… of having support for Hamas or Israel shoved down my throat. Fuck them both. I care about Israeli and Palestinian civilians, but I don’t particularly care whether Israel or Hamas wins. Both sides want to commit genocide against each other. I value Israelis and Palestinians equally, as everyone should. (Zionists and anti-Zionists don’t seem to agree with me, though.) I’m not going to pick Far-Right Racist Group A over Far-Right Racist Group B just because Far-Right Racist Group A has less power right now. I’m not going to call an indigenous population “settler colonialists,” as though we were dealing with Christopher Columbus. Both Jews and Arabs have the right to live in Israel/Palestine, but Zionists and anti-Zionists cannot get that through their thick fucking skulls. Jews were EXPELLED from Palestine by antisemitic Christian and Muslim governments. Don’t fucking tell me that it’s the same as the British colonising India or something.
But I’m not going to excuse the Jewish-supremacist, far-right Netanyahu government’s genocidal behaviour against the people of Gaza because of Jews’ suffering in the Holocaust. Jews are indigenous to Palestine. They aren’t just a bunch of random white settlers and I want to fucking strangle anyone who tries to push that narrative on me. But being indigenous doesn’t let you off for being shitty to your neighbours. Arabs have a right to live freely and have equal rights. No more apartheid, no more segregation. They have every right to rebel, but Hamas is not the flag to rally around. Jews have every fucking right to be afraid of pogroms led by an Islamist terrorist group, apartheid regime notwithstanding. (I’ve said this before, but Hamas isn’t Nelson Mandela. Stop trying to whitewash this national-chauvinist terrorist group just because they want to free themselves from Israeli occupation. Are you going to call Al-Qaeda freedom fighters for challenging American imperialism by flying a plane into the fucking Twin Towers next? Are ISIS now freedom fighters because they’re a thorn in the side for Western imperialist powers because they want to maintain hegemony over the Middle East—and everywhere else?) Being oppressed doesn’t get you a get-out-of-basic-human-decency card. Claiming otherwise is a recipe for disaster, as we are now witnessing every day in Gaza.
And Zionists and anti-Zionists tend to treat their sides like their favourite sports team. They don’t trivialise deaths on their own side, but they show a remarkable amount of callousness towards the deaths of the other side’s civilians. And if you challenge them, they double down and start shouting about how Palestinians are all a bunch of terrorists or all Israelis are Kosher Nazis. Come the fuck on. People are fucking killing each other, spouting nationalist slogans and swearing they’ll wipe the other side off the map.
As soon as the Middle East is involved, everyone becomes unhinged, I swear.
Fuck Netanyahu. Fuck Hamas. I hope both governments fail and are replaced by something better for everyone living in the area. It feels as the only sane voices about all this are from anarchists and certain communists, who rightly see through the pro-nationalist bullshit that is spewing from both Zionists and anti-Zionists.
(I am infinitely relieved to have this anonymous blog, because I think if I showed certain people, I think they’d shun me because I refuse to be on Team Israel or Palestine. It’s like asking me to choose between arsenic and strychnine.)
