We, the admin team, decry all forms of settler-colonialism, and we recognize that Zionism is a pro-settler-colonialist position.
Therefore we propose that should no longer be accepting of any Zionist accounts on our instances.
Please upvote for agree, downvote for disagree.
Note: we only count votes by instance members of dbzer0 and anarchist.nexus, plus a few vouched-for external users.
Hi mateys, I've kept things simple in the above text, for brevity, but in fact it took the admin team quite a while to get to this stage. We have discussed the policy change extensively, and a variety of different perspectives emerged. I will attempt to sum them up below as best I can:
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The "this isn't that complicated" school of thought goes something like this: If someone is consistently posting comments that mirror Hasbara talking points (e.g. justifying the genocide in Gaza, consistently painting Palestinians as terrorists and Israel as the victim), then they should be instance banned. It's just not acceptable for Zionists to be allowed on our instances.
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The "slippery slope" / "purity test" school of thought is that banning people for having an "unpopular" political opinion would potentially mean banning half the fediverse, if more and more of these policies were enacted over time. To attempt to mitigate this we are keeping the scope of this rule as narrow as possible, and I also don't think many of our users will be affected. Also, we typically don't have frequent policy changes, and I have no reason to expect that to change moving forward.
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Another important discussion point was "how do we decide whether someone is pro-Zionist or not?" We can't always be 100% sure of someone's true intentions, we can only go on what they have posted and that is subject to interpretation. I don't feel there is an easy answer to this one, except to say that we would have to be pretty certain before issuing a perma-ban.
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The "geopolitics don't matter" school of thought is that trying to be on the "correct" side of every issue is kind of pointless because nothing that happens in lemmy chat forums will ever make an ounce of difference in the real world. Don't bother moderating users over political/ideological differences, just let people argue if they want. While I can totally empathize with this sentiment, I can also see the case for taking a clear stance on this topic in accordance with our values and the overwhelming support for the Palestinian cause among our users. Personally, I am advocating in favor of the resolution.
Please add your comments below if you want to provide your own thoughts on the topic, or have any questions.
expiry: 7
They had a nation there 2000 years ago. That's very different from "having ancestry", because after the Kingdom of Israel got conquered, most Israelites remained. They started being "a wondering nation" after persecution got ramped up to 11, which was the state throughout most of the 2000 years.
Considering that, historically, Israel existed over 2000 years ago, Palestine existed... well, never, and the entire region's borders were created in early 20th century by the French and British anyway, I think it's a fair assumption that both of these peoples should be able to have a nation of their own, with their own borders.
They had a kingdom 2000 years ago which wasn't Israel but Judea. Israel was destroyed much earlier. Nation states are a recent phenomenon.
True. Most descends of the ancient Israelites and Judahites stayed and later converted to Christianity and eventually to Islam. They still live there, at least before 1948. On the other hand, Judaism spread through Europe mainly through convertion.
Half of them already lived outside Israel in the first century (hence the Septuagint for Jews who didn't speak Hebrew) which isn't too surprising in a world without nations and boarders.
National identities developed in Europe during in 19th century. Before that, neither Germany nor France or Italy existed. Palestine identity started to form at the end of the 19th century. As Zionism did. Before that, Jewish was a religious identity. They didn't identity as a wondering nation because there were no nations.
What about no nations no boarders? Or a binational state? Einstein advocated for the latter by the way.
Yup. And they left their ancestral home due to persecution.
"Palestine" was the name of a region. Like "Golan Heights", or "Normandy", or "Pomerania".
We aren't developed enough, as humanity, to handle that.
Fundamentalism doesn't care about borders. Hamas will want to eradicate Israelis, and Zionists will want to eradicate Palestinians regardless if there's a border between them or not.