islamic Jihad have triggered a form of collective secondary traumatization within Jewish communities worldwide.

The exterminationism with which torture and murder were carried out is based on antisemitic ideology.
The images produced by terror have the function of further fueling psychological warfare.
eyewitness and survivor reports prove which megalomaniac machinery of destruction..

these images were supposed to immediately follow.
This is exactly what was intended. The stories of people being burned alive in their homes, raped, tortured and murdered in front of their relatives, hiding under corpses and pretending to be dead are familiar to many Jews.

They know them from their own grandparents. This refers not only to the Nazi extermination factories in Poland and mass executions in Ukraine & Lithuania, but also to the antisem. policies of repression & persecution in Eastern Europ. countries before and after the "3rd Reich",

the expulsions from the Maghreb countries and the Middle East (e.g. Farhud pogrom in Iraq), and so on.
So much for ethnic cleansing and genocide.

Some specifics for the vulnerability of the Jewish community in Germany are still to be mentioned here, before we get to the effects of the current situation (And yes, because people seem to be bad in history, we should specifically talk about Germany):

- Social marginalization due to migration (i.e. structural poverty)
-continuities of intertwined racist and antisemitic violence (Halle 2019 as the tip of the iceberg) since 1945
-defense mechanism toward the Nazi legacy among middle class German majority

-receptiveness of antisemitic conspiracy beliefs, especially visible since the Covid pandemic and the Querdenken movement
- 45% members of the Jewish community in Germany with an origin from Ukraine and thus affected by the Russian war against Ukraine.
So much for privilege.

On the direct impact of October 7 on Jewish people in Germany, I'll give just a few examples:
Direct physical threats of violence both on- and offline,
E.g., message (summarized) to a 14-year-old boy: "I'll rape your mother and sister and then I'll kill you. After school."

Overt insults, intimidation, threats and harassment, increasingly aimed specifically at vulnerable people: very young or old people, people with disabilities
Arson attack on synagogue/community center where Kindergarten is also located.

Violence after Israel solidarity rallies (after which people were followed and hid in stores in the pedestrian zone, reported beatings, people being hospitalized)
graffiti on houses
Threats of kidnapping
Glorification of terror
Mass reproduction of antisemitic propaganda

Journalists wanting evidence of such cases:@Report_Antisem and @ofek_beratung Yesterday RIAS issued a monitoring report of the period since October 7.
Balance: 240% increase in antisemitic cases.
So much for the claim that there is no Israel-related antisemitism.

On a feminist note:
The impact of explicitly sexualized violence in the form of mass rape and forced prostitution and enslavement of abducted women announced by the terrorists.
The reproduction of this violence in the form of verbal threats.

The largely absent stance on this from feminist circles worldwide.
I don't know how many Jewish women I've spoken to in the last 1.5 weeks who report nightmares, out-of-body-experiences, panic attacks.
So much for intersectionality.

I do not want to engage in victim competition, the fact that the Palestinian civilians are suffering, is just as much a fact as all of the above mentioned.
I will also not allow my statements to be reinterpreted for racist mobilization, because we will all suffer from that.

I will not let fascists take my values.
What I am asking you to is:
Ask yourselves where you should question your worldview and why you were not able to de-antisemitize it to this day.
So much for solidarity.