Is he wrong though ? History showed that Germany hated its neighbours after WWI and that was a strong cement for WWII. How many people from Afghanistan were hostile of the US, after they helped the Mujahideen secure governance ? Didn’t that play a role in 9/11 ? Didn’t Iran become hostile towards the US for the same reason ? The survivors cultivate hate for the ones responsible of their loss. It’s a fact.
The pretense that it’s Israelis, not Palestinians, who face an existential threat of ethnic hatred in Palestine, is a false Zionist talking point to distract you from the reality and in fact works to make genocide more palatable to those who internalize it. Precisely as Joshua Cohen has internalized it. It is a mirror image of fascist ethnic cleansing rhetoric: the people being oppressed must be characterized as a threat, whereas the oppressors are characterized as valiant or victims or both. Throughout this “article” you can see many cases of this implicit impetus and a theme of Jewish supremacy. Cohen himself even sympathizes with Netanyahu. https://web.archive.org/web/20260115002425/https://www.theatlantic.com/books/archive/2024/01/joshua-cohen-ruby-namdar-israel-october-7/677126/
It further includes the actually antisemitic trope that Israel and Judaism are interchangeable. To conflate a genocidal settler colonist project with Jewishness itself - because of course the oppressed will hate their oppressors, and they even use their oppressors’ own language, but Palestinians hate Israelis for killing their families and stealing their homes and keeping them sick and poor in Bantustans. It is Europeans who perfected and maintained antisemitism and its litany of tropes and conspiracy theories, its race hatred. Palestinians do not follow those tropes, nor entertain race hatred in their resistance. That is something virtually exclusively pedaled by Zionists themselves, particularly Israeli Zionists, for a naive and eager Western audience. So you’ll think, “oh but is he wrong?” when a genocide apologist tells you how the untermensch are a pitiable threat.
Plenty of Palestinians don’t hate Jews even nowadays. Palestinians have had more nuance on Jews than you’d think possible with Israelis constantly screaming they’re killing them and their children because they’re not Jewish. And that’s now while the genocide is going on.
Sure some Jews had deep hatred after the Holcoaust for Germans. But some Jews didn’t and live in Germany nowadays. In the end holding the victims of something accountable for their suffering is ridiculous.
Sure some Jews had deep hatred after the Holcoaust for Germans.
Yeah, quite a few of them, but even that is quite different in character from antisemitism with it’s political scapegoating aspect, all the conspiracy theories, and the racialisation of it. It’s not like they extended that to Swedes or the Dutch because they’re all white.
For Euros whiteness wasn’t and isn’t a consistent and sufficient category for white supremacists, they still drew and draw racialized dividing lines on ethnic and nationalist grounds, generally as a false consciousness that scapegoats race for social challenges created by their political and economic systems. Hating an ethnic German was and is not incompatible with being a white supremacist and having nothing against Swedes, for example. Racial categories are not scientific or even consistent, they just need to serve a purpose for the dominant social powers, and that purpose is usually either (1) the creation of an external enemy that must be dominated or dispossessed (justifying war and occupation) or (2) to create a “deserving” underclass that can be mistreated, underpaid, and kept precarious, and blamed for the ills faced by other oppressed (but less oppressed) people, particularly workers. The development of capitalism over 500-700 years is rife with the creation of these categories in order to slowly proletarianize the male population and (mostly) enslave the census population, plus justify racialized slavery in colonies.
It would not make much sense for Jewish Holocaust survivors to simply hate white people. This is because they were also white per racial categories in those parts of Europe. But whiteness was a lesser category than ethnonational categories at the time. Polish Jew, Lithuanian, Ukrainian, Slovak, German, these were categories in use. These categories were often relatively new and created through the emergence of nation states, serving a purpose for the now dominant economic and political system.
It would not even fully make sense for a Jewish person to simply hate Germans. Many were German, considered themselves such. It was the Jewish-excluding Germans that excluded Jews, not the other way around. Same for Polish Jews, etc. This is prevailing opinion as well, because Jews were and are not monolithic, they had differing cultures, languages, norms across Europe. It is Israeli ethnonationalism that has attempted to crush these differences and basically invent a language (modem Israeli Hebrew) to kill off the variety of languages spoken by Ashkenazi Jews (and other Jews), trying to make Judaism into a monolith whose sole representative is a genocidal settler colonial ethnostate.
But even if it did make some level of sense for Jewish Holocaust survivors to blame a single racial category (that of their oppressors), historically it is unlikely that they would have. The oppressed do not have as much need for ethnic hatred. Ethnic hatred is a tool for the oppressor to justify their crimes. The oppressed, experiencing a form of liberation, tend to just seek basic justice and equity.
Right, sure, the point is just even if a Jew does hate Germans after the Holocaust it simply doesn’t have the political character of nazi antisemitism.
Sorry, I don’t really see the connection between this article and the discussion here, or rather, how it would say that they’d be the same. In my mind rather the opposite. Good read though.
Of course. The primary difference being oppressor vs. oppressed. Same as how in the US white supremacy just isn’t the same as a black person that’s sick of white people.
Though I do want to emphasize that it’s a trope by and for the oppressor to speculate about how they have to keep oppressing or else the oppressed will get revenge. There’s a very limited rhetorical toolbox for liberal ethnic supremacists and it hasn’t changed much in 400 years.
Do all Jews hate Germans with vicious racism and fanatical conspiracy theories today? Nope. And they never really even did, despite what was done to them.
You should learn that the oppressed are rarely as cruel as their oppressors and have less need for a racialized understanding of them - and this reflects the reality of Palestine. The ethnic hatred of Palestinians, dehumanizing them, treating them as a threat with purely hypothetical logic serves an actual function for Israel, who are killing and removing Palestinians from their land. It makes their own citizens accept and even celebrate the genocide, ensuring the project can continue internally. It also builds and externally-facing PR line for Westerners to gobble up, as Western governments are the primary sponsor of this genocide.
It is purely a projection, an attempt to get ahead of the obvious guilt, and that is why Cohen ties the two together. “Massacred Palestinians? Let’s make this about Jewish people and how they’re under threat.”
Is he wrong though ? History showed that Germany hated its neighbours after WWI and that was a strong cement for WWII. How many people from Afghanistan were hostile of the US, after they helped the Mujahideen secure governance ? Didn’t that play a role in 9/11 ? Didn’t Iran become hostile towards the US for the same reason ? The survivors cultivate hate for the ones responsible of their loss. It’s a fact.
Yes, it is wrong.
The pretense that it’s Israelis, not Palestinians, who face an existential threat of ethnic hatred in Palestine, is a false Zionist talking point to distract you from the reality and in fact works to make genocide more palatable to those who internalize it. Precisely as Joshua Cohen has internalized it. It is a mirror image of fascist ethnic cleansing rhetoric: the people being oppressed must be characterized as a threat, whereas the oppressors are characterized as valiant or victims or both. Throughout this “article” you can see many cases of this implicit impetus and a theme of Jewish supremacy. Cohen himself even sympathizes with Netanyahu. https://web.archive.org/web/20260115002425/https://www.theatlantic.com/books/archive/2024/01/joshua-cohen-ruby-namdar-israel-october-7/677126/
It further includes the actually antisemitic trope that Israel and Judaism are interchangeable. To conflate a genocidal settler colonist project with Jewishness itself - because of course the oppressed will hate their oppressors, and they even use their oppressors’ own language, but Palestinians hate Israelis for killing their families and stealing their homes and keeping them sick and poor in Bantustans. It is Europeans who perfected and maintained antisemitism and its litany of tropes and conspiracy theories, its race hatred. Palestinians do not follow those tropes, nor entertain race hatred in their resistance. That is something virtually exclusively pedaled by Zionists themselves, particularly Israeli Zionists, for a naive and eager Western audience. So you’ll think, “oh but is he wrong?” when a genocide apologist tells you how the untermensch are a pitiable threat.
You don’t think this is wrong?
Do you think that the palestinians won’t be hating the jews of Israel ? And in a broder sense every jew that helped them in the genocide ?
Plenty of Palestinians don’t hate Jews even nowadays. Palestinians have had more nuance on Jews than you’d think possible with Israelis constantly screaming they’re killing them and their children because they’re not Jewish. And that’s now while the genocide is going on.
Sure some Jews had deep hatred after the Holcoaust for Germans. But some Jews didn’t and live in Germany nowadays. In the end holding the victims of something accountable for their suffering is ridiculous.
The Ugly Exigencies of Genocide
Yeah, quite a few of them, but even that is quite different in character from antisemitism with it’s political scapegoating aspect, all the conspiracy theories, and the racialisation of it. It’s not like they extended that to Swedes or the Dutch because they’re all white.
For Euros whiteness wasn’t and isn’t a consistent and sufficient category for white supremacists, they still drew and draw racialized dividing lines on ethnic and nationalist grounds, generally as a false consciousness that scapegoats race for social challenges created by their political and economic systems. Hating an ethnic German was and is not incompatible with being a white supremacist and having nothing against Swedes, for example. Racial categories are not scientific or even consistent, they just need to serve a purpose for the dominant social powers, and that purpose is usually either (1) the creation of an external enemy that must be dominated or dispossessed (justifying war and occupation) or (2) to create a “deserving” underclass that can be mistreated, underpaid, and kept precarious, and blamed for the ills faced by other oppressed (but less oppressed) people, particularly workers. The development of capitalism over 500-700 years is rife with the creation of these categories in order to slowly proletarianize the male population and (mostly) enslave the census population, plus justify racialized slavery in colonies.
It would not make much sense for Jewish Holocaust survivors to simply hate white people. This is because they were also white per racial categories in those parts of Europe. But whiteness was a lesser category than ethnonational categories at the time. Polish Jew, Lithuanian, Ukrainian, Slovak, German, these were categories in use. These categories were often relatively new and created through the emergence of nation states, serving a purpose for the now dominant economic and political system.
It would not even fully make sense for a Jewish person to simply hate Germans. Many were German, considered themselves such. It was the Jewish-excluding Germans that excluded Jews, not the other way around. Same for Polish Jews, etc. This is prevailing opinion as well, because Jews were and are not monolithic, they had differing cultures, languages, norms across Europe. It is Israeli ethnonationalism that has attempted to crush these differences and basically invent a language (modem Israeli Hebrew) to kill off the variety of languages spoken by Ashkenazi Jews (and other Jews), trying to make Judaism into a monolith whose sole representative is a genocidal settler colonial ethnostate.
But even if it did make some level of sense for Jewish Holocaust survivors to blame a single racial category (that of their oppressors), historically it is unlikely that they would have. The oppressed do not have as much need for ethnic hatred. Ethnic hatred is a tool for the oppressor to justify their crimes. The oppressed, experiencing a form of liberation, tend to just seek basic justice and equity.
Right, sure, the point is just even if a Jew does hate Germans after the Holocaust it simply doesn’t have the political character of nazi antisemitism.
No it’s exactly the same.
https://nykolami.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/26/2017/12/James-Baldwin-Article.pdf
Sorry, I don’t really see the connection between this article and the discussion here, or rather, how it would say that they’d be the same. In my mind rather the opposite. Good read though.
Of course. The primary difference being oppressor vs. oppressed. Same as how in the US white supremacy just isn’t the same as a black person that’s sick of white people.
Though I do want to emphasize that it’s a trope by and for the oppressor to speculate about how they have to keep oppressing or else the oppressed will get revenge. There’s a very limited rhetorical toolbox for liberal ethnic supremacists and it hasn’t changed much in 400 years.
Totally agree.
Do all Jews hate Germans with vicious racism and fanatical conspiracy theories today? Nope. And they never really even did, despite what was done to them.
You should learn that the oppressed are rarely as cruel as their oppressors and have less need for a racialized understanding of them - and this reflects the reality of Palestine. The ethnic hatred of Palestinians, dehumanizing them, treating them as a threat with purely hypothetical logic serves an actual function for Israel, who are killing and removing Palestinians from their land. It makes their own citizens accept and even celebrate the genocide, ensuring the project can continue internally. It also builds and externally-facing PR line for Westerners to gobble up, as Western governments are the primary sponsor of this genocide.
It is purely a projection, an attempt to get ahead of the obvious guilt, and that is why Cohen ties the two together. “Massacred Palestinians? Let’s make this about Jewish people and how they’re under threat.”