Fifteen Thoughts On Palestine

Friday, 14 May 2021, 7:00 am
Opinion: Caitlin Johnstone

Listen to this article:

1

You don't get to drop an entire colony on top of an inhabited country, grind those inhabitants into the dirt for generations, and then claim self defense every time they retaliate. That's not a thing.

The US-centralized power alliance in general is a gargantuan globe-spanning juggernaut that feeds on rivers of human blood and every time its victims try to escape from its fangs it shows up on the news sobbing that it is merely defending itself.

2

I'm building a new house. There were people living where I wanted to build it, so I just started building it on top of them. They tried to stop me so I had to kill them for being terrorists. If you disagree with my actions you're basically a Nazi. My house has a right to exist.

Sound fair?

3

A nation is not a person, a nation is an abstract concept. It doesn't have a "right to exist". It doesn't have a "right to defend itself". People have the right to these things, and a nation is only legitimate insofar as it advances those rights. For all people.

4

People who condemn Palestinian retaliations against their oppressors have no real answers for what Palestinians should do instead besides "nothing" and "die".

5

A nation that cannot exist without nonstop warfare is not a real nation, it's an ongoing military operation that happens to have suburbs.

6

- Create a permanent ethnic underclass.

- Take everything from them.

- Rob them of reasons to live.

- Oppress them.

- Abuse them.

- Kill them.

- Bomb the shit out of them.

- Call on them to stop fighting you.

- Say you just want peace.

7

Let's all please get very clear on this:

1) Status quo: occupation/apartheid is violence against Palestinians

2) Then Israel escalates through evictions/beatings/shootings

3) Then some Palestinians respond w/violence

4) Then Israel "responds" w/massacres

If u start reporting at #3, you're misleading your audience.

— Omar Baddar (@OmarBaddar) May 10, 2021

8

Israel is losing control of the narrative because there are only so many viral videos of unconscionable brutality that can be dismissed with "Actually this is way more complicated than it looks."

When one side's arguments consist of sharing raw video footage and the other side's arguments consist of saying "Actually this is more complicated than it looks", it should be obvious to everyone that the latter side is in the wrong.

It's like the cheating spouse caught in the act saying "This isn't what it looks like!" Uhh, yeah it is. All the information is right there, you're just managing the perception of that information.

When I left an abusive relationship I told people he raped me, he hit me, he psychologically and financially abused me, while he told people that it's actually quite complicated. In my experience that's generally the case when one side defends abuses with "it's complicated", from my ex to Israeli apartheid to John Bolton defending the Iraq invasion.

Michael Brooks on "Israel/Palestine is a complex issue" pic.twitter.com/aEPNOhrOWj

— pass the PRO act (@workerism) May 12, 2021

9

Awareness is spreading of Israeli apartheid brutality for the same reason awareness is spreading of US police brutality: the internet combined with smartphone cameras. Seeing is believing. Seeing brings change. That's why the powerful are working so hard to censor the internet.

10

- Impose an apartheid ethnostate which punishes Arabs for European crimes.

- Abuse them until they hate you.

- Cite their hatred as evidence that you need your apartheid ethnostate to protect you from hate.

11

Palestine is one of those precious few areas where there's an obvious clear-cut right side and wrong side and it's possible to just take the right side and be objectively unassailably correct, but because of decades of pro-Israel propaganda most people still fuck it up.

12

I don't know who needs to hear this but accusing someone of antisemitism for valid criticisms of a brutal apartheid regime is odious and disgusting and is becoming increasingly recognized as such all around the world.

13

If social media and liberals had existed in the fifteenth through nineteenth centuries there would've been frequent condemnations of "violence on both sides" in the genocidal settler colonialism of the Americas, Africa, and Australia.

14

Once you accept that religious texts are made up nonsense from ancient historical contexts that have no relevance to the present, Zionism just looks like one more instance of white people butchering yet another indigenous population in order to take their land.

Zionism is a white supremacist ideology. It is white supremacist in the way it is weaponized against Arabs and Persians by western Christian fundamentalists and western war hawks, and it is white supremacist in the way it manifests in Israel itself. Case in point:

Israeli TV showing the live brutal beating of a man by Jewish thugs in a working class Israeli neighborhood near Jaffa, disturbing images. Jerusalem Post reporting the victim is a Jew whom they mistook for an Arab. https://t.co/P7ilvx9uBW https://t.co/oc8fuk4iE9

— Rania Khalek (@RaniaKhalek) May 12, 2021

15

A nation that can't exist without nonstop warfare is like a house that can't stand without nonstop construction work. If your house would collapse without construction teams working on it 24/7 forever, you'd either (A) move or (B) come up with a different architectural design.

Originally published here.

© Scoop Media

Caitlin Johnstone

Rogue journalist

Caitlin Johnstone is a 100 percent crowdfunded rogue journalist, bogan socialist, anarcho-psychonaut, guerilla poet and utopia prepper living in Australia with her American husband and two kids. She writes about politics, economics, media, feminism and the nature of consciousness. She is the author of the illustrated poetry book "Woke: A Field Guide For Utopia Preppers."

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