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   Karl Fogel (kfogel@kfogel.org)'s status on Tuesday, 04-Mar-2025 04:04:08 JST Karl Fogel

   • Evan Prodromou
   @evan Why is this a question?
   • Embed this notice
     Evan Prodromou (evan@cosocial.ca)'s status on Tuesday, 04-Mar-2025 04:04:03 JST Evan Prodromou

     in reply to

     @kfogel why do people question this?

     I think some people think that protests organized by Palestinian people against the war should feature Palestinian people more prominently. That the media's focus on Jewish participants erases and dehumanizes Palestinians and other Arabs.

     Other people think that having Jewish participants shows that anti-war protests aren't necessarily anti-semitic.

     In the US, focusing on white leaders at a Black Lives Matter protest might have similar dynamics.

   • Embed this notice
     Evan Prodromou (evan@cosocial.ca)'s status on Wednesday, 05-Mar-2025 12:11:55 JST Evan Prodromou

     in reply to

     @kfogel I think it's a very interesting and unique dynamic. I have only seen a few notes about this on the Internet, and they mostly tie it to media coverage. I think there's a common idea that Palestinians and Palestinian Americans are rarely given a microphone.

   • Embed this notice
     Karl Fogel (kfogel@kfogel.org)'s status on Wednesday, 05-Mar-2025 12:12:00 JST Karl Fogel

     in reply to

     • Evan Prodromou

     @evan Thanks for asking. I can say what jumped out for me: the implicit assumption that a Jewish person necessarily has any connection to Israel or to Israeli policy at all -- i.e., that a Jewish person participating in such a protest is more worthy of inquiry than any other non-Palestinian participating would be.

     If the concern is just that the protests should feature Palestinian people more prominently, then that would argue against any non-Palestinian taking a leadership role -- not just against Jews doing so. (There is a complex question of what is meant by a "Palestinian" in this context, but for our purposes here I just mean someone with a personal, familial or other heritage-based connection to Palestinian territory and thus to the experience of oppression by Israel.) But your question wasn't "Should non-Palestinians have leading roles in anti-Gaza-war protests?", it was "Should Jewish people have leading roles in anti-Gaza-war protests?"

     This is also different from the dynamic, which you offered as an example, of white people taking leadership roles at a Black Lives Matter protest. In that case, the dichotomy is inherent and unseverable from the political situation: at the very least, every white person in the U.S. has benefitted economically from years of pro-white-because-anti-black policies, and thus every white person truly is implicated, even if not by their own choice.

     But a Jew outside Israel is not inherently implicated in Israeli policies, does not benefit from U.S. subsidy of Israeli military action, etc. They're just a person, who is Jewish, living in a country that is not Israel, as indeed most Jews have done for the past couple of millennia. Most importantly for this discussion, they have no way to further separate themselves from the connection that many people seem to assume they have with Israel and its government's policies. They're already doing all the same things everyone else is doing to achieve that! Like, you know, not living in Israel, not being a citizen of Israel, not voting in Israeli elections, etc. The unfortunate implication is that the one remaining thing they could do is not be Jewish.

     That's why I asked "Why is this a question?"

     @marymessall in reply mentioned that "Non-Jews don't need to be telling Jewish people what their roles are", and I want to be clear that that's not what I'm saying here. My reaction to your question would be the same whether you are Jewish or not (indeed I don't know whether you are), and my feeling about whether someone should be asked to stay out of a leadership role because of being a Jew would be unaffected by whether those doing the asking were Jewish or not as well.

   • Embed this notice
     Evan Prodromou (evan@cosocial.ca)'s status on Thursday, 06-Mar-2025 05:18:17 JST Evan Prodromou

     in reply to

     • Aaron Williamson

     @copiesofcopies @kfogel I think that's a good principle.

   • Embed this notice
     Aaron Williamson (copiesofcopies@social.coop)'s status on Thursday, 06-Mar-2025 05:18:19 JST Aaron Williamson

     in reply to

     • Evan Prodromou

     @kfogel @evan for me the answer is the same for any group: let’s the people most impacted lead, and support them.

   • Embed this notice
     Karl Fogel (kfogel@kfogel.org)'s status on Thursday, 06-Mar-2025 05:18:21 JST Karl Fogel

     in reply to

     • Evan Prodromou

     @evan I don't know if that impression is accurate or not (though for what it's worth I haven't noticed anything like it -- but maybe Chicago is unusual, or my environment is unusual in some way). Assuming it were true, the first question to ask is always the base rate question: what is the proportion of Palestinians in the general population in the place you're considering? That will have a big effect on how many are even available to be leaders of protests.

     In any case, it still isn't specifically a question about Jews participating in leadership roles or not.