But My Violence is Justified!
I live in Israel. I am putting this factoid at the beginning of the post so you can already begin forming whatever preconceived notion you want to believe about me. If you want to toss a "Free Palestine" in my inbox before reading, feel free. I'm used to it at this point.
Yeah, that was melodramatic, but with the recent war and all1 the fact that I'm essentially a walking flag to a lot of people gets pushed into my head again. I am my government, my government is me, and any mistake made by said government should have the appropriate punishment inflicted on me and the rest of the populace, that's just how it is. Whatever actions I may have taken for or against the government does not matter - I live here, therefore I am supporting the state, therefore I am a colonizer, therefore violence against me is righteous.
No, I do not think the Gazan people deserve it either; they're suffering in ways that are impossible to put into words. The only people I'd argue deserve any of this are the people in power on both ends who keep this shitshow going. But this kind of stance seems to be missing when we're talking politics now - either Israelis being shot is fine and the Palestinians are martyrs on the right side of history, or Israelis are poor innocent jews and Palestinians are brutes who need to be glassed. Fuck is nuance? Pick an extreme position and stick to it, kiddo.
That's what's driving me up the wall this week: seeing a lot of people I talk to or follow justifying the senseless massacre of innocents under the guise of "but our violence is just." Clearly, Hamas doing a shoot-out at a party is fine because the people dancing there were all colonizers who can only fall asleep to the sound of gazans cryng. Obviously, the IDF taking down a 14 story apartment building is fine because some terrorist used to do his shopping two blocks down, so those children are just collateral.
The IDF are treating the people living in Gaza like animals and have contributed to the extremism present in there. Hamas are a terrorist organization who's primary goal is to kill, and any good they do is at best by accident. These two stances do not contradict, and you don't need to deny one to believe the other.
Oh yeah if you didn't know - Israel and Gaza went to war about two days back. It's going about the way you'd assume.↩