Y'know all the Gen Z folks online who oversimplify the entire world and all morality into a binary oppressor and victim dynamic which...just doesn't reflect reality?
Which routinely regards murdering, raping, suicide bombing, gay-hating, misogynist terrorists...as the good guys?
Want to know how they developed this particular set of cognative distortions?
This worldview, often seen among Millennials and very common among Gen Z leftists, was produced by the corruption of a good and useful bit of critical theory meant to address nuance, complexity, and compassion: intersectionality.
Coined by KimberlĂŠ Crenshaw in 1989, intersectionality began as a way to explain how different forms of discrimination overlap and interact, especially for Black women who face both racism and sexism in ways that neither anti-racist nor feminist frameworks alone fully addressed.
So, for example:
A white woman might face sexism but not racism.
A Black man might face racism but not sexism.
A Black woman faces both, and often in compounded ways.
This seems like a helpful way to understand complexity in lived experiences, right?
Because it is! It's fantastic and appropriate and necessary! Sojourner Truth brought it up in 1851.
So late Millennials and Gen Z college students were exposed to sloppy versions of Crenshaw's thesis and, like a lab leak, the idea spread beyond academic critical theory into activist and online spaces...where it began to mutate into something else entirely.
Instead of just understanding overlapping disadvantages, intersectionality became a kind of oppression calculator.
People began to stack their marginalized identities in a way that assigned moral authority. The more marginalized identities you hold, the more your voice is prioritized.
If you have "privileged" identities (white, male, cisgender, etc.), you may be expected in leftist spaces to sit down, shut up, and only listen.
The problem: it is awfully illiberal to grant agency to (or take agency from) an individual based on their group association.
(Liberals recognize that as old fashioned bigotry masquerading as justice.)
Oppressor/Oppressed
So this framing helped flatten the complexity of individuals into a binary of oppressor or oppressed, based solely on which and how many marginalized identities one can claim.
This inevitably led to hierarchies of victimhood in which competing identities are ranked to determine whose suffering is more valid.
Leftists seemingly trade memes like the one below without irony:
That's the origin of Oppression Olympics.
This is where it went completely off the rails, with some movements and organizations deciding that only those with certain identities or performed political perspectives should be permitted to speak.
But...what if you're not a holder of one of these victim identities? Well, if you belong to a privileged group, you're now the proud owner of collective guilt and are held responsible for the system of oppression...even if you've personally done nothing wrong.
This made it easy to turn entire groups, millions of complex people in varying and nuanced circumstances...into simplified moral symbols.
If a group is judged powerful or privileged, it (and anyone associated with it) is an oppressor.
If a group is judged marginalized, it becomes the victim.
Wait, though - it gets worse.
Once this kind of "intersectionality" (which no longer resembled Crenshaw's) became part of the social media discourse, algorithms boosted simple, emotional content that aligned with the victim/oppressor binary. In social media, engagement is everything, and it distorts everything.
Gen Z folks are particularly susceptible to these distortions because they have spent most of their lives soaking in performative social media activism which offers a (wrong but) clear, simple, binary moral compass in a world which otherwise feels messy, confusing, and overwhelming. This gives them the opportunity to express solidarity with those who suffer injustice, which makes them feel like they're good people for siding with the good people against the bad people.
So intersectionality went from "people are complex" to "if you check [X] boxes, you are righteous, and if not...you're complicit."
Intersectionality started as a tool for empathy and nuance, helping us see how systems of oppression intersect and interact. This, I want to repeat, is great.
In social media activism, though, it got flattened into a worldview where people and nations are judged morally and collectively based on their group identities and perceived power.
You know how you can tell that this isn't really justice? Justice is rarely so simple, binary, and completely devoid of nuance.
Okay, so there's the mindset of the Gen Z leftist. Let's look at how they apply it to Israel.
The many and complex facts and long history of the Arab/Israeli conflict don't fit neatly into this framing, so the narratives must be re-written to cram them into the shape such leftists demand:
Palestinians = oppressed
Framed as an indigenous, stateless people living under military occupation and suffering from systemic discrimination, they are exclusively innocent victims without agency who need the good people of the West to save them from...
Israel/Jews = oppressors
Cast as a colonial, European, settler colonialist, imperialist, racist power, seen as inflicting structural violence on a vulnerable population.
And because these leftists don't read history (just memes and TikTok), they believe this oppression has been going on from time immemorial.
(That's perhaps part of where they get the idea that "Palestine" is an ancient civilization.)
This framework, this need to be on the right side of a false binary requires them to aggressively ignore, bury, appropriate, downplay, or invert all Jewish historical trauma, indigeneity, and security concerns...all to make a complex set of circumstances fit into the box of their simple moral binary.
Think about it. Isn't that the content of most of the ugly comments you get from them? Simple, moral binaries which aren't supported by facts, evidence, or reason?
(Yes, the far right Gen Z folks do the same thing for different reasons and in a mirror...where victim and Oppressor switch places. That's how we get cishet white Christian males who are certain they're being oppressed, but that's a topic for another time, maybe.)
Israel as White Colonial Power
Israel is increasingly racialized as "white" or "European," despite its multi-ethnic population (including ~50% Mizrahi/ Sephardi Jews and ~20% Arab citizens).
Zionism, instead of being recognized as a liberation movement for Jews after ~2000 years of genocides and ethnic cleansings, is recast as an extension of European settler colonialism...despite Jews being undeniably indigenous to the region and never meeting the definition of 'settler colonialism.'
The term's definition, the leftists realize, must be changed so they can cram Israel into the oppressor box! It's become a common tactic.
Remember when Amnesty International could only try to make "genocide" stick to Israel by changing the definition of genicide?
Remember when Ireland demanded that the ICJ change the definition of genocide for the exclusive purpose of slapping that label on Israel?
Its still effin' ridiculous, but at least this finally explains their cognative distortion of reality: They must distort reality in order to feel okay about themselves.
Palestinians as Eternal Victims
Palestinians, to be crammed into this framing, are depicted as having no agency, portrayed solely as victims of Israeli evil.
Violence by Palestinian actors (terrorism, 138 suicide bombings, incitement...October 7th...) is justified, excused, or omitted as a "reaction" to occupation. They're oppressed, say the leftists, so they bear no responsibility for their choices.
Like children. Infantilizing, isn't it?
Power is Oppression
Israel's military, economy, and alliance with the US make it the powerful party and therefore the oppressor. Why?
Because the framing requires the more powerful side to be morally wrong...even if it is acting in self-defense.
Not satisfied with ordinary Jewish Erasure, this victim/oppressor framing erases:
Jewish indigeneity to the land.
The Holocaust's role in accelerating global Zionist momentum after WWII
The ethnic cleansing of 850,000 Jews from Arab lands, most of whom went to Israel.
~2,000 years of Jewish ethnic cleansings and genocides.
This false binary requires that Jews be racialized as white and labeled privileged.
De-legitimizing the oppression of Jews usefully de-legitimizes their right to self-determination.
So history, facts and reason are set aside, any attempt to bring nuance to the conversation is shut down, any fact or point of view shared by an Israeli or a Jew is obviously a lie because Jews, remember, are oppressors. As a result, any defense of Israel is framed as siding with oppression. (As has been the case so many times before, Jews are just wrong and evil and will therefore be condemned regardless of what they do.)
Again, think about it. How many times on Tumblr have you seen a reasoned defense of Israel and the response from the tankies is something along the lines of 'you're lying and defending genocide?'
The victim-oppressor lens simplifies the complex, long-term Israel-Arab conflict into a grotesquely, dishonestly simplified morality play with a powerful villain and a powerless victim.
That's why kids who claim to care about justice do shit like this:
Understanding how they got like this is just the first step.
The next question is:
Can they be de-programmed?
Thoughts?
@knicrow writes in the comments:
@knicrow seems to accidentally demonstrate my thesis.
Israel's casting as "the powerful oppressor" in this case is not simply due to social categorization...
My thesis is not that groups or nations are inaccurately labeled "powerful." I wrote nothing like that. If you're writing in good faith (which I presume), this is a reading comprehension issue on your end and I urge you to read it again.
My thesis was that this worldview requires morally judging all groups/nations as either oppressor or victim without consistent moral standards, without looking at intent, without evaluation of actions. And that's exactly what you're doing. You're defining Victim and Oppressor based on capability.
...it is due to the fact that Israel's resources, funding, and support are miles beyond what the group that they are attacking could hope to garner...
@amarytha does this too, citing the "...insane imbalance of power."
You're both right that Israel has built the most powerful military capability in the region, an improbably enviable economy despite scarce natural resources, and cultivated international alliance with one of the world's great powers.
No honest and informed person denies the massive power differential between Israel and Hamas.
But you're both suggesting it is this power differential which makes Israel the villain. Instead of applying any consistent moral principle, you're defaulting to the exact same dynamic my thesis describes.
This framing, this bias has seeped into your minds more deeply than you realize. Look at the language you employ:
...it is due to the fact that Israel's resources, funding, and support are miles beyond what the group that they [Israel] are attacking could hope to garner...[and that Hamas]...is incapable of retaliating in a comparable manner.
Israel didn't attack, and Hamas' role isn't that of retaliation.
I don't know how many more times this needs to be said, but it's at least once more:
Hamas started this war by invading and attacking Israel, murdering Israeli civilians, and promising to do it again and again.
You probably already knew this, but that didn't stop you from framing Israel as the aggressor/instigator...despite the naked falsity of that framing.
Please ask yourself why that is. I'm not calling you a liar, I'm assuming your biases are unconscious and I'm asking you to honestly, privately, sincerely examine them.
You're not alone in falsely framing Israel, which was attacked on seven fronts and has never started a war.
@amarytha wrote:
...how is that supposed to justify the State of Israel essentially carpet bombing the gaza strip in the 21st century?
Again, this is factually, provably false.
@amarytha has not studied wars of the past and does not know what carpet bombing is. Most likely, they are deploying a term they don't understand because Amnesty International accused Israel of carpet bombing.
Carpet bombing (also known as saturation bombing) is indiscriminate, wide-area bombing using large numbers of unguided bombs and aimed at destroying entire areas regardless of specific military targets. It is often associated with WWII (think Dresden or Tokyo) or the Vietnam War.
That's factually not what the IDF has done in Gaza. The IDF has had specific, legitimate military targets (Yes, international law says that hiding weapons and combatants in/under hospitals makes them legitimate targets) which it has struck using guided, precision munitions. The IDF has done more to minimize civilian casualties than any military in history and you won't find a single military historian or scholar of war who disagrees, because these are facts.
The best evidence that the IDF has not engaged in carpet bombing is pretty obvious.
If Israel had been carpet bombing Gaza, there would be no Gazans alive in the strip. That would be a genocide.
War is fucking horrible. Every war is fucking horrible.
Every Palestinian child killed is a tragedy, every Palestinian child is worth as much as an Israeli child. Children and other innocents always die in wars, which is why wise people don't start them unless they must.
It is a tragedy of historical proportions that Hamas started this one, but it is a war and innocents die in wars.
Hamas took billions in foreign aid and, instead of using it to building the infrastructure to improve the lives of Gazans or prepare for declaring statehood, they used it to make their leaders in Qatar (and now Turkey) rich and to build 450 miles of tunnels under schools and hospitals for the explicit purpose of maximizing civilian casualties. Then they invaded Israel, murdered everyone they could, and promised to do it again and again.
Hamas targeted civilians. Israel tries to spare civilians in its efforts to end the threat of Hamas.
Despite that, @knicrow and @amarytha frame Hamas as victims and Israel as an oppressor.
I'm imploring them to take some quiet, private time to ask themselves these questions:
1. By what moral principle do I regard Israel as evil aggressor and Gazans as innocent victims?
2. Do I honestly believe that any nation in Israel's circumstances would tolerate Hamas' continued existence?
3. If a government is responsible for protecting its citizens from being murdered by a neighboring people, what should Israel have done about Hamas?
----
Once again, you're not disputing my thesis, you're demonstrating it. You're saying that because Israel is more powerful, Israel is morally wrong. That's not ethics or morality. That's you having internalized the very framing you claim to agree is ridiculous...until it is applied to Israel.
Since you've never studied ethics, I urge you to start with James Rachels' The Elements of Moral Philosophy, available to you at no charge here. It's one of the most commonly used texts for undergrad Ethics 101.
Morality, says Rachels, should be based on reason, impartiality, and the weighing of relevant facts, not merely on power dynamics.
Rather than looking at relative strength, look at the nature of actions, intentions, and consequences.
Rachels also stresses that impartiality is a core moral principle and that the interests of all parties should be considered equally unless there is a morally relevant difference.
Being stronger is not a morally relevant difference.
If Israel uses its power to avoid civilian harm while Hamas deliberately targets civilians and embeds military assets in civilian areas, an impartial moral analysis would not assign blame based on who is stronger but on who violates moral norms in actions, intentions, and consequences.
Please: Get off social media now and then and read a book.
