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.
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.