you know who we need to hold israel (defence forces and govt) accountable to do better for? the people. israel. who are more than a genocidal, lying government. yes the apartheid state has been around less than a century. but jews have been around for millennia. descendants of abraham, isaac and jacob have been around for millennia. legend has it the name of israel and 'israelites' as a synonym for 'hebrews' and 'jews' ever since this guy called jacob fought God like 4, 5 thousand years ago. imagine what our ancestors would think. these fathers (and mothers, do i need to talk about sarah and rebekah and rachel and leah?) of israelis and (many) palestinians and other europeans like myself with vaguely jewish descent. don't they deserve to have their name taken back from being something that's used as a force of evil? what about citizens convinced that yes, this is bad, they just want the 'war' to be over but think 'free palestine' means their own death and displacement because that's what they've been told? because after 70 years that's the only thing they can imagine is being called for, because it's what their government, if they were palestine, would do? don't they deserve to have a vision of peace that's beyond their wildest imaginings?
such a power-hungry murder-hungry leadership is never elected through the choice of empowered people. humans are better than that. the only way to have something like this kind of pass is to invoke so much fear and so much misinformation that people think it's the best of bad options. that it somehow represents their interest. a whole nation doesn't want this. no nation of people is bad. only the (numerical) minority who are in power are. most people are just scared. and when you're scared, you tend to be misinformed. easy victims of misinformation. it's hard to be the bigger person and to stand up against something wrong when all you're fed is fear. and yet. someone has to. can't we help out with that?
you know, there's some people in Australia who think if our Indigenous people get their way, all people of European and Asian and African and American and wherever else descent will be kicked out or subjugated somehow. treated the way colonisers treated them for centuries. i've met Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander activists who tirelessly spend their time saying this isn't true, they only want peace and reconciliation. they only want to be equal and recognised as such. they shouldn't have to say this. it should be obvious. why do (usually white) people believe this? because it's what colonisers would do. get revenge. it's what the West, largely, would do. somehow deep down even if we don't admit it we know we've been in the wrong. we know justice means to some extent suffering for what our ancestors did. we want that suffering to be minimal. it looks bad from an ethics standpoint. terrible, even. but we as humans are wired neurobiologically to defend our own safety. it's what keeps us safe and allows us to persist as a species.
so the number one way to convince someone to override someone else's right to that is to make them believe that someone else's right to exist somehow conflicts with theirs. this is never true. it's just a question of logistics. but if your government is set on killing people, it's going to do all it can to make sure you don't revolt and stop it. it's going to minimise its crimes over the years. do you know how easy it is to normalise the mistreatment of another people group until it's hard to notice up close? think of how we've discussed systemic racism. think of, if you're a white person, how in 2020 when we were all at home and you had nothing to do but be on the internet, you realised how you've benefitted from it, without ever wanting for anyone to get hurt or have it harder than you did. just by simply existing in a system designed to favour you, preferably without you ever noticing and therefore going and dismantling it.
yes this genocide is bloody and violent. yes it shocks those who were already horrified at one, two, three, or even a hundred Black murders by those meant to protect us. human life is precious. black lives matter. indigenous lives matter. palestinian lives matter. we know that deep within ourselves, we know that we're one humanity. fear and division don't help anyone. but peace can't be false, no one can be one with their oppressor. palestine needs to be free. don't you remember the story of joseph, favoured by his father, oppressed by his brothers, separated from them for decades and when they reunited, wanting only to be equal to them even after saving their lives and holding a powerful political position? hierarchies get us nowhere. all they do is disempower. feminism is meant to help men, too. it always has been. men, who have a right to be raised as more than oppressors. israelis, who have a right to a proper informed decision not to be complicit in a genocide too. who have a right to a vision of harmony. in Australia we celebrate harmony day on the 21st of march. it's coming up in a few weeks. many different cultures living together. and yet. it's true no colonisers are innocent. it's true many of us aussies are living off the benefits of our ancestors who were that. we're not quite innocent either. but if we left, where would we go? many of us don't have a homeland anymore, or we have so many that we can never truly belong in any of them. and i know it's not the same. our genocide isn't happening now, at least not at the same rate, despite the disparity in health outcomes and incarceration and the occasional murder. most of us aren't doing the murdering and actually want to do better. i don't know what it's like to be living as an israeli in 2024.
but i do look to the west and i see the conditional help they gave to construct israel after the war. to build something that in the wake of another genocide, is told that their empowerment depends on the same power structures that hurt them to begin with and with no power of their own, the west would give it to them in exchange for the power to build them into a military monster and it's easy to forget how to be kind. it doesn't mean you're innocent. but when you have millions of people being funneled down this path--I think we've seen this before. we know that not all germans believed hitler's beliefs or supported him, and those who did, it was largely out of fear for their own lives and holding misinformation about what he was actually getting up to. because germans are not bad people. misguided means that with guidance to do better, they will do better. this is the same for israelis. for jews, because many identify with both. jews aren't bad people! yet some of us were raised to believe so. some of us don't realise how normalised that belief was but when christianity has gotten to run the path it has for the last century or more, had people within it be misguided by the same ideas that tell them to disagree with someone is for them to be a threat to your life, those with more power are going to be the voices we hear and it's going to be polarising. we're going to pick up some harmful beliefs and it's up to us in our relative safety all over the world to be the ones to unpack them.
isn't it easy to, if you believe jews to be monsters, when you offer them 'help' with something, to only imagine the help they want is help to be what you believe they are? isn't it easy to raise to power the few who actually do live out this stereotype? until all the good people, the majority of them, with all their traditions and customs that deserve to be respected and celebrated and allowed to exist and do good, are so suppressed we wonder if they're even there anymore? isn't this a self fulfilling prophecy? this is how you villainise someone. and if you're usamerica right now (again, i'm not referring to you, the people. i know that most of you don't want this) and to a lesser extent other western countries, some greedy self-interest to provide someone you already believe to be no better than this with the means to behave in ways you would never be caught doing (but it's just far away enough that people might not draw the link, and it retains your fragile sense of power) crops up and all of a sudden this is the status quo. all of a sudden this is how the momentum is going, and to stop what you're doing will cause chaos but nothing is as bad as continuing. but you're not ready for the chaos. because you're going to lose the power you have which was never yours to hold to begin with.
free palestine, free the world, meet the needs of the people. create a world where israelis and usamericans and westerners in general aren't automatically complicit in genocide unless we stand against it. create a world where israelis are free to be good because we're not backing them into a corner of propaganda believing this is who they are and they are no better than that, so they better allow their government to do this in order that they survive. believe that jews can be good. it's about time. believe that usamericans can be good too but that we need to unpack the power dynamics of the world and work at unraveling the threads of colonialism and healing the hurt to the nations. many of us have generational trauma due to it and will continue to do so. make the economic argument if you have to, for we know the price of mental health care now in 2024 and we know how to sustain the capacity of our healthcare systems, not max them out. we need a lot of trauma informed care. and that means that we can learn to process what we've been through and not turn around and let out that repressed hurt to hurt someone else, someone we believe will hurt us and maybe isn't quite human. chances are they're just as human as anyone. sometimes trauma gives you paranoia, even if it's your ancestors' and not yours. the holocaust is still a living memory for many today. through years when mental health care was stigmatised, its need never went away. hurt simply festered. we've got the resources to do better now and the very first step is a ceasefire. followed by a vision. of harmony where no one's rights are taken away, where everyone has the right to a feeling of autonomy but theirs doesn't take that right away from anyone else. it is possible but we're going to have to think differently. we're going to have to see people as people rather than perpetrators of sins that often aren't theirs specifically but belong to those associated with them willingly or unwillingly. we're going to have to realise that being capable of doing better isn't the same as being completely innocent, and in that raising the moral bar higher than we can handle simply removes the hope that we desperately need: that misguided and scared people who don't stand up to Every Wrong Thing can do better. that they need investment, not villainisation, especially if they've been victims of oppression themselves in the past--we can't sweep this under the rug. we ourselves are them. and we have to believe we can do better too.
