Any discourse about the terror state of Israel is going to draw in strange characters, including express antisemites, and I’ve been noticing a sparse but present range of bigoted language and sentiment in response to Israel’s invasion of Gaza. I can’t tell if people are merely erroneously equating the state of Israel with Jews broadly (as Israel itself does), or this is a cynical hijacking of the anti-imperialist movement by right-wingers and other bad actors. Either way, it’s not too uncommon to hear people express inappropriate hatred of Jewish people in general when criticizing Israel specifically.
I want to be absolutely clear that I have not seen a single instance of such behavior on this site, but it does exist elsewhere, even if in small amounts. Obviously, the problem of imperialist genocide goes far beyond, and does not necessarily encompass, Jews or Judaism, and it’s clear that communists understand this far better than most.
With all that in mind, is there a way to educate these folks? When you see antisemitic remarks like I’ve described, what do you say?
It might help to use examples of some of what Zionists have done to Jewish people in order to demonstrate that it’s not Jewish people that are the issue - it’s a white settler state that happens to be majority European-Jewish trying to justify its colony while serving the interests of the US and Europe in the region. Anarcho-Bolshevik recently posted something about the Iron Dome misfire that has links to a number of shit Israel’s done that’s been harmful to Jewish people.
And if they somehow take that as a justification to hate Jewish people because a handful are exploiting their own people, then they’re probably dumb (can’t see that’s what happens all across the world, throughout history, and isn’t a racial or culturally exclusive thing), or just looking for something to justify their hate. In either case, it’s probably a wasted effort to convince them, but by pointing out their flawed logic, you might convince others who are listening to the convo.