Yoav Oren

Making lemonade 🍋 from watermelons 🍉

HOW DARE YOU @GretaThunberg. How DARE you call for ethnically cleansing the Jewish people from our ancestral land?? You know nothing. No history, no reality, no truth. So I have this to say to you. Israel is not a colonialist state – it’s a refugee state which was literally decolonized from Britain. The majority of Israeli Jews are people of color, whose families were ethnically cleansed from other parts of the Middle East. Throughout history, the only indigenous sovereign entities to exist in the land have been Jewish states. Jews originate from the land, derive our religion and our practices from it and despite centuries of exile and displacement have always kept an unbroken presence there. And you Greta Thunberg, are chanting “crush Zionism” on the streets of Sweden. Zionism is the Jewish people exercising our right to self-determination in some parts of our only historic, ancestral and indigenous homeland. Hamas showed us on October 7 what “crushing Zionism” looks like and you want to cheer that on Greta? Greta Thunberg, if I can borrow your famous phrase, “how dare you!” But this is how antisemitism works – Find what is most evil to you, and blame it on the Jews, or today - on the Jewish state. I can understand that younger generations in western societies feel guilty about the evils of colonialism. But Israel’s history is not your history, and whatever guilt you feel, supporting the massacre of Jews in their ancestral land will not wash away the sins of your fathers. When your ancestors were colonizing the world, my ancestors were being slaughtered by Cossacks. We were dreaming – next year in Jerusalem – of building a life raft in our homeland. We fled genocidal violence in Europe. We were ethnically cleansed from Arab countries all over the Middle East. And we built a liberal, democratic Jewish state. That is not a colonial enterprise. Zionism is not a colonial enterprise – Zionism is the decolonization movement of the Jewish people. And to anyone who cannot accept our presence or who slanders Israel as something it is not, we are here to say: “how dare you.”