The West Bank: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NqK3_n6pdDY

https://invidious.incogniweb.net/watch?v=NqK3_n6pdDY

Having watched that, it seems that many Palestinians have good reason to be anti-Jewish, or at least anti-Israel.

Which makes me wonder about European antisemitism. I never saw any cogent case for European antisemitism at all--just so much vile gibberish. Were there some European Jewish people who were behaving like some Jews in West Bank? What was the best case for European antisemitism?

This is exactly what I say. This is what happens when Zionists equate Israel with the Jewish people. When Israel commits a war crime against you, they actively want you to think they did it on behalf of all Jews everywhere. When you start a country based on ethnic cleansing, and you claim to do it on behalf of all Jews everywhere, then eventually ignorant people will listen to you and start thinking that Jews must just all be okay with every horrible thing Israel has ever done. That what's Israel certainly wants them to think.


Before Christianity, European anti-Semitism largely boiled down to them just being not-Romans (or not-Greeks) and, to some extent, not polytheistic. Rome was not fond of groups who did not acknowledge the emperor's divinity in some capacity. Jews were a thorn in the side of foreign European occupiers. The Maccabees violently drove out the Greeks under Antiochus, and the Jews would try and fail to drive out the Romans--with tragic consequences.
I'm not sure I've seen it in scholarship, but part of it has to be that the Jews were emphatically monotheistic. When Romans encountered other pagan groups, they were usually fine with them practicing their religion much as they had before. Romans typically assumed that their pagan neighbors worshipped basically the same gods just with different names. Examples are not limited to: the Punic hero god Melqart was equated with Hercules; the Germanic war god Tyr was equated with Mars; the Celtic god-king Lugus was equated with Mercury. The Romans sometimes did not even record the native names for these gods--instead just referring to them by the Roman god who seemed closest to them.
I feel like this fundamental incompatibility with official Roman religion must have contributed to Roman anti-Semitism.

As for European anti-Semitism after Christianity, well...
Accusations of deicide have been levelled against the Jews for almost as long as Christianity has existed. There is a very explicit scriptural basis for this in the Gospel of Matthew ch. 27 (New King James Version):

Hence, the official church position, and by extension the official position of those states which attached themselves to the church, was that Jews were fundamentally murderous and anti-Christian.
This "othering" of Jews meshed easily with the pre-existing anti-Semitism of the Roman world. Whereas before Jews were hated for rejecting the emperor and Roman-ness, now they were hated for rejecting Christ and Christianity.
Jews really didn't have to do anything and most European Christians through history still viewed them as dishonest, violent, greedy, self-serving, etc. They tried mainly to keep their heads down but it still wasn't good enough.
These tropes are so pervasive that even when Europeans started to tolerate atheism, many atheists continued to hold anti-Semitic beliefs--albeit dressed up in non-Christian justifications. I often see anti-Semitic atheists disparage Jews as anti-West, because they are so resistant to assimilation and resistant to the nationalism of whichever nation they called home. Jews made countless political and intellectual contributions to socialism and communism, and anti-Semitic, anti-socialist capitalists often cite this as justification for their hate.
To the western anti-Semite, Jews reject everything 'good' about 'the West': nationalism, Christianity, and capitalism.

I think that the Romans gave Jews a special exemption not to have to worship the Emperor.

I know that the Catholic Church (and other Christians) used to denounce Jews as Christ-killers. But, I'm not aware of any Jews doing anything similar to what some Jews are presently doing in West Bank, at least in Europe in the past few centuries. There have been libelous accusations against Jews (e.g., using Christian blood to bake their matzos, or poisoning wells), but nothing verifiable that I've seen.

What some Jews are doing in West Bank is the opposite of what I would expect from Jews that I have known.

Evangelical Christian support of the Israeli takeover of West Bank is, well, consistent with Evangelical Christians being nuts.

Except for one brief period Jews were never in a position to oppress Christian Europeans the way Christians have Jews for the last dozen centuries , or that Israeli Jews do to Palestinians today.

The brief period of "reverse pogroms" was after Christ but before Paul.

Christianity started out as a heretical sect of Judaism...and Roman authorities, Christians, and Jews, all viewed Christians as being a weird subset of Jews. And in the city of Rome itself the Jewish community would turn on and beat up on its "followers of Christos" as Romans reported under Nero(okay you two, break it up!). So in that brief moment Jews had power over their rogue Christian cousins, and had the power to oppress them. But after a few decades St. Paul came along and demanded "preaching to the Gentiles", and rapidly Christianity not only grew, but became majority Gentile...causing Romans, Jews, and Christians, all to speak of Christians and Jews as being separate groups.

The Pagan Romans both oppressed Christians, and beat the crap out of Judea (crushing the revolts, and destroying the temple and dispersing the population). But when Constantine paved the way for the Christianization of the Roman Empire Jews were the scattered minority ...and subject to persecution by Christians.

Hysterical nonsense (like the blood libel) became Christian folklore. And even "killing Christ" is probably spin. The Romans pulled the trigger, not the Jews.

One could argue that modern Zionism is just "European imperialism and colonialism for Jews" and that the Jews were not allowed to oppress indigenious peoples the way European Gentiles did in the last five hundred years until...the 20th and 21st centuries when that enterprise had become frowned upon.

I don't think it's fair to blame a whole people for what their ancestors had done, or even blame a whole people for what some of them are currently doing. I can see the justification for Palestinian anger at the abusive Israeli government, military, and settlers, but it's unfair to blame every Israeli citizen or every Jew for it. Nor more than all Palestinians should be blamed for the atrocities committed by Hamas, which had set off the current situation there.

It reads like you're blaming Hamas for the Nakba, because that's what set off the current situation there.

The situation didn't start with October 7th, October 7th was an act of retaliation.

No, I was actually referring to October 7.
I just couldn't remember the date until you brought it up.

The two state solution is going down the tubes because the extremist war criminals on both sides (Bibi and the Settlers) and HAMAS both want the other ethnic group cleansed ...from the River to the Sea.

Tribalism seems to be swamping rationality.

I understood you were framing things as though the region's history began on October 7th, I was just pointing out how deeply "flawed" (to put it politely) that framing is.

Bad things began because the people who were being ethnically cleansed chose to retaliate ignores that the decades of ethnic cleansing were both a much more massive bad thing as well as were why the retaliation occurred.

Israelis can't and won't have peace until they acknowledge that they've always been the antagonist in the situation.

^^^
I agree ethnic cleansing is the plan of the Israeli government and certainly the settlers, but I don't think it's fair to blame all Israelis, and certainly not all Jews, as many of them are Pro-Palestinian rights.

I don't blame them all, at least not anymore than I blame all Russians for Russia's invasion of Ukraine or all Germans for the Nazi's invasions.

Not a single civilian in Israeli who supports Israel's campaigns of ethnic cleansing and theft deserves a shred of my sympathy.

The ones who oppose it do deserve sympathy, but if there's not enough of them to adequately exert pressure than there's not enough to distract me from the actual victims that have resulted from Israeli's founding and everything that has resulted since.

Based on polling it is not extremism but mainstream opinion on both sides because lets face it both groups have legitimate reasons to expect the other side will cleanse if not massacre them out of existence if given the opportunity.

So ...thats why WE have to...cleanse THEM out of existence?


Thats certainly what Bibi would say in response to my post.

I wanna see him hang from the same tree as the head honcho of HAMAS for causing both the HAMAS oct 7 attacks and the current near genocide by Israel in response. Bibi caused by aiding and abetting HAMAS for years ...at the expense of dealing with saner and secular Palestinian Authority that seemed to be working with peace process.

Bibi would say "but in the long run the PA would seek to wipe Jews out of Palestine as well so they were just as bad...so Ive gotta wipe the Arabs out first!"

The reply was not about have to, it is about why they think they have to.

Bibi is all about Bibi. He needs the Jewish supremacists in order to stay in power and out of jail so he lets them do what they please.

Palestinian Authority saner? That is a relative term. They are still running the “pay for slay” program/Martyr’s Fund which gives out monthly payments to prisoners or families of those killed attacking Israel.