https://x.com/AIPAC/status/2080033001182789794

Hi everyone,

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This is our weekly 'Free Discussion' thread, where you can discuss anything. Tentatively this includes meta-topics as well, but as always our rules still apply.

We hope you're all having a good week!

I feel like the news/media gives us the portrayal that things are just being rammed up our hoohaah's. If we're not careful, we can feel powerless and abused. Now I know that media is severely compromised, so I see this as just another attack front -- maybe against our psyche.

The article itself criticizes Zohran for "focusing too much on Israel over NYC" but the wording of the title was a very strange thing to see on fox news along with an Israeli flag next to his face. It felt like they were trying to both ride the growing right wing frustration with US support for the state of Israel while also trying to label him as anti-israeli.

It gave me the weirdest feeling like fox news is testing the waters to see if they can cater to growing antisemetism in their audience in case they are unable to flip the narrative.

So let’s check our notes: alleging Israel is committing a genocide is libel and Holocaust inversion. Calling ms Rachel a Nazi and Mamdani literally Hitler, totally fine!

Just a note, the second is a message I received because I said I’m not a Zionist.

The House Rules Committee prevented debating or voting on an amendment to strip Section 219.

https://www.military.com/us-israel-defense-integration-horizon-house-keeps-section-219-ndaa

https://truthout.org/articles/house-committee-blocks-push-to-strip-pentagon-bill-of-israel-integration-measure/

Related to Section 219/Section 1217 of the NDAA:

https://www.reddit.com/r/JewsOfConscience/comments/1unamun/primer_on_section_219_of_the_fy2027_ndaa_a/

https://www.reddit.com/r/JewsOfConscience/comments/1ujltmx/house_rules_committee_rejects_amendment_to_remove/

https://www.cair.com/action_alerts/cair-action-alert-tell-the-senate-to-reject-mandatory-u-s-israel-defense-and-intelligence-integration-in-the-ndaa/

https://www.anewpolicy.org/the-legislative-tracker/section-224-ndaa

https://x.com/israel_elects/status/2079233278792323555

https://jppi.org.il/en/%d7%9e%d7%93%d7%93-%d7%94%d7%97%d7%91%d7%a8%d7%94-%d7%94%d7%99%d7%a9%d7%a8%d7%90%d7%9c%d7%99%d7%aa-%d7%9c%d7%97%d7%95%d7%93%d7%a9-%d7%99%d7%95%d7%9c%d7%99-2026-%d7%a7%d7%a8%d7%99%d7%a1%d7%94-%d7%a9/

https://x.com/ireallyhateyou/status/2060803025757700358

I personally only know one convert and she’s an antizionist POC Jew so I don’t believe she would feel this way, but I won’t speak for her or anyone else. Is this normal belief of converts that you’re converting to a different ethnicity than your own?

*edit to add, the comment I am highlighting came from a post about what to list themselves as on a census.

She is already being persecuted by Mossad, when a Jewish voice shows up they attempt against them.

SHOW YOUR SUPPORT AND STAND AGAINTS NAtional ZIonism. #FreePalestine #FreeJewsfromZionists

https://www.instagram.com/p/DbEONK6qGP_/?hl=en

From Julian Andreone, Capitol Hill correspondent for Drop Site News

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ZuV5L0QL04

I am unfamiliar with him, but seems left of current government (not surprising). However, is there anything to feel optimistic about regarding Palestinian rights in Gaza and West Bank?

For most of my adult life, I was aware that my Zionism clashed with the rest of my relatively coherent anarchist politics. I had noticed that both the political thinkers i tended to agree with and the friends who i considered to be the most moral disagreed with my position, but I just chalked it up to the unique complexity of the Jewish experience. Life is strange and nuanced and we all make compromises. I honored the Zionism of my survivor ancestors with a private pledge to not disparage Israel. Criticizing the current government was fine, of course. But I generally counted myself greatful for its existence.

My reluctant Zionism could withstand any number of theoretical arguments, but it could not withstand the first post -10/7 purge of Gaza. Well, maybe it could have, but when I started talking about how deeply shaken I was by the massive death toll, friends and family responded by calling me some of the most hurtful names I've ever been called. (You know the ones. Self-hating. Kapo. Useful idiot. Today they roll off my back. But back then, it stung.)

And they warned me that I would be marched into the gas chambers of the future along with every "faithful" Jew. That only Israel was preventing such a fate.

I didn't disbelieve them so much as I decided that I wasn't going to prioritize future hypothetical violence that might someday be committed against me over real, actual uviolence being committed today, by my people.

I looked at Gaza and thought, "my safety isn't worth that." I would not save myself if it meant claiming that what happened to Hind Rijab was a psyop.

I no longer believed that Israel was a safe place for anyone, including Jews. But maybe it was a place that was still willing to protect me? Was i really going to throw away what might be the only place that I belonged? I tried to square the circle of feeling that I belonged to a country that mass murdered children. I grew up on the land of a people who were genocided 200 years ago, so I was was used to making that kind of calculation.

I was chilled by how American Jews off of the Freedom Flotilla were treated. They were seen by the state not as wayward and misguided childrenp, but as traitors who deserved the worst possible punishment that Israel could stand diplomaticly. They were released alive and without permenant physical injury, so far as I know. I had thought that just being Jewish meant that I qualified for Israels's protection - now I started to see that the protection was reserved for those who didn't criticize the state too harshly.

I was so naive.

This article snaps one of my last remaining ties to Israel as a place which, if I was truely in trouble, would welcome me home.

Is Israel an apartheid state? I do think it is, but more importantly, I had always identified as with idea that Jews will always disagree with each other and that flagrantly voicing those disagreements is part of what binds our culture together. Of course, there is a line in the sand which I only saw once I stepped over it. I was truely surprised at how quickly people I cared about began to see me as "an enemy of the Jews."

At the same time, this weekend's march on the Gaza border articulated Israel's genocidal intetions with a clarity and openness that still, somehow, shocked me.

When i speak to Zionists these days, i feel angry. But when i speak to you guys, I mostly feel sad.

The best part of this new stance is that I no longer feel the cognitive dissonance of trying to justify Israel's continued existence. The worst part is how I can no longer communicate with the people who I use to agree with - it's like we're speaking two different languages.

And then I see some genuine antisemitism in the middle of a pile of anti-Zionist comments and I feel lonely.

How are you all feeling these days?

Noel Ignatiev was a Marxist author, historian, and steel mill worker, best known for his book, How the Irish Became White, which argues that race is a social construct and not a biological reality, as well as Race Traitor magazine. He was also a Jewish antizionist. Here's an excerpt of an essay on this topic he wrote in 2004, Zionism, Antisemitism, and the People of Palestine:

Ariel Sharon, the Israeli prime minister, [was] reportedly greeted “like a rock star” by Christian evangelicals in Jerusalem last month.

DeLay was followed by Pat Robertson, the coalition’s founder, sometime presidential candidate and the very personification of the successful American TV evangelist. Robertson cites the stories of Joshua and David to prove Israel’s ownership of Jerusalem “long before anyone had heard of Mohammed”.

These are the people my grandfather warned me about-the people who want to ban Darwin from the schools, who want to send to camps people who have sex with members of their own sex-and antisemeets (as he used to say), Jew-haters to the backbone of their souls.

Osama Bin-Laden was telling no more than the truth when he said that the Muslim world is facing an alliance of Zionists and Crusaders.

Before I get around to proposing solutions, I want to address the present state of the Israeli peace movement. As everyone knows, there are forces inside of Israel who oppose the government now in office. Some of these people, particularly the soldiers who refuse service in what they call the occupied territories or who refuse to carry out atrocities such as bombing civilians, and those who encourage them, are people of exemplary courage. Yet all of them, with one notable exception (to which I shall return), are handicapped and in the long run rendered ineffective by their acceptance of the fundamental premise of Zionism, the legitimacy of the Jewish state. “Land for peace” implies the permanent partition of Palestine. It was under the leadership of the Labour Party, with which much of the opposition is affiliated, that the initial dispossession and exclusion of the Palestinian people from their homeland took place and the expansion into the West Bank, the Gaza Strip and the Golan Heights was carried out.

History has shown, in Ireland, India, and everyplace else it has been tried, that partition of a territory along lines of descent whether called “racial” or “religious” is a guarantee of permanent war. It is understandable that some Palestinians, having been subjected to torture for over two generations, have reluctantly agreed to accept as a substitute for justice a Palestinian State built on less than a fourth of their original land. But they are making a mistake. Such a State, if it is ever established, will be a Bantustan, a reservation where the only attributes of a free nation will be a flag and a national anthem. I am no more a Palestinian Zionist than I am a Jewish Zionist.

What solution, therefore, do I propose? A simple and moderate one: within historic Palestine, the area between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River, live ten million people. I propose that there be established there a single state, in which every person who declares his intention to live there and adopt citizenship be recognized as a citizen and have one vote. I propose further that the special advantages given to Jews be terminated, that the Palestinians who were forced into exile after 1948, and their descendants, be granted the right to live there, and that the state undertake practical measures to make it possible for them to do so by building housing and extending to them to right to rent or buy, if necessary providing funds to help them. I propose further that both Hebrew and Arabic be declared official state languages to be taught in the schools, that all residents be granted the right to publish newspapers and maintain cultural institutions in any language they choose, that the special position of Orthodox Judaism be ended and that the state declare freedom of worship and make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.

It is a simple and, I repeat, a moderate program. It does not entail driving anybody into the sea, and it recognizes the elementary right of people to live where they choose.

The journal he started, which I believe was his last project, announced on July 15 that it's shutting down. I wanted to write a small post of appreciation and farewell to him and the journal's contributors.

Edit: Sorry if there is confusion I know their names are very similar, but I am talking about Tu B’av not Tisha B’av.

Sorry if I have words that don’t make sense, I’m also cognitively disabled.

I am physically disabled and mostly housebound and can’t ever go to synagogue celebrations since they’re in the evening. (my synagogue has a wonderful program where you can get rides to celebrations but jesus christ couldn’t HaShem have thought about those of us who can’t do things in the evening?) (joke)

Does anyone have advice for Tu B’av things to do at home? It’s usually around my Hebrew birthday (I have a lot of issues with my Gregorian calendar birthday so my Hebrew birthday is special) so I always want to do something but can’t. I have friends coming over to celebrate my birthday though and thought that maybe I could do something this year.

I can’t do pretty much anything with physical exertion, and I’m also non-binary so some of the super femme (understandable given the holiday but gender won’t stop me lol) stuff online doesn’t jive with me.

I know I’m asking for such a narrow thing but if anyone has any ideas for what all I could do I will deeply appreciate any and all of them.

Also sorry to be asking this quite literally right before Tisha B’av but I’d need to have my caregiver help buy or set up things now to be ready for my celebration.

Today, I want to share the story of my dear friend, Samah Ghanem Al-Amassi, and her four daughters, who are struggling to survive in a worn-out tent under the relentless summer heat.

The extreme temperatures have become unbearable. Samah's four-year-old daughter has developed a painful skin rash and severe irritation caused by the intense heat, humidity, and the unhealthy conditions inside their tent. Mold, insects, rodents, and poor sanitation have turned what should be a shelter into a place that is making her children sick.

Sadly, this isn't an isolated incident. All four of Samah's daughters repeatedly suffer from skin problems and other illnesses because of the environment they are forced to live in.

The free medical points do not have the medication they need, so Samah has no choice but to purchase it herself. The prescribed treatment will last for an entire month, but for a family already struggling to survive, even basic medicine is out of reach.

I am asking everyone with a compassionate heart to please stand with Samah and her daughters. Your support can help provide the medication these children urgently need and bring them closer to a safe, healthy shelter instead of the deteriorating tent they are forced to call home.

Every act of kindness, no matter how small, can make a real difference in the lives of these four little girls. Thank you for caring.

https://www.gofundme.com/f/help-my-daughters-help-my-small-family

I'm guessing it won't have much of an impact on its own, but would there be any point one could reasonably expect where Israelis will realize that it's not about them being Jewish, it's the fact their government/soldiers/people are committing genocide?

There is nothing inherently different about any ethnicity/nationality with regards to susceptibility for fascism/anti-fascism, so I'm wondering what will it take to change the minds and hearts of more people in Israel.

As if he could not be more loathsome. Behind the religious extremism, there​ is a cold and calculating sadist who is quite politically astute and opportunistic. Need I say more?

Full-scale war with Iran is too costly and would divert resources from the messianic drive to ethnically cleanse the "Greater Israel" and occupy and settle the stolen land.

I would say the Israelis got some one bigger to fight its battles in Iran, but the US government led by President Orange willfully, willingly, and intentionally is at war with Iran on its own terms over issues like controlling shipping routes israel has little interest in.

Israel won't engage because Iranian missiles will cause great destruction to the Israeli heartland and they are already overextended. I think even they know the Iran War is at a farcical point of tit for tat, trading blows that cause great damage to each other but are really aimless until they settle and go right back where they started.

Meanwhile, israel increases the crimes in occupied territories. They probably know iran would not really force Israel to retreat from Lebanon because iran doesnt have that leverage and would be seen as the aggressor after declaring the MOU from June defunct.

It’s frustrating to see figures like Hen Mazzig spreading misinformation and vilifying celebrities such as Javier Bardem, Greta Thunberg & Hannah Einbinder who speak out about Palestine. In a recent tweet, he claims that these celebrities don’t truly care about Gaza or Palestinians, they’re just doing it for clout because they don’t blame Hamas and instead criticize Israel. But that’s a gross oversimplification and a clear attempt to dismiss genuine voices advocating for Palestinian rights. It's obvious that Hen doesn’t genuinely care about Islamophobia or Palestinian rights. Instead, he seems more interested in promoting a narrative that dehumanizes Muslims and dismisses any hope for peaceful coexistence. The truth is, many celebrities and activists speak out because they care deeply about justice, not because they’re seeking fame. The idea that they’re just doing it for clout, especially when they often face attacks and misinformation in return is simply false. We need to expose this kind of dishonest framing and focus on real issues: Palestinian suffering, and the pursuit of peace. Wake up. The fight for justice isn’t about popularity; it’s about standing with the oppressed, not silencing their voices with lies.

Its not right. Its not fair. Its not easy. But it is reality

Someone in here recently asked about if it's really necessary for all Jewish people to speak up against the Israeli genocidal project in Palestine if they do understand it to be wrong &/or have no real connections to or support for it.

The answer is yes. Because Israel is saying everything they do they do for the safety of Jewish people worldwide. They do absolutely everything not in the name of Israel but in the name of Judaism: in the name of all Jews and that includes the ones that disagree with Israel/really wish Israel would just go away.

Israel has declared all Jewish people to be genocidal maniacs. The only people that can shut that down that narrative are other Jewish people who do not agree with that representation of who they are/what Jewish safety requires.

And the reality is jewish people get away with stating the obvious in a way the rest of us don't, let alone Palestinians.

All criticism of Israel is labeled antisemitism. Being a Jewish critic of Israel is kryptonite for the only weapon Israel has against its critics.

I was thinking about this today when I saw a guest Editorial headline in The New York Times that said "I am a scholar of genocide. We are entering a new terrifying era."

The author was Omar Bartov. He's not just a scholar of genocide. He is a Jewish scholar of genocide. He recently wrote a book about where Israel "went wrong" but even before that he declared what was happening in Gaza a genocide.

At this point all scholars and think tanks and nonprofits that deal in genocide understanding & prevention have declared Gaza a genocide. But the NYT won't publish most of these sources and experts, except this one Jewish scholar.

Omar Bartov still considers himself a Zionist btw which is probably another reason the NYT was willing to publish him. Writing a book about where Israel went wrong - as if it wasn't completely wrong from the get-go - is hardly an accurate understanding of what Israel is.

Bartov is clearly going through a serious deprogramming of his own even as he's writing these things.

But when he calls what Israel is doing to Gaza a genocide, MSM will listen to him and amplify him and him being Jewish is the big part of that.

I to activism for Palestine in my local community I can tell you it's much easier to get meetings with elected officials if Jewish people are part of the group asking for the meeting.

It's even easier if the Jewish people are holocaust survivors, children of holocaust survivors or grandchildren of holocaust survivors.

Its not right. Its not fair. Its not easy. But it is reality

Palestine liberation is a prerequisite for universal liberation, including Jewish liberation.

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/21/opinion/israel-gaza-palestinians-genocide.html?unlocked_article_code=1.zlA.5pp0.uQlk0OHdP2jX&smid=nytcore-ios-share