In defiance

Wake up babe, new request for comment just dropped.

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I’ve been a public feminist and writer in Australia for nearly 20 years.

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During that time, I’ve been called more things than I can count: “controversial”, “hardline”, “man hater”, “troll”, “bully”, “frightbat”, “deranged”, “unhinged”, “vile”, “misandrist” and, in more recent months, “Jew hater”.

I’ve never felt the need to defend myself against these labels, and not because I think any of them have the slightest bit of truth. But I refuse to play a game whose rules are intrinsically designed to put people like me on the back foot. To defend myself against any of these depictions is to legitimise the allegations in the first place - and that is pure nonsense.

I’ve also never cared if someone thinks I’m “controversial” or a “man-hater”, because I know this is a knee jerk response borne out of their own fear and/or fury. Why would I waste precious time trying to convince them they’re wrong about me? I know that what really enrages them isn’t the belief that I’m any of the things they say I am. It’s that I’m clearly not concerned with making myself likeable - and women who don’t care about being liked are much harder to control.

In the case of the status quo working overtime to uphold itself (such as tabloid newspapers like the Daily Mail and the Australian pouring all their efforts into sanitising Israel), what they’re really scared of is that someone like me (a white woman who is supposed to side with Israel and model that support to other white women, who are the linchpins connecting white supremacy, capitalism and patriarchy) is refusing to do so, despite risking the biggest label of unlikeability of all: being maligned as an antisemite.

If I refuse to uphold the unspoken rules around How We Discuss Israel, just as I’ve refused in the past to pander to men and cultural anxieties about being disliked by them, how many other linchpins might decide to unstick themselves?

And if we all defiantly refuse to be afraid of their laughable accusations and reject any suggestion we need to ‘splain ourselves or “clarify” what we mean, we signal to these mendacious players not just that we don’t care what they think but that we don’t answer to them and never will.

Zionists have been using threats and intimidation to silence critics of Israel for decades. It’s no longer working, and they’re becoming increasingly desperate about it. The more people who stand defiantly not just against Israel’s genocide but against all attempts to frame this opposition as an attack on Jewish people, the more the threat of labels will lose their ability to control everyone.

I’m one of an ever growing number of people who are rejecting these tactics. But we need more people to resist the rhetorical manipulation Zionism relies on to keep people from speaking the abject truth.

Because every time we allow the forces that are intent on defending power and oppression to set the terms of engagement, we lose ground. By treating ideological accusations designed to silence us as legitimate claims deserving of clarification, we concede to a fabricated “nuance” of approach that does not exist in reality.

Opposing Israel is the only moral option in the face of genocide and its brutal history of forced displacement, apartheid, murder and destruction that it’s been waging with the tacit support of the colonial west for 77 years. There is and should be absolutely no debate or attempts to “clarify” in regards to that.

Do not shake in your convictions, but stand strong and true. They can only take your power if you let them.

Fuck Israel and fuck Zionism. I cannot be any clearer than that.