I (as apposed to most) cared about palestinians way before the gaza conflict. I had my phase of listing to palestinian/arab music and feeling angry about their prospects long before this war and could without any conflict hold both the blood boiling anger towards israelis and complete indifference towards the jewish religion/ethnicity.
Yes I am gatekeeping this. I can't even look at my Spotify recap without feeling the cringe about one of my top songs being an arabic rap song with Gaza in the title. It was before the war. don't group me in with weekly protestors that have trouble scheduling their pro palestine protest between their climate change protest and putting ducttape on their mouth to stop animal cruelty.
I would say my attitude has been changing by the online content I consume. Not because of any jewish conspiracies about bankers or media cotorl or whaterer. Not really even the war in gaza. Its from people like Dan Saltmen.
Dan Saltmen is probably most well known for being a friend of the streamer Destiny and for creating a old chat app called tinychat. For me, his and Destiny inability to differentiate between anti zionism and anti semitism has been bothering me. A random comment of someone convinced that hamas did not coordinate a mass rape campaign, they would see as antisemitism. Not even that they didn't happen, just that they where not top-down coordinated is sufficient for labeling them antisemitic. Calls for Tel aviv to become the same rubble as gaza are maybe calls for violence/terror. But anti jew? I don't see it.
Dan Saltmen said something once on a podcast that started this process for me. He was making the point that not believing in the right of israel to exist is antisemitic. He said something along the lines of: "If 80% of a group holds a particular believe strongly, and you are strongly apposed to that believe, are you against that group?" Logically I would say no because I am not against the whole group just the 80% majority and am fine with the remaining. But at what point is the percentage high enough that you assume guilt instead of innocence when you see a member of that group? and at what percentage would that feeling be justified?
This same Dan has been openly doxing people when they made negative statements about israel. He has a long running campaign to get some pro palestinian streamers banned who in his mind have crossed the line of pro-palestine into pro-Hamas and was trying to get the ceo of twitch fired. Contacting media, ADL, politicians obsessively (his words btw, he is proud of this). One of the awful things that Twitch apparently did was banning new account creations of Israel and Palestine regions after october 7 due to graphic material being uploaded, which they forgot to remove later. This was is apparently antisemitism. That it also banned palestinian account creation was not relevant as "Palestinians do not use twitch". He pointed towards the fact that the trust and safety team was located in Egypt as evidence that twitch is antisemitic. I am not exaggerating here, just because of the fact that Egyptians overall have a negative view of Israel marked them unable to work for trust and safety at twitch. I remember watching him during a livestream pointing out a name of one of the employees that looked arab. And making the point that he is likely biased because of his ethnicity. He threatened to dox the employees if Twitch did not meet his demands.
If he was just a one-off I could deal with it. Okay the prime minister of Israel saying that anti zionism = anti semitism is expected. He is saying whatever to win his war. But even the leader of my local political party, that I VOTED FOR is calling people anti semitic for criticism of israel that I agree with. Calling for the ban of 'from the river to the sea' while wearing a pin that marks the whole region as Israel... why. The whole H3 lawsuit, where he was setting traps for streamers to react to his content to then sue only the once that he finds 'pro-hamas' and getting the identity of his reddit anti-fans through lawsuits I just don't get how they believe any of this will help them.
The most frustrating thing is the pinpoint accuracy of their targets. They obviously never targeted israeli supporters who when to far, because "everyone else is already doing that", but they also seem to show little interest in targeting the true antisemitism online. The onces that claim holocaust only killed 300k or that bankers where colluding and using incest porn and immigration to destroy the west. The type of antisemitism that you can imagine hearing from a modern day Himmler was left alone. This is what really frustrated me, as this is a true problem these days. The same Nazi style antisemitism of the right has been gaining steam. But the focus has been on mostly left wing criticisms of the war.
Honestly at some point his and others behavior has gotten to me. From media to politicians. Their fluidity of the term jewish to mean a race, religion, country or a set of believes always in a way to attack pro-palestinians, the focus on anti-war sentiments and personal vendettas instead of the true right wing antisemitism all the whole neglecting of all the suffering of gaza's population. The sentiment that jew=israel from that side is moving me towards hating both. And looking at recent polling from Israel and American jews about their attitudes toward ethnic cleansing of gaza, the 80% bar Dan was talking about might be apt.
If it was a small group it would be okay. But besides Ezra Klein I don't hear any sane voices of jewish/israel aligned figures. I even tried to look at Israelis protests against the government to moderate myself. As I was happy with the headlines mentioning the protests against the government. Unfortunately they often fail to state why. Hint: it is not the fact that gaza is in ruins and thousands dead and starving. It is that they want the remaining hostages back. It is about anti-corruption. Even the onces against the war are peace hippies that do not want to enlist in any kind of war, not that they think that this particular one is immoral.
I feel confident writing this down now as I know that I have not yet crossed the line of anti semitism. I still am able to differentiate between the support of israel government and the larger jewish people, even with the constant push to see them as one. But I do feel rushed though. As if I wait to much longer I might blur them together and I know that I would not stop hating zionism and thus fall on the other side. At that point I would not be even able to tell you this, self-censoring even for you my S o m i.