Permanently Deleted
I’ll add as many anti-Israel emotes as y’all and I can come up with except the one where we’re toeing the line into, and I hate to use this phrase as a cracker but I don’t know how else to describe it, generational trauma. I know the holocaust has been cynically weaponized by this freak fascist ethnostate to do unspeakable horror, but it’s innately uncomfortable even as part of the anti-Zionist diaspora to make something like this. It fucking sucks, and I’m sorry, but that’s why I scoured for any other representation of Israel that doesn’t invoke Judaism as a whole.
This might be my suburbanite americracker brain showing, but it’s really my only major line-in-the-sand. Sorry.
honestly I’m still surprised we even added considering that there is still a burning star of david on it.
It’s abstracted enough. Genuinely didn’t even notice till you pointed it out
I just want to say that I also completely understand and agree with you. It may be too much and unnecessary to have a burning Star of David.
According to Gershom Scholem, the Star of David (magen David) has since only the 19th century been used as a representation of Jewish people as a whole but was used for specific and special religious rituals by Jewish people for far longer. It was probably only because of its use to generally symbolize Jewish people starting in the 19th century that it was picked up by the Zionist movement and now as we know it is sadly intertwined with it. I do find the co-option of the Star of David by Zionism to be reprehensible and, of course, Zionists will also use it in a hateful way which is disgusting, so I don’t think Foucaults is wrong in pointing out that it has regrettably added a new chapter in its history, namely in being a hate symbol. But I don’t think this discounts its history of meaning as being a deeply religious, ritualistic symbol for the Jewish people since at least the seventh century BCE according to Scholem. This is the tricky part of dealing with fascist/fundamentalist movements which co-opt religious or ethnic symbols and utilize them as a sign of their movement. We want to justifiably reject their movement but we also don’t want to identify the symbol, or the people of the symbol, with their movement in the first place because that is exactly what they want—so it takes some care to attack the true enemy. In this case, I think a burning Star of David can be considered an anti-Semitic symbol much in the same way as an emoji of a burning menorah, or a burning Tetragrammaton or any of the Holy Names or even just the Yod. These are all deeply religiously Jewish symbols and should be understood as such. As Leftists we should not always let the Right use or take what they want and I think this is one of those cases when we should still support our Jewish comrades in rupturing Zionism from Judaism and the magen David, specifically.
