In any violent conflict between groups of people, it’s easy to share emotionally evocative anecdotes which are so horrifying that they paint the perpetrators of those atrocities as categorically evil. But this is the logic of zooming in on the devastating effects of one punch during a fistfight without ever asking why the fight is occurring. It’s also a frustrating truth about human psychology that if someone is exposed to one emotionally evocative atrocity first, then they are very likely to form an opinion based on that which is incredibly resistant to changing based on emergent context. From this, we can see that emotions are a terrible metric of ethics and politics, because they’re so easily manipulated. Whoever decides what we’re exposed to first has the ability to control our politics, regardless of what context or even overwhelming counterpoints emerge later on. Most people feel that those who hold opposite views to their own have been emotionally swayed in this way, and we are all susceptible. Especially when there is emotionally evocative content on each side of a conflict, this means that we can write off the other side as having been emotionally swayed.
I am just as susceptible to this as anyone else, none of us are exempt and all of us have been heavily swayed already. This is why Chomsky said that: “Citizens of the democratic societies should undertake a course of intellectual self-defense to protect themselves from manipulation and control,” a statement that inspired this delightful book, titled: “A Short Course in Intellectual Self-Defense” by Normand Baillargeon, which Chomsky endorses and recommends. Anyway, as someone whose perspectives on the country of Israel have spanned the full spectrum at different times in my life, this is my best attempt to share some of the facts about Israel which shape my beliefs today, beyond the emotionally charged rhetoric. For me, the picture that these facts paint in conjunction is far greater than the sum of their individual parts. I can be guilty of hyperbole from time to time, and I’m doing my best to stick to things which are objectively true, and which anyone who likes can go verify.
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The concept of Zionism was born in the late 1800s, and a man named Theodor Herzl is widely called the Father of Zionism. Herzl and the early Zionisits considered many possibilities for where to put the new country of Israel, including Argentina, Kenya, Mozambique, a few others, and Palestine. They discussed how each location had different pros and cons, Argentina had more arable land, a more hospitable climate, more distance from their enemies, and less oversight from European powers. They openly discussed how they would eradicate the indigenous population of each country, and the challenges that they would face in each location. Herzl wrote about this, it’s all verifiable by his own hand. The primary reason they settled on Palestine, despite it’s challenges, was that they wanted a purely Jewish state. This meant that they’d have to commit an ethnic cleansing wherever they went, they were explicitly copying the US model. But by the late 1800s, a lot of people in colonial countries were starting to talk about how that might be unethical, so they needed a bulletproof justification, and the history of Jewish people on that land gave them a ready-made excuse for their pre-planned genocide, again, Hertzl and friends were crystal clear about all this, you can go read it from him, if you have the stomach. From this, we can see that the explicitly colonial project of Israel is not, and never was, about the land that it is currently occupying. All of the arguments about how that land is their by right and they can’t live anywhere else are, by this one fact, exposed as being pure propaganda.
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The second salient fact here is that while the specific numbers vary by study, no one debates the fact that the overwhelming majority of Israelis have virtually zero blood from that region of the world. Most Israelis, especially in the settlements, are from suburbs of New York, or Russia, or any number of other places, and the handful that have any genetics from that region have like 5%. Statistically, they’re just white people from Jersey who Israel paid to come steal some Palestinians’ houses. Zionists have ready-made defenses for the implications of this fact, they’ll say that it’s the result of the horrors that Jewish people suffered, and they’re rebuilding their communities, and that blood quantum is not the only measure of identity- all things that sound valid, and have meaning. It’s very true that blood quantum is far from the only measure of identity, and a hyperfocus on blood quantum is inherently genocidal, as we see with indigenous populations in the US relative to the legal system that requires people to have one quarter indigenous blood to qualify legally as indigenous. So without the fact that Zionism considered Argentina, these arguments might have some merit. But when we know they considered Argentina, and specifically selected Palestine for the propaganda to excuse the genocide that they always planned on committing, then the fact that they recruit millions of people who have zero ancestry in the region to come steal Palestinian’s homes starts to look less like healthy cultural regeneration and more like intentional weaponization of paid settlers to steal land from the indigenous people. Because the overwhelming majority of Palestinians have genetics from that land going back millennia. So while yes, blood quantum is not the whole story, it would be absurd to ignore the fact that a population which is like 95% genetically foreign is intentionally displacing a population which is like 95% genetically native. Again, depending on what study you look at there’s a decent margin of error on those specific numbers, but no one debates the clear trend.
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The next fact that bears remembering here is this: at the moment, over 12% of the trade that happens on the face of the planet annually goes through the Suez Canal, which is part of Egypt. It’s here, and you may remember when a ship named the Ever Given got stuck in it and shut down 12 percent of global trade for a while.
This means that for the US and Israel to engage in trade north of Africa, they have to be on at least civil trade terms with Egypt, which is an overwhelmingly Muslim country, and solidly part of the Arab Bloc. This prevents the US and Israel from engaging in military and economic ways that would lead Egypt to bar them from trading through the Suez. Bear in mind, Egypt makes a lot of money on that trade, so they’ll put up with a lot, but it’s still true that if the US were to piss Egypt off enough, they have the power to shut down access. For a long time, Israel has wanted it’s own canal. There’s a whole plan for this, it’s called the Ben Gurion Canal. Ben Gurion is widely remembered as the founder of the country of Israel, and he made detailed plans for the complete military expulsion of all Palestinains, and implemented a lot of those plans, as Israel’s Defense Minister. So the fact that he’s a widely celebrated historical figure looks very similar to how Columbus is hailed as a hero in the US, after writing and implementing a genocide. If you look at a map, the logical place for the Ben Gurion Canal to hit the Mediterranean Sea is a little strip of land right here,
called Gaza. The Ben Gurion Canal would have a lot of effects. It would allow the US and Israel to trade outside the control of the Arab Bloc, freeing them from the annoying little constraint that they had against far more aggressive military actions in the middle east. Ecologists also say that it would salinate the entire surrounding aquifer and land base, literally salting the earth, killing the entire ecosystem while making it impossible to grow crops or drink the water, but that is such a small, trivial fact that it hardly bears mentioning, right? The point is that the financial benefits to the US and Israel would be nearly incalculable. Some people believe that this is one of the reasons that the US continues to hand Israel blank checks- the Ben Gurion Canal would allow them to simply take all the oil in the Middle East without any fear of economic reprisal in the form of limitations on trade, and that’s not to mention the money they’d save in not needing to pay Egypt for every shipping container they wanted to move north of Africa.
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The fourth fact is this: Every single Israeli has free health care, free education including college, and free child care. Everything, from dental work to having someone to watch your kids, is free in Israel- and it’s all paid for by the USA. If a US citizen wants some actual support from their government, the best way to get it is to move to Israel. All it will cost you is your soul, and potentially the impacts of being dragged by a genocidal government into a regional war against nuclear powers. So when politicians in the US ask how we would pay for health care, just remember that they are more than happy to pay for not just health care, but college and even child care- for Israelis, with your money. Every IDF member who is wounded as they commit genocide is tended with US tax dollars. But this is just one facet of this fact. The other facet is this- Israel has materially supported every genocide on the face of the planet for the last fifty years. They are currently selling weapons to Russia for Russia to use in Ukraine. The US gave Israel those weapons, and Israel is selling them to Russia. And this is just the tip of the iceberg. From their direct support of the atrocities happening in Sudan today, to their support for China’s ethnic cleansing of the Uighur Muslims, to Ethiopia’s genocide, to the Juntas in Argentina- Isreal has armed the perpetrators of most of the human rights violations on the planet, with US aid. The US it’s self arms many perpetrators of human rights violations directly, first and foremost Israel, but then it gives Israel so much money and so many weapons that Israel acts as a bargain bin for dictators and tyrants worldwide. If you want to take the lives of a few million innocent people but you can’t afford the weaponry to do it, look no further than Israel. Since it’s all free for them thanks to US tax payers, they’ll give you amazing deals on weapons of mass destruction beyond your wildest dreams!
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The fifth point I want to make is not factual, it’s ethical. Because it’s about ethics, but I’ll leave it up to you, with a hypothetical. If someone drive by your home and shot into your window, what would you do? The first thing I’d do is call the police. But imagine the police do nothing, and the next night, the same person does it again. Still, the police do nothing. Every night, the same person drives by and shoots at your family- you’re losing family members daily, and the police refuse to intervene. Very quickly, I would take up arms and defend my family. This metaphor carries on a larger scale, there’s sequential steps to ethical resistance. So when people talk about how the Palestinians should engage in peaceful resistance, I agree. The thing they’re missing is this: the Palestinians have. In 2018, Palestinians organized a series of Gandhi-style peaceful protests called the Great March of Return, simply walking up to the barricades, peaceful and unarmed. The IDF simply opened fire, over and over and over again. Just as the Indians knew that the British would do this, the Palestinians knew that the Israelis would do this. But while the world saw India, the world has remained blind to Palestine.
And back to the metaphor, if I were armed and standing in my yard, and someone starting shooting at my family- I would not call the police, I would immediately defend my family, with whatever tools I had available.
Let me ask you another question. Imagine that your family has lived in the same place for tens of thousand of years, and then international government, like the UN, told you that tomorrow, they were giving a third of your land to a group of refugees, and you had to evacuate to make room for them so that they could have your house, what would you do? What if, the very next day, those refugees started leaving the land they’d been given and taking the land you’d been evacuated to? What if, all the while, they daily assaulted everyone in your family, women, children, everyone along the way? What if they took 90% of your state and locked you and your entire community into what human rights organizations called the largest open-air concentration camp on the planet? What if their entire stated goal was to get rid of all of you, all together and take 100% of your land?
Under those circumstances, can you imagine how some people might believe that armed resistance was wholly ethical? Can you imagine how especially once you organized a massive peaceful resistance movement, and the international community did absolutely nothing, then even more people might believe that armed conflict was ethical?
Ok, that’s it for the ethics, back to facts.
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Since the day the UN drew the borders of Israel, in 1947, Israel has been openly and intentionally violating those borders, and stealing land from the Palestinians in violation of both international law and the fundamental principles of human rights. The Palestinians have tried every possible form of resistance, ranging from peaceful to armed, and thus far, nothing has worked. The world has ignored their peaceful protests, and used any armed resistance to excuse the atrocities they’re suffering.
I am older than Hamas, and the same age as Hezbollah. Both of those organizations grew in response to the atrocities of Israel, and any attempt to paint Hamas or Hezbollah as the cause of this conflict is pure propaganda intended to excuse genocide. Yes, Israelis have suffered. But comparing the suffering that the aggressors experience when their victims resist genocide to the suffering the victims experince is to openly support genocide.
Notice that I put that part in the facts section, because it’s not up for debate any more than climate change is. Every single time a reporter says: “Do you condemn Hamas,” they are supporting and excusing genocide. It’s like asking “Do you condemn slave rebellions?” or “Do you condemn a woman who defended herself when she was being attacked by a man?”
If you carry these facts with you, then any emotionally evocative propaganda that you see, from either side, will be grounded in reality. I started with a strong condemnation of emotional politics, and I want to end with a clarification to that. When our politics are shaped by emotions alone, then they are easily manipulated. But once we carry these facts, once we are engaged in healthy intellectual self-defense, then our emotions become central. We should be outraged. We should be far more outraged than we are, and we should allow our outrage to drive us to action which stops Israel, by any means necessary. I believe in the right of self defense. I believe in it in my driveway for my home, I believe in it for Palestine, I believe in it for Lebanon and Iran and Egypt. The only countries at play which don’t have a claim to the right of self defense are the USA and Israel, because they’re not defending themselves, they are the aggressors. I don’t get to attack someone and then claim Self Defense as a cause, that’s not what the words mean. If I wait in a dark ally and then jump on someone screaming “I’m going to take your life and your money!” and then proceed to try, and they break my arm, whose fault is that? If their six friends show up and take my life, whose fault is that? Who did that? Do I get to claim that I was acting in self-defense, or would you laugh at that absurdity? How would you feel about a clip going around that just showed my victim breaking my arm and me screaming, with zero context, as though my victim was a horrible violent person?
I understand that I’m talking about human lives. It must be horrible for the people of Isreal to lose loved ones. It would be horrible for my family if I tried to mug someone and take their life, and they killed me. But the fact that it would be horrible would in no way make it my victim’s fault, and pretending that the conflict is balanced would be to excuse my aggression.
This went longer than I planned, but to recap, here’s the six facts that I think ground any conversation about Israel.
1. Zionism considered many possible locations, and chose Palestine so they had a good excuse for genocide.
2. Most Israelis have virtually zero ancestors from that land, and almost all Palestinians have almost 100% of ancestors from that land.
3. The US and Isreal really want their own canal so that they can commit more atrocities in the middle east without the risk of Egypt barring trade.
4. The US subsidizes the entire Israeli economy, including health care, education, child care, and infinite weaponry which Israel uses to support unspeakable human rights violations around the world.
5. Everyone has the right to defend themselves.
6. Israel has been violating international borders and laws and stealing land from Palestine since the day it was founded, and their explicit goal is a pure Jewish state, which means the eradication of the Palestinian people.