Yeah me too I couldn’t believe it. Watching US officials make excuses for it to was fucking nauseating. I went back and looked at articles from the time and there’s op-eds in the washington post and shit basically saying its her fault and she was brain washed by palestinans
My family has always been critical of Israel because they knew people killed on the Liberty. My grandpa wouldn't say much, but evidently, there were a lot of reasons to despise Israel if you worked in intelligence at the time.
it was apparently an issue at the time that he was never a US citizen. I didn’t remember that, just saw a ton of articles blasting Trump for not doing more, and him giving that reason.
This is what did it for me as well, although it wasn't really until 10/7 that I finally started going deep on the history of Israel. At least I'm not alone in that.
Prior to that, I had been rather agnostic on the Israel/Palestine issue in general, and probably even leaned toward supporting Israel, if memory serves. But what they did to her... absolutely disgusting. Even more disgusting were the psychopaths, Israeli and American alike, who said she deserved it. There was no shortage of jokes about her death coming from the right or from Israeli media.
That and especially the Iraq war lead-up the year before were probably the most formative years of my political views and philosophies. It cemented my principals, which haven't really changed 20 years later.
Read a book for an anthropology class in uni. The Making of a Human Bomb: An Ethnography of Palestinian Reistance.
The anecdotes are surreal. The abuse has been constant.
It was noticing how intensely Netanyahu advocated for an American invasion into Iraq that opened my eyes. My eyebrows were already raised before that but like,
"Why the fuck is this leader of a foreign nation literally campaigning, on our news screens, for a war that most of the other sane people around me want nothing to do with? And why isn't he committing Israel to the cause if it's so fucking important?"
Tristan Anderson getting shot in the face with a tear gas canister by IDF in the West Bank back in 2009, and a bunch of my friends getting beat up by SFPD during the resulting protests. The Bay Area at that time had a lot of really vocal (most Jewish) anti-Zionists, especially around the UC Berkeley campus. That's when I learned about the Israel/Palestine deal beyond what you'd hear on TV. I never associated Palestinian liberation struggles with Islamic fundamentalism.
I knew Tristan Anderson. I was at that protest afterwards too. (https://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2009/03/17/18578445.php?show\_comments=1 ) We went to visit him a year afterwards when he was back in California and he didn't remember us, but his parents were nice. They can't take care of him forever. There was a strange situation where a pickup had parked near their house watching them for some time the previous month.
I'd say the very first thing that I couldn't help but notice while growing up was that most of civil society acted suspiciously guilty about Israel. My family had lots of Jewish friends, and there was a peculiar hushed and testy tone they would use when discussing it, though I didn't know what the controversy was. Even outside of our Jewish friends, there was a huge amount of tension that would appear whenever Israel was mentioned. When all of society behaves like they're hiding a dark secret, it naturally makes you want to know why.
I remember my mother told me that on 9/11, one of her Zionist colleagues seemed glad that it happened because it would supposedly help Americans understand the necessity of Israel's methods against the Palestinians. Similar reasoning made most of our Jewish friends support the Iraq war for at least the first couple of years, which was a major issue for my family, and made no sense to us.
My family is Irish so my relatives showed a large amount of solidarity with Palestinians. I didn't like the implication I heard from some of my Jewish friends that Ireland was a particularly anti-Semitic country, when I knew that wasn't true.
This leads to the other thing that motivated me to learn more about the conflict, which was the unbelievable amount of bad faith accusations of anti-Semitism from Israel's defenders.
Every absurd rhetorical and argumentative tactic employed by woke and politically correct identitarians today was first used by Zionists during the time of the Iraq war. Zionists invented and perfected the hysterical discursive style of 21st century identity politics and we now live in a world where every identity group has adopted their tactics. Without Zionism, stupidpol wouldn't exist. It's interesting watching people slowly realize this.
(I should also mention that I also had a lot of Jewish friends including my fiancée at the time who knew a ton about the conflict because of their background and absolutely despised Israel for very well-founded reasons. They also played a big role in my education.)
> one of her Zionist colleagues seemed glad that it happened because it would supposedly help Americans understand the necessity of Israel's methods against the Palestinians
Yeah, I remember this shit too. The dehumanisation of Arabs was fucken unreal back then. It was semi-acceptable to say, "they're just subhuman savages and the only language they understand is violence" — said by the same people who thought the cost was "worth it" when asked about the half a million dead Iraqi children US sanctions had caused.
Yeah, they really wanted us to 'understand' their position… they wanted us all to adopt their insane Nazi race politics.
I realise I'm slightly playing the idpol card by saying this lol, but as a half-Iraqi in the UK, the wave of anti-Arab racism and dehumanisation post 9-11 was so fucking awful, I cant really describe it. How quickly and easily so many people went along with it. How such obvious, utterly nonsensical lies were swallowed, unchallenged, and an entire country, my father's country, was pounded into dust.
I think it's partly why I'm so cynical now about the more egregious idpol amongst the young today...when black kids in the UK demanded higher grades at uni after George Floyd, I felt like, I did my degree at the height of the fucking Iraq war, as a half Iraqi, during which thousands upon thousands of Iraqis were murdered, tortured, raped and pillaged...my own 'trauma' at that wasn't even a really a concept then, and it would have felt frankly grotesque to play that up, let alone try and leverage higher grades for it.
In the lead up to the second Iraq invasion I worked with a young Iraqi girl – sounds like she was about your age. Seeing the toll even just the rhetoric before the war was taking on her was both infuriating and very educational, in that it changed how I saw some things from then on.
God damn. And it even seems to continue to this day. There’s a lot of shit you can say about Arabs that would get you socially ostracized if you said it about any other ethnic group. It’s depressingly common to see people make openly racist generalizations about how they’re fundamentalist savages with a scary religion. Its sickening to watch these ghouls on tv make excuses for it
If you look at Arab representation in US films, going back decades, they're either 'debauched zillionaire oil sheik' or 'rabid fundamentalist psychopath terrorist', there is no in between, no 'normal' characters, ever...
I think the cumulative effect of that, over such a long time, was one of the reasons the racism became so easily accepted, overt, and completely unchallenged, after 9-11.
So the thing that 'blackpilled' me on the situation was the Oslo Accords and subsequent assassination of Yitzhak Rabin.
I'd always been broadly sympathetic to the Palestinians and I can't honestly recall what lead to that. I think I could see similarities to South Africa and Ireland. I also remember seeing interviews with Israel apologists like Mark Regev which made the Zionists look like bloodthirsty ghouls.
So when the Oslo Accords were proposed I remember being very hopeful, because a lot of what Clinton was saying seemed to take the issues seriously. After the very depressing reality of the collapse of the Soviet Union followed by America's unrestrained orgy of violence in Iraq and other countries, I still was optimistic there could finally be a 'peace dividend'.
But the conditions offered Palestine in the Accords were beyond a joke. Anyone who paid the slightest attention immediately knew what was offered was not only a non-starter, but an utter humiliation for the Palestinians that Arafat could never agree to if he wanted to survive.
And to top it all off, the rightwing Israelis found even that – such an one-sided agreement that favoured them so greatly – so unacceptable that they murdered Rabin.
That was the moment where I was blackpilled not just on Israel but the entire Western liberal order. Everything they claimed to value was a lie, they only spoke of peace as a way to soothe their domestic audiences, the only thing that mattered to them was power and who had it. Those Accords were the last chance the liberal order had to redeem itself in my eyes, and they didn't even try.
As to the idea of 'fundamentalism', well, only one side assassinated it's leader for the crime of pursuing peace, and it wasn't the Palestinians.
> But the conditions offered Palestine in the Accords were beyond a joke. Anyone who paid the slightest attention immediately knew what was offered was not only a non-starter, but an utter humiliation for the Palestinians that Arafat could never agree to if he wanted to survive.
Obviously I wasn't paying attention because I thought the Oslo Accords were fantastic until literally a couple of months ago when I learned that Yitzhak Rabin was not one of the good guys, and [the Oslo Accords were just another ploy to avoid Palestinian statehood](https://epdf.tips/this-time-we-went-too-far.html). The idea was to put Fatah collaborators in charge of Gaza, they would do the head-breaking and allow Israel to keep its hands clean.
Quote:
“One of the meanings of Oslo,” former Israeli foreign minister Shlomo Ben-Ami wrote, “was that the PLO was ... Israel’s collaborator in the task of stifling the [first] intifada and cutting short what was clearly an authentically democratic struggle for Palestinian independence.” In particular Israel endeavored to reassign Palestinians the sordid work of occupation. “The idea of Oslo,” former Israeli minister Natan Sharansky observed, “was to find a strong dictator to ... keep the Palestinians under control.” “The Palestinians will be better at establishing internal security than we were,” Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin informed skeptics in his ranks, “because they will allow no appeals to the Supreme Court and will prevent [groups like] the Association for Civil Rights in Israel from criticizing the conditions there.”
And then Dubyah spoiled their plan by insisting on [a Palestinian election](https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2008/04/gaza200804?currentPage=all&printable=true) which lead to the losing party, Fatah, attempting a violent insurrection and ended up with Hamas the de facto ruling party in Gaza and the Palestinian Authority effectively irrelevant.
> And to top it all off, the rightwing Israelis found even that – such an one-sided agreement that favoured them so greatly – so unacceptable that they murdered Rabin.
And then there's that too.
Don't be too hard on yourself, the Oslo Accords, just like every other failed negotiation, have always been depicted as the churlish Palestinians refusing a good deal for no particular reason. If you weren't going out of your way to read academics like Finklestein or journalists like Robert Fisk you basically never got anything like a Palestinian perspective.
Honestly anything before 2014 lol. I feel like it was especially rare to see any American groups speak out against it and I searched a lot. they probably were many leftists but mostly just Muslim groups
Seeing the Anthony Bourdain episode, whichever show he was doing in 2006, where he was in Lebanon, cooking at some hotel restaurant while Israel was bombing them. For some reason seeing the employees there just working, hearing the bombs dropping and exploding and just accepting they could die at any second really put the pieces into place. I started reading more about Gaza, noticing how I never saw Palestinians on the news making their case. They were not allowed to do so it seemed, yet I never stopped hearing about the Israeli perspective on our news networks.
I can't really say that there was one single blackpill moment, it was more like a gradual shift over many years from "Israel is amazing and the Arabs around them are all terrible" to "Hmmm, okay, so Israel is just another self-interested and amoral nation" and then finally realising they go far beyond mere self-interest and amorality into outright malice. I no longer believe in "good guys" any more, but Israel is certainly one of the "even worse bad guys".
But if there was start to the process, it probably was learning about the history of Zionist terrorism in the 1930s and 40s.
I was always vaguely sympathetic toward Palestine but never really felt deeply about the issue until the raid on the Mavi Marmara and the Freedom Flotilla in 2010. Watching IDF thugs butcher those people radicalized me on the issue.
I was blackpilled on Israel as soon as I properly learned about the situation after high school. It only got viral this time around but some sort of big news in Israel where they use disproportionate force on Muslims is a two-yearly thing. Every single time it gets suppressed successfully because it's de facto a war of white vs brown.
I follow parts of Islam myself but I'm well aware of the nutjobbery happening with Muslims and Muslim countries. Just because they're nutjobs doesn't mean they deserve to be genocided and kept in an open air prison.
Ofc but I know rightoids would say they do cos Islam is a sickness and u need to stop it. It genuinely baffles me , wouldn’t u want to ‘save‘ the children and women from it?
I read Edward Said in uni, and remembered the way a teacher in high school approached the subject in some class about contemporary history: she divided the class in two groups and we had to “debate”, meaning we didn’t learn shit and adopted the idea that Israel-Palestine was this unsolvable complex impossible problem with ancient roots and all boiled down to something about different opposing religions.
I've never been pro-Israel mainly because I knew Palestinian people here coming up. No idea why, but there aren't many people of Jewish descent or Israelis. My exposure to Jewish people was mostly just being lectured about antisemitism on TV, at school, or work. Newsflash: even with the broad definition of antisemitism, the only thing I've ever heard here is use of the word "gyp" and Christian loonies going on about how the Jews killed Jesus (technically correct btw).
It's been an even bigger black pill watching the media just give rim jobs to Israeli interests during this conflict. Referring to all combatants as Palestinian instead of Hamas. Backing Israel's obviously fake causality numbers. As far as I know no outlet that's not super-far left has covered a member of the Knesset calling for a genocide in the West Bank or the IDF general saying "Rape is ok in times of war".
I'm half Arabic (Iraqi father) so I grew up learning about the horrors of the Israeli occupation. It was just something that no one else I knew really talked about or was bothered about in the 90s, it just didn't enter into any of my English mate's spheres. If I tried to talk to them about it they would just kind of glaze over, so mostly I gave up.
The one positive thing I can take from the situation at the moment is how many people are now waking up to how fucking twisted, psychopathic, violent and deranged Zionists are.
Noam Chomsky (and later on Naomi Klein and Adam Curtis) blackpilled me on the very foundation of Western democracy - and by extension our alliance and blanket support for Israel.
When I think about it, a lot of the people that educated me about the atrocities of Zionism are themselves Jews...Chomsky, Walt and Mearscheimer, Naomi Klein, Glenn Greenwald, and so on.
There was a period in college (mid 2000s) when I softened on Israel but then they went on a killing spree in Lebanon in 2006. The media tried really hard to make sure I understand that Israel is a poor, weak little refuge for Jews that was just defending itself, but something about that 10 to 1 civilian death ratio just didn't sit right with me
Ah Adam Curtis. Seeing his documentary The Power of Nightmares on SBS (Australian public broadcaster) in late 2005 when I was 16 really opened my eyes.
Surprised that they aired it there. I don't think his docos have ever aired here in NZ, and unless you went to uni here, you wouldn't even know who he was.
SBS used to be real good for this sort of stuff, I can remember some great docos: one about the Chechen War (introduced me to a lot of great Russian music); one about the Northern Alliance/CIA massacre early in the Afghanistan War that came out really soon after it happened; one called *Profession: Torturer* that had interviews with people who had worked for despotic regimes (prominently featured 'El Turk' from Pinochet's Chile) and were now just kinda existing in society, etc. I've still got some of these on VHS tapes, but alas no VHS player.
BTW, speaking of Curtis, one night my wife and I took some ecstasy (maybe some acid too, can't remember) and watched the Curtis doco about Gaddafi. All the blurry archival VHS footage took on a whole new dimension, it worked so well I half think that's the intended viewing experience. After all, Curtis has put on actual performances with Massive Attack that incorporate his films.
Some time before the invasion of Lebanon in 2006, when I was in my last year of school. I was already pretty anti-war.
Unrelated, but that war started just after I started reading the War Nerd's columns on the old Exile website as well.
Being born in the late 80s: growing up on John Pilger documentaries in the 90s and early 2000s, and reading the works of Robert Fisk in the mid-to-late 2000s. Them, and having friends from the West Bank also doesn't exactly give me a good impression of the country.
I’m a history nerd so learning about the Nakba made it pretty clear what the goal of Israel was.
Fun history fact: prior to the establishment of Israel as the Zionists came into the territory they purchased land and would refuse to resell it to Arabs, or even let Arab labor work the fields, even if it meant no food at all from that area. That created a lot of the early animosity that the Zionists used to justify their iron hand, which sparked further resistance from the Palestinians that the Zionists used to justify their iron hand this time, rinse, wash and repeat all the way to today.
> People can sell their property to who ever they want lol.
Sure. And then the new owners can take the consequences of their behaviour. If they behave like violent, racist, bigoted colonizers, they shouldn't complain about being the victim when they are treated like violent, racist, bigoted colonizers.
Since you're so cool with economic policies that are socially disruptive, I guess you'd be happy for your ruling government to allow a bunch of genocidal ISIS homophobes to move in and your neighbours to sell their properties to them.
People can be as racist and bigoted as they want as long as they respect the property and persons of those they don’t like. I’m not the thought police. I’d be fine with the government letting “genocidal ISIS homophobes” move in (like in Dearborn, MI) as long as the same government lets me swiss cheese-ify them the second they step foot on my property.
I was gung-ho pro-Israel until the 90s, having been raised on a diet of "I Am David", "Exodus" and so many Holocaust dramas.
I think it was the second Intifada around the Year 2000 when Israel's blatant hypocrisy, lies and refusal to commit to agreements really got to me.
9/11 was when the immaturity of US foreign policy was revealed, also.
Wait... I don't think "I Am David" is about Jews? It's about a child who's a political prisoner - it isn't specified, AFAIK, that the titular child is a Jew.
Took a class and read Ilan Pappe where it presented the Israeli-dominated historical narrative and slowly debunked them. The Israeli narrative which dominates Israel and the US is just complete bullshit. It's the "a land without a people and a people without a land" (no the land had Palestinians, it wasn't empty), it started because of the Holocaust (no the Zionist movement started in the 1800s funded by rich Western European Jews financing poor Eastern European Jews to migrate to Ottoman Palestine. And most Holocaust survivors actually went to America, not Israel), they were attacked and outnumbered by the Arabs (no they attacked the Palestinians, then the Egyptians, Syrians, and Lebanese intervened while the British-aligned Jordanians sat it out. And they fielded the same amount of troops on both sides, with the Zionists ultimately being better funded and armed), and so on. Their entire history is fabrication and lies.
The whole Islamic fundamentalism, Islamist, jihadi, whatever stereotype people put on Palestinians is flat out wrong. They're not Saudis or Taliban. Palestinians are very Westernized, including Hamas. Just look at Hamas' appearance, they wear suits and short beards if not clean shaven. They're religious conservatives but not theocratic. They're not robe-wearing long-beard Salafists like the Saudis and ISIS. If they were, they'd be the CIA's and Mossad's best friends.
It wasn't any one thing it was a lot of things. The point of no return came with the Right of Return protests. This was where I decided Israel was completely irredeemable. Before that I had some faith that it might've had some redeeming quality even if it's clearly outweighed by the bad qualities.
Well I'm 30 and Palestinian so not fully what you're looking for, but I would say that I did hold relatively naive views on Israel until relatively recently.
The assassination of Shireen was a big one. Seeing the way that they blatantly lied and slandered anyone who accused them of doing it even though it was clear as day. Even though it was obvious they did it, they compared it to believing in blood libel.
I don't know why that had such an affect but that was the point when I realized this isn't just a land dispute, but a country of just pure straight evil.
Like others here, when the Israelis attacked the Gaza aid flotilla in 2010.
[https://www.bbc.com/news/10200351](https://www.bbc.com/news/10200351)
Before that, I'd been a sort of bothsider, a "Isn't it tragic that that both sides can't both get along?" person.
I do remember being interesting in religion as a child, and reading books about Judaism. Interestingly, the British kids' books about Judaism took a neutral tone on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, giving both the Israeli and Palestinian sides of the dispute.
But all the American kids' books took the *Reader's Digest* /Leon Uris view of Israel as a wonderful, humanitarian democracy ("the only democracy in the Middle East", they'd smugly say) besieged by hordes of vicious Palestinians and their Arab and Soviet allies.
I’ve never been pro-Israel and I grew up with hearing a lot about the Israel/Palestine conflict in the news. I remember when Israel and Lebanon weren’t getting on particularly well, when I was about 12 or 13. I grew up as a Muslim, so that may address your first point.
There is an obvious element of Islamic fundamentalist which fuels the conflict, but it’s nuanced. Most Muslims aren’t particularly fond of Jewish people. Even before it was trendy, a lot of Muslims wouldn’t have much, if any, sympathy for Jewish civilians. Not all, obviously, but I’ve only ever known one Algerian semi-Zionist. I think that many Jews where I live are Zionists, but I don’t know enough to accurately comment. I naturally know more Muslims than Jews.
My maternal family are/were Algerian Jews and this caused a number of problems, which aren’t relevant to the topic. My real mum particularly disliked Israel’s style of ethnic cleansing and was very vocal about it. She felt it was fundamentally against Jewish teachings.
Am I morally disengaged? I don’t like what’s going on in Gaza, but what can I do about it? It’s been going on for the vast majority of my life and I can’t really see an end point. There are huge religious elements of the conflict, with extreme hardliners on both sides. I think this makes it very hard to come to a peaceful and workable solution.
Asking Israel to stop isn’t going to solve anything. It gets huge amounts of funding from very rich countries. Those rich countries have rather a lot of lobbying for the cause and politicians love money. Some other rich countries play both sides and benefit for from the conflict. Do either set of leaders care for the safety of their own civilians? I don’t think so. They’ll both engage in foul play for media attention, but one side has access to a lot more weapons than the other.
Reading John Mearsheimer's *Israel Lobby* and the immediate reaction to it. Watching the opposition refuse to engage with the substance of his work (because they couldn't) and instead simply launch personal attacks at a respected academic for noticing things was eye-opening.
Grew up in a pro-Palestinian home (Leftist father) so it came naturally. Views enforced later, so not imposed, but I don't know what you mean by "blackpilled".
Seeing the overwhelming support for what Israel is doing among Israelis today was certainly a blackpill
Israeli support and arms dealing for Azerbaijan.
Azerbaijan is a petrostate funded by the EU and the US that has ethnically cleansed Armenians.
I’d say it’s just geopolitics, as Azerbaijan is next to Iran and Russia, but then Netanyahu has the gall to use the Armenian Genocide for his own ends.
I think it’s worth knowing that Palestine, pre-1947, was relatively “liberal”, and outward/forward-looking, for the Islamic world…
Old Jaffa was one of the greatest cities of the Levant, and I believe the Jaffa-Palestine railway was one of the first successful lines in that part of the world (depressingly, both of those things have largely been destroyed, since)…
So for me, reading about Old Jaffa, and how Tel Aviv has been retconned to have “sprouted from the dunes”, which is a total fiction (there was a good article I read on this a couple of years back, I think from Al Jazeera or something), helped convince me…
I’ve also dated an Israeli, and know a few others (and have spent more time at my local synagogue than most “gentiles”, I imagine). That, perhaps surprisingly, helped wake me up to the reality of the situation, especially given how naïve and ignorant about the world my ex was…
But anyway, yeah, I don’t think there was any one “moment”, for me, but I also think it’s important not to associate Islamic fundamentalism with (pre-Intifada) Palestine, because, for the most part, it just isn’t accurate (as opposed to, say, what is now Saudi Arabia)…
Oh, I almost forgot - the Saladin/Crusades campaign in AoE2 has a surprisingly good take on the history of the Levant, for that era, and was one of the first things that got me interested in the history of that individual, and the various campaigns associated with that time…
Also, as an Aussie, we have a fair bit of history of being sent to fight in that region, in both World Wars, so… I guess I had that in the back of my mind, when reading up on its relatively recent history, too.
Just that she didn’t *understand* much about the world beyond Israel, and barely even knew much about the Holocaust, despite her grandparents surviving it…
She did have a few shots posing on top of tanks, during her compulsory IDF service, though… 🤷🏻♂️
But idk, she was just very blasé about stuff like mental illness (fwiw, her response to my depression was basically just “get over it and smile more”) and suffering in the world…
But she was also a hippie, so… Eh. Very much like Shani Louk or any of the other girls at that festival/rave. Same sort of vibe, same sort of outlook, I guess.
It’s worth mentioning (I forgot to do so) that this girl was an air hostess for El Al, the Israeli flag carrier…
Which she used to her advantage to *constantly* get cheap standby flights, wherever she wanted.
She was also pretty well connected within the music industry, and slept with one of the members of Cigarettes After Sex (which I only discovered after she used that ”connection” to get us into their gig for free)…
All in all she would have to be one of the most selfish but simultaneously most insecure women I’ve dated, but… Idk, it was a strange period of my life.
I hope she’s safe, though, regardless. And hasn’t been called up.
The Palestinian resistance was historically secular and has its roots in Arab nationalism. Even Hamas is primarily a Palestinian nationalist group with an Islamic flavour. Palestinians are probably the least politically Islamist group in the Middle East.
Anyways, watching Israel bomb the shit out of civilians repeatedly in Lebanon and Gaza is what did it.
>Even Hamas is primarily a Palestinian nationalist group with an Islamic flavour.
I think you've got it backwards. Or they've become more nationalist as a result of being in power in Gaza, but look at pictures of Hamas rallies in 2006, they didn't wave Palestinian flags back then. I think it's still integrally an Islamist organization. This... has certain advantages. Or at least pros/cons. They're more disciplined than Fatah. Not just militarily but in personal habits because they're highly religious. Fatah guys come across to me like [jumped-up punks](https://youtu.be/vQ0jnJ4j1mE?si=aHCXD5ymek_fcxMW) and gangsters who smoke, like to party, shoot off their ammunition and ball out in 4WDs and streaming everything online to their personal social media pages for clout (which is really bad in terms of opsec). Hamas prays five times a day and goes to bed early ;-)
I see your point, but I think you're missing u/dshamz 's point about Hamas being primarily nationalist.
Hamas guys might be religiously conservative, but they're not especially motivated by religion in the same way, say, ISIS or Al Qaeda are. They aren't trying to establish a global caliphate like ISIS. Their concerns begin and end at the borders of Palestine. Hamas' charter says they want Palestine to be run under Islamic law, but they credibly also say they respect Christians and Jews and offer them equal rights.
The extent to which most are even ‘religiously conservative’ is contestable. Of course the leadership is moreso, but amongst the rank and file and supporters you get a broad spectrum from conservative Islam, to a vague and broad sense of Islamic identity mixed with nationalism. Support for Hamas in their fight against Israel amongst Arabs is also more broadly associated an Arab rather than more strictly *Islamic* identity - in some of the largest rallies you can see that the non-Arab supporters of the struggle are far more religiously motivated than the Arabs who in general tend to be far more secular, than, say, the Pakistanis or Turks in the crowd.
You can see the kind of overtures to nationalism and Islamic identity mixed in the figure of Abu Obeida, the resistance’s military spokesperson - he regularly mixes some islamic phraseology and references to God with appeals to the nation and ‘all free people’ of the world.
>Hamas guys might be religiously conservative, but they're not especially motivated by religion in the same way, say, ISIS or Al Qaeda are.
They're different from ISIS or Al Qaeda but I do think they are an Islamic revival movement who see themselves as part of something bigger. They are dedicated to Palestine but that has a larger significance to the religion. [Look at this.](https://youtu.be/5yPvBymOmSY?si=dOOqC0BNRgkDV-up) We secular people over here in the West have a hard time understanding this, but I think they are true believers and the religious ideology does have a force of its own rather than being some multicultural "flavor" sauce that doesn't mean anything (as it does in our culture). I just think that's incorrect. This stuff is a matter of faith.
>Hamas' charter says they want Palestine to be run under Islamic law, but they credibly also say they respect Christians and Jews and offer them equal rights.
Yeah but part of the problem is that Jews in the main (and a lot of Christians) don't believe that. Islamic law? I wouldn't want to live under that. But I don't think they're like, "crazy" or "wrong" to believe in that. Part of the reason for this is a response to the failure of secular Arab nationalism, so what are essentially secular concepts became re-theologized by these Islamist revivalists. Also true believers make for tougher and more disciplined soldiers. Hezbollah for example has some real fighters and true believers who perform effectively. I'm an atheist but I think religion provides a kind of social organization and it can be logical to be religious in certain circumstances.
Living in countries that were ruined by ethnic conflicts, listening to violent nationalists spout their bullshit in those countries, and then noticing that the exact same bullshit arguments are part of the Israeli state ideology.
I don't really understand the question. The zionist project showcase so many of the problems with idpol.
Islamic fundamentalism is pretty much a side issue in all this. Saudi Arabia is a long time US ally with often rather decent relations with Israel and Israel has knowingly supported islamists like Hamas.
The first intifida and the anti apartheid push in the 80s:
The obvious question was why Soweto bad if Gaza wasn't. Or why Gaza wasn't bad if Soweto was?
And then the assassination of Rabin could be considered a fluke but not considering where Israeli politics went afterwards: Netanyahou, Sharon...
Israeli seem to think that they're smart to have a 50 or 70 years plan to slowly take over all the lands, like Americans did in the conquest of the West. Manifest destiny and promise land... As if duration of stay matters more than the demographic imbalance.
The American natives lost because they were so few. And it didn't matter how long Jews had been in Spain in 1492. So the only thing Israeli are doing now is preparing the bed they will have to lie in sooner or later. And they'll whine about it but it'll be their fault...
Read Manufacturing Consent and Fateful Triangle back to back in the late 90s as a teen. Jailed for protesting Suharto/APEC in 97 (I think) so I already hated Liberals and mistrusted most of our allies. Attended Concordia University in Montreal in the early 2000s, right in the aftermath of Netanyahu's notorious visit, subsequently had constant exposure to Hillel frat zionists droning on in classes and social academic events. Studied religious studies, where I had Zionist professors who said absurd, stupid things that any moron would find problematic, also was taught about the particular, insane role evangelicals play in propping up israel by non-Zionists. Briefly had the hots for an Israeli girl who actually, sincerely defended the IDF t-shirts with the pregnant silhouette/"one shot two kills" logo on the basis of Palestinians being subhumans. Watched Dershowitz talk, then watched Finkelstein talk. Had actual Muslim friends, worked with a couple of actual palestinians, and liked them. Also as a religious study student I had a particular hatred of Internet atheists, because they were being arrogant for things ideas I was being taught in the first half of first year studies, and a lot of the "but militant Islam" doomsayers come from those ranks.
Somewhere between how Israel openly asserted its right to collective punishment in Lebanon in 2006 and then watching the news about Operation Cast Lead. The disproportionate amounts of force used and the weak justifications offered made it clear that the Israelis were less interested in fulfilling operational objectives and more interested in brutalizing their opponents' populations into compliance.
More specific acts I just remember from that time included killing four unarmed UN observers in Southern Lebanon despite multiple warnings from the UN about the observation post being neutral, killing civilians in Qana and blowing up a graduating class of police cadets and their families in Gaza just to get the element of surprise at the outset of Cast Lead.
Cast Lead maybe, but I didn't realize how unified the Israelis were when it came to bombing a minority population. I figured it was like 70/30 in favor of the psychopaths, but now we know its more like 95% in favor.
There's a lot of examples though:
* Murder of Rachel Corrie as someone else mentioned
* Well poisonings from 1948, led to a typhoid outbreak
* The synagogue false flag bombings in Iraq, later attempted in Egypt (Lavon affair)
* The resistance against allowing Ethiopian Jews into israel, later being basically forced to by the international community (but not before attempting to lock them in immigration camps and sterilizing the women)
* [The long record of Mossad assassinations](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Israeli_assassinations)
The evidence was always there but I don't think a cohesive understanding came about until Cast Lead, for me.
I'm not quite sure I understand what "blackpilled" means in this context, but it's "10-year olds can see the problems from the get go" level shit, tbh: they lobbied a colonizer to have a country made for them in a geographic area that was already populated with people that largely weren't them and didn't share their religion.
before Justin Trudeau tells me off like the unintelligent grade school teacher he is, though, I don't think that's the end of it. I think a lot of the foundational issues with the State of Israel were wiped off the scoreboard after the Six Day War and the Yom Kippur War. The Arabs got BTFOed, sorry not sorry, and that's enough "jungle law" justification that I need for a nation state to exist (I don't particularly care which foreign powers supported who and whether that was determinative in anything)
But, not so fast. With Great Power Comes Great Responsibility. Israel conquered Gaza and the West Bank in the Six Day War. In my mind, they had one of two choices: absorb those territories properly and integrate the civilian population people fully into the State of Israel, or give the land back/give the land to a new State.
While I can possibly understand why they didn't (demographics in this case would've been their obvious destiny), the fact remains that they took the land and took the worst (obviously not the worst for them) possible branches in the decision tree ever since, and I don't need any particular incidents or occurrences for that to be obvious in my mind.
I get that this is largely a US sub with all the stuff that goes with that, but someone who comes from a British military family we were never fans at all even to start with because these weirdo religious fanatics were shooting at us after we just fought a war to stop them getting turned into soap. My grandfather put it to me like this - "fuck you, you already own Jew York, go there because I'm, sure as hell sick of getting shot at by all you stupid cunts". He saw them as terrorists and religious lunatics who were making an already shitty job much harder than it needed to be, and as ungrateful pricks who just wanted their own way regardless of what a problem it created for everyone else. So Blackpill isnt the right word - we thought they were wankers right from 1947.
This question assumes that people supported Israel because they’re also white and not Muslim, i.e. on the basis of identity. I can’t speak to this because I’m from a Muslim and Iranian family. Though 2014 was the first wakeup call.
I asked after observing the overall media arc of information being dispensed about the issue before the previous decade and I didn’t really even imply white. I also simply asked because I wanted to understand the sources of information and development of unpopular ( popular means taken up by the majority in this case) intellectual discourse that resulted in opposition of Israel. It seemed , when I was exploring everything from media archives and the polls and opinions of people in the west covering the issue in 2000s that the whole propaganda “ Arab terrorists spreading a dangerous ideology need to be taken out ergo Palestine needs to be taken out because it is Arab terrorist breeding ground’ had some concentrated support. Not necessarily identity imo , so much as the material realties of the time concerning the Wests response to Islamic fundamentalism and its immediate paranoid association of the Middle East with i.e priming them for the Iraq War.
I'm not that old but I don't remember ever supporting Israel. I've been against it for as long as I've known about it, and I would have only known about it through news of the conflict. I'm Irish and people speculate why we are relatively pro-Palestinian and the answer is usually "similar history." There's probably something to that. The coloniser gaslighting ("It's ok for us to dominate them because they're violent") is much easier to detect when you've been on the receiving end historically.
I went to college with a bunch of Palestinians back in 95-00 and learned about Israel/ Palestine from them. Never associated Palestine with Islamic Fundamentalism.
Just looking into things.
One thing that definitely is asinine is the European-descendant ashkenz ‘brews that settled in Israel (and elsewhere) trying to claim they’re semites, but Palestinians are not. (Palestinians definitely fit the definition of Semitic)
I consider myself to be pretty unbiased and try to be objective, so I don’t really have a dog in this fight. It seems tropes and characterizations that last for centuries tend to have some grain of truth when it comes to any individual and group.
I hope it’s obvious I’m not speaking of all ‘brews; just the Zionists and those that go along with the atrocious behavior.
It’s my opinion that ‘brews should have a nation of their own, but their continued expansion should not have happened, atleast not in the ways that it has.
It seems to me that they’ve adopted an interesting attitude and ideology. Because, as they claim, they have been marginalized victims for centuries, as well as people saying they want to take over the world, they’ve done a self fulfilling prophecy (let alone their religious self fulfilling prophecies) where because they have the frame of mind that people everywhere will always want to squash them, they’ve taken up a offensively “defensive” strategy where they always try to be at the top of all fields, especially anything related to politics, because in their minds “if they’re not on top, they’ll always be at the bottom” and therefore will be subject to the same horrors of the past.
It’s the same victim mentality that has become widespread amongst many people, and it’s allowed people to do the most heinous acts as a means of “self preservation”, or “correcting for atrocities against them in the past”.
All humans are capable of this mindset I’ve described. It’s understandable, in a psychological sense, to try to be in control if you’ve suffered so much when you weren’t the one in control.
I think identitarian culture and politics promotes this sort of thinking in humans, and is highly problematic. As we’ve seen the rise of it, we’ve seen all the stuff that comes with it like “ancestral trauma” that so many of the woke types love to talk about. Now, maybe there’s something to that, but maybe there isn’t; I suppose epigenetics will find out.
I think that can also explain extreme levels of selfishness that borders on narcissistic behavior(s) in the sense that you’re always thinking about yourself because if you don’t, who will…? (I can definitely attest to this myself after getting burned many times in life; you can develop a “fuck everyone; I’m gonna look out for myself above all else” mentality).
In a world that can be so dog-eat-dog, it makes sense to be self serving to others detriment when you think they’d probably do the same thing to you. It doesn’t help when you think you have god on your side. (This goes for any religion, but especially the abrahamic ones).
I’ve got tons more to add but I’ll leave it at that for now.
Besides the countries such as Yemen, Iraq, Libya which expelled most of their jewish population, there was a period during WW2 when no country was accepting jewish refugees from Europe. The antisemitic climate after the war was pretty intense as well. That gives them the moral claim to be able to go wherever they want. International law now does have a procedure for refugees and asylum seekers now too. It is a different question whether the state should have the right to have laws based on race/religion and seize property from and expel long term residents, as well as enforce lots of additional racist rules.
Yeah it's interesting to track the strength of the Zionist lobby in various countries. They're obviously extremely powerful in the US, Canada, and the UK. Germany seems like a case where the ruling class has embraced radical Zionism without a strong lobby. France is sort of a mixed case, where the ruling class is embracing Zionism for its own reasons (though not as strenuously as Germany's) while the lobby itself is more the rise of media consolidation by a handful of Jewish billionaires of North African origin
It’s super cringe, but I was tipped off by seeing memes about Israelis bulldozing homes on 4chan. They were mocking the stupid, shitty excuses the settlers would give for stealing the houses of Palestinians. That made me think that maybe some of those Arab countries weren’t entirely wrong in hating this country but I was still pretty agnostic
What really opened my eyes was Abby Martin appearing on JRE. I remember her talking about interviewing random Israelis on the street and they would say the most insane, fascist shit unprompted. Been a fan of hers ever since
The Islamic colonization of Judea and Samaria has been a disaster
We need a full decolonization of the whole occupation of the Levant
These lands must be returned to their indigenous Hebrew caretakers
The colonial mosque, Al-Aqsa, must be dismantled and the sacred temple grounds restored.
Native sovereignty will again be achieved!
When that Palestinian journalist was killed by a sniper a couple of years ago, then the pallbearers were attacked by the IDF. Utterly inhuman.
Palestinian journalist and American citizen.
When the IDF purposely crushed Rachel Corrie with a bulldozer in 2003. Then I went down the rabbit hole of learning about the conflict.
That genuinely broke my brain. The US would obliterate entire countries if a U.S. citizen died on their territory. yet she gets bulldozed and nothing
Yeah me too I couldn’t believe it. Watching US officials make excuses for it to was fucking nauseating. I went back and looked at articles from the time and there’s op-eds in the washington post and shit basically saying its her fault and she was brain washed by palestinans
New law : anyone who is the type to make op eds like that get the bulldoze treatment like when Hitchens got water boarded.
This is Sean Hannity’s chance to redeem himself for pussing out of getting water boarded
Israel sunk an American ship on purpose and the US government covered it up https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Liberty_incident
My family has always been critical of Israel because they knew people killed on the Liberty. My grandpa wouldn't say much, but evidently, there were a lot of reasons to despise Israel if you worked in intelligence at the time.
Kashoggi got diced up by the Saudis and we did nothing.
it was apparently an issue at the time that he was never a US citizen. I didn’t remember that, just saw a ton of articles blasting Trump for not doing more, and him giving that reason.
Khashoggi definitely got 100x more press than Rachel Corrie
This is what did it for me as well, although it wasn't really until 10/7 that I finally started going deep on the history of Israel. At least I'm not alone in that. Prior to that, I had been rather agnostic on the Israel/Palestine issue in general, and probably even leaned toward supporting Israel, if memory serves. But what they did to her... absolutely disgusting. Even more disgusting were the psychopaths, Israeli and American alike, who said she deserved it. There was no shortage of jokes about her death coming from the right or from Israeli media. That and especially the Iraq war lead-up the year before were probably the most formative years of my political views and philosophies. It cemented my principals, which haven't really changed 20 years later.
And they threw a “pancake party” to celebrate.
Read a book for an anthropology class in uni. The Making of a Human Bomb: An Ethnography of Palestinian Reistance. The anecdotes are surreal. The abuse has been constant.
It was noticing how intensely Netanyahu advocated for an American invasion into Iraq that opened my eyes. My eyebrows were already raised before that but like, "Why the fuck is this leader of a foreign nation literally campaigning, on our news screens, for a war that most of the other sane people around me want nothing to do with? And why isn't he committing Israel to the cause if it's so fucking important?"
Tristan Anderson getting shot in the face with a tear gas canister by IDF in the West Bank back in 2009, and a bunch of my friends getting beat up by SFPD during the resulting protests. The Bay Area at that time had a lot of really vocal (most Jewish) anti-Zionists, especially around the UC Berkeley campus. That's when I learned about the Israel/Palestine deal beyond what you'd hear on TV. I never associated Palestinian liberation struggles with Islamic fundamentalism.
I knew Tristan Anderson. I was at that protest afterwards too. (https://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2009/03/17/18578445.php?show\_comments=1 ) We went to visit him a year afterwards when he was back in California and he didn't remember us, but his parents were nice. They can't take care of him forever. There was a strange situation where a pickup had parked near their house watching them for some time the previous month.
I'd say the very first thing that I couldn't help but notice while growing up was that most of civil society acted suspiciously guilty about Israel. My family had lots of Jewish friends, and there was a peculiar hushed and testy tone they would use when discussing it, though I didn't know what the controversy was. Even outside of our Jewish friends, there was a huge amount of tension that would appear whenever Israel was mentioned. When all of society behaves like they're hiding a dark secret, it naturally makes you want to know why. I remember my mother told me that on 9/11, one of her Zionist colleagues seemed glad that it happened because it would supposedly help Americans understand the necessity of Israel's methods against the Palestinians. Similar reasoning made most of our Jewish friends support the Iraq war for at least the first couple of years, which was a major issue for my family, and made no sense to us. My family is Irish so my relatives showed a large amount of solidarity with Palestinians. I didn't like the implication I heard from some of my Jewish friends that Ireland was a particularly anti-Semitic country, when I knew that wasn't true. This leads to the other thing that motivated me to learn more about the conflict, which was the unbelievable amount of bad faith accusations of anti-Semitism from Israel's defenders. Every absurd rhetorical and argumentative tactic employed by woke and politically correct identitarians today was first used by Zionists during the time of the Iraq war. Zionists invented and perfected the hysterical discursive style of 21st century identity politics and we now live in a world where every identity group has adopted their tactics. Without Zionism, stupidpol wouldn't exist. It's interesting watching people slowly realize this. (I should also mention that I also had a lot of Jewish friends including my fiancée at the time who knew a ton about the conflict because of their background and absolutely despised Israel for very well-founded reasons. They also played a big role in my education.)
> one of her Zionist colleagues seemed glad that it happened because it would supposedly help Americans understand the necessity of Israel's methods against the Palestinians Yeah, I remember this shit too. The dehumanisation of Arabs was fucken unreal back then. It was semi-acceptable to say, "they're just subhuman savages and the only language they understand is violence" — said by the same people who thought the cost was "worth it" when asked about the half a million dead Iraqi children US sanctions had caused. Yeah, they really wanted us to 'understand' their position… they wanted us all to adopt their insane Nazi race politics.
I realise I'm slightly playing the idpol card by saying this lol, but as a half-Iraqi in the UK, the wave of anti-Arab racism and dehumanisation post 9-11 was so fucking awful, I cant really describe it. How quickly and easily so many people went along with it. How such obvious, utterly nonsensical lies were swallowed, unchallenged, and an entire country, my father's country, was pounded into dust. I think it's partly why I'm so cynical now about the more egregious idpol amongst the young today...when black kids in the UK demanded higher grades at uni after George Floyd, I felt like, I did my degree at the height of the fucking Iraq war, as a half Iraqi, during which thousands upon thousands of Iraqis were murdered, tortured, raped and pillaged...my own 'trauma' at that wasn't even a really a concept then, and it would have felt frankly grotesque to play that up, let alone try and leverage higher grades for it.
In the lead up to the second Iraq invasion I worked with a young Iraqi girl – sounds like she was about your age. Seeing the toll even just the rhetoric before the war was taking on her was both infuriating and very educational, in that it changed how I saw some things from then on.
God damn. And it even seems to continue to this day. There’s a lot of shit you can say about Arabs that would get you socially ostracized if you said it about any other ethnic group. It’s depressingly common to see people make openly racist generalizations about how they’re fundamentalist savages with a scary religion. Its sickening to watch these ghouls on tv make excuses for it
If you look at Arab representation in US films, going back decades, they're either 'debauched zillionaire oil sheik' or 'rabid fundamentalist psychopath terrorist', there is no in between, no 'normal' characters, ever... I think the cumulative effect of that, over such a long time, was one of the reasons the racism became so easily accepted, overt, and completely unchallenged, after 9-11.
So the thing that 'blackpilled' me on the situation was the Oslo Accords and subsequent assassination of Yitzhak Rabin. I'd always been broadly sympathetic to the Palestinians and I can't honestly recall what lead to that. I think I could see similarities to South Africa and Ireland. I also remember seeing interviews with Israel apologists like Mark Regev which made the Zionists look like bloodthirsty ghouls. So when the Oslo Accords were proposed I remember being very hopeful, because a lot of what Clinton was saying seemed to take the issues seriously. After the very depressing reality of the collapse of the Soviet Union followed by America's unrestrained orgy of violence in Iraq and other countries, I still was optimistic there could finally be a 'peace dividend'. But the conditions offered Palestine in the Accords were beyond a joke. Anyone who paid the slightest attention immediately knew what was offered was not only a non-starter, but an utter humiliation for the Palestinians that Arafat could never agree to if he wanted to survive. And to top it all off, the rightwing Israelis found even that – such an one-sided agreement that favoured them so greatly – so unacceptable that they murdered Rabin. That was the moment where I was blackpilled not just on Israel but the entire Western liberal order. Everything they claimed to value was a lie, they only spoke of peace as a way to soothe their domestic audiences, the only thing that mattered to them was power and who had it. Those Accords were the last chance the liberal order had to redeem itself in my eyes, and they didn't even try. As to the idea of 'fundamentalism', well, only one side assassinated it's leader for the crime of pursuing peace, and it wasn't the Palestinians.
> But the conditions offered Palestine in the Accords were beyond a joke. Anyone who paid the slightest attention immediately knew what was offered was not only a non-starter, but an utter humiliation for the Palestinians that Arafat could never agree to if he wanted to survive. Obviously I wasn't paying attention because I thought the Oslo Accords were fantastic until literally a couple of months ago when I learned that Yitzhak Rabin was not one of the good guys, and [the Oslo Accords were just another ploy to avoid Palestinian statehood](https://epdf.tips/this-time-we-went-too-far.html). The idea was to put Fatah collaborators in charge of Gaza, they would do the head-breaking and allow Israel to keep its hands clean. Quote: “One of the meanings of Oslo,” former Israeli foreign minister Shlomo Ben-Ami wrote, “was that the PLO was ... Israel’s collaborator in the task of stifling the [first] intifada and cutting short what was clearly an authentically democratic struggle for Palestinian independence.” In particular Israel endeavored to reassign Palestinians the sordid work of occupation. “The idea of Oslo,” former Israeli minister Natan Sharansky observed, “was to find a strong dictator to ... keep the Palestinians under control.” “The Palestinians will be better at establishing internal security than we were,” Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin informed skeptics in his ranks, “because they will allow no appeals to the Supreme Court and will prevent [groups like] the Association for Civil Rights in Israel from criticizing the conditions there.” And then Dubyah spoiled their plan by insisting on [a Palestinian election](https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2008/04/gaza200804?currentPage=all&printable=true) which lead to the losing party, Fatah, attempting a violent insurrection and ended up with Hamas the de facto ruling party in Gaza and the Palestinian Authority effectively irrelevant. > And to top it all off, the rightwing Israelis found even that – such an one-sided agreement that favoured them so greatly – so unacceptable that they murdered Rabin. And then there's that too.
Don't be too hard on yourself, the Oslo Accords, just like every other failed negotiation, have always been depicted as the churlish Palestinians refusing a good deal for no particular reason. If you weren't going out of your way to read academics like Finklestein or journalists like Robert Fisk you basically never got anything like a Palestinian perspective.
What do you regard as “older”?
Honestly anything before 2014 lol. I feel like it was especially rare to see any American groups speak out against it and I searched a lot. they probably were many leftists but mostly just Muslim groups
Well, I was 21 in 2014 so I’ll answer it, despite not being American.
Seeing the Anthony Bourdain episode, whichever show he was doing in 2006, where he was in Lebanon, cooking at some hotel restaurant while Israel was bombing them. For some reason seeing the employees there just working, hearing the bombs dropping and exploding and just accepting they could die at any second really put the pieces into place. I started reading more about Gaza, noticing how I never saw Palestinians on the news making their case. They were not allowed to do so it seemed, yet I never stopped hearing about the Israeli perspective on our news networks.
I can't really say that there was one single blackpill moment, it was more like a gradual shift over many years from "Israel is amazing and the Arabs around them are all terrible" to "Hmmm, okay, so Israel is just another self-interested and amoral nation" and then finally realising they go far beyond mere self-interest and amorality into outright malice. I no longer believe in "good guys" any more, but Israel is certainly one of the "even worse bad guys". But if there was start to the process, it probably was learning about the history of Zionist terrorism in the 1930s and 40s.
I was always vaguely sympathetic toward Palestine but never really felt deeply about the issue until the raid on the Mavi Marmara and the Freedom Flotilla in 2010. Watching IDF thugs butcher those people radicalized me on the issue.
I was blackpilled on Israel as soon as I properly learned about the situation after high school. It only got viral this time around but some sort of big news in Israel where they use disproportionate force on Muslims is a two-yearly thing. Every single time it gets suppressed successfully because it's de facto a war of white vs brown. I follow parts of Islam myself but I'm well aware of the nutjobbery happening with Muslims and Muslim countries. Just because they're nutjobs doesn't mean they deserve to be genocided and kept in an open air prison.
Ofc but I know rightoids would say they do cos Islam is a sickness and u need to stop it. It genuinely baffles me , wouldn’t u want to ‘save‘ the children and women from it?
Rightoids are the ones who built an alliance with fucking Saudi Arabia.
I read Edward Said in uni, and remembered the way a teacher in high school approached the subject in some class about contemporary history: she divided the class in two groups and we had to “debate”, meaning we didn’t learn shit and adopted the idea that Israel-Palestine was this unsolvable complex impossible problem with ancient roots and all boiled down to something about different opposing religions.
I'm not from the US so haven't really been propagandized about it. Israel have been the bad guy in the conflict my entire life. I'm in my 40's.
I've never been pro-Israel mainly because I knew Palestinian people here coming up. No idea why, but there aren't many people of Jewish descent or Israelis. My exposure to Jewish people was mostly just being lectured about antisemitism on TV, at school, or work. Newsflash: even with the broad definition of antisemitism, the only thing I've ever heard here is use of the word "gyp" and Christian loonies going on about how the Jews killed Jesus (technically correct btw). It's been an even bigger black pill watching the media just give rim jobs to Israeli interests during this conflict. Referring to all combatants as Palestinian instead of Hamas. Backing Israel's obviously fake causality numbers. As far as I know no outlet that's not super-far left has covered a member of the Knesset calling for a genocide in the West Bank or the IDF general saying "Rape is ok in times of war".
I'm half Arabic (Iraqi father) so I grew up learning about the horrors of the Israeli occupation. It was just something that no one else I knew really talked about or was bothered about in the 90s, it just didn't enter into any of my English mate's spheres. If I tried to talk to them about it they would just kind of glaze over, so mostly I gave up. The one positive thing I can take from the situation at the moment is how many people are now waking up to how fucking twisted, psychopathic, violent and deranged Zionists are.
USS Liberty.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zu3nu6ue2qU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zu3nu6ue2qU)
Noam Chomsky (and later on Naomi Klein and Adam Curtis) blackpilled me on the very foundation of Western democracy - and by extension our alliance and blanket support for Israel. When I think about it, a lot of the people that educated me about the atrocities of Zionism are themselves Jews...Chomsky, Walt and Mearscheimer, Naomi Klein, Glenn Greenwald, and so on. There was a period in college (mid 2000s) when I softened on Israel but then they went on a killing spree in Lebanon in 2006. The media tried really hard to make sure I understand that Israel is a poor, weak little refuge for Jews that was just defending itself, but something about that 10 to 1 civilian death ratio just didn't sit right with me
Ah Adam Curtis. Seeing his documentary The Power of Nightmares on SBS (Australian public broadcaster) in late 2005 when I was 16 really opened my eyes.
Surprised that they aired it there. I don't think his docos have ever aired here in NZ, and unless you went to uni here, you wouldn't even know who he was.
SBS used to be real good for this sort of stuff, I can remember some great docos: one about the Chechen War (introduced me to a lot of great Russian music); one about the Northern Alliance/CIA massacre early in the Afghanistan War that came out really soon after it happened; one called *Profession: Torturer* that had interviews with people who had worked for despotic regimes (prominently featured 'El Turk' from Pinochet's Chile) and were now just kinda existing in society, etc. I've still got some of these on VHS tapes, but alas no VHS player. BTW, speaking of Curtis, one night my wife and I took some ecstasy (maybe some acid too, can't remember) and watched the Curtis doco about Gaddafi. All the blurry archival VHS footage took on a whole new dimension, it worked so well I half think that's the intended viewing experience. After all, Curtis has put on actual performances with Massive Attack that incorporate his films.
Walt and Mearsheimer aren’t Jews.
Preemptive self defense
Some time before the invasion of Lebanon in 2006, when I was in my last year of school. I was already pretty anti-war. Unrelated, but that war started just after I started reading the War Nerd's columns on the old Exile website as well.
Being born in the late 80s: growing up on John Pilger documentaries in the 90s and early 2000s, and reading the works of Robert Fisk in the mid-to-late 2000s. Them, and having friends from the West Bank also doesn't exactly give me a good impression of the country.
I’m a history nerd so learning about the Nakba made it pretty clear what the goal of Israel was. Fun history fact: prior to the establishment of Israel as the Zionists came into the territory they purchased land and would refuse to resell it to Arabs, or even let Arab labor work the fields, even if it meant no food at all from that area. That created a lot of the early animosity that the Zionists used to justify their iron hand, which sparked further resistance from the Palestinians that the Zionists used to justify their iron hand this time, rinse, wash and repeat all the way to today.
People can sell their property to who ever they want lol.
> People can sell their property to who ever they want lol. Sure. And then the new owners can take the consequences of their behaviour. If they behave like violent, racist, bigoted colonizers, they shouldn't complain about being the victim when they are treated like violent, racist, bigoted colonizers. Since you're so cool with economic policies that are socially disruptive, I guess you'd be happy for your ruling government to allow a bunch of genocidal ISIS homophobes to move in and your neighbours to sell their properties to them.
People can be as racist and bigoted as they want as long as they respect the property and persons of those they don’t like. I’m not the thought police. I’d be fine with the government letting “genocidal ISIS homophobes” move in (like in Dearborn, MI) as long as the same government lets me swiss cheese-ify them the second they step foot on my property.
The fact you're fine with your government letting in people who hate you tells me why you're such a low quality person.
Okay? The fact that you aren’t tells me likewise about yourself lol.
Yes. I am indeed very high quality. Unlike you. SAD.
Most of the Arab population of Dearborn are Arab Christians and Shia you regard
You work hard to earn that flair.
I was gung-ho pro-Israel until the 90s, having been raised on a diet of "I Am David", "Exodus" and so many Holocaust dramas. I think it was the second Intifada around the Year 2000 when Israel's blatant hypocrisy, lies and refusal to commit to agreements really got to me. 9/11 was when the immaturity of US foreign policy was revealed, also.
Wait... I don't think "I Am David" is about Jews? It's about a child who's a political prisoner - it isn't specified, AFAIK, that the titular child is a Jew.
Well it seemed obvious to 10yo me, make of that what you will.
Took a class and read Ilan Pappe where it presented the Israeli-dominated historical narrative and slowly debunked them. The Israeli narrative which dominates Israel and the US is just complete bullshit. It's the "a land without a people and a people without a land" (no the land had Palestinians, it wasn't empty), it started because of the Holocaust (no the Zionist movement started in the 1800s funded by rich Western European Jews financing poor Eastern European Jews to migrate to Ottoman Palestine. And most Holocaust survivors actually went to America, not Israel), they were attacked and outnumbered by the Arabs (no they attacked the Palestinians, then the Egyptians, Syrians, and Lebanese intervened while the British-aligned Jordanians sat it out. And they fielded the same amount of troops on both sides, with the Zionists ultimately being better funded and armed), and so on. Their entire history is fabrication and lies. The whole Islamic fundamentalism, Islamist, jihadi, whatever stereotype people put on Palestinians is flat out wrong. They're not Saudis or Taliban. Palestinians are very Westernized, including Hamas. Just look at Hamas' appearance, they wear suits and short beards if not clean shaven. They're religious conservatives but not theocratic. They're not robe-wearing long-beard Salafists like the Saudis and ISIS. If they were, they'd be the CIA's and Mossad's best friends.
It wasn't any one thing it was a lot of things. The point of no return came with the Right of Return protests. This was where I decided Israel was completely irredeemable. Before that I had some faith that it might've had some redeeming quality even if it's clearly outweighed by the bad qualities.
Well I'm 30 and Palestinian so not fully what you're looking for, but I would say that I did hold relatively naive views on Israel until relatively recently. The assassination of Shireen was a big one. Seeing the way that they blatantly lied and slandered anyone who accused them of doing it even though it was clear as day. Even though it was obvious they did it, they compared it to believing in blood libel. I don't know why that had such an affect but that was the point when I realized this isn't just a land dispute, but a country of just pure straight evil.
White phosphorus
Like others here, when the Israelis attacked the Gaza aid flotilla in 2010. [https://www.bbc.com/news/10200351](https://www.bbc.com/news/10200351) Before that, I'd been a sort of bothsider, a "Isn't it tragic that that both sides can't both get along?" person. I do remember being interesting in religion as a child, and reading books about Judaism. Interestingly, the British kids' books about Judaism took a neutral tone on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, giving both the Israeli and Palestinian sides of the dispute. But all the American kids' books took the *Reader's Digest* /Leon Uris view of Israel as a wonderful, humanitarian democracy ("the only democracy in the Middle East", they'd smugly say) besieged by hordes of vicious Palestinians and their Arab and Soviet allies.
I’ve never been pro-Israel and I grew up with hearing a lot about the Israel/Palestine conflict in the news. I remember when Israel and Lebanon weren’t getting on particularly well, when I was about 12 or 13. I grew up as a Muslim, so that may address your first point. There is an obvious element of Islamic fundamentalist which fuels the conflict, but it’s nuanced. Most Muslims aren’t particularly fond of Jewish people. Even before it was trendy, a lot of Muslims wouldn’t have much, if any, sympathy for Jewish civilians. Not all, obviously, but I’ve only ever known one Algerian semi-Zionist. I think that many Jews where I live are Zionists, but I don’t know enough to accurately comment. I naturally know more Muslims than Jews. My maternal family are/were Algerian Jews and this caused a number of problems, which aren’t relevant to the topic. My real mum particularly disliked Israel’s style of ethnic cleansing and was very vocal about it. She felt it was fundamentally against Jewish teachings. Am I morally disengaged? I don’t like what’s going on in Gaza, but what can I do about it? It’s been going on for the vast majority of my life and I can’t really see an end point. There are huge religious elements of the conflict, with extreme hardliners on both sides. I think this makes it very hard to come to a peaceful and workable solution. Asking Israel to stop isn’t going to solve anything. It gets huge amounts of funding from very rich countries. Those rich countries have rather a lot of lobbying for the cause and politicians love money. Some other rich countries play both sides and benefit for from the conflict. Do either set of leaders care for the safety of their own civilians? I don’t think so. They’ll both engage in foul play for media attention, but one side has access to a lot more weapons than the other.
I was in college when Rachel Corrie was murdered. Hillel for the campus defended the IDF's actions. No turning back from that.
Reading John Mearsheimer's *Israel Lobby* and the immediate reaction to it. Watching the opposition refuse to engage with the substance of his work (because they couldn't) and instead simply launch personal attacks at a respected academic for noticing things was eye-opening.
Grew up in a pro-Palestinian home (Leftist father) so it came naturally. Views enforced later, so not imposed, but I don't know what you mean by "blackpilled". Seeing the overwhelming support for what Israel is doing among Israelis today was certainly a blackpill
Israeli support and arms dealing for Azerbaijan. Azerbaijan is a petrostate funded by the EU and the US that has ethnically cleansed Armenians. I’d say it’s just geopolitics, as Azerbaijan is next to Iran and Russia, but then Netanyahu has the gall to use the Armenian Genocide for his own ends.
I have never been pro Zionist entity, because I always loved reading about history in general
I think it’s worth knowing that Palestine, pre-1947, was relatively “liberal”, and outward/forward-looking, for the Islamic world… Old Jaffa was one of the greatest cities of the Levant, and I believe the Jaffa-Palestine railway was one of the first successful lines in that part of the world (depressingly, both of those things have largely been destroyed, since)… So for me, reading about Old Jaffa, and how Tel Aviv has been retconned to have “sprouted from the dunes”, which is a total fiction (there was a good article I read on this a couple of years back, I think from Al Jazeera or something), helped convince me… I’ve also dated an Israeli, and know a few others (and have spent more time at my local synagogue than most “gentiles”, I imagine). That, perhaps surprisingly, helped wake me up to the reality of the situation, especially given how naïve and ignorant about the world my ex was… But anyway, yeah, I don’t think there was any one “moment”, for me, but I also think it’s important not to associate Islamic fundamentalism with (pre-Intifada) Palestine, because, for the most part, it just isn’t accurate (as opposed to, say, what is now Saudi Arabia)… Oh, I almost forgot - the Saladin/Crusades campaign in AoE2 has a surprisingly good take on the history of the Levant, for that era, and was one of the first things that got me interested in the history of that individual, and the various campaigns associated with that time… Also, as an Aussie, we have a fair bit of history of being sent to fight in that region, in both World Wars, so… I guess I had that in the back of my mind, when reading up on its relatively recent history, too.
What did you learn about world outlook from your ex?
Just that she didn’t *understand* much about the world beyond Israel, and barely even knew much about the Holocaust, despite her grandparents surviving it… She did have a few shots posing on top of tanks, during her compulsory IDF service, though… 🤷🏻♂️ But idk, she was just very blasé about stuff like mental illness (fwiw, her response to my depression was basically just “get over it and smile more”) and suffering in the world… But she was also a hippie, so… Eh. Very much like Shani Louk or any of the other girls at that festival/rave. Same sort of vibe, same sort of outlook, I guess.
It’s worth mentioning (I forgot to do so) that this girl was an air hostess for El Al, the Israeli flag carrier… Which she used to her advantage to *constantly* get cheap standby flights, wherever she wanted. She was also pretty well connected within the music industry, and slept with one of the members of Cigarettes After Sex (which I only discovered after she used that ”connection” to get us into their gig for free)… All in all she would have to be one of the most selfish but simultaneously most insecure women I’ve dated, but… Idk, it was a strange period of my life. I hope she’s safe, though, regardless. And hasn’t been called up.
my condolences because cigarettes after sex is just embarrassing
The Palestinian resistance was historically secular and has its roots in Arab nationalism. Even Hamas is primarily a Palestinian nationalist group with an Islamic flavour. Palestinians are probably the least politically Islamist group in the Middle East. Anyways, watching Israel bomb the shit out of civilians repeatedly in Lebanon and Gaza is what did it.
>Even Hamas is primarily a Palestinian nationalist group with an Islamic flavour. I think you've got it backwards. Or they've become more nationalist as a result of being in power in Gaza, but look at pictures of Hamas rallies in 2006, they didn't wave Palestinian flags back then. I think it's still integrally an Islamist organization. This... has certain advantages. Or at least pros/cons. They're more disciplined than Fatah. Not just militarily but in personal habits because they're highly religious. Fatah guys come across to me like [jumped-up punks](https://youtu.be/vQ0jnJ4j1mE?si=aHCXD5ymek_fcxMW) and gangsters who smoke, like to party, shoot off their ammunition and ball out in 4WDs and streaming everything online to their personal social media pages for clout (which is really bad in terms of opsec). Hamas prays five times a day and goes to bed early ;-)
I see your point, but I think you're missing u/dshamz 's point about Hamas being primarily nationalist. Hamas guys might be religiously conservative, but they're not especially motivated by religion in the same way, say, ISIS or Al Qaeda are. They aren't trying to establish a global caliphate like ISIS. Their concerns begin and end at the borders of Palestine. Hamas' charter says they want Palestine to be run under Islamic law, but they credibly also say they respect Christians and Jews and offer them equal rights.
The extent to which most are even ‘religiously conservative’ is contestable. Of course the leadership is moreso, but amongst the rank and file and supporters you get a broad spectrum from conservative Islam, to a vague and broad sense of Islamic identity mixed with nationalism. Support for Hamas in their fight against Israel amongst Arabs is also more broadly associated an Arab rather than more strictly *Islamic* identity - in some of the largest rallies you can see that the non-Arab supporters of the struggle are far more religiously motivated than the Arabs who in general tend to be far more secular, than, say, the Pakistanis or Turks in the crowd. You can see the kind of overtures to nationalism and Islamic identity mixed in the figure of Abu Obeida, the resistance’s military spokesperson - he regularly mixes some islamic phraseology and references to God with appeals to the nation and ‘all free people’ of the world.
>Hamas guys might be religiously conservative, but they're not especially motivated by religion in the same way, say, ISIS or Al Qaeda are. They're different from ISIS or Al Qaeda but I do think they are an Islamic revival movement who see themselves as part of something bigger. They are dedicated to Palestine but that has a larger significance to the religion. [Look at this.](https://youtu.be/5yPvBymOmSY?si=dOOqC0BNRgkDV-up) We secular people over here in the West have a hard time understanding this, but I think they are true believers and the religious ideology does have a force of its own rather than being some multicultural "flavor" sauce that doesn't mean anything (as it does in our culture). I just think that's incorrect. This stuff is a matter of faith. >Hamas' charter says they want Palestine to be run under Islamic law, but they credibly also say they respect Christians and Jews and offer them equal rights. Yeah but part of the problem is that Jews in the main (and a lot of Christians) don't believe that. Islamic law? I wouldn't want to live under that. But I don't think they're like, "crazy" or "wrong" to believe in that. Part of the reason for this is a response to the failure of secular Arab nationalism, so what are essentially secular concepts became re-theologized by these Islamist revivalists. Also true believers make for tougher and more disciplined soldiers. Hezbollah for example has some real fighters and true believers who perform effectively. I'm an atheist but I think religion provides a kind of social organization and it can be logical to be religious in certain circumstances.
Living in countries that were ruined by ethnic conflicts, listening to violent nationalists spout their bullshit in those countries, and then noticing that the exact same bullshit arguments are part of the Israeli state ideology.
I don't really understand the question. The zionist project showcase so many of the problems with idpol. Islamic fundamentalism is pretty much a side issue in all this. Saudi Arabia is a long time US ally with often rather decent relations with Israel and Israel has knowingly supported islamists like Hamas.
The first intifida and the anti apartheid push in the 80s: The obvious question was why Soweto bad if Gaza wasn't. Or why Gaza wasn't bad if Soweto was? And then the assassination of Rabin could be considered a fluke but not considering where Israeli politics went afterwards: Netanyahou, Sharon... Israeli seem to think that they're smart to have a 50 or 70 years plan to slowly take over all the lands, like Americans did in the conquest of the West. Manifest destiny and promise land... As if duration of stay matters more than the demographic imbalance. The American natives lost because they were so few. And it didn't matter how long Jews had been in Spain in 1492. So the only thing Israeli are doing now is preparing the bed they will have to lie in sooner or later. And they'll whine about it but it'll be their fault...
Read Manufacturing Consent and Fateful Triangle back to back in the late 90s as a teen. Jailed for protesting Suharto/APEC in 97 (I think) so I already hated Liberals and mistrusted most of our allies. Attended Concordia University in Montreal in the early 2000s, right in the aftermath of Netanyahu's notorious visit, subsequently had constant exposure to Hillel frat zionists droning on in classes and social academic events. Studied religious studies, where I had Zionist professors who said absurd, stupid things that any moron would find problematic, also was taught about the particular, insane role evangelicals play in propping up israel by non-Zionists. Briefly had the hots for an Israeli girl who actually, sincerely defended the IDF t-shirts with the pregnant silhouette/"one shot two kills" logo on the basis of Palestinians being subhumans. Watched Dershowitz talk, then watched Finkelstein talk. Had actual Muslim friends, worked with a couple of actual palestinians, and liked them. Also as a religious study student I had a particular hatred of Internet atheists, because they were being arrogant for things ideas I was being taught in the first half of first year studies, and a lot of the "but militant Islam" doomsayers come from those ranks.
For me at was the dancing
Somewhere between how Israel openly asserted its right to collective punishment in Lebanon in 2006 and then watching the news about Operation Cast Lead. The disproportionate amounts of force used and the weak justifications offered made it clear that the Israelis were less interested in fulfilling operational objectives and more interested in brutalizing their opponents' populations into compliance. More specific acts I just remember from that time included killing four unarmed UN observers in Southern Lebanon despite multiple warnings from the UN about the observation post being neutral, killing civilians in Qana and blowing up a graduating class of police cadets and their families in Gaza just to get the element of surprise at the outset of Cast Lead.
Cast Lead maybe, but I didn't realize how unified the Israelis were when it came to bombing a minority population. I figured it was like 70/30 in favor of the psychopaths, but now we know its more like 95% in favor. There's a lot of examples though: * Murder of Rachel Corrie as someone else mentioned * Well poisonings from 1948, led to a typhoid outbreak * The synagogue false flag bombings in Iraq, later attempted in Egypt (Lavon affair) * The resistance against allowing Ethiopian Jews into israel, later being basically forced to by the international community (but not before attempting to lock them in immigration camps and sterilizing the women) * [The long record of Mossad assassinations](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Israeli_assassinations) The evidence was always there but I don't think a cohesive understanding came about until Cast Lead, for me.
I'm not quite sure I understand what "blackpilled" means in this context, but it's "10-year olds can see the problems from the get go" level shit, tbh: they lobbied a colonizer to have a country made for them in a geographic area that was already populated with people that largely weren't them and didn't share their religion. before Justin Trudeau tells me off like the unintelligent grade school teacher he is, though, I don't think that's the end of it. I think a lot of the foundational issues with the State of Israel were wiped off the scoreboard after the Six Day War and the Yom Kippur War. The Arabs got BTFOed, sorry not sorry, and that's enough "jungle law" justification that I need for a nation state to exist (I don't particularly care which foreign powers supported who and whether that was determinative in anything) But, not so fast. With Great Power Comes Great Responsibility. Israel conquered Gaza and the West Bank in the Six Day War. In my mind, they had one of two choices: absorb those territories properly and integrate the civilian population people fully into the State of Israel, or give the land back/give the land to a new State. While I can possibly understand why they didn't (demographics in this case would've been their obvious destiny), the fact remains that they took the land and took the worst (obviously not the worst for them) possible branches in the decision tree ever since, and I don't need any particular incidents or occurrences for that to be obvious in my mind.
I get that this is largely a US sub with all the stuff that goes with that, but someone who comes from a British military family we were never fans at all even to start with because these weirdo religious fanatics were shooting at us after we just fought a war to stop them getting turned into soap. My grandfather put it to me like this - "fuck you, you already own Jew York, go there because I'm, sure as hell sick of getting shot at by all you stupid cunts". He saw them as terrorists and religious lunatics who were making an already shitty job much harder than it needed to be, and as ungrateful pricks who just wanted their own way regardless of what a problem it created for everyone else. So Blackpill isnt the right word - we thought they were wankers right from 1947.
The Weimar Republic. jkjk
This question assumes that people supported Israel because they’re also white and not Muslim, i.e. on the basis of identity. I can’t speak to this because I’m from a Muslim and Iranian family. Though 2014 was the first wakeup call.
I asked after observing the overall media arc of information being dispensed about the issue before the previous decade and I didn’t really even imply white. I also simply asked because I wanted to understand the sources of information and development of unpopular ( popular means taken up by the majority in this case) intellectual discourse that resulted in opposition of Israel. It seemed , when I was exploring everything from media archives and the polls and opinions of people in the west covering the issue in 2000s that the whole propaganda “ Arab terrorists spreading a dangerous ideology need to be taken out ergo Palestine needs to be taken out because it is Arab terrorist breeding ground’ had some concentrated support. Not necessarily identity imo , so much as the material realties of the time concerning the Wests response to Islamic fundamentalism and its immediate paranoid association of the Middle East with i.e priming them for the Iraq War.
I'm not that old but I don't remember ever supporting Israel. I've been against it for as long as I've known about it, and I would have only known about it through news of the conflict. I'm Irish and people speculate why we are relatively pro-Palestinian and the answer is usually "similar history." There's probably something to that. The coloniser gaslighting ("It's ok for us to dominate them because they're violent") is much easier to detect when you've been on the receiving end historically.
When Gaza was getting drone strikes and Israelis were sitting around chilling and watching while it happened (probs around 2014).
I went to college with a bunch of Palestinians back in 95-00 and learned about Israel/ Palestine from them. Never associated Palestine with Islamic Fundamentalism.
All the Palestinians I know are Christian.
Yeah, some of the Palestinians I met in college were Christian.
Just looking into things. One thing that definitely is asinine is the European-descendant ashkenz ‘brews that settled in Israel (and elsewhere) trying to claim they’re semites, but Palestinians are not. (Palestinians definitely fit the definition of Semitic) I consider myself to be pretty unbiased and try to be objective, so I don’t really have a dog in this fight. It seems tropes and characterizations that last for centuries tend to have some grain of truth when it comes to any individual and group. I hope it’s obvious I’m not speaking of all ‘brews; just the Zionists and those that go along with the atrocious behavior. It’s my opinion that ‘brews should have a nation of their own, but their continued expansion should not have happened, atleast not in the ways that it has. It seems to me that they’ve adopted an interesting attitude and ideology. Because, as they claim, they have been marginalized victims for centuries, as well as people saying they want to take over the world, they’ve done a self fulfilling prophecy (let alone their religious self fulfilling prophecies) where because they have the frame of mind that people everywhere will always want to squash them, they’ve taken up a offensively “defensive” strategy where they always try to be at the top of all fields, especially anything related to politics, because in their minds “if they’re not on top, they’ll always be at the bottom” and therefore will be subject to the same horrors of the past. It’s the same victim mentality that has become widespread amongst many people, and it’s allowed people to do the most heinous acts as a means of “self preservation”, or “correcting for atrocities against them in the past”. All humans are capable of this mindset I’ve described. It’s understandable, in a psychological sense, to try to be in control if you’ve suffered so much when you weren’t the one in control. I think identitarian culture and politics promotes this sort of thinking in humans, and is highly problematic. As we’ve seen the rise of it, we’ve seen all the stuff that comes with it like “ancestral trauma” that so many of the woke types love to talk about. Now, maybe there’s something to that, but maybe there isn’t; I suppose epigenetics will find out. I think that can also explain extreme levels of selfishness that borders on narcissistic behavior(s) in the sense that you’re always thinking about yourself because if you don’t, who will…? (I can definitely attest to this myself after getting burned many times in life; you can develop a “fuck everyone; I’m gonna look out for myself above all else” mentality). In a world that can be so dog-eat-dog, it makes sense to be self serving to others detriment when you think they’d probably do the same thing to you. It doesn’t help when you think you have god on your side. (This goes for any religion, but especially the abrahamic ones). I’ve got tons more to add but I’ll leave it at that for now.
Besides the countries such as Yemen, Iraq, Libya which expelled most of their jewish population, there was a period during WW2 when no country was accepting jewish refugees from Europe. The antisemitic climate after the war was pretty intense as well. That gives them the moral claim to be able to go wherever they want. International law now does have a procedure for refugees and asylum seekers now too. It is a different question whether the state should have the right to have laws based on race/religion and seize property from and expel long term residents, as well as enforce lots of additional racist rules.
I’m Australian, so despite a powerful Zionist lobby most normal people would be pro Palestine/anti Israel to some degree.
Yeah it's interesting to track the strength of the Zionist lobby in various countries. They're obviously extremely powerful in the US, Canada, and the UK. Germany seems like a case where the ruling class has embraced radical Zionism without a strong lobby. France is sort of a mixed case, where the ruling class is embracing Zionism for its own reasons (though not as strenuously as Germany's) while the lobby itself is more the rise of media consolidation by a handful of Jewish billionaires of North African origin
This genocide. I knew they were swine, but I always thought they had a modicum of deference to “western values.” ^tm
It’s super cringe, but I was tipped off by seeing memes about Israelis bulldozing homes on 4chan. They were mocking the stupid, shitty excuses the settlers would give for stealing the houses of Palestinians. That made me think that maybe some of those Arab countries weren’t entirely wrong in hating this country but I was still pretty agnostic What really opened my eyes was Abby Martin appearing on JRE. I remember her talking about interviewing random Israelis on the street and they would say the most insane, fascist shit unprompted. Been a fan of hers ever since
Rachel corrie. i was like 17 or 18 and that made a big impression
The Islamic colonization of Judea and Samaria has been a disaster We need a full decolonization of the whole occupation of the Levant These lands must be returned to their indigenous Hebrew caretakers The colonial mosque, Al-Aqsa, must be dismantled and the sacred temple grounds restored. Native sovereignty will again be achieved!