Maybe it will help if I state very clearly some of my political stances:
Israel-Palestine:
Anti-Zionist. I’m the grandson of a Palestinian refugee who died without ever being able to go back. I could understand aspects of Zionism until they decided to do the Nakba. It’s been completely unjustifiable since then.
What is happening right now in Gaza is textbook genocide. States that continue to supply Israel with weapons and funds are complicit in genocide, especially the US and Germany.
An occupied people have the right to resist, as granted by international law. The occupiers have no right to “self-defence”. International law is clear on that.
Hamas is an authoritarian group that was favored by Israel until Oct 7 as an alternative to a PLO-style resistance group. Hamas also sold out the Syrian people with its 2023 rapprochement with Assad and Iran. That being said, the moral and legal responsibility for this genocide is on the ones committing the genocide: Israel.
This was entirely avoidable. Israel’s decent into genocidal insanity was predictable. I even wrote about it in 2015, and I was just some random 24 yo with access to the same internet we all have. During the 2014 war on Gaza, high-ranking members of the Israel cabinet were advocating genocide. Openly.
The West saw this and chose to continue supporting a genocidal regime. Same for the Arab monarchies and dictatorships.
The solution to this is also actually simple, and actually feasible. Immediate ceasefire. Israel to face international justice for the crime of genocide. Every single human being from the river to the sea afforded equal rights under the law, regardless of religion. The ethnosupremacist project that is Zionism condemned for what it is. If the ICC can accuse Putin of war crimes, and rightly so, they can do the same for Netanyahu.
If any Jewish person from anywhere in the world can get a subsidised one way ticket to Israel and handed a nationality, it is more than fair that Palestinians who were ethnically cleansed from that same land be given the right of return. Not just fair, it is guaranteed by international law. You don’t lose that right just because the ethnic cleansers maintained a status quo for over 70 years. It is a right. No one should ever be ethnically cleansed from their homes. Ever.
It is not sufficient to oppose Zionism on moral grounds. We must understand what led to Zionism, namely European antisemitism. We must understand Jewish history to understand how Europe gave itself the right to impose its ‘problem’ on the indigenous population of Palestine. Today, for example, Germany gives itself the right to define who is a Jew and Germany accuses Jews who are critical of Israel of being antisemites.
The Palestinian cause is a moral and just one. Anyone with a functioning conscience can see and agree with that. It does not mean, however, that any actor worldwide who calls themselves pro-Palestine is to be trusted. For various reasons, the US-Israeli relationship attracts all sorts of ‘dissent’, including tankies, including far-right nativists, and everyone in between.
There is a battle for the soul of Judaism. It is being waged by Jews who are horrified by this genocide versus Jews who are uncritically supporting Israel. This is a very difficult battle for many reasons, which is why Jews who declare “not in our name” need our support, including through a zero tolerance policy towards antisemites.
Lastly for now: BDS is amongst the few tactics left for Palestinians and their supporters in the West and elsewhere. The South African model is instructive.
There is a way to stop BDS: ceasefire now, end apartheid, legal accountability and reparations for Palestinians, not just by Israel but also by its accomplices. End the Occupation.
@ayoub living in Germany as an immigrant from a country destroyed by colonialism, it is kind of scary to see otherwise reasonable, progressive-identified Germans reproducing the very same colonial excuses of the last 500 years, word for word, when defending why it's ok for Israel to exist as an occupation of previously inhabited land, nevermind that genocide is the price.
the occupation is ok because the people living there are retrograde, hostile, murderous barbarians, rapists of good white women, follow an evil religion, do not make good use of the land, oppress one another, need to be forcibly civilised, resist cultural assimilation, this is a terrible thing but such is our burden, usw.
@angiebaby that’s definitely a big part of it, but it doesn’t explain why they’re willing to risk actually losing to Trump. I think they’re extremely deluded and unable to understand the seriousness of the situation, despite playing an active role in this genocide. I think they think doing enough ‘locally’ with various pledges would be enough to ignore their foreign policy
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