This thread . Some people will have started to follow me back when I wrote about development, Malawi, and such stuff. These days my research has taken a very different direction, primarily because I refuse to let my Jewishness be defined by a colonial-Modern ideology; Zionism https://twitter.com/JElyachar/status/1391721521140453377

There is so much that Zionist historiography has submerged. Virtually none of my Jewish friends are aware of the history detailed in @Jelyachar's thread. The other day one of my closest friends responded to me sharing some of my family history, and my comments that there was a

time when Jews just thought of themselves as Arabs, by saying "yeah, but what about the Hebron pogrom in 1929?". And just like that, 1500 years of largely peaceful coexistence was replaced by an event that was produced by imperial machinations and local class relations

We really can't overestimate how powerful Zionist historiography is in shaping diaspora Jewish subjectivity. The things I have learned over the past ten years were entirely absent from my Jewish education when I was younger, and the same goes for education in most synagogues

and organised Jewish life today (with notable exceptions, for instance @JewishSolidAct @NaamodUK @jewdas). There is an absolute naturalisation of the relationship between Zionism and Jewishness, and no understanding of the ways in which Jews were made into (willing and unwilling)

Zionists and/or Zionist material. No one ever talks about how Zionist agents prevented Jewish children in post-WW2 DP camps from being taken in by other European countries (they thought it would detract from the Zionist claim that only Israel could be a safe haven for Jews).

Instead of getting to safety, many of these kids remained in DP camps for an extra year, in some cases dying of diseases that were rife in the camps (see Grodzinsky's In the Shadow of the Holocaust). No one ever talks about how/why Algeria's Jews all decided to go to France, not

Israel, or how Palestinian and Muslim communities across mandate Palestine signed mutual aid agreements with each other (against the Irgun and Stern Gang) in 1947/48 (see @AishaAriella's Potential History), or how Jews took Muslim names, Muslims took Jewish names, everyone

celebrated each other's festivals (see @mhayoun's When we were Arabs), took bullets for each other rather than be segregated in British camps for political prisoners (see Zvi Yehuda's The New Babylonian Diaspora). Of course it wasn't all amazing everywhere all the time, but from

the Abbasid Caliphate of the 7th Century until well after 1948 there was a thriving and co-constitutive social and cultural epoch of literature, art, music and theology. This is something that should be celebrated, and not allowed to die, and it should inform a Jewish identity

that doesn't end up tying itself in knots trying to defend the indefensible, or just as bad staying silent when people who less than 80 years ago many Jews lived alongside in relative harmony (a harmony destabilised by British and Zionist Imperial interference) are being

mercilessly cleansed from their homes and land. When I say #FreePalestine I am not just saying it for my Muslim, Christian and Bedouin brothers and sisters in Palestine, but for diaspora and Israeli Jews too. There is no Jewish freedom without a free Palestine, and there is no

Jewish future with a settler colonial state that has always been deeply Orientalist and Islamophobic, which includes the way the state has treated Arab Jews, from its very inception. In the sense that the Zionist project has always proven itself to be more concerned with national

safety rather than Jewish safety, to the extent of putting Jewish lives at risk in the name of perceived national security (i.e. the kids in the DP camps, support for white nationalist regimes in the US and Hungary), then Israel can be said to be an antisemitic state too.

I don't tweet about my family (just!) for kicks. I do it as a form of refusal, a big f**k you to the hegemony of Zionist historiography and the beautiful multiplicities and potentialities it erases #SaveSheikhJarrah #FreePalestine