I’ve seen and felt this over and over again, but for now, I’ll just quote an Israeli post on X here (I’ll quote my own experiences below it):
https://x.com/havivrettiggur/status/1881909710833570066
This is such a fascinating thread. This person, neither Jew nor Zionist, claims that others don’t know what Zionism is. As evidence, she then cites several Palestinian anti-Zionist voices explaining the same thing in the exact same words. Since all these identical non-us voices say the same thing about us, she seems to believe she’s now proven that she truly and fully understands us.
They shrink our entire society, history and culture down to a villainous ideological cartoon and then accuse us of being cartoon villain. And they think it’s a clever move.
And when they still, generation after generation, fail to dislodge us as their ideologues keep promising they will, they never look up from the cartoon and wonder if there’s something about us they might be missing.
I don’t think you know what Zionism is, Nerdeen. In fact, I think your whole exercise of “knowing what Zionism is” is actually a refusal to seriously understand us, our complexity, our history, our motivations and predicaments. I think you hope that if you refuse to see us as a full, complex human society, we will somehow not be one, that our existence somehow depends on your moral permission, and thus that through your purposeful ignorance, history may yet be reversed.
This approach to us has always failed you. It will fail you this time too.
Our identity and story do not need your approval to be valid, anymore than yours do mine. When you put away these childish bigotries and make an honest attempt to actually understand our story, you might actually do something useful for the Palestinian future.
So basically, a Muslim comes and always tells you that you do not know what Zionism is, and that instead, you should listen only to what they say Zionism is. That is, they are the only ones who know what Zionism is, and that Jews are truly evil, because they believe in the Qur’aan, and only those people can ever know the true truth.
This is (1) discrediting your ability to study something by yourself, and (2) invalidation of whatever opinion you hold as long as you do not follow the same sources as them. Now this is fine for someone who holds a political side, but when they reach out to others without informing that, pretending to be neutral people seeing the truth behind a political movement, then that is cheap.
My own experience:
Plenty of followers of Muhammad came to me and told me and others to support Palestine, and said that if you do not stand for Palestine, and for freeing Palestine “from the River to the Sea” from Israel, you are not a human being, and likewise. They used “appeals to emotion” a lot over reason, which was fine considering the death toll that came about in Israel.
Secondly, a follower of Muhammad will always speak in somewhat of a threatening tone, asking you to never speak about Islam as though you know it if you are not a believer-and-submitter (Muslim). Somewhat like “don’t teach a Muslim (Muhammad-ian) how his Deen (way of life) works.” Look at the tone of that. It doesn’t say “you don’t know how a Musilm’s Deen works unless you are familiar with it.” It says “don’t teach.”