https://www.jta.org/archive/ben-gurion-reveals-suggestion-of-north-vietnams-communist-leader
https://www.jta.org/2014/11/02/culture/from-the-archive-israels-friend-in-hanoi
https://richardpollock.substack.com/p/two-unlikely-national-liberation (pro-Israel blog)

This seems kind of disappointing.

Shit, it doesn't even seem like we can end Israeli apartheid without fighting a world war over it

I found this article to be pretty interesting.

Modern nationalism valorises a people’s deep, primordial relationship with land. It also depends on enemies, outsiders and foreigners to help unite the members of the nation...

For much of Western history, however, claiming foreign ancestry was the key to political legitimacy. From the Roman Empire to the Renaissance, noble families across Europe insisted that they were not related to the populations they ruled. They traced their ancestry back to illustrious foreign powers, including figures of myth and legend. Among the most popular were the protagonists of the Trojan War....

...from the long view of European history, nationalist myths about indigenous peoples are a recent invention, a response to elites’ emphasis on their foreign origins.

The article doesn't mention it, but I think another good example of this would probably be the Jewish origin myth of the Exodus. The archaeological consensus is that it never happened, there was never any mass migration from Egypt to Palestine, nor was there any overthrow & expulsion of Canaanites. What most likely happened is that at some point, the Canaanite society experienced a political collapse, the local population started self-identifying differently, and a cohort of self-identified "Israelites" successfully took up the vacuum of power and formed a government. Then they invented an origin myth about how they were actually from the exotic land of the Nile, even though they were really just the same ethnicity as the Canaanite rulers of a generation or two earlier.

In September 1935, the Nazi government in Germany passed two laws, the "Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honour" and the "Reich Citizenship Law", that are together commonly known as the Nuremberg Laws. These laws are most well-known for forbidding marriages and extramarital intercourse between Jews and "Aryan" Germans; forbidding the employment of German females under 45 in Jewish households; and declaring that only those of German or related blood were eligible to be Reich citizens, with Jews reclassified as merely "state subjects" without any citizenship rights.

There is another thing that these laws did that has been less discussed, but really ought to be given more attention, especially in light of events that have transpired in the past year.

The Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honour banned Jews in Germany from flying or displaying the National flag (meaning the Nazi flag), but stated they were "permitted to display the Jewish colors". Several months later, the Nazi government issued a further statement clarifying that this language refers to the flag used by the Zionist movement at the time.

Per the Jewish Telegraphic Agency on January 2nd, 1936:

“It is up to the Jewish nation,” the decree states, “to decide for itself which are to be the colors of the Jewish national flag, but until then the Zionists’ blue-white flag, together with the symbols of all the different Zionist groups, is valid in the Reich as the Jewish flag and as such will be enjoying State protection.”

The "Zionists' blue-white flag" referenced here featured a white background with two blue stripes and a Star of David in between them. It is the same flag that is now used as the flag of Israel.

I learned this from reading Zionism During the Holocaust by Tony Greenstein. Positively eye-opening.

(edit: corrected a grammatical error)

My parents have had a terrible marriage for basically as long as I can remember. I have been anticipating their divorce on some level since I was about 11 (I'm now in my late 20s), and I don't know why they don't just pull the plug. In fact, I don't even know why they got married in the first place; they don't enjoy each other's company, they don't have congruent ideas or tastes on basically anything, they're basically incompatible in every way.

I think they both would have been better off if they had split up early, never gotten married and never had children together. They should have married different people, or just not gotten married at all.

The obvious implication of this, of course, is that I shouldn't have been born. This does cause me some existential discomfort. Thoughts occur to me like, "Why do I care so much about the future? Why do I pay so much attention to politics? What's the point of advocating for socialism or trying to work towards a better future? I don't have kids, I can't have kids*, I don't think I should have kids, and I don't even think my parents should have had me. In a better timeline, I wouldn't even be here anyway."

*(I had a vasectomy a few years ago)

I would like to feel a bit more assured about all of this. What do you think?

Contemporaneous articles from socialist publications:

https://www.marxists.org/archive/cliff/works/1946/04/palestrike.html
https://www.marxists.org/archive/cliff/works/1946/05/strike.html

According to T Cliff, the strike comprised 32,000 workers, or 15% of the whole working class in Palestine at that time - 26,000 Arab Palestinians and 6,000 Jews.

The strike was denounced by the Histadrut and by Zionist Hebrew newspapers, as well as by at least one (presumably bourgeois) Arabic newspaper which denigrated the strike as "Zionist".

Per Jacobin:

The largest postwar Arab-Jewish joint labor action was the April 1946 strike of blue- and white-collar postal, telegraph and telephone, and railway workers throughout the country — the first general strike of railway and postal workers in Palestine. They were soon joined by government civil servants and Public Works Department and port workers, with about twenty-three thousand workers taking part in total.

The incapacitated British Mandate administration had to concede to many of the strikers’ demands, including wage increases, a cost-of-living allowance, and pension improvements. Neither the Histadrut leaders nor conservative Palestinian nationalists welcomed this expression of Jewish-Arab solidarity.

Unfortunately, after the strike succeeded, this binational solidarity did not really continue much further. The Histadrut would go on to undercut other expressions of Jewish-Arab solidarity in order to solidify Jewish nationalism. The following year, the UN would announce its partition plan for Palestine, and historical Palestine would devolve into civil (and then regional) war.

Relevant Haaretz article by Hadash member Odeh Bisharat: https://archive.ph/kEIUb

The state of Israel currently controls an area of land comprising four distinct regions: the 1948 green line territory (what could be considered “Israel proper”), the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, and the Golan Heights.

In total, about 14.8 million people live in this combined area, with a plurality (but NOT a majority) of them - 7.2 million - being Israeli Jews. That means that the rest, the majority, are non-Jewish - they include Gazans, West Bank inhabitants, and non-Jewish Israeli citizens (aka ‘48 Arabs).

Are Americans aware of this? It doesn’t get brought up very much, but to me this seems like a pretty significant fact. We’re sending billions of dollars a year to Israel so that a minority of the people who live there can have a special set of rights over the majority.

I did not know this prior to October 7th. I was pro-Palestinian prior to that anyway, but I mistakenly thought that Israel was, at least, oppressing a numerical minority rather than a majority.