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I just don't think we should criminalise advocacy of a one state solution... Opposing anti-Semitism shouldn't have a 'what about the Afrikaans?!' quality, if people are trying to oppose very real apartheid, ongoing ethnic cleansing and genocide.

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If people belong to 'Jewish institutions' that support Zionism, fine such people absolutely shouldn't be persecuted, but also maybe it's time people reflect on whether institutions do things like give money to support settlers or a genocidal state, or set up markets to sell stolen land?

Zionism now means the actually-existing Israeli state and the ideologies that justify that actually existing state and settler-colonial project, one currently stealing parts of Lebanon and ethnically cleansing at will in the West Bank. It doesn't refer to the imaginary one in someone's head.

Whether or not this was the best resolution to pass, there's something at the very least a bit disingenuous about all of the talk about this being anti-Semitic or bad because it 'denies' Jews 'self-determination'.

Ben Rosenzweig @benrosenzweig.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

On the KPRF as ‘systemic opposition’, an excerpt from Sofya Glazunova’s 2020 Queensland University of Technology PhD thesis, ‘Digital media as a tool for non-systemic opposition in Russia: A case study of Alexey Navalny's populist communications on YouTube’. doi.org/10.5204/thes...

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Ben Rosenzweig @benrosenzweig.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

One interesting recent account of the Russian parliament is David Szakonyi’s ‘Corruption and Co-Optation in Autocracy: Evidence from Russia’, in the February 2025 issue of American Political Science Review. Discussing the period from 2007 to 2021, he writes: doi.org/10.1017/S000...

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Ben Rosenzweig @benrosenzweig.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

Well, the rhetorical inconsistency comes from wanting to use the law to condemn ethnic cleansing, occupation and genocide, but people also developing a critique of Israel that goes beyond the limits of international law, and not knowing how to reconcile the two so pretending there's no conflict?

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Ben Rosenzweig @benrosenzweig.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

Well, the UN voted to give the deed to Gaza to Donald Trump personally, so that entire massive history of international law has been kind of thrust aside as nothing in any case... even as South Africa desperately and heroically tries to make international law mean something in relation to Israel.

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Ben Rosenzweig @benrosenzweig.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

Again, I'm not completely up to date on Russian politics, but unless the situation has changed massively in the last few years, the patterns of KPRF contestation generally fit the pattern outlined in this thread. Those people don't look young...

Ben Rosenzweig @benrosenzweig.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

Since then, the story of Russian electoral politics is the story of successful manufactured consensus on both foreign policy and on not contesting the core interests in the Putin bloc, a set of conditions imposed by the state in which the KPRF is heavily implicated.

Ben Rosenzweig @benrosenzweig.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

In this instance, it was very obvious during the 2000 election process that, as it became clear that Putin would win, all significant tv channels fell into line.

Ben Rosenzweig @benrosenzweig.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

Putin got more tv time than the other three candidates combined, whether state media or media owned by oligarchs being politically integrated into the new Russian elite, a process which really began under Yeltsin, who wrote: "During the elections financial capital turned into political capital."

Ben Rosenzweig @benrosenzweig.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

Instead, a smear campaign was launched by the government in the last week of the election campaign against Yabloko and its leader, Gregory Yavlinsky, which rhetorical positioned themselves as a democratic opposition.

Ben Rosenzweig @benrosenzweig.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

Whether this was because Putin's people had dismissed the KPRF as any kind of rival for power, or whether they'd actually negotiated for the party to assume a less oppositional role, effectively coopted, isn't entirely clear.

Ben Rosenzweig @benrosenzweig.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

In 2000, Gennady Zyganov, leader of the KPRF even back then, gave many interviews in the media but unlike in 1996, the party was otherwise largely ignored rather than being demonised by the ruling faction, despite its significant voting base.

Ben Rosenzweig @benrosenzweig.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

The party's official ideology was oppositional, but the KPRF's actions became far less oriented to any form of contestation of the emerging power blocs then starting to become truly entrenched in the Russian state and as core parts of new Russian elites.

Ben Rosenzweig @benrosenzweig.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

This has been true throughout the 21st century so far, but arguably goes back even further, since the crack down and repression of 1996. In the elections of 1999 and 2000, the KPRF started to keep a lower profile, possibly trying to avoid further repression.

Ben Rosenzweig @benrosenzweig.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

That's why in the 21st century the party is simultaneously part of the coercively manufactured political consensus of the Russian state, AND sometimes also includes people subject to more surveillance and repression. Hence the accusations that the party is managed opposition.

Ben Rosenzweig @benrosenzweig.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

The party exists in a tension between on the one hand the limits necessary for participation in the Russian state and the acceptance of control by Putin's political managers, and on the other members and voters who sometimes wish to push at the boundaries of that almost fictional oppositional role.

Ben Rosenzweig @benrosenzweig.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

I don't know what they're protesting about specifically, but the KPRF is a party with a support base amongst the oldest parts of the voting population, and unless things have changed for a long time they've only offered criticisms about aspects of domestic policy.

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Ben Rosenzweig @benrosenzweig.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

Communists slowly built bases in the Jewish-Israeli and especially Arab populations. From Martin W. Slann’s ‘Ideology and Ethnicity in Israel's Two Communist Parties: The Conflict Between Maki and Rakah’, in the Winter 1974 issue of Studies in Comparative Communism. doi.org/10.1016/0039...

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Ben Rosenzweig @benrosenzweig.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

In the '70s, Israel refused to recognise any Palestinian political organisation, calling them terrorists. Easily the most substantial Palestinian political group at that time and for many years, the central group in the PLO, was Fatah. This was an account of how they saw their aims in 1970.

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Ben Rosenzweig @benrosenzweig.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

There is certainly no-one running in the Israeli elections with any chance of forming a government who has taken positions substantially different from the current government on questions of Apartheid, settler-colonialism or genocide.

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Ben Rosenzweig @benrosenzweig.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

There is simply no equivalent in the Jewish-Israeli population anymore. There is no movement including Jewish Israelis in even small numbers even as critical as the movements which reacted to the massacres of entire Palestinian refugee camps in the early '80s.

Ben Rosenzweig @benrosenzweig.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

In the August 1961 elections to the Fifth Knesset, MAKI had managed to get five people elected to Israel's Parliament of 120. While the party's record was far from perfect, it wasn't defined by ethnicity or religion and was the only parliamentary party including Jews critical of Zionism.

Ben Rosenzweig @benrosenzweig.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

For decades the only notable party in Israel with both Jewish and Palestinian members was the Communist Party (MAKI). From Israeli diplomat Pinchas E. Lapide's deeply anti-Communist article, 'The Communist Party in Israel/Il Partito Comunista in Israele', in the September 1963 issue of Il Politico.

Ben Rosenzweig @benrosenzweig.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

And the class action 'suit' is of course overalls and boots if you want that retro quality, black pajamas for Viet Cong chic, or the ill-fitting one you have in the back of the closet for when you have to go to court...

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Ben Rosenzweig @benrosenzweig.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

Maybe they meant 'class action' in the sense my marxist friends do - you know, a wave of strikes, workers marching through the cities, industrial organising on a new scale at a higher level of politicisation... now THAT'S some class action!

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Ben Rosenzweig @benrosenzweig.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

Excerpt from the account in the 1954 University of North Carolina Press book, Schools in Transition: Community Experiences in Desegregation, a multi-authored study of some scale. Does try to make the police look conscientious but… Note who is charged and what for. This is the point of the thread.

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Ben Rosenzweig @benrosenzweig.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

Article in the 16 February 1952 edition of The Black Dispatch, the Oklahoma City newspaper.

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Ben Rosenzweig @benrosenzweig.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

Excerpt from the 13 February 1952 edition of the New York-based National Guardian (“the progressive newsweekly”).

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Ben Rosenzweig @benrosenzweig.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

In 1952, efforts to desegregate schools in Cairo, Illinois - to let black kids attend the same schools as white kids - were met with a campaign of bombings and cross-burnings, and the police and local authorities were notably... not great.

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Ben Rosenzweig @benrosenzweig.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

How are you following another twenty accounts every couple of seconds?

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Ben Rosenzweig @benrosenzweig.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

I can't find video of Paul Newman in the overlooked 1976 masterpiece Buffalo Bill and the Indians or Sitting Bull's History Lesson angrily exclaiming: "Goddamnit, where's my real jacket?"

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Ben Rosenzweig @benrosenzweig.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

And Latin American Left solidarity with struggles in the Middle East has a long complicated history. And not just because one of the hijackers when Leila Khaled's PFLP group took a plane was a Nicaraguan leftist. I don't THINK the Shining Path would have been their most likely partners...

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Ben Rosenzweig @benrosenzweig.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

That grouping in the first episode seems an odd one, but then you remember that Hezbollah DOES has developed ongoing committed alliances with significant parts of the Lebanese organised Left over many years - them being the head of one of the two big parliamentary alliances in Lebanon for one thing.

Ben Rosenzweig @benrosenzweig.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

I remember because I remember noticing that the pilot episode they were talking about the Shining Path and Hezbollah forming an alliance with other groups, but when I next watched any of the show a couple of years later they seemed to be fighting vague fictitious groups whose motives seemed obscure?

Ben Rosenzweig @benrosenzweig.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

First episode of that show, the villains other than the organisation that had captured the protagonist were Hezbollah and the Shining Path...

Ben Rosenzweig @benrosenzweig.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

But they're selling the pleasures made possible by permission to collectively enjoy the suffering of others and maybe the right to strike down inferiors on the street. We're arguing for solidarity and the possibility of an actually better world. Different projects.

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Ben Rosenzweig @benrosenzweig.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

For some historical context, an excerpt from Alexander Flores, 'Judeophobia in Context: Anti-Semitism among Modern Palestinians', which appeared in Die Welt des Islams in 2006. www.jstor.org/stable/20140...

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Ben Rosenzweig @benrosenzweig.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

The comment on Mario Offenberg's book in the 'Recent Books on International Relations' section of the April 1976 issue of Foreign Affairs, de facto journal of the US foreign policy establishment.

Ben Rosenzweig @benrosenzweig.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

Mario Offenberg’s film, ‘The Struggle for the Land, or Palestine in Israel’, was awarded the Hany Jawhariyya prize at the Leipzig Festival and was awarded a PLO prize in 1977, and was the first film officially censored in Israel.

Ben Rosenzweig @benrosenzweig.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

Offenberg's book has never been translated into English; these were the comments by Alexander Flores in 'Recent studies on the history of the Palestine Communist Party', which appeared in the Khamsin 7 in 1980.

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Ben Rosenzweig @benrosenzweig.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

Time again for this, from Fred Halliday writing on Mario Offenberg's 1975 book, Kommunismus in Palastina: Nation und Klasse in der Antikolonialen Revolution. From the April 1977 issue of MERIP Reports. Poale Zion was the 'socialist Zionist' party. doi.org/10.2307/3011... @merip.bsky.social