If you’re an American liberal there’s a good chance your sympathies lie with the Palestinian people living on the wrong side of an apartheid state. Decades of teenagers getting shot and killed just for throwing rocks at Israeli soldiers, people’s homes getting bulldozed to make room for far right settlers, denied educational and employment opportunities enjoyed on the other side of militarized borders, the imperialism made all the more shambolic by US support for it, and on and on and on.
The Israeli Defense Forces tells i24NEWS: Around 40 babies were butchered in the village of Kfar Aza, in southern Israel
'We're going to go after Hamas. We're going to hunt them down. We're going to eradicate them' Danny Danon, Former Israeli ambassador to the UN says pic.twitter.com/KoCzk6QJs8
— i24NEWS English (@i24NEWS_EN) October 10, 2023
And you have something seriously fucking wrong with you if you can’t square that sympathy for regular Palestinian folk and outrage over the abuses they’ve suffered with the absolute horrors of what happened to regular Israeli folks on Saturday. We’re not Middle East history scholars, but we’d probably know if 40 Palestinian babies had ever been beheaded en masse by Israeli soldiers. This test is pretty easy yet some people on the left are still failing it. Failing spectacularly.
Like this George Washington University Students for Justice in Palestine statement “in full support of the liberation of our homeland and our people’s right to resist the violent 75-year long colonization of our homeland by any means necessary” written as if they were supporting a sit-in:
Over the past few days, Palestinians in Gaza and across occupied Palestine have mobilized against the Zionist entity, seizing settlements imposed on our land in violation of international law. For the first time in our history, Palestinians have reclaimed land that we were ethnically cleansed from in 1948. Over 50% of Gaza’s population is under 18 years old. The vast majority of them have never been outside of the colonial prison walls, have never set foot on a single inch of the land that their families were violently ethnically cleansed from. This past weekend we witnessed them breaking free, tearing down the prison walls, and making it known to the world.
This kind of shit goes beyond playing right into the hands of the MAGA assholes who just switched their Swastika jerseys for Star of David ones again. It shows a lack of just basic compassion.
We’re not going into the weeds on the larger questions of how much regular people are responsible for or complicit in what their government does to other people. Our sense is in this particular situation not a lot because we wouldn’t think the kibbutzes or an EDM concert are the kinds of places you would find hardcore Zionists. Even if they were how the fuck does beheading infants and gunning down teenagers get laundered into “breaking free, tearing down the prison walls”?
If Hamas had fired one missile that landed on Benjamin Netanyahu’s limo with him inside would be laughing our asses off. The world would be better off without him, full stop. Even better would’ve been if a dozen or two of the sick freaks he’s elevated to remain in power got blown to hell with him.
That would’ve been easier to handle. That instead we got stuck in this universe, with these atrocities inflicted upon innocent people, with still more going to suffer and die as collateral damage in this endless conflict that Israel could’ve ended decades ago is harder. But the line is clear enough here, and liberals horseshoeing into cheering for terrorism are on the wrong side of it.