I'm going to start this by talking a little about my own stupidity:
I've said so many stupid things over the years. Still worse, I've written them down. Still worse, I've written them here where anybody can find them in a keyword search. Still worse, I've written so many stupid things about Israel/Palestine.
Like... not just stupid: Kanye West stupid. Justin Bieber stupid. Paris Hilton stupid. Donald Rumsfeld stupid!
Here are just two examples that stand out in my mind. I can't find them right now, hopefully I deleted them, so I'll rewrite the points and try to not disguise how stupid they are:
The silver medal was something along the lines of 'Jerusalem is just more important to us than them. It's only their third-most important city. For for us, it's number one."
Read this facebook page for other masterpieces of geopolitical analysis.
But the dumbest thing I've ever said about Israel/Palestine, without a doubt, it's not even close, oh my god I'm saying it again... was when I declared "Israel and Palestine is a question of something people don't want to think about: relative privilege. If Palestinians were truly as unprivileged as everybody thinks, they would be too focused on their survival to nurse their humiliations in this way."
What kind of uncensored blithering, blundering idiot gets so high on his own verbal diarrhea that he lets his mouth shit out whatever brainlessly provocative statement traipses into his clearly stupid mind? Relative privilege? Christ on a fucking hamburger did you even believe that except for the five minutes before and after you wrote it? Still worse the thought, was there actually a period of a few years that you believed that? Have you blocked them out??
Nobody can follow the Gaza war and think that there is any sort of privilege going on there, even in a relative sense. Whether it's ultimately the fault of Israel's limitations on them or the fault of a fanatical Hamas kleptocracy, to think that any of the two million Gazans lives in more than an absolute of deprivilege is delusional. Maybe a few thousand Hamasniks get favors from the literal $10 billion hoarded by Ismail Haniya, Khaled Mashal and Abu Marzuk, but that's it. Everybody else is on their own, muddling through life as best as any impoverished community can, trying not to think with dread of what the next war brings, the next bombing, the next invasion. And then there's the hell of peacetime in an impoverished region with 47% unemployment and half the population dependent on foreign aid. There is no major industry or exports, dependence on Israel for the power and water that Israel's obviously denying them right now; living at their best times a dictatorship that polices their political loyalties, their religious observance, their sexual behavior, and even their dress. One-half of Gazans are under 18, and 80% of them already have mental health problems. It is almost impossible to get out, it is almost impossible to get in.
(From here on, I'm going to take a lot from Peter Beinart's twitter feed for a while because I can't deal with the anti-Zionist rhetoric on so many other pro-Palestine sources. His totals from the Gaza Health Ministry are deemed reliable by Human Rights Watch. I don't ultimately know if the statistics are correct or even if I trust HRW when it comes to Israel, but any true accounting of what happens needs to mention them all.)
All that is just before the war. 3,600 children have died in Gaza: that is 2,200 more than died in the Hamas attack of any agegroup. There is no good water supply right now: more than 50,000 pregnant women are drinking bad water along with 30,000 babies under six months. There will not be genocidal numbers or genocidal intent, but let's not obscure the truth: large parts of the Netanyahu administration have a clear intent to utilize ethnic cleansing. Something like it is already happening in the West Bank. It would seem 91 Palestinians are already dead there, much of it is government raids on people intending to fight violently, but a dozen or more have been committed by West Bank settlers playing vigilantes who are trying to scare Palestinians into leaving their homes. In one Palestinian village, settlers announced that all Palestinians needed to leave their homes or they would be killed. What's almost more outrageous than the murders themselves is the complete refusal of Benyamin Netanyahu to condemn it. Let's call that what it is: lynchings. And that's not even in Israel proper: at Netanya College a group of Israeli far rightists tried to storm an Arab student dorm.
But now we hear that Netanyahu has talked to the Egyptian President and offered to pay a large part of their international debt if they let a large Palestinian population into Egypt. Biden has promised he won't allow it to happen, but let's be honest, Biden may not be there in two years, and this war might.
On the one hand, life for Gazans can't get much worse. They'll encounter much in Egypt of the same poverty, racism and governmental tyranny they did in Gaza, but it does give a fresh start in an ample land that would ostensibly give them more opportunity and mobility than they ever had. On the other hand, this is ethnic cleansing by any name. It's completing the job that was begun in '48, and whatever the truth of what happened in '48 (and let's face it, dozens of countries did mass ethnic cleansing in the years after WWII, so did Israel), this would be known as The Second Naqba. Even if this could spell improvement in the lies of some Gazans, Israel will be 'caught' red-handed in the ethnic cleansing they managed to cover up in '48. Many people would inflate ethnic cleansing into accusations of genocide, and any approbation short of genocide would be largely deserved. When mass populations are uprooted, thousands die merely from the trek, the chaos, the disorganization, the crime, the hunger, the lack of medical care. There is no way to organize a deracination without mass casualties. Not even Israel could do it.
And even if this possibility for ethnic cleansing doesn't materialize, the eventual possibility for genocide is absolutely there. Anyone in person who'd suggest to me that Gaza's experiencing a genocide right now might get a glass of water in their face, but after the Hamas massacres, you can't believably tell anyone that Israeli society doesn't have enough anti-Arab hatred to go through with it. Given the continual rightward trend of Israeli governments, it would be ludicrous to pretend that genocidal level of murder isn't eventually possible: at least in twenty years when this new generation is grown and has exponential families of their own. Add to that the ever present possibility of inter-Palestinian civil war and the chance of Israel being pulled in, and Palestinians may face an existential nightmare.
What drives Jews crazy, and I mean literally insane, is the clear hypocrisy and bad faith of the people most critical of Israel. Where were they when 600,000 people were massacred right next door in Syria? Oh, right. They only cared enough to stop Obama from sending in a couple hundred troops... They made a little noise when it came to Darfur and Rwanda, but compared to their shouting on behalf of Palestine, it was a whisper. In Iraq, they only showed up for when America committed and enabled atrocities, but when Saddam himself was murdering a million of his own, when he fired chemical weapons on both Iran and Israel, they were nowhere - even when Saddam was an American ally, they were nowhere. Iraq wasn't even mentioned until it was time to invade Iraq. Even right now, Saudi Arabia is still murdering Yemenis, of whom they've already killed somewhere between 150,000 and 300,000. Where are they for the Uigyurs in China? Where are they for the Rohingyas in Burma? Where are they for the Nuers in South Sudan? Where are they for the Ethiopians and the Tigrays? Where are they for the Yazdis of Syria and Iraq?
Genocides are still happening, genocides of Muslims by Christians, secularists and other Muslims: not ten thousand dead, not even a hundred thousand, multiple hundred thousands are butchered, right now, in countries where America has even economic ties as deep or deeper than as Israel. But when a fraction of this is perpetrated by Jews who have many obvious reasons to fear their safety, it's the crime of crimes. If you make this much noise about Israel, the noise you make about these other crises shouldn't just be as loud, the noise should be so loud that the world never hears anything else. Yet on these crises, you're basically mute. That, more than anything else, is why Jews are convinced that Israel's critics are antisemitic in their pours.
People who direct disproportionate criticism at Israel are not antisemites, they're just stupid, and they're easily manipulated by antisemites who badly want to kill us. The reason the Palestinian cause has so much more attention than these other cataclysms is because Palestine's terror campaigns have experienced unprecedented success, success that's largely come at the expense of the Palestinian people. The more your heart bleeds, the easier it can turn to stone, and the more you excuse a resistance lead by a totalitarian dictatorship, the more that dictatorship gets people killed. Nobody saves lives by thinking about politics with their hearts.
What is important is to not turn away. Never avert your eyes from the tragedy. If there are this many horrors in Palestine, imagine how many horrors are all across the world. The world is not an easy place to live in, and Gaza is just one of its many chambers of horrors. If you're going to give voice to the horrors of Palestine, you had better be willing to voice the horrors all across the world. And if you're going to speak up for Israel, you had better give voice to the horrors of Palestine.
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