For what it's worth, this is the ADL's official position on gentile asylum seekers in Israel. Not open borders exactly, but definitely not "based mass deportations" either. So it's not even clear they are being inconsistent.
"For what it's worth" - a concession to the fact that it's worth squat. The old sternly worded letter gambit.... The ADL is being consistent, let's give them that. Did they follow up with another sternly worded letter?
I think something you left out, probably because it is largely unknown amongst non-Arabs is the major, major role Al-Jazeera had during the Arab spring and how for decades it basically was the “free news” of the Arabic world, as free as that can be. Basically Al-Jazeera was a major condition of the fact that the Arab spring became a revolution in the whole Middle East and it was, the major reason the Gulf States broke contact with Qatar a few years ago.
Saudi Arabia had as a precondition to close Al-Jazeera before any normalisation.
Al-Jazeera is a huge asset of the Qataru regime and it has used it as a weapon for a long time, it surprises me it took them that long to create the woke AJ+
An interesting difference between the UAE and Qatar is the kind of foreign influence they cultivate. Qatar cultivates elite academics and think tanks etc. They invite prestigious academics to debate in Doha. The UAE may do this too but it’s to a much lesser extent. The UAE does on the other hand cultivate repulsive slopfluencers, crypto scammers and Andrew Tate esque oddities. I feel like AJ’s leftward bias is geared towards appealing to highly educated audiences, who they presume lean left (Every Al Jazeera watcher I’ve met irl was highly educated). One thing that sets Al Jazeera apart is its relatively high brow content. Unlike, MSNBC, CNN or Fox News they make relatively good documentaries about politics and history (even their Six-Day and Yom Kippur War documentaries are some of the best made in relatively recent years). They also make interesting documentaries about stuff that generally never gets reported. For example they have a very interesting documentary about ISIS-K before anybody knew who they were.
It's almost like American Jews are smart enough to realize Israel and America are two different countries that live in two different situations. Unlike the author.
I think this is a misunderstanding of the criticism. The anger on the "for thee but not for me" meme is almost entirely direct at the liberal American Zionists. The abstract opinion of Israel's citizens is a moot point since it doesn't effect American politics that directly. What does effect American politics is the many American Zionists both, Jew and gentile, who will view any Israeli policy in the most sympathetic possible light which if done by any other government including their own for any reason they would call fascist. There isn't quite the same powerful ethno narcissistic Muslim lobby in the US like exists in most of Western Europe (although we sure are trying to import enough "skilled immigrants" to rectify that) so the Al Jazeera point is gonna fall flat with most people. Almost any politically engaged American has at some point encountered this hypocrisy first hand and its simply not sustainable.
If American Jews went all in bush era Neoconservatism plus hostility to non western immigration their position would at least be coherent but its more likely that most Secular American Jewry if forced to choose between post 60s race communism and Zionism are gonna pick post 60s race communism.
I know you're from the UK so maybe the Jewish community there is less activated by this issue but in the US "the average Jew is abit more righting on Israel" is a massive understatement. I try to avoid making this purely a question of the Jewish minority because there are plenty of gentiles, especially southern evangelicals , who are completely insane on this topic as well. You correct these types are generally fairly indifferent to Israels domestic politics but that is again besides the point.
Just today it has been reported American Ambassador has invited Jonathan Pollard to the embassy in Jerusalem for a meeting and in the past has publicly called for pardoning him. It is difficult to imagine a traitor on behalf of any other country getting this kind of treatment.
I don't think this is a good example of the case at hand. Pollard received a much more onerous sentence than is typical for those convicted of spying for allied countries. This is maybe because he was actually being sentenced for a bunch of other stuff he did that he wasn't convicted of, or, as more seems to be the case, it was punishment for his decision to go to the press and try to get the Israel lobby to push for his release. Subsequently, establishment Jewish organisations did their best to ignore the case and it became a cause celebre for anti-establishment right-populist Jews, which is why he was released by Trump.
Pollard is legitimately a crackpot who is on YouTube every week calling for the use of nuclear weapons, conquering Jordan and all sorts of other insanity. That Huckabee would meet him certainly illustrates something, namely the bizarre cross-cultural links between American evangelical culture and Israeli militarism. However, I don't think there is any hypocrisy here. Pollard probably thinks America should nuke Mexico.
There's a number of problems with this contrived standard of spying for a friendly nation. Firstly it implies Pollard received a uniquely harsh sentence because he spied for the Israelis but you're really just comparing him to other Israeli spies since they're the only "friendly" country regularly caught committing espionage against us. Secondly, it implies it didn't damage American national security since its helping a friend which is exact defense Soviet spies in the 40s and 50s, not to mention to suspicion of many American officials some of Pollards info was traded to the Soviet for various concessions.
Clemency toward Pollard was not exclusively a right wing thing. Bill Clinton came very close to releasing him and I know Chuck Schumer lobbied Obama for clemency as well. If I googled it I'm sure I could find a dozen other Congressional Democrats who also lobbied on his behalf at various points. It was not exactly a fringe position.
I agree with you that American evangelical culture is more than a little sick in the head on this topic but disagree there is no hypocrisy. I wont claim to know the heart of Pollard regarding Mexico but I can assure you if you advocated any of what Pollard believes about anyone other than the Palestinians to Mike Huckabee he'd call you a Nazi.
I don't think the resistance of liberal zionists to non-Jewish immigration to Israel is because of security (at least in the national security/terrorism sense) or some abstract "people are more right wing about things they care about" motivation. It's that, with regard to Israel, liberal Zionists do really believe that Israel should be a Jewish reservation where Jews dominate so that Jews won't be at the mercy of a domestic government that could ever oppress them. This is, at bottom, the point of Zionism. This is not, strictly speaking, incompatible with leftist thought (which sanctifies reservations for Native Americans and safe spaces for non-whites) but it is facially inconsistent with the liberal consensus that governments should be indifferent to their ethnic or religious demographics.
WW2 was fought by the Allies explicitly on the principle of national determination exercised through liberal-democratic constitutional structures. America had immigration quotas until 1965 to maintain the existing demographic balance, and when these quotas were abolished, supporters claim that it would (magically?) not upset the demographic balance. Outside of America, western countries maintained the assumption that each country was *for* a particular nation and that minority groups were there to add a bit of spice.. America was the exception because of its history and role as the imperial center. (Canada was a partial exception because it was binational). This consensus only really started to break down in the 2000s.
The reason why boomer liberals support Zionism is because Zionism is completely compatible with boomer liberalism so long as you don't think too hard about the 1948 refugees and Israel agrees to maintain the fiction that the occupation is a temporary security measure. Between 2000-2018, Israel and the West were moving away from each other mostly because the West was radicalising. Only more recently has it been the other way round.
Well, I guess we could debate how longstanding or widespread the liberal consensus I mentioned is - but it sounds like you would agree that it has been until very recently the dominant liberal consensus in Anglo North America for a very long time (and I guess Australia and New Zealand), and in Europe at least after each country more or less ethnically cleansed its troublesome minorities/had its borders redrawn to exclude them.
And liberal Jews have always been fully on board with this, especially in Europe where they were the ethnic group always on the outs with the nationalist movement.
So it's at least a little inconsistent for a Jewish institution full of American Jewish liberal boomers like the ADL to be all in on "ethnicity shouldn't matter in America" and "it is critical that Jews remain the dominant ethnic group in Israel."
No, I don't think that at all. The assumption that the United Kingdom would remain 90%+ White British in perpetuity was held by almost the entire population until the late 2000s, and New Labour had to hide what they were doing until then. America is the odd one out. Same goes for the rest of the Anglosphere.
Well, to be clear, I'm not talking about the assumptions of the population at large as to future demographics but the ideological beliefs of the center-left side of the spectrum, namely that the state should not intervene in matters of ethnic demographics. If you tell me in the UK that Tony Blair and his cohort loudly pursued the opposite line I don't know enough to tell you otherwise, but in Canada - where I grew up - that was not the case (at least outside Quebec, which has always been hyperfocused on demographics, although they usually favored French speaking North Africans and Lebanese over white Anglo-Saxons).
The traditional attitude to American Jews that Israel is basically for Jews is the same as Irish Americans or Italian American or Armenian Americans to their equivalents. Until quite recently, Israel was much *more* diverse than most of these countries so the question hardly arose.
Which then gels with the Board of Deputies' logic on the immigration point (which is the missing piece here) that open borders is specifically a good thing because countries should let Jews in if/when they need to get out of dodge. This is the meat of people's views on this point, it's not that Jew 1 says x and Jew 2 says y, it's that Jewish organisation ("organised Jewry" if you want to be bad about it) argue for x and y simultaneously based on what's good for the Jews.
That's not necessarily weird; it'd be weirder if Jewish advocacy groups just argued for a selection of policies their members happened to like for non-ethnic reasons ("the Jews have got together and decided we'd like lower taxes and high-speed rail"). The problem is it gives a really bad impression of Jews caring more-or-less exclusively about the interests of Jews globally as opposed to fellow-citizens nationally. There's obviously selection bias here (Jews who aren't that fussed about being Jewish don't get involved with the Jewish ethnic lobby), but the optics of a group that looks like it speaks for all Jews* proclaiming what national policy should be with reference only to the interests of Jews and not anyone else are just appalling, especially as rightist whites hate all these organisations, and leftist whites equate a Jewish ethnic lobby with a white ethnic lobby int terms of social acceptability.
It's particularly dispiriting in the UK, where Jews are increasingly becoming the canary in the immigrant violence coal mine.
*BoD is uniquely unfortunate in that its name sounds like an official body that all the Jews vote for, as if it were some kind of lower house of the Elders of Zion.
I don't think the liberal Jewish position on immigration is based (at least anymore) on wanting Jews to be able to immigrate in a crisis. Israel hasn't solved a lot of problems maybe but it absolutely did solve the "find a country willing to take Jews" problem. Plus, there just aren't very many large populations of Jews around the world that are at risk of needing to escape. Close to 90% of the world's Jews live in Israel, the US, Canada, and Australia.
The liberal Jewish position on immigration is very close to the gentile gentile position on immigration: (i) refugees are sympathetic (ii) discrimination on the basis of ethnicity is bad (iii) diversity is good.
Well if it's any consolation to meme-ists, liberal zionism is on its way to extinction so pretty soon all the diaspora Jews who care about Israel will be right wing nativists in America too.
Reading this article of yours, I was reminded of a book from 2017;yes, 2017! which I always recommend to anyone who can read Spanish: “La palestinización de los mexicanos” by Alfredo Jalife. He is… let’s say; a colorful figure: an openly antisemitic-but-claims-to-be-“just-anti-Zionist”… Mexican–Lebanese-Catholic who has worked for years as a Qatar–Iran (media) asset, and who more recently became surprisingly well connected with the MAGA-adjacent antisemitic sphere in the U.S. A strange trajectory, but very symptomatic.
He was, for a while, a kind of “intellectual friend” of mine, that’s why I know quite a bit about these networks, obsessions, and the entire ecosystem around Qatar…Including, yes, the whole Epstein–Qatar matter, which ironically is a priority both for Donald and for Bibi… 👀
The Qatarization of the West is not a recent thing. It has been happening for decades, quietly, methodically…and it is deeply intertwined with bibism, trumpism, MAGA-culture, and all these strange processes of soft “palestinization.” After the Qatarization phase, we will inevitably enter a period of permanent self-palestinization: we ourselves becoming structurally palestinized within our own states. Power loves irony. Russia, interestingly, is the only major white and Christian nation that remains largely outside this Qatarization process; a process that is, at its core, a geopolitical trident of neo-Ottomanism, petro-Islam, and the global media-financial machine that accompanies it… pathetic. Let’s think about a prison break…
A more substantive critique is that the vast majority of Zionist Jews in the west, both left and right, would never tolerate a demographic policy in the US or Europe that mimicked Israel's. Israel's immigration policies may wax and wane over time, but they would never allow the Jewish population to fall below a super majority. Ben Shapiro would consider a similar policy in the US or UK to be immoral. Ben Shapiro has frequently said he could care less about the demographics of the US. Same for other right of center Zionists like Dennis Prager or Mark Levin.
Also, to my knowledge, Israel does not have birthright citizenship, so they can screw up immigration policy for a few election cycles and then fix it without too much trouble. Do that in the US and we get tons of anchor babies who have irrevocable US citizenship.
This is precisely what I mean. Ben Shapiro was arguing *against* large scale immigration from Latin America on the grounds that it changed American culture and values. Liberals accused him of racism and fearing the 'browning of America' and he said that was not his concern. Dishonest people took this out of context to demonstrate that Jews want to flood America with immigrants, when this was the literal exact opposite of what Shapiro was doing.
Now, you might still want to argue that Shapiro is hypocritical in some way because he would oppose the browning of Israel, but ISRAEL IS ALREADY BROWNED, and the people he supports in Israel are the brownisers.
"Now, you might still want to argue that Shapiro is hypocritical in some way because he would oppose the browning of Israel, but ISRAEL IS ALREADY BROWNED, and the people he supports in Israel are the brownisers."
I think this is actually a major point of contention between you and most of the commenters.
You see Israel as a very "diverse" state, while in their eyes, a Jew is a Jew, even if brown, even if (arguably) the differences between the Ashkenazim and the Mizrahim may be larger than between a White European and a Hispanic American.
Islamic civilizational opposition: just old fashioned Muslims who are angry that Jews were able to defeat fellow Muslims and rule over Al-Aqsa Mosque. Not as personal of a grudge as for Syria or previously Egypt, because of the distance between the two countries, as well as Qatar's lack of relevance demographically/militarily.
For what it's worth, this is the ADL's official position on gentile asylum seekers in Israel. Not open borders exactly, but definitely not "based mass deportations" either. So it's not even clear they are being inconsistent.
https://hias.org/news/hias-and-adl-raise-grave-concerns-over-deportation-of-asylum-seekers-from-israel/
"For what it's worth" - a concession to the fact that it's worth squat. The old sternly worded letter gambit.... The ADL is being consistent, let's give them that. Did they follow up with another sternly worded letter?
What's the difference between Donald Trump and American Reform Jews? Trump has Jewish grandchildren
I can think of a few other differences…
I think something you left out, probably because it is largely unknown amongst non-Arabs is the major, major role Al-Jazeera had during the Arab spring and how for decades it basically was the “free news” of the Arabic world, as free as that can be. Basically Al-Jazeera was a major condition of the fact that the Arab spring became a revolution in the whole Middle East and it was, the major reason the Gulf States broke contact with Qatar a few years ago.
Saudi Arabia had as a precondition to close Al-Jazeera before any normalisation.
Al-Jazeera is a huge asset of the Qataru regime and it has used it as a weapon for a long time, it surprises me it took them that long to create the woke AJ+
Interestingly, Saudi's state outlet calls out Al-Jazeera for the contradictory messaging in English and Arabic: https://english.alarabiya.net/News/gulf/2017/10/01/Al-Jazeera-English-vs-Al-Jazeera-Arabic-One-channel-two-messages.
An interesting difference between the UAE and Qatar is the kind of foreign influence they cultivate. Qatar cultivates elite academics and think tanks etc. They invite prestigious academics to debate in Doha. The UAE may do this too but it’s to a much lesser extent. The UAE does on the other hand cultivate repulsive slopfluencers, crypto scammers and Andrew Tate esque oddities. I feel like AJ’s leftward bias is geared towards appealing to highly educated audiences, who they presume lean left (Every Al Jazeera watcher I’ve met irl was highly educated). One thing that sets Al Jazeera apart is its relatively high brow content. Unlike, MSNBC, CNN or Fox News they make relatively good documentaries about politics and history (even their Six-Day and Yom Kippur War documentaries are some of the best made in relatively recent years). They also make interesting documentaries about stuff that generally never gets reported. For example they have a very interesting documentary about ISIS-K before anybody knew who they were.
It's almost like American Jews are smart enough to realize Israel and America are two different countries that live in two different situations. Unlike the author.
This is a comment that makes sense if you read the first several words and commented
Sounds like the distinction between “security” and “immigration” went right over your head
I think this is a misunderstanding of the criticism. The anger on the "for thee but not for me" meme is almost entirely direct at the liberal American Zionists. The abstract opinion of Israel's citizens is a moot point since it doesn't effect American politics that directly. What does effect American politics is the many American Zionists both, Jew and gentile, who will view any Israeli policy in the most sympathetic possible light which if done by any other government including their own for any reason they would call fascist. There isn't quite the same powerful ethno narcissistic Muslim lobby in the US like exists in most of Western Europe (although we sure are trying to import enough "skilled immigrants" to rectify that) so the Al Jazeera point is gonna fall flat with most people. Almost any politically engaged American has at some point encountered this hypocrisy first hand and its simply not sustainable.
If American Jews went all in bush era Neoconservatism plus hostility to non western immigration their position would at least be coherent but its more likely that most Secular American Jewry if forced to choose between post 60s race communism and Zionism are gonna pick post 60s race communism.
I feel you didn't read the middle of the article.
I know you're from the UK so maybe the Jewish community there is less activated by this issue but in the US "the average Jew is abit more righting on Israel" is a massive understatement. I try to avoid making this purely a question of the Jewish minority because there are plenty of gentiles, especially southern evangelicals , who are completely insane on this topic as well. You correct these types are generally fairly indifferent to Israels domestic politics but that is again besides the point.
I think you're wrong and that if you try to come up with concrete examples this will become evident.
Just today it has been reported American Ambassador has invited Jonathan Pollard to the embassy in Jerusalem for a meeting and in the past has publicly called for pardoning him. It is difficult to imagine a traitor on behalf of any other country getting this kind of treatment.
I don't think this is a good example of the case at hand. Pollard received a much more onerous sentence than is typical for those convicted of spying for allied countries. This is maybe because he was actually being sentenced for a bunch of other stuff he did that he wasn't convicted of, or, as more seems to be the case, it was punishment for his decision to go to the press and try to get the Israel lobby to push for his release. Subsequently, establishment Jewish organisations did their best to ignore the case and it became a cause celebre for anti-establishment right-populist Jews, which is why he was released by Trump.
Pollard is legitimately a crackpot who is on YouTube every week calling for the use of nuclear weapons, conquering Jordan and all sorts of other insanity. That Huckabee would meet him certainly illustrates something, namely the bizarre cross-cultural links between American evangelical culture and Israeli militarism. However, I don't think there is any hypocrisy here. Pollard probably thinks America should nuke Mexico.
There's a number of problems with this contrived standard of spying for a friendly nation. Firstly it implies Pollard received a uniquely harsh sentence because he spied for the Israelis but you're really just comparing him to other Israeli spies since they're the only "friendly" country regularly caught committing espionage against us. Secondly, it implies it didn't damage American national security since its helping a friend which is exact defense Soviet spies in the 40s and 50s, not to mention to suspicion of many American officials some of Pollards info was traded to the Soviet for various concessions.
Clemency toward Pollard was not exclusively a right wing thing. Bill Clinton came very close to releasing him and I know Chuck Schumer lobbied Obama for clemency as well. If I googled it I'm sure I could find a dozen other Congressional Democrats who also lobbied on his behalf at various points. It was not exactly a fringe position.
I agree with you that American evangelical culture is more than a little sick in the head on this topic but disagree there is no hypocrisy. I wont claim to know the heart of Pollard regarding Mexico but I can assure you if you advocated any of what Pollard believes about anyone other than the Palestinians to Mike Huckabee he'd call you a Nazi.
Sometimes you whine too much but this cuts through the noise like a razor
Everyone wants to ask The Jewish Question. Too bad no one wants to find the Jewish answers. Demented conspiracies are way more fun.
I don't think the resistance of liberal zionists to non-Jewish immigration to Israel is because of security (at least in the national security/terrorism sense) or some abstract "people are more right wing about things they care about" motivation. It's that, with regard to Israel, liberal Zionists do really believe that Israel should be a Jewish reservation where Jews dominate so that Jews won't be at the mercy of a domestic government that could ever oppress them. This is, at bottom, the point of Zionism. This is not, strictly speaking, incompatible with leftist thought (which sanctifies reservations for Native Americans and safe spaces for non-whites) but it is facially inconsistent with the liberal consensus that governments should be indifferent to their ethnic or religious demographics.
WW2 was fought by the Allies explicitly on the principle of national determination exercised through liberal-democratic constitutional structures. America had immigration quotas until 1965 to maintain the existing demographic balance, and when these quotas were abolished, supporters claim that it would (magically?) not upset the demographic balance. Outside of America, western countries maintained the assumption that each country was *for* a particular nation and that minority groups were there to add a bit of spice.. America was the exception because of its history and role as the imperial center. (Canada was a partial exception because it was binational). This consensus only really started to break down in the 2000s.
The reason why boomer liberals support Zionism is because Zionism is completely compatible with boomer liberalism so long as you don't think too hard about the 1948 refugees and Israel agrees to maintain the fiction that the occupation is a temporary security measure. Between 2000-2018, Israel and the West were moving away from each other mostly because the West was radicalising. Only more recently has it been the other way round.
Well, I guess we could debate how longstanding or widespread the liberal consensus I mentioned is - but it sounds like you would agree that it has been until very recently the dominant liberal consensus in Anglo North America for a very long time (and I guess Australia and New Zealand), and in Europe at least after each country more or less ethnically cleansed its troublesome minorities/had its borders redrawn to exclude them.
And liberal Jews have always been fully on board with this, especially in Europe where they were the ethnic group always on the outs with the nationalist movement.
So it's at least a little inconsistent for a Jewish institution full of American Jewish liberal boomers like the ADL to be all in on "ethnicity shouldn't matter in America" and "it is critical that Jews remain the dominant ethnic group in Israel."
No, I don't think that at all. The assumption that the United Kingdom would remain 90%+ White British in perpetuity was held by almost the entire population until the late 2000s, and New Labour had to hide what they were doing until then. America is the odd one out. Same goes for the rest of the Anglosphere.
Well, to be clear, I'm not talking about the assumptions of the population at large as to future demographics but the ideological beliefs of the center-left side of the spectrum, namely that the state should not intervene in matters of ethnic demographics. If you tell me in the UK that Tony Blair and his cohort loudly pursued the opposite line I don't know enough to tell you otherwise, but in Canada - where I grew up - that was not the case (at least outside Quebec, which has always been hyperfocused on demographics, although they usually favored French speaking North Africans and Lebanese over white Anglo-Saxons).
Canada changed in the 1980s already. Probably a product of proximity to America.
I don't think this principle of indifference to ethnic composition actually exists. The United States has had a visa programme to increase diversity since 1990. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diversity_Immigrant_Visa
The traditional attitude to American Jews that Israel is basically for Jews is the same as Irish Americans or Italian American or Armenian Americans to their equivalents. Until quite recently, Israel was much *more* diverse than most of these countries so the question hardly arose.
Which then gels with the Board of Deputies' logic on the immigration point (which is the missing piece here) that open borders is specifically a good thing because countries should let Jews in if/when they need to get out of dodge. This is the meat of people's views on this point, it's not that Jew 1 says x and Jew 2 says y, it's that Jewish organisation ("organised Jewry" if you want to be bad about it) argue for x and y simultaneously based on what's good for the Jews.
That's not necessarily weird; it'd be weirder if Jewish advocacy groups just argued for a selection of policies their members happened to like for non-ethnic reasons ("the Jews have got together and decided we'd like lower taxes and high-speed rail"). The problem is it gives a really bad impression of Jews caring more-or-less exclusively about the interests of Jews globally as opposed to fellow-citizens nationally. There's obviously selection bias here (Jews who aren't that fussed about being Jewish don't get involved with the Jewish ethnic lobby), but the optics of a group that looks like it speaks for all Jews* proclaiming what national policy should be with reference only to the interests of Jews and not anyone else are just appalling, especially as rightist whites hate all these organisations, and leftist whites equate a Jewish ethnic lobby with a white ethnic lobby int terms of social acceptability.
It's particularly dispiriting in the UK, where Jews are increasingly becoming the canary in the immigrant violence coal mine.
*BoD is uniquely unfortunate in that its name sounds like an official body that all the Jews vote for, as if it were some kind of lower house of the Elders of Zion.
I don't think the liberal Jewish position on immigration is based (at least anymore) on wanting Jews to be able to immigrate in a crisis. Israel hasn't solved a lot of problems maybe but it absolutely did solve the "find a country willing to take Jews" problem. Plus, there just aren't very many large populations of Jews around the world that are at risk of needing to escape. Close to 90% of the world's Jews live in Israel, the US, Canada, and Australia.
The liberal Jewish position on immigration is very close to the gentile gentile position on immigration: (i) refugees are sympathetic (ii) discrimination on the basis of ethnicity is bad (iii) diversity is good.
Well if it's any consolation to meme-ists, liberal zionism is on its way to extinction so pretty soon all the diaspora Jews who care about Israel will be right wing nativists in America too.
https://www.amazon.com/Trump-supremacismo-blanco-Palestinizaci%C3%93n-Mexicanos/dp/6077521477
Reading this article of yours, I was reminded of a book from 2017;yes, 2017! which I always recommend to anyone who can read Spanish: “La palestinización de los mexicanos” by Alfredo Jalife. He is… let’s say; a colorful figure: an openly antisemitic-but-claims-to-be-“just-anti-Zionist”… Mexican–Lebanese-Catholic who has worked for years as a Qatar–Iran (media) asset, and who more recently became surprisingly well connected with the MAGA-adjacent antisemitic sphere in the U.S. A strange trajectory, but very symptomatic.
He was, for a while, a kind of “intellectual friend” of mine, that’s why I know quite a bit about these networks, obsessions, and the entire ecosystem around Qatar…Including, yes, the whole Epstein–Qatar matter, which ironically is a priority both for Donald and for Bibi… 👀
The Qatarization of the West is not a recent thing. It has been happening for decades, quietly, methodically…and it is deeply intertwined with bibism, trumpism, MAGA-culture, and all these strange processes of soft “palestinization.” After the Qatarization phase, we will inevitably enter a period of permanent self-palestinization: we ourselves becoming structurally palestinized within our own states. Power loves irony. Russia, interestingly, is the only major white and Christian nation that remains largely outside this Qatarization process; a process that is, at its core, a geopolitical trident of neo-Ottomanism, petro-Islam, and the global media-financial machine that accompanies it… pathetic. Let’s think about a prison break…
A more substantive critique is that the vast majority of Zionist Jews in the west, both left and right, would never tolerate a demographic policy in the US or Europe that mimicked Israel's. Israel's immigration policies may wax and wane over time, but they would never allow the Jewish population to fall below a super majority. Ben Shapiro would consider a similar policy in the US or UK to be immoral. Ben Shapiro has frequently said he could care less about the demographics of the US. Same for other right of center Zionists like Dennis Prager or Mark Levin.
Also, to my knowledge, Israel does not have birthright citizenship, so they can screw up immigration policy for a few election cycles and then fix it without too much trouble. Do that in the US and we get tons of anchor babies who have irrevocable US citizenship.
This is precisely what I mean. Ben Shapiro was arguing *against* large scale immigration from Latin America on the grounds that it changed American culture and values. Liberals accused him of racism and fearing the 'browning of America' and he said that was not his concern. Dishonest people took this out of context to demonstrate that Jews want to flood America with immigrants, when this was the literal exact opposite of what Shapiro was doing.
Now, you might still want to argue that Shapiro is hypocritical in some way because he would oppose the browning of Israel, but ISRAEL IS ALREADY BROWNED, and the people he supports in Israel are the brownisers.
"Now, you might still want to argue that Shapiro is hypocritical in some way because he would oppose the browning of Israel, but ISRAEL IS ALREADY BROWNED, and the people he supports in Israel are the brownisers."
I think this is actually a major point of contention between you and most of the commenters.
You see Israel as a very "diverse" state, while in their eyes, a Jew is a Jew, even if brown, even if (arguably) the differences between the Ashkenazim and the Mizrahim may be larger than between a White European and a Hispanic American.
What is the source of Qatar's animus to Israel?
Islamic civilizational opposition: just old fashioned Muslims who are angry that Jews were able to defeat fellow Muslims and rule over Al-Aqsa Mosque. Not as personal of a grudge as for Syria or previously Egypt, because of the distance between the two countries, as well as Qatar's lack of relevance demographically/militarily.
Also, they figured out they could use it as a way of gaining soft power in the wider Muslim world and Israel wouldn't even penalise them for it.