We, the admin team, decry all forms of settler-colonialism, and we recognize that Zionism is a pro-settler-colonialist position.
Therefore we propose that should no longer be accepting of any Zionist accounts on our instances.
Please upvote for agree, downvote for disagree.
Note: we only count votes by instance members of dbzer0 and anarchist.nexus, plus a few vouched-for external users.
Hi mateys, I've kept things simple in the above text, for brevity, but in fact it took the admin team quite a while to get to this stage. We have discussed the policy change extensively, and a variety of different perspectives emerged. I will attempt to sum them up below as best I can:
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The "this isn't that complicated" school of thought goes something like this: If someone is consistently posting comments that mirror Hasbara talking points (e.g. justifying the genocide in Gaza, consistently painting Palestinians as terrorists and Israel as the victim), then they should be instance banned. It's just not acceptable for Zionists to be allowed on our instances.
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The "slippery slope" / "purity test" school of thought is that banning people for having an "unpopular" political opinion would potentially mean banning half the fediverse, if more and more of these policies were enacted over time. To attempt to mitigate this we are keeping the scope of this rule as narrow as possible, and I also don't think many of our users will be affected. Also, we typically don't have frequent policy changes, and I have no reason to expect that to change moving forward.
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Another important discussion point was "how do we decide whether someone is pro-Zionist or not?" We can't always be 100% sure of someone's true intentions, we can only go on what they have posted and that is subject to interpretation. I don't feel there is an easy answer to this one, except to say that we would have to be pretty certain before issuing a perma-ban.
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The "geopolitics don't matter" school of thought is that trying to be on the "correct" side of every issue is kind of pointless because nothing that happens in lemmy chat forums will ever make an ounce of difference in the real world. Don't bother moderating users over political/ideological differences, just let people argue if they want. While I can totally empathize with this sentiment, I can also see the case for taking a clear stance on this topic in accordance with our values and the overwhelming support for the Palestinian cause among our users. Personally, I am advocating in favor of the resolution.
Please add your comments below if you want to provide your own thoughts on the topic, or have any questions.
expiry: 7
Hey, the drones were circling over my fucking Christmas lunch this week. We were cranking up the Bublé to cover the constant buzzing, and the bad/worst part is that the kids seemed used to the sound. The only reason those things were in the air over an area with no militia activity is psychological warfare basically. This was a good 80+ km from the border. People in Santa hats were sticking their heads out of the window and looking up. I struggle to get across how normal we are while discussing what we’re dealing with, and I figure mentioning how it’s affected me filling myself with wine and carving a comically sized bird could help get that across to people who also do this every year, or to who the idea is less foreign than the idea of being constantly surveilled by a hostile expansionist entity. I’m not trying to use my sect to say I’m special and don’t deserve this, I’m just trying to see if it can help bridge a gap to discuss something difficult, to be clear.
That said, my opinion might still come off as a bit too lenient to some of you and I think I should write it out. But I am from and live in Lebanon, and I am directly affected by these crimes.
I’ve got a lot of users (I think literally every single one on German instances lmfao) tagged in my client as “Zionist”. I think most of them just pop into a few threads naturally and make a few reality-denying comments from force of habit. I see them in other places and they fit the typical description of internet dude with opinions on Rust and Linux making interesting comments about random stuff. They’re mostly well-behaved outside of beliefs that are upstream of me being chucked into a concentration camp so the US military’s contractors can make my home a parking lot at an exorbitant cost. When I catch them in a thread about solar panels or something, I’ll even find them making comments that I want to read. Normal people with good insight.
The average person in the West has been fed such a blatantly false narrative that I find myself not blaming a few of the milder opinions. It’s on par for me with progressives talking up and down the potential greatness of the American experiment. I think Zionism is one thing that people can learn about and understand and clearly see that the status quo is not normal or natural or inevitable or even self-sustaining.
This might all be downstream of me moderating the way I have tended to handle this stuff on Reddit, my old online home which I’ve spent well over a decade.
My opinion is a two sided thing because I don’t know if this means blocking users from other instances from federating, blocking them from posting or voting on our instance’s posts and comments, or blocking them from signing up.
I think blocking them from signup is very reasonable. Probably morally necessary.
I think blocking them as external users, regardless of the extent of it, might be heavy handed if it’s a one-off comment by a normal human being, often German, who has been propagandized since birth that Jews will all immediately die if Arabs aren’t treated like cattle. I think these people can learn. OTOH there are what seems like dedicated Hasbara accounts that have an RSS feed of every post with “Israel” or Palestine and have to respond to every single one with a comment that would immediately get you banned from literally any webpage with a text box if you swapped the words Jewish and Muslim. If we can block those outright nothing will be lost.
What I propose is a three/five strikes system for external users with a relatively gentle warning message with some good links like someone already proposed here. Probably a little thing in German to get the attention of those with Nazi baggage who are completely delusional and intentionally ignoring reality.
Personally if I was the one writing it I’d also include that, as a Westerner, believing that Jewish people may inherently leave the West for a colonial frontier far away from you is literally anti-Semitism if you think about it for 20 seconds. Nothing says ancestral homeland like having to rename towns and treat the local population like inconveniently located bags of blood.
I’m also in favor of extending the window since a lot of people are not going to be online much this time of year. I hope, at least. For their own sake.
Happy New Year everyone; I hope Natenyahu lets me and all of us see the untold horrors that await us in 2026.
thank u for sharing ur perspective.
i second this proposal.
I don't even know what instance I'm posting on but I just wanted to say that I too am amazed how well you moderate your handling of this stuff.
Fully support extending window.
Edit: Counterpoint: I live in the west. As a teen during the 00's, I thought 'antisemitism' meant 'opposing genocide'. So of course I proudly identified as that. Had to be corrected by a girlfriend¹.
Its pretty fucking obvious what's going on over there. Especially now. Of was obvious to me as a child 20(fuck) years ago, and I'm clever but I'm not that clever. It's tempting to assume good faith, it's tempting to assume people are basically good, but if an adult still parrots Zionist talking points in 2026, they're clearly motivated by something other than logic. You're not going to talk them into decency. Ostracization, however much or little we can pull off, might have a much better shot.
¹who was jewish, and for some reason I cannot comprehend continued to date me after this.
I completely agree with this. I like to troll badguys, and I can't do that if they're instance banned; I think it should be up to individual users to block people from other instances.
I also like to assume that anyone commenting from a dbzer0/AN account is a good person, and I can't do that if Zionists are allowed to have an account here.
Edit: Unruffled answered this in a comment