Accusations of antisemitism

A couple of weeks ago, a few kind students warned me about a post on Instagram: link.¹

I am always open to hear how my ideas and positions are hurtful in ways I do not realize yet. And I believe that when it comes to antisemitism, non-Jewish people like me have a special duty to be extra wary. As I have written here:

In the end, the conflict in Palestine knows many monsters, and they all feed on each other. But many of these monsters came from white, Dutch, German, French etc. non-Jewish people, manifested as the genocidal antisemitic and colonial violence committed abroad and at home. And since we cannot go back to fight these monsters in the past, the second best thing is to fight and resist their manifestations in the present, both at home and abroad.

At the same time, experience has shown me that when I am accused of antisemitism, these accusations are often made from deeply misguided positions that should be rejected by all of us.

The latest accusation focuses on a cartoon, shared by Mondoweis on Mastodon on the 7th of October 2023 (see screenshots also mentioned above). The accusation claims that I actively boosted (“retweeted”) that cartoon. I believe there is room for disagreement here.²

I did however actively boost a post in which Mondoweis criticizes the decision (by their Mastodon admin) to flag as “inappropriate” a post that shares a carefully written overview of the events of the 7th of October, which included that cartoon.

Looking back, I’m not a big fan of the cartoon, if only because there is a gray area between “cartoonesque” and “caricature” that people experience/interpret differently. I think it’s often better to simply stay away from such gray areas.

About the rest of the cartoon: I believe that Palestinians have the right to defend themselves against the occupation, and that this gives elderly Palestinian women the right to break through (illegal) border fences, roll up their sleeves and scare away armed members of an occupation force, Jewish or not.

At the same time, given that 815 of the 1195 Israeli fatalities on the 7th of October were unarmed civilians,³ who - like the tens of thousands unarmed Palestinian civilians that the state of Israel has murdered in the last two years - have the right to not be targeted, I feel the timing of the cartoon is wrong. As such, it undermines the (otherwise carefully written) article that it was published with.

Having said that, the fact that the Instagram post targets not only the cartoon (suggesting that I actively shared it) but my general social media presence (which I tend to curate with care), tells me that the people behind this post (students or not) depart from a very different set of ideas of what is right and wrong. More recent posts from the same Instagram account reinforce this belief.

Finally, although I understand that it is not always easy to express an unpopular⁴ opinion, and that it can then help to do so anonymously, I believe Instagram is not the right place to do so.

This, for me, is the main upshot: if this Instagram account is indeed (partly) managed by AUC students, I am happy that they have found Mastodon, and I invite them to join me there in open and respectful debate. But please leave the threats you make on that Instagram account - “accountability is coming” - behind. We don’t do that there.