There's no whinier human alive than the anti-Zionist Jews, most of them probably fake, who are now raging in the responses to my wife's extremely reasonable tweet. A weird number of them are anonymous or actually entirely foreign people taking insult in the name of Jews. I'm guessing there aren't this many anti-Zionist Jews in the world. I'm guessing she tripped a bot army. To the substance of the complaint that she's disrespecting the memory of Jews - it is as ignorant as it is self-righteous. They keep bringing up the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising as proof of Jews not dying quietly. But the uprising was the exception. It was immensely heroic. Israel's Holocaust Remembrance Day is officially called "Day of Remembrance for the Holocaust and the Bravery" in its honor. But it was still one of the very few exceptions to the much more common story. Jews were always brave, but it was usually the bravery of dying with dignity. They held their children close at the selection in Auschwitz, imagining they could protect them; they clad themselves in prayer shawls and sang as they walked to the pyre set for them by the Christian mob in Nordhausen in 1349; they killed their own children in the towns of the Rhine as the Crusaders approached to avoid them being killed more gruesomely by the Crusaders; they converted publicly to Islam but then secretly kept their faith when the Muwahidun of Morocco swept across northwest Africa and southern Spain in the 12th century. They died, they surrendered, they converted. And yes, they often did so with as much dignity and courage as anyone could have mustered in their situation. But their bravery doesn't change the fact that they were helpless. In fact, the single most successful strategy they pursued, time after time, was running away. It's ironic that anti-Zionist American Jews would not know that; the vast bulk of American Jewry today are the great-great-grandchildren of helpless, penniless Jews who fled the forced poverty, hatred and murderous violence of Eastern Europe. They fled in their millions. So yes, we are pretty much the first Jews in 2000 years who refuse to die quietly - who *can* refuse to die quietly. And yes, our forebears usually died quietly, in the sense that they are largely unremembered. The pearl-clutching Twitter mob in this very thread are an astonishing example of how badly the Jewish past is remembered by Jews today. They rage again and again against the alleged disrespecting of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising ("antisemitic!" some declare) because they can't actually remember any other example. In their very ignorance, they prove the point. Our ancestors died with as much dignity as they could muster. But that is not enough. I love my ancestors for that dignity, but only the privileged Jews of America, who are today safer than any Jew who's ever lived, would dare feign a faux nostalgia for that vulnerability, for the "nobility" or "privilege" of dying well. No, we will not betray the memory of our dead forebears by pretending their deaths were better than our present-day strengths. Even if you believe we make mistakes, and even sometimes terrible mistakes, you would not ask any other nation on earth to prefer a noble death. There is no greater antisemitism than that fervent wish of the anti-Zionist. As my wife said, we are the first Jews who will not go quietly, as Hamas and its allies openly demand of us, and as their far more powerful and soon-to-be nuclear patron declares on a weekly basis. We won't go quietly because the sacrifices of our grandparents give us a chance, for the first time, to fight back, ferociously and successfully. Tweet away, you fake mob. My brilliant wife is right, and you're too stupid and ignorant to know why.
There's no whinier human alive than the anti-Zionist Jews, most of them probably fake, who are now raging in the responses to my wife's extremely reasonable tweet. A weird number of them are anonymous or actually entirely foreign people taking insult in the name of Jews. I'm guessing there aren't this many anti-Zionist Jews in the world. I'm guessing she tripped a bot army. To the substance of the complaint that she's disrespecting the memory of Jews - it is as ignorant as it is self-righteous. They keep bringing up the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising as proof of Jews not dying quietly. But the uprising was the exception. It was immensely heroic. Israel's Holocaust Remembrance Day is officially called "Day of Remembrance for the Holocaust and the Bravery" in its honor. But it was still one of the very few exceptions to the much more common story. Jews were always brave, but it was usually the bravery of dying with dignity. They held their children close at the selection in Auschwitz, imagining they could protect them; they clad themselves in prayer shawls and sang as they walked to the pyre set for them by the Christian mob in Nordhausen in 1349; they killed their own children in the towns of the Rhine as the Crusaders approached to avoid them being killed more gruesomely by the Crusaders; they converted publicly to Islam but then secretly kept their faith when the Muwahidun of Morocco swept across northwest Africa and southern Spain in the 12th century. They died, they surrendered, they converted. And yes, they often did so with as much dignity and courage as anyone could have mustered in their situation. But their bravery doesn't change the fact that they were helpless. In fact, the single most successful strategy they pursued, time after time, was running away. It's ironic that anti-Zionist American Jews would not know that; the vast bulk of American Jewry today are the great-great-grandchildren of helpless, penniless Jews who fled the forced poverty, hatred and murderous violence of Eastern Europe. They fled in their millions. So yes, we are pretty much the first Jews in 2000 years who refuse to die quietly - who *can* refuse to die quietly. And yes, our forebears usually died quietly, in the sense that they are largely unremembered. The pearl-clutching Twitter mob in this very thread are an astonishing example of how badly the Jewish past is remembered by Jews today. They rage again and again against the alleged disrespecting of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising ("antisemitic!" some declare) because they can't actually remember any other example. In their very ignorance, they prove the point. Our ancestors died with as much dignity as they could muster. But that is not enough. I love my ancestors for that dignity, but only the privileged Jews of America, who are today safer than any Jew who's ever lived, would dare feign a faux nostalgia for that vulnerability, for the "nobility" or "privilege" of dying well. No, we will not betray the memory of our dead forebears by pretending their deaths were better than our present-day strengths. Even if you believe we make mistakes, and even sometimes terrible mistakes, you would not ask any other nation on earth to prefer a noble death. There is no greater antisemitism than that fervent wish of the anti-Zionist. As my wife said, we are the first Jews who will not go quietly, as Hamas and its allies openly demand of us, and as their far more powerful and soon-to-be nuclear patron declares on a weekly basis. We won't go quietly because the sacrifices of our grandparents give us a chance, for the first time, to fight back, ferociously and successfully. Tweet away, you fake mob. My brilliant wife is right, and you're too stupid and ignorant to know why.
@havivrettiggur The point here is playing the victims, which is frankly unbearable. While thousands after thousands of Palestinians have been brutally murdered by Israel and thousands are dying and starving to death, you write these arrogant words of “defiance”? Of what? Of humanity?
@havivrettiggur @RachelGur Maybe not the first to “refuse”, just the first with a viable alternative.
@havivrettiggur Do not be disheartened. There are many non-Jews like me who will stand by your side. Your values are our values. Your struggle is our struggle. Am Yisrael Chai!
@havivrettiggur Don't be so modest. You whine enough to balance the scales.
People should really read what Haviv has written here. It's a great example of the Zionist's self-licking ice cream cone, a sort of ever expanding, self reinforcing delusion where all grievances are either born of antisemitism or, if Jewish, stem from self-loathing. Haviv then drones on for several paragraphs about how Jews historically died with courage while failing to fight back but what's really amazing is for all that will to engage in, and perhaps learn from, historical retrospection there seems to be a complete unwillingness, writ large amongst Zionists, to reconcile the more contemporary objective failures in both the early formation of Israel and the political theory of Zionism itself with the need to provide Jews with security in the form of a nation state of their own. For *any* tiny ethnic minority it would *always* be unsafe to ethnically cleanse an extant majority, steal their land for the creation of a nation state and then politically disenfranchise them in the geographic periphery - real bad idea, especially if that majority outbreeds the minority 3:1, as Arabs do Jews. Zionist Jews: People get mad at us and kill us in the diaspora, we need safety, so let's return to our "ancestral homeland", kill some of the majority population who've been living there for centuries and set up shop on that land, that'll be safe, that'll be secure. Humanity: Nope. For a people seeking to create a secure homeland, Zionism, which seems to attract Jews principally by making a romantic appeal to "ancestry" and "indigeneity", neither of which entitle anything, has been a horribly unsafe and unstable construct that has had to rely on the use of ethnic cleansing, apartheid and genocide internally and the provenance of gentile security guarantees and a kind of proximate legitimacy through recognition by foreign states externally in order to create and maintain "Israel" - all to say - for all the talk about dead Jews and a need to create Jewish security, Zionism has produced a lot of dead Jews and the absence of Jewish security. In fact, by Israel's own account, the state hosted, on 10/7, the single largest loss of Jewish life since the holocaust, it couldn't defend itself by itself from non-state actors with small arms on motorcycles and hang gliders and bizarrely, after 76 years, continues to be existentially dependent upon Gentile power for protection, which, ironically, is just a reconfiguration of the exact same problem Jews have always historically been faced with in the diaspora, ie. dependency on Gentile authority for security - another example of the structural failure of Zionism. It's just an objective fact that Israel is today the least safe place on the planet for Jews to live. I'm not a Jew, I won't whine about how Zionism has worked to deracinate Jewish identity, I get the argument, but I personally don't care. I think, whether Gentile or Jew, self-serving or altruistic, a strong, legitimate, independent Jewish state solves the Jewish security problem and that benefits all of humanity - but Israel is not strong, is not legitimate, is not independent and most of all, is not safe. The reality is that the massive and complex political Rube-Goldberg device that is modern Zionism would not be needed if a Jewish state were simply formed on legitimately acquired land. It's time for Zionists to start recognizing the folly of their nascent efforts at statehood and realize that they stand at a fork in the road of Jewish nationalism, down one side is a fate not dissimilar to that which was met by the Nazis, international isolation, conflagration and ultimately the ash heap of history, down the other is a new legitimate construct, built on the object lessons that can be drawn from Zionism's failures in design and implementation of a Jewish state. A demographic timebomb is ticking in the Zionist's faces as the world increasingly shrieks in horror and pushes away at the site of their atrocities - the choice is urgent.