I’m positively on the edge of my seat waiting to see if any of my ultra-empathetic friends/acquaintances/frenemies come forward to support Hezbollah, and what logics they use to justify it.
My hypothesis is that the issue won’t catch in the coarse weave of their conceptual nets. They’ll be unable to wrap their heads and hearts around it in a morally self-gratifying way, and it’ll just become background noise, like all the other uninteresting atrocities going on all over the world all the time.
But who can even know anymore what people can believe and get all passionately worked up about? It has been fascinating to observe human nature for the last 12 years, especially since October 7th. Such unexpected twists and turns and inversions and contortions! Apparently people can be brought to believe or disbelieve or support or condemn just about anything, if everyone else around them does the same.
Have you considered that both the Palestinians and Israelis both have the right to live there and that both are wrong in their actions?
I challenge you to be as critical of Israel as you are with Hamas, or Hezbollah.
I fear that you’re losing the ability to be critical of all parties equally.
The problem here, Neil, is that some issues are not morally equivalent, even when you put effort into seeing both side’s point of view. Personally, I would love to see a two-state solution, but this is not possible when one only side wants it. Progressivists seem incapable of conceiving the reality that the Palestinian population has supported a regime that wants to eliminate the state of Israel, and voted it into power expressly for that purpose.
It is not that the Palestinians have no legitimate grievances. Of course they do. They had a Jewish state founded under them on land they inhabited for centuries. They’ve lost out in every Israeli-Arab clash since 1948, whether that clash was their fault or not. And every Palestinian pays a high cost in civil liberties for Palestinian terrorism whether they support that terrorism or not.
Regarding Israel, I have serious qualms in a number of places. First as a good American the idea of an ethno-state is offensive to me. And right-wing religious zionists who believe Israel belongs to the Jews ‘coz God gave it to them are just fundamentalist shitheads. Those people were overjoyed to have an excuse to take Palestine in 67. And many of them do want a one-state solution and would undermine peace efforts from the Israeli side, which is fucking repugnant. Finally, the reality of terrorism (it is more than a mere threat) has required Israel to police Palestinians in truly humiliating and oppressive ways. Nobody can live under that and not loathe their oppressors, no matter what justifications are made. If you think these things don’t torment me, you’re wrong.
But here’s the thing. Jews have been persecuted for hundreds of years in many places. Often it has happened in precisely the places where Jews have assimilated and believed they found a home. And when Jews found themselves persecuted and murdered, no nation would help them. They were stateless, with nowhere to go. That includes the USA and England. Because people are, for whatever reason, so weird, unsympathetic and often just hostile toward Jews, Jews have found it necessary to found a state. That state was recognized by the UN. It was founded on the land partitioned to them by the British when they left the territory, and there was no government. The Palestinians were also granted their own partition and they could have founded a state on that land. But they (and the Arab world) have seemed much more interested in the non-existence of Israel than with the existence of a peaceful and prosperous Palestinian state.
This is my attempt to demonstrate a nuanced and fair-minded picture of the conflict. But I do side strongly with Israel, because Israel just wants to exist, and Hamas and Hezbollah just want Israel to not exist. And especially after watching just how few shits allegedly decent people give about what happened to Israelis on October 7th and how even fewer shits they give about the survival of the state of Israel — I believe in the necessity of Israel more than ever.
Now, it’s your turn. What do you think Israel should have done differently and what do you think it should do in the future?