As Israel becomes a more divisive issue on the Western left, questions about the Jewish connection to the Holy Land become more fraught. In this post, I continue my reflections on these questions. Since joining Twitter in an effort to promote this blog, I’ve engaged in several rather acrimonious “Twitter battles” with random critics. Although I haven’t found these debates particularly enlightening, studying them is very important nonetheless. That is both for strategic reasons (for those who want to defend Jewish identity, Zionism, or both); for the sake of understanding the growing divisions within the Jewish left; and for understanding the growing tensions between elements of the progressive left more broadly and Jewish communities across the world. The starting point for this post is a specific thread, in which an interlocutor and I discuss whether Ashkenazi Jews are indigenous to the Holy Land. See also my previous post on this subject. You can download that thread from this link. I have also displayed it below. To read the thread, just zoom in and scroll, starting on the left top. Red lines attach tweets to subthreads that respond to them. **Note: Since this conversation took place on what is already a public forum (Twitter), I did not bother to anonymize the identities of any of the other interlocutors. If you were involved in this debate and wish to be anonymized, please contact me immediately on Twitter and I will arrange this for you. INSIGHTS FROM A COLLEAGUE: I discussed this thread with an anonymous colleague, who has graciously agreed to share his reflections (in dark red): I read the thread and I have several quick reactions (other than the obvious ones that Twitter doesn't lend itself to rational argument and that about the Israeli/Palestinian dispute you won't convince anyone who already has a strong view about it).
So, all in all, I don't know this guy and he may be smart, but frankly I'm not impressed at all. If you ask me it's pretty run of the mill progressive nonsense, with the usual word magic. I think if you made any mistake in this thread, it's not catching that one. There's nothing wrong with the arguments you adduce there, but you set yourself up to lose the debate when you don't explicitly call these people out for trying to act as the language police. No, the word 'indigenous' doesn't mean what he wants it to mean—and when you don't vigorously push back against his attempt to appropriate that word, you deprive yourself of the conceptual tools to make your argument. I think this is a very common problem in debates between ideological progressive lefties and honest moderates: the former are very aggressive about language use, and the latter are often not sufficiently alert to call out aberration in this department (perhaps on the assumption that it doesn't matter much). COMING SOON...
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