Israel is the ultimate Omelas
I always thought that Israel was a perfect microcosm of the duality of man because on the one hand they had brutal oppression and on the other it had all those brilliant futurists and scientists, and a great healthcare system that had one of the best responses to covid.
It always baffled me how those two things could coexist in the same country. How those brutal stories of oppression and books of revolutionary thought could be coming from the same place.
Now I'm realizing that this kind of makes it the perfect tyranny.
In totalitarian states like the Nazi dictatorship or sovjet communist states, the population was severely oppressed. We associate the Nazis with blind obedience but actually there was an assassination attempt on him every few months or so, 42 in the 12 years he was Dictator. Bastard kept surviving due to bad luck, like a speech being cancelled due to rain or some intern moving the suitcase with the bomb. The Nazis demanded total obedience and would execute people for speaking French or drawing modern art.
Then there is the USA's corporate rule - not as bad as dictatorships maybe, but much of the population is dirt poor and know their options to vote for are largely corporate stooges. They don't have health care, decent education or consumer protection, so they have reasons to resent their taxes being used for war.
But Israel? The population lives in one of the most advanced utopias on earth! There is healthcare, luxury, culture, even relative freedom as long as you don't say "palestine". If you don't go in the westbank, you don't realize what's going on. The insidious trick of what segregation does is that it keeps the oppressed out of sight.
If you really want to be ignorant, you can probably manage to stay that way, comfortably, and live with all the same comforts as Swedes Canadians and Japanese.
The tyranny does not touch you unless you become a soldier or there happens to be a resistance attack near you, and even in those cases, the propaganda machine has comforting answers for you. Or at least, you're told that ending the tyranny means destroying your utopia - if it's you or a stranger, many people will pick themselves their lifestyle and their family.
Of course the big lie here, or the point where the analogy totally breaks down, is that doing away with appartment and giving equal citizen rights to everyone will not actually do away with the world-class universities and hospitals or even safety... indeed you'd be safer if you didn't keep producing angry traumatized people by butchering their families. It's a false dichotomy. A trap that presents the status quo as some lesser evil.
Euro-americans are fine without Jim Crow laws; Germans did not perish without conquerring Poland; Afrikaners are fine without apartheid - indeed the former disenfranchised people are still catching up economically exty years later. There should probably be affirmative action or reparations, once Palestinians get equal rights.
Nationalism is a myth cooked up as recent as the 19th century. Historically there have never been "pure, unmixed" peoples. People mix and trade and emigrate and copy each other, as long as people have been. You are going to have to live with people different from you & share with them. It's ok. The rest of us learned that lesson too (albeit imperfectly and often at a great cost; The EU is not clean-handed at all and is unforgivable fucking up in many ways as we speak) - No one needs ethnostates. No one is entitled to ethnostates - not Germans, not Euro-Americans, not Hindus, not the Japanese, not Israelis. Ethnostates do not make you safe. Moreover: Ethnostates are not practically feasible.
Look at the area slightly east of where I live and all the bloodshed that came from being unable to draw a line so that all Poles are on one side & all Germans on the other. And now there's still Poles living here and not even a real border anymore. If only we could have made the EU straight away instead of having all those wars, displacements & slaughter!
One day in the far future when there is peace ppl will look back at today and ask "why didn't they stop it sooner why all this waste?"
Eventually you're just gonna have to SHARE the god damn country. Like EVERY OTHER COUNTRY on earth that has multiple languages, religions and ethnic groups.
The Rwandans managed to make peace! And in that case there wasn't even a detachment of technology involved, ppl killed their neighbors (and those who refused to participate in the killing) with bare hands and machetes. But it's a prosperous, orderly country now. They opened many malls recetly & had a great response to covid.
It can be done. There's nothing special about the middle east. People there are not uniquely depraved, the region has been stable & prosperous before.
