@Alon @BenRossTransit I don' know anything about the "Zionist doctors" line on Twitter, but I strongly disagree with the claim that anti-Zionism is a type of antisemitism. certainly there are plenty of antisemites who hide under the label antizionist, for sure. but there are lots of antizionist Jews, for example. 1/

@Alon @BenRossTransit i've always been a squish-middle liberal diaspora Jew, conscious of the dissonance between some liberal values I uphold and the notion of an avowedly "Jewish state" where Judaism is exclusive, not just a national heritage into which all are free to assimilate. Nevertheless, Israel has in its history had some very admirable aspects, and the Jewish experience has been exceptional. 2/

@Alon @BenRossTransit i, like most diaspora Jews, have been willing to live with the tension between our general ideals about how a modern state should define itself and Israel, treating it hopefully as an experiment in reconciling disparate goods and values. but it's getting harder to resist a conclusion that the second intifada, and the change in the Israeli polity that trauma provoked, has shown the model simply to be unworkable in actual practice, a failure. 3/

@Alon @BenRossTransit i don't quite identify as antizionist yet. but a few months more of this, the endlessly ticking clock of more than 30,000 lives, people ill and starving in ways my own Jewish imagination cannot fail to connect to concentration camps, might well push me over that line. /fin

@Alon @BenRossTransit it sounds like you are referring to antizionism more than antisemitism. sure, oct 7 gave a lot of the most horrific sort of antizionists license to express an awful, bloody glee. but you misunderstand what i am talking about. i think an era is definitively over, for the jewish diaspora more than israel, thanks to israel’s response. israelis already feel the world hates and misunderstands them, and their government is working to prove them right. 1/

@Alon @BenRossTransit but the jewish diaspora, in the west, in the aspiring west of eastern europe with its long, dark history, has been able to rely on a kind of caution and immunity conferred by the moral absolute of the holocaust. i think that’s gone. i think the transformation will be tectonic over time. it will polarize the diaspora into a much more distinctive and aggrieved community on the one hand and integrationists who increasingly disavow their historical jewish identity. 2/

@Alon @BenRossTransit like so many right wing projects, right wing israelis are creating the world that proves correct their own cynicism. the polarization of israeli politics will infect the hitherto squish ambivalence of the typical liberal diasporite. those who embrace a jewish identity will increasingly be conflated with zionism and its now very brutal branding, and will face much less apologetic disdain from liberal-to-left quarters and more openly presented swastikas from the right. 3/

@Alon @BenRossTransit those who disclaim jewish identity in order to disavow zionism will test our grandparents’ proposition that whatever you think you are, they will always know you as a jew. /fin

@BenRossTransit i think israel, which was winning a slow war of consigning the palestinian cause to irrelevance on oct 6, is making the case against the possibility of a civilized zionism and therefore of “israel’s right to exist” as an explicitly jewish state despite the tensions of that formulation with contemporary liberal values. 1/

@BenRossTransit i don’t think you are fairly characterizing the piece. but whatever, i hold no brief for, know nothing about, its author. 2/

@BenRossTransit but if you don’t understand that a lot of people who were never israel’s enemies, including much of the jewish diaspora, now see project of Israel as we have understood it since 1947 as a definitive failure, as something unsupportable, rather than something simultaneously awkward and hopeful, then you are choosing not to understand. 3/

@BenRossTransit and if you don’t understand how the character of Israel’s actions is likely to give license to forms and degrees of antisemitism that for almost eighty years has been entombed by the moral clarity of the holocaust, well your not understanding won’t protect you, or me. 4/

@BenRossTransit i’ll just leave this there. /fin

@BenRossTransit @adamgreenfield if this is all you take from the essay, i don't think you are giving it a fair read. i don't think it is a diatribe. i think the author is pretty sad about the take on history he describes. as a jew growing up in america in gentler times, i certainly perceived how we made the shoah into a universal touchstone, a point of black and white in a world of gray. sometime this was to good purpose, sometime it was disingenuous. 1/

@BenRossTransit i think whatever your reaction to this detail or that in the piece, the author is correct that the current conflict has put an end to the era during which the shoah will serve as a universal moral touchstone. it remains a horror, unjustifiable and unforgivable and astonishing in its technical modernity, sure. but it can no longer stand out of time, it becomes horror and atrocity yet again enmeshed in the matrix of horror and atrocity that is all of human history. 2/

@BenRossTransit we, the jews, are no longer special, history's perennial dispossessed, perennial victims. we got ourselves a state, an army, bombs and atom bombs. and we've had our turns on the side of atrocity opposite from victims. 3/

@BenRossTransit that was true a year ago as well, but a year ago it was still somewhat credible to say, to feel, that once the horror of the shoah is in the balance, still we are so much more sinned against than sinning. quantitatively that is still true. Gaza's deaths aren't 6 million. but there are questions of the character of the action. that, more than the number, made the shoah the shoah. 4/

@BenRossTransit bombing, starving, and shooting a trapped population of civilians — even while you genuinely try to get them away from precisely where you are bombing and shooting, except when you have to shoot them because in their starvation they are threatening as they sack your aid trucks — that is a character of activity the world will not set aside as small beside the horrors we have suffered. i don't think the world will be wrong to not set it aside. but i certainly fear what's next. /fin

“Israel today is dynamiting the edifice of global norms built after 1945, which has been tottering since the catastrophic and still unpunished war on terror and Vladimir Putin’s revanchist war in Ukraine. The profound rupture we feel today between the past and the present is a rupture in the moral history of the world since the ground zero of 1945 – the history in which the Shoah has been for many years the central event and universal reference.” #PankajMishra https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v46/n05/pankaj-mishra/the-shoah-after-gaza

ht @adamgreenfield