“You have to stand for something other than yourself” is my philosophy, and its meaning is simple: don’t be a centrist. However, over the last few weeks, I’ve been exposed to the worst of the enlightened centrism that liberals have mistaken for a principled position.
There’s nothing complicated about the Palestine-Israel “conflict”, yet the two friends I’ve lost over this fact begged to differ. I’ll call them Bowls and Katara.
Bowls reposted propaganda from the state of Israel about the death of a Holocaust survivor by Hamas. I wasn’t saying that it didn’t happen, just maybe not in the way that Israel said it did because, at that point, they had been churning out lies. But my main point of concern was what Israel was trying to get the audience to think about; that the events of October 7th were motivated by anti-Semitism. It wasn’t. It was a case of the colonized rising against their colonizers.
Well, Bowls bought it anyway because she asked if Holocaust survivors deserved to die, like anyone was killing anyone on the virtue of being a Holocaust survivor. I made an effort to be gentle with her, stressing that she was just being empathetic because I know it looked like what Israel said it did, but that amounted to nothing as she would go on to unfollow me a week later. I assume she told Katara that I brutally attacked her for being an empath, as Katara said that she “didn’t appreciate the way I came at Bowls. Being sad at the death of a Holocaust survivor does not mean you’re pro-Israel.” Of course not, but before she unfollowed me, she admitted that she was, in fact, trying to show “both sides” and pointed to the slide about Palestine she posted earlier. I explained to her why that was a misinformed position, and she got snippy with me. “I didn’t ask to be educated or receive my education on the topic from you.” Okay.
That was that until Katara unfollowed me soon after. I had to ask her for an explanation.
Katara acknowledged that what is happening in Palestine is a genocide but proclaimed that I’ve been saying and posting a very one-dimensional take on a war that is decidedly not black and white. A few sentences before that, the girl accused me of posting things that “border on anti-Semitism” (without any evidence) and her lack of posting about it didn’t mean she wasn’t doing anything in person (fair enough). There are a lot of things to unpack, though.
The defining characteristic of genocides is that it is black and white. There’s an oppressor and then there’s the oppressed, and the oppressor puts the oppressed through the stages of genocide: “classification, symbolization, discrimination, dehumanization, polarization, preparation, persecution, extermination, and denial.” The reason that she thinks it’s black and white is because of Palestinian resistance, which makes them “just as bad as Israel”. This is also the same mentality behind the mythology of “mutual abuse”. There’s no such thing; one is the abuser, and one is the victim that is fighting back against the abuse. This is true for Israel and Palestine. Since October 7th, I’ve been posting as I learn how deep the rot goes in Israeli society, from the minstrelsy in their TikTok, the apartheid in the West Bank, how badly they treat Holocaust survivors, etc. It looks like, in order to entertain the Israeli side, you have to pretend that Israeli society isn’t deeply racist and sick.
Unlike with Bowls, I was properly pissed off and didn’t hide it. She couldn’t find examples of my anti-Semitism because there are none. I had been very clear that the problem was with the state of Israel, not Jewish people, but I pointed it back at her. So, I was supposed to believe that she was active in her community when she couldn’t even say anything to me about my repeated “anti-Semitism” until I confronted her about unfollowing me. But that ties into my motto. Not shaking the table was more important to Katara than enacting any meaningful changes. Katara also accused me of posting about the genocide in a “toxic” way. I COULD’VE chosen a harmless way to talk about it, offered some meaningless platitude about wanting peace on both sides, but that’s a child’s way of viewing the world. Katara wants to “change the way the U.S. works from the inside,” but by now everyone should know that corruption is a feature, not a bug, in a system that places profit over all, and the U.S. is one of the powers preventing world peace in the first place.
Shekinah's Digital Junk Drawer 