Lena Elsinger

This is, as the Jews say, their whole Torah. All the rest is commentary. The Jews of Israel are Algerie Francaise -- and will be defeated in the same way. Alas, it is only when they begin to ask whether in some vital ways we might be different from Algerie Francaise -- differences that make us a bit "stickier," a bit harder to remove -- that their movement will finally transform from a campaign of never-ending brutality and self-destruction into a movement for actual real-world liberation. They could begin that shift right here in this historical analogy they love so much. They could notice that for the majority of the 132 years that France ruled Algeria, Algerians scarcely thought of themselves as Algerians. They only organized a resistance movement in 1954 -- 124 years into French colonial rule. And once their resistance was underway, the French were gone in eight short years. A million white French Europeans literally got on boats and left. The Palestinian effort, meanwhile, has had a rather different trajectory. If we set its beginning in the 1964 founding of the PLO, which was modeled in many ways on the Algerian FLN, it's been going for 62 years. If we date it to the Arab Revolt or the 1920 riots, it's been going for even longer: 90 years and 106 years respectively. All of which suggests that the Algeria analogy probably offers stronger evidence that we're *not* French Algeria than that we are. Something isn't working like the analogy suggests it should. What if -- forgive the length, dear reader, I'm coming to the point -- we're not really French colonialists, no matter how much they insist we are? What if we're something altogether more real and rooted and desperate and grimly determined to cling to our land, a trait Palestinians celebrate in themselves as "sumud" and assume we Jews can't possibly possess the same? What if we're exactly what we think we are: a long-suffering people who arrived here as desperate refugees fresh out of any other options, and who found and built a home here after millennia of brutal and vulnerable wandering? What if the demand that we be erased from this place amounts to a demand that we be erased from the world -- and thus closes our ranks, unifies us and mobilizes us to action? What if the PLO/Hamas narratives about the inevitability of our destruction have done more harm to the cause of Palestine than to the existence of Israel? What if their refusal to seriously learn our historical experience and culture and identity -- understanding us feels to them like legitimizing us; it is so taboo in their culture that Palestinian scholars face literal violence for teaching our history -- what if this purposeful ignorance makes it vastly more likely that they will fail in their effort to destroy us? So what if, in the end, like it or not, the only viable path to Palestinian liberation lies in accepting that we're not going anywhere, and thus ending the forever war and sending the ball -- the question of Palestinian freedom -- squarely back into our court? What then? Anyway, back to the great war against sunburned French colonialists...any minute now we'll all be taking those boats to, erm, wherever our France might be...

MUST WATCH: El-Sayed’s pal Hasan Piker and Nick Fuentes. You really can’t tell ’em apart! On Black people: Fuentes - “I don’t wanna live around black people.” Piker - “I don’t give a f*ck what black people care about.” On America: Fuentes - “This is a godless country. I hate it.” Piker - “America deserved 9/11, dude.” Piker - “Motherf*ck the Constitution and motherf*ck this country.” On Jews: Fuentes - “They’re ugly. They’re dysgenic.” Piker - “The most inbred” Same hate. Same contempt. But apparently one comes with a progressive exemption.

“He’s spent every minute since election night just trolling and snarking and provoking and attention-seeking.” Is this you on election night, Mehdi? 😏

Hi Dan, that's a nice get-out but let's do apples for apples: you've never been asked, as a Jewish congressman, to condemn Jewish extremists on national TV. And nor should you be.

The phrase "spiritually Israeli" is absolutely antisemitic. It's the idea that Israeli Jewish identity and culture are inauthentic, rootless, greedy and predatory. It's the Jew across a millennium of Christian imagination, repurposed for online progressive banter. No, it's not because Israel, with its universal health care, public universities and 14 weeks paid maternity leave, is "hyper-capitalist." Nor is it because a country whose calendar and daily slang and history curriculum and pop music and legal system and even its relationship to its geography all draw from a 2,500-year-old bookshelf is by some mysterious measure an "inauthentic culture." Whatever the hell that means. "Spiritually Israeli" is a projection of American progressive cultural emptiness onto a Jewish target it's become moral and necessary to hate -- which was the function of antisemitism always and everywhere.

You mean the line he’s said in every single stump speech since the day he got in the race? The one that probably polls at 80-90%? Is that the breaking news you’ve uncovered? Should we alert the Pulitzer committee?

@Grok Did Jews comprise the majority population in the area of land allocated for a Jewish nation-state by the UN Partition Plan of 1947? If so, was this achieved by stealing land & killing Palestinians? Or by purchasing back land & remigrating over the course of decades?