For the past two years, Israel has relentlessly bombed U.N. schools and critical hospitals across the Gaza Strip. Scratch that. For the last seventy years, Israel has bombed schools, hospitals, mosques and public facilities claiming that Palestinians are immoral for hiding arms and fighters in such places.
“Israel’s claims and condemnations are justified. Even terror organisations should obey the basic rules of right and wrong” wrote an Israeli journalist for Haaretz in 2011.
But were Israel’s terror groups (or militias, as the West prefers to call them) bound to the same rules? A declassified CIA report from 1948 learns that Irgun, Lehi, and Haganah (which went on to form the Israeli government & IDF), hid their illegal arms and bombs in schools, synagogues, and hospitals.
Every accusation is a confession. So I began an investigation of my own, taking tips from declassified Mi5 and CIA documents to demonstrate how Zionist / Israeli terror groups used the same tactics they accuse Hamas of today.
The “Israeli” desire to have a homeland is a desire to create an ethnostate by ethnic cleansing and occupation. It is a settler proposition like the settlers of the US that genocided the indigenous people there in order to steal land, which necessarily requires a dehumanization of the colonized, they must be made deserving of the violence that everyday settlers are asked to partake in. It is possible to analyze this and understand its basis, but never empathize with what is essentially just colonial ethnic supremacy.
Even simply wanting a “homeland” is a horrible thing when the premise of this is ethnic purity. Wanting a home, great. Wanting a place to be safe, sure. Wanting a “whites only” type of state? We must never empathize with this.
Palestinians are a displaced indigenous people, driven out by violent occupiers in human memory. They do not simply “desire a homeland”, they want their literal homes back. Before that, they want the occupation itself to cease. The occupation has never stopped seizing land and subjugating Palestinians.
Please do not “both sides” an ethnic cleansing occupying power that kills 10X as many people, likely 50X civilians with those who resist them. The use of the term “terrorist” in this context is racialized to the advantage of the oppressor. You are from Lebanon? If you sympathize with Palestinians, Zionists will call you a terrorist, bar you from jobs, and get away with it. The term is not used equally or fairly in the first place, but even those who try to do so end up flattening the reality, obscuring the true nature of what is happening: a systematic ethnic cleansing of an indigenous people by an ethnic supremacist occupying power and those who fight back against it.
Imagine if you simply called the US settlers who genocided indigenous people and the indigenous people who fought back “terrorists”. Made them the same in that way. Do you truly think these are equal forces? Equally just? What of the outcomes? We must oppose and fight back against ethnic cleansing colonizers, not stand on the sidelines saying how the colonized are just as bad as the colonizers. Due to the power imbalance, this flattening is actually a favor to the colonizers, it helps to suppress open support the colonized.
“Israelis” have always been this way. Their initial forays were ethnic supremacist. Zionists built a culture around ethnic supremacy that demanded (1) every Jewish person leave Europe for Palestine or otherwise they “deserved” every pogrom, (2) every Jewish person become extremely militant and violent against anyone getting in the way of the Zionist project. Their culture is to conflate Zionism and Judaism (they are not the same), which necessitates a dehumanization of the people they seek to displace (Palestinians) and a rejection and infantalization of all Jewish people who oppose Zionism.
The early Zionist terrorists like Ben Gurion (he was literally a death squad leader) were open about this. They explicitly stated the necessity of stealing land, of scaring off the local populations with violent cadres, of redefinjng Jewishness around the lines of occupation and in opposition to the inevitable reaction of a colonized people against their occupiers. The Nazis gladly helped with this prohect, as interests aligned: Zionists wanted as many Jewish peopke to move to Palestine as possible, taking on a settlet role, and Nazis premised much of their political actions on the removal of Jewish people by many means. Mass killing was one of many options they explored alongside projects like the Madagascar Plan (with echoes for transferring Palestinians to another state) and deportation to Palestine.
Humanity is subject to the conditions in which they are raised. We are not confronting human nature, we are confronting systems of oppression that create, for example, settler colonial ethnic cleansing.
Thank you for spending so much time thinking about a throw away comment I made
Do you still believe that your insistence on being right about an issue that springs from a time long before you were born is going to somehow convince anyone to see things exactly as you demand?
If you cannot even engage in discussion with the hope that it might spur some small semblance of rationality, then perhaps you are contributing to the suffering of people who you may have no direct connection with whatsoever
I guess others dying and suffering to defend a hill that you have never stood on will continue to be fashionable
Good luck to us. We need it
I have never thought that being right about something automatically means others will be convinced. This is an odd way to reply and does not actually address anything I said. Please consider telling me what you found unconvincing instead.
What in my reply seemed irrational to you? If it was all of it, pick two salient points and I will gladly explain them.
My comment on Lemmy doesn’t kill anyone. You seem to be very confused.
But in terms of the death in Palestine, as I mentioned before, you employed false and misleading rhetoric that serves the oppressor. You are just one person who has fallen for and repeated that propaganda, which makes you just like most people in Western and Middle Eastern countries, who tacitly provide consent for genocide. But this is mostly a passive role, a failure to recognize and oppose injustice created by empire-backed settler colonialism.
You are not as intelligent as you tell yourself you are
Enjoy your comfort, bought with the blood of others who you pretend to care about
Some deep reflection on your part would go a long way toward increasing both your happiness and your ability to actually have a beneficial effect on the world
I mean that, although you will probably insist (I’ve noticed that about you and the people you associate yourself with), that the most important thing is that you FEEL like you are “on the right side of history”. Such a comforting phrase for those who refuse to actually do anything other than perform
I am done here
I was going to reply point by point, but there isn’t really anything there and it began to get repetitive. At this point you are just blindly insulting me and trying to villify me by lying, presumably a defensive posturing because you can’t (and never have) actually addressed anything I have said. So you are now making things up like knowing my associations and whether I do anything to advance the causes I believe in. Just vague and made-up nonsense. If you believe lying is wrong, please do some self-criticism on this behavior. I certainly didn’t force you to embarrass yourself like this, this is all your own choices. Even just not replying would have been a better way to handle my fairly gentle criticisms. Criticisms complete with long explanations to give you chances to find common ground. Notice that despite your words trying to equate the genocidal occupiers and the resisting occupied, I did not simply start insulting you or making things up out of nothing. See, it is possible.
I hope you can find ways to be more honest with yourself and others on this topic, because it is really not about you.
Zionist settler-colonialism is a European/Western project that only goes as far back as the late 19th to early 20th century, and didn’t come into much significance until after WWII.
no u