My profile probably confuses a lot of people because I'm a Lebanon-raised Palestinian-Lebanese quasi-anarchist who learned some Hebrew and did my MA on the linguistic politics of Yiddish and Hebrew. A 🧵

I'm obsessed with Jewish history and consider radical Jewish thinkers as my primary influences (besides James Baldwin, naturally). Levi, Arendt, Goldman, Bookchin, Solotaroff, Walter Benjamin, Bauman, Graeber, Postone, Butler, Shohat and so many more.

I still have this poster in my flat and I have a Yiddish shirt that reads "down with the police". I take Doikayt very seriously. My MA thesis basically looked at Yiddish Doikayt/Here-ness versus Hebrew-oriented Zionism as the there-ness (this is a generalization)

One thing I'm proud of is that I predicted in my 2016 thesis that the resurgence of anti-Zionist Jewish politics is going to grow significantly in the coming decade as Israel becomes more fascist, and the gap between (esp) American Jews and Israel will only grow - and, well ...

But I want to emphasize that I do not see these Jewish thinkers as just influences. I've come to identify with Jewish history as the history of my kin. So when I say I'm not over the Holocaust, I mean it. I think about it almost every day. It still makes me angry.

This is why German pro-Israelism pisses me off so much as well. It's not just because it contributes to the suffering of my people, but because cowards piss me off and I find German politics to be the politics of moral cowards. Empty, mediocre, pathetic, deadly.

Their projection of moral superiority means nothing to me. You did the Holocaust and then hid behind Israeli settler colonialism and genocide. Nothing else fucking matters. You failed.

That's also why I don't believe at all that the Germans feel guilt about the Holocaust. Supporting Israel as their staatsräson is the coward's way out. And we pay the price for shitty German politics because apparently Germany just gonna Germany.

This sort of politics is broadly speaking how the West approaches the Holocaust as well. It doesn't deal with history seriously. It skips the critical work of memory entirely. It infantilizes and fetichizes Jews instead of taking seriously the work of critical Jewish thinkers.

Jews were not some passive observers of a horror that befell them. They fought. Zionists today seem particularly obsessed with denying that Jews fought back. They lost because the rest of the world failed to act on time. It's the West and the Soviets that failed the 20th century.

There's a reason Nazis were so worried about the influence of Jewish thinkers in Europe and that's because they were the most consistent voice for revolutionary change Europe had seen. What antisemites saw as 'rootlessness' was actually a desire to be rooted wherever you are.

While so much of Christian Europe was busy obsessing over the 'Jewish question' (which should be called 'we don't know how to deal with the Other because our conception of identity barely moved beyond the toddler stage of philosophy' but that's too long).

And because of the anarchist-y bits in me, I do not take the nation state for granted. This means that I have no problem learning how to make sense of my own Lebanese/Palestinian/Levantine family's history of displacement by reading Benjamin or Levi or Arendt etc.

I don't see them as the 'Other'. They're my kin. As Baldwin put it re the Black experience, I view those who create a negative 'Other' as revealing more of themselves than of the 'Other'. That's how I view so much of the past century of European history.

I'm not convinced with the European project and I don't see it going anywhere good unless they take seriously their Jewish heritage because to this day I don't believe most Europeans really understand what *they* lost with the Holocaust.