If you are expecting to read my usual Left Coast column, I tell you now that you will be disappointed. I write, today, from a place of horror—about the massacre unleashed against civilians in Israel this past week, and about the morally cretinous bloodlust reaction some who fashion themselves as being on the “left” seem to have experienced in its aftermath, but also in despair at the ghastly collective punishments being unleashed from the air on Gaza residents by Netanyahu’s far-right government and the Israeli military.
And the biggest divide I see is between the people who genuinely want the world to be better and the people who are using political radicalism as their excuse to voice their murder fantasies, who dream about standing in an angry mob as 8-year-olds get sent to the gallows for the crime of being born from a royal vagina.
Spare me your melodrama, children and babies are not your fucking oppressors. If you seriously want to tell me that calling for babies to be beheaded and every Israeli being burned alive is “desperate revenge against oppressors”, then I guess Netanyahu really is doing self defense right now.
If you genuinely want the world to be better, you have to pick a side. You can’t just rest in your armchair in your ivory tower and condemn the material reality on the ground on all sides.
I am picking a side you dingdong. That doesn’t mean I want the side I’m rooting for to ethnically cleanse the other, holy fuck.
Not an idealistic side you made up in your head, a side that actually materially exists in the real world.
Israel and its goals or Hamas and its goals.
Pick one.
Hamas does not have a policy of completely exterminating of all Israelis. You are, despite nominally supporting Hamas, implicitly promoting anti-Hamas Zionist lies.
As far as I’m concerned, unless we in the crackerverse take up arms against our settler governments we are complicit. I include all of the settler-colonial project in this, so I’m guilty too because I’m posting instead of dedicating my life to opposing this evil project in all its forms.
Am I supposed to not be held accountable just because I merely create wealth for my ruling class and pay into the imperial death machine?
You completely dodged his point to talk about some other shit.
From the Hamas Political Document
“Hamas affirms that its conflict is with the Zionist project not with the Jews because of their religion. Hamas does not wage a struggle against the Jews because they are Jewish but wages a struggle against the Zionists who occupy Palestine.”
Now, what does this mean? One interpretation could be that they only struggle against Zionist jingoists.
The taking of hostages tells us something deeper. Were they all IDF reservists and veterans? I doubt it.
So, what is a Zionist? I posit that it’s all of us who live and serve in the imperial core. Every single one of us that feeds into this death machine and our ruling class. So I’m a communist, what the fuck does that matter? I haven’t done anything. I’m paying off loans for my trailer, I’m selling my labor for wages, I’m consuming the same treats as everyone else, and I pay my taxes. Am I not a Zionist, simply because of that?
Ok but the fact that they took hostages that are just “regular settlers” rather than active service members doesn’t mean Hamas’s goals are to wipe out every settler. And you are acting like if people don’t side with the idea of wiping out every settler we aren’t siding with Palestine. But thats not even the goal of Hamas. You just made that shit up in your head.
if your politics have you conclude you can do nothing and deserve to die, even that you should do something that you then don’t do, you don’t have actionable politics. you have shit politics. hamas are not doing some 200 IQ definition stretching, they literally mean zionists because they need to go shoot people and need a functional definition of who they are at war with.
you having some martyr complex to excuse inaction does not mean it makes any sense to wish death on random ass civilians or literally babies. the point of whoever it was you read was almost certainly not that because you’re white you should be OK with being murdered, it’s that you should take action. when we talk about the attacks being an inevitable reaction to decades of occupation, that does not mean we think randos who were living where they were born deserved to die.
it’s just especially absurd because you’re only saying that because you know damn well you’re perfectly safe and that even in the event of a liberation movement they aren’t going ti try to murder you. you want to have these callous, unhinged takes and pretend you’re applying it equally to yourself when you know that won’t happen.
Are you actually on the side of Palestinians? You seem more like a bog standard online leftist that has done the bare minimum of recognizing a genocide for what it is and has taken that to mean they can just say whatever edgy nonsense pops into their head and pretend that’s anticolonialism. “Oh, you can’t criticize me for saying shit that Zionists pretend are the actual stakes of the conflict because I have right opinions.”
You are not special here. You are not more outraged than anyone else. You are valuing the clout of appearing more “extreme” to a handful of internet leftists over the damage of giving Zionists screenshots of Palestine supporters actually wanting to commit genocide. If you’re worried about what side people are on, first worry whether you’re even helping the one you pretend to care about.
Clout? I’m anonymous.
Posting isn’t politics. We can’t help anyone here. If I was worth anything I wouldn’t be wasting my time arguing on an underwater basket weaving forum, I’d be doing something that actually matters. We’re complicit. If I were killed for it, I’d understand.
Excuse me? Do you think I was implying I’m pro-Israel or…?
You sure sound anti-Hamas, therefore:
Go fuck yourself. If you wanna smugly tell me that I have to be in favor of Israeli genocide to be on the side of Palestine, you can go die in a fucking cave. Call me idealistic if you want, you fucking maniac.
You’re the one that wants to smugly denounce both sides as bad while upholding your imaginary side of the conflict as the solution. There are only two material sides in this conflict: Hamas and Israel. That’s it. If you don’t support the only material force fighting for Gaza:
yeah sure whatever im a centrist because i dont want either side to genocide the other you are completely fucking insane
I see that divide too. Too many self-described leftists don’t really care about society improving somewhat as much as they want to be knee-jerk contrarians against the status quo and also think violence is fun instead of sometimes necessary.