Apologists and Abolitionists
Avoiding the lesser-evilism trap
Introduction
I’ve been engaging with other readers and authors in the comments section of various articles about the Israeli military siege on Gaza these past few weeks. Attempting to ‘change minds’ on the internet is mostly a fool’s errand, especially due to the fact that a lot of content comes from sources not engaging in good faith like trolls, provocateurs, paid propagandists etc. I realize you’re never going to change the minds of Joseph Goebbels or his agents. You’re probably not going to change the mind of that AI bot either.
But, it is a way to interact with others, find new people to follow, argue with prepubescent teens who’ve just discovered Ayn Rand, and collect examples of a wide range of thought; from the enlightened, to the amusing, to the clinically insane.
While trawling the comments section a few days ago, I engaged with an author that sent me a link to one of their articles:
My rebuttal to this article (and the ideas/sentiments it contains) is far too long for a comment. Besides, comments get buried under others and very few people end up reading them. I think its important for other readers to understand the danger of the way of thinking that this article represents, so I’ve decided to flesh my thoughts out into a full-length article to share freely with others.
Power and Oppression
The gist of the article — as far as I understand it — is that the author takes issue with anyone who criticizes Israel or expresses support for Palestinians. These people are misguided leftists just whining about things like oppression and colonization and genocide where none actually exists. They’re hating on Israel simply because it is powerful, and mistakenly think Palestinians are oppressed. They’re ‘siding’ with Hamas and advocating for atrocities against Jews.
I’ve been interacting with a few Hamas apologists online lately. They mean well but have developed a sophisticated justification for why it’s ok to rape, kill, torture, and burn Jews.
The article also gets into pedantry over certain words, terms and labels, and explains away those who might be concerned about Palestinians as being excessively ‘woke’. Here’s an example:
I have found that the Oppression-Oriented New Left (what some call “woke” people) are just that: fixated on oppression. In their minds, whoever has the upper hand is wrong, and whoever is struggling is right. If oppression is in the mix, it literally does not matter (much) if they just burned a few kids alive.
True, power alone doesn’t make you bad, but entities with power all too often use this ‘upper hand’ to do bad things. Power is often an enabler of negative tendencies that would otherwise be suppressed. A power imbalance enables the stronger side to act with impunity, largely shielded from the consequences or repercussions of their actions.
If you’ve had the misfortune of driving or being a pedestrian in the US, you might have noticed that while not all people who drive trucks are a**holes, there sure seem to be a lot of drivers who act like a**holes while driving trucks. I think the same is true with power. The power itself isn’t the issue, but rather how one wields it, like a weapon. What is the weapon being used for?
Is it enabling tyranny, or defending against it? Or more cynically: Is it enabling tyranny while its possessor claims to be defending against it?
How was this power or ‘upper hand’ gained in the first place? How is it being used now? Simply dismissing away criticisms of those with power because they have power seems conveniently to their benefit. If power truly doesn’t matter, then why cling to it as they do?
Who’s on the receiving end of the power? What are their grievances? Are any of these valid?
Another excerpt from the article:
For whatever reason, strange academese terms such as “settler-colonialist” and “power differential” and “oppressor/oppressed binary” are now common terms used by regular schoolteachers, commentators, and others in the Oppression-oriented New Left.
I wonder if slaves had any thoughts on power, oppressors and those oppressed. Or, the Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto during German occupation in WWII. Or the Palestinians.
Apparently, taking the time to ponder any of these questions is too academic for those like this author, who swat them away by calling it ‘academese’ and ‘woke’ and complaining about the use of terms like ‘settler-colonialist’ which describe very real things relevant to this conflict.
In fact, they stand in defense of the very settler-colonialist empire they claim is no such thing, while haranguing those who do not with sanctimonious lectures and nonsensical labels like: “oppression-oriented new leftist” (whatever that means).
An Example From History
Here’s an account detailing a slave rebellion that occurred in the United States while slavery was still legal in many parts of the country:
In the early hours of August 22, 1831, a slave named Nat Turner led more than fifty followers in a bloody revolt in Southampton, Virginia, killing nearly 60 white people, mostly women and children. The local authorities stopped the uprising by dawn the next day. They captured or killed most of the insurgents, although Turner himself managed to avoid capture for sixty days.
Even though Turner and his followers had been stopped, panic spread across the region. In the days following the attack, 3000 soldiers, militia men, and vigilantes killed more than one hundred suspected rebels.
Nat Turner’s rebellion led to the passage of a series of new laws. The Virginia legislature actually debated ending slavery, but chose instead to impose additional restrictions and harsher penalties on the activities of both enslaved and free African Americans. Other slave states followed suit, restricting the rights of free and enslaved blacks to gather in groups, travel, preach, and learn to read and write.
Now, imagine that you are alive in 1831. What would you do?
- Option A: Express remorse and shock at the brutality of the slave rebellion, but point out that the fundamental issue is the institution of slavery itself. Your fight is not against individual slave-owners or the plantations, but the policies of the state which allow and protect slavery in the first place. You see this as the root cause of the conflict between owner and slave. You are opposed to the new laws enacted in Virginia and take up the cause of abolition with renewed vigor. You understand that it is slavery as a state-protected and state-sponsored institution that must be defeated. That must be the focus rather than violent reprisals and executions of rebelling slaves.
- Option B: Express support for the slave rebellion. Assist or defend them in plotting and carrying out violent attacks against plantation owners, slave masters, and their families.
- Option C: Express unwavering support for the institution of slavery, and emphatic support for the use of force to suppress the rebellion and to hunt down and kill/capture all involved. You argue passionately for Virginia to preserve and protect slavery and lobby for additional restrictions and penalties for Blacks. Your battle cry is: “Law and order must be preserved!”. You believe slave-owners have a right to own slaves as property, and the right to use force against them should they rebel, disobey or attempt to flee.
It’s easy to say now with nearly 200 years of hindsight that you would have picked the correct option: ‘A’.
It’s always easy to side with the winners of history after the fact. Making the correct decision as history is being written is more difficult, especially when that involves swimming upstream against the status quo and challenging the existing structures of power.
The truth is, there were many that picked ‘C’ at the time. They used the violence of ‘B’ to justify ever-increasing brutality and oppression of Blacks. They accused ‘A’ of supporting ‘B’. They made impassioned speeches using all kinds of strange mental acrobatics to defend the indefensible. They claimed that slaves were better off as slaves, or couldn’t be trusted with freedom due to their savagery, ignorance and illiteracy (never mind the fact that those in power saw to it that laws were passed making the education of slaves illegal). They claimed that owning slaves was a god-given right, and used biblical arguments to back this up. They wrote op-ed pieces in papers, attempting to curry favor with the public increasingly rejecting slavery on moral grounds.
They were a motivated, determined bunch as they represented those that held the power and knew it was theirs to lose if public sentiment turned against the system that enriched them.
When they couldn’t win the argument in defense of slavery on moral grounds, they resorted to arguments of ‘pragmatism’, reluctantly admitting that while slavery wasn’t perfect, it was preferable to the chaos that would result from emancipation. It’s just what people were used to by that point, and it would be too much of a shock to suddenly free all the slaves. Where would they go? Where would they live? They attempted to exploit racism, suggesting that if slaves were freed, this would pave the way for them eventually winning a ‘demographic war’ and taking over the country from Whites.
When that failed, they would just shrug and say things like: “What’s done is done. We can’t go back in time and fix the injustices of the past. No use tilting at windmills. Slavery is here to stay, so you might as well just accept it for what it is.”
Or, they would just flat-out claim that slavery is a righteous institution and that those who opposed it ‘mean well’ but were misguided in their defense of the slaves.
If there was some sort of 1800’s pejorative equivalent of the term ‘woke’, I bet they used it often when referring to abolitionists. Perhaps abolitionists were just, “oppression-oriented new leftists.”
The ideological ancestors of that author would have proudly stood among them, publishing papers and distributing leaflets about how you must support the Confederacy and its right to exist as a slave state. How you must not object to the tactics necessary in crushing the marauding bands of rebelling slaves! If you object, you should check your moral compass and evaluate how you ended up defending Nat Turner’s child-killers.
Parallels
Here are excerpts from more comments published by that author and others (excerpts link to full comment):
Do you notice any similarities between what an 1800’s pro-slavery apologist in the US might have said, and any of these?
The last example is an especially-peculiar analysis. Were white abolitionists just playing a privileged game speaking out against slavery to fill slaves’ heads with false hopes of freedom and ill-fated rebellions?
This is by no means the only author or reader expressing these sorts of sentiments in this debate and my intent is not to single this one author out. I appreciate that they shared their thoughts publicly and wrote the article as it provides a good example of some opinions that are trending at the moment.
It’s important to analyze and study these so we can finally learn from the history that some people are either unaware of, or willfully choose to ignore out of malice.
These ideas are recycled garbage from the past used to justify systemic oppression generations ago.
I don’t think they were very good ideas in the 1800s. Fortunately for humanity, they did not prevail. Neither did the Confederacy, which attempted to build a new country on the basis of slavery which this sort of thought attempted to defend.
The question is: Will they prevail today?
Lesser Evilism
As the saying goes, you can’t kill an idea. So, although the matter of slavery in the US is decided, we must debate these slavery apologists over and over again every time they insist that systemic oppression, apartheid, genocide, or nuking impoverished, starving civilians of a defeated nation is the only way to save the holy empire:
Or, that granting the enslaved freedom would reward the Nat Turners, and that if you object, you are part of a traitorous ‘Fifth Column’ (Oh, and also that they are “personally proud of the ruins in Gaza”) as this “Minister for Social Equality and the Advancement of the Status of Women of Israel” explains in a speech that isn’t the least bit unhinged:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ya-dN9D4Y0E
There are many rhetorical tricks that tyranny apologists use to justify and ‘sell’ their wars to the public. This topic alone merits its own article. However, for the sake of brevity, I’ll highlight just one here: ‘lesser-evilism’.
Lesser-Evilism
This is perhaps the most common and insidious of all their tricks. It’s their favorite game.
Simply put, you have a binary option between two mutually-exclusive options or ‘sides’. Supporting one means you completely condemn the other. Criticizing one means you completely support the other. It’s all or nothing, with no room for nuance.
Most importantly, there are only two options or sides. There is no space in the infinite plane of the universe for any option other than these two. The options set before you are are framed in a way to discourage the mere consideration of any other possibilities outside of those.
Armed with this rhetorical parlor trick, they demand that you take their side, or else you stand with the enemy. Even if you refuse to be badgered into this, they will take whatever you say and mangle it into some sort of comical caricature that ‘proves’ you are in fact a monster.
Interacting with a childish lesser-evilism troll can be pretty obnoxious, which I think is kind of the point. For example, this hypothetical conversation:
“Man, the Cowboys really suck this year.”
“I didn’t know you were a Dolphins fan!”
“I’m not. Who said anything about the Dolphins? I root for the Cowboys but they’re really dropping the ball this season.”
“I knew it! You hate the Cowboys!”
“That’s not what I said”
“But you said they suck.”
“They do. They need to fix a lot of issues this season. For instance: far too many fumbles.”
“Haha Dolphin lover, Dolphin lover, Dolphin lover!”
More seriously, perhaps you say something nuanced like these examples:
- “People react according to the conditions in which they exist and if faced with excessive force or violence, are liable to lash out violently in response.”
- “Attempting to bomb an impoverished population into oblivion might not endear them to your cause.”
- “I don’t think the Republicans or the Democrats represent my best interests.”
- “This war my government is telling me to fight is unjust.”
- “I think slavery is the fundamental issue, and that we should abolish that instead of engaging in endless suppression of violent slave revolts.”
Uh oh. None of those are the one right answer (according to them). Now they will distort your answer to make it fit into their mold, call you ‘woke’ and declare victory.
According to them, you now are the foremost advocate for child murder, and wish more planes had been used in 9/11. Since you won’t stand with them in defending the slave empire, you are now responsible for all the deaths from the rebellions.
Of course, they’re not responsible for the empire’s bombing of civilians. That can conveniently be labeled ‘collateral damage’, none of which they’re responsible for.
But you? You are aiding and abetting slaves, or terrorists!
Having no way to really justify slavery, the slavery apologist attempts to shift focus on the violence of the slaves, all of which you are now accountable for as an abolitionist!
Their logic becomes: “Slavery is OK because the slaves murdered innocent people.”
Their demand is: “Slavery is better than the dead families of plantation owners, so you must support it!”
Violent Slaves Do Not Justify Slavery
Of course power matters, and of course oppressors are able to oppress because they hold it all and the slave holds none. The slave does not have the power to make the laws of the slave state by which he’s bound. The indigenous forced off their land by a settler military power does not have the power or representation in the settler’s government to sway or halt the settler expansion. The Palestinians who were forced off their land during the Nakba and became refugees had no say or vote in the matter. They are left few options other than terrorism, rebellion or revolution. Many oppressed people resort to violence, as I explain in this linked comment.
Despite Nat Turner’s rebellion resulting in the slaying of innocent children, the institution of slavery was still wrong and needed to be abolished. If slaves had murdered thousands of children, that would be horrific. But, it would not fundamentally change the fact that slavery is wrong. There is no ‘magic’ threshold of dead plantation owners that would suddenly justify the institution of slavery or racist segregation.
I’m sure slavery apologist screamed things like, “Quit supporting child murderers” at abolitionists in the 1800s. Today we have modern apologists for a murderous apartheid state responding to criticisms with, “Why do you support Hamas baby killers?”
Understanding why oppressed people under the thumb of an invader, or occupier, or being ethnically cleansed might lash out in violence in desperation does not mean you support or encourage it. In fact, we want it to end! Abolitionists understood that ending the institution of state-sanctioned chattel slavery was the only way to address and fix the root cause of slave rebellions.
It’s the apologists for slavery, or empire, or apartheid that are defending tyrannical systems that can only foment more violence, not peace.
If you destroy a man’s home and kill his family in a drone strike, he might not be peaceful about it. Is it wrong for him to retaliate in violence against other innocent people, even if he thinks he is justified in killing the children of his enemy as they have his? I would not condone that. But one thing is certain: it’s a possibility and he has a motive. Though I would not condone it, I would also not be shocked.
It’s amazing how many people are shocked in the West (whether feigned or genuine) at the fact that bombing people and killing their families makes them really really angry, even if they are tallied as ‘collateral damage’. That is little consolation to the parent who just lost a child.
It’s Really Not All That Bad
Apologists wish to distract from the fundamental fact that slavery or imperial wars of conquest, or forcefully displacing people to take land are wrong. They know they don’t have great arguments in defense of the Nakba, or the Trail of Tears. So instead, they focus on spreading fear of the savagery of those they intend to keep forcefully subjugated, or to bomb. They focus on dehumanizing the oppressed, and exploiting terrorism to justify their annihilation.
Damn any man who sympathizes with Indians! . . . . I have come to kill Indians, and believe it is right and honorable to use any means under God’s heaven to kill Indians. — Col. John Milton Chivington, U.S. Army
They distract from the morality of the fundamental issue (i.e. slavery, imperialism, colonialism) by attempting to establish morality based on percentage rates of collateral damage in military actions compared to the percentage of deaths caused by terrorist attacks or Indigenous reprisals against settlers, or slave rebellions. They attempt to explain how this really isn’t all that bad:
If you just shuffle the numbers around in a certain way, this is actually a really good thing according to them, or at least the best possible outcome, according to masterpieces in absurdity such as this:
Here’s another example from the original article attempting to explain how none of this is really anything to worry about:
To be clear, “genocide” means killing off an entire people. There are 2.2 million Gazans, 3 million Palestinians in the West Bank, and 1.6 million Palestinians who are full citizens of Israel proper. 10,000 deaths is unbelievably tragic, but a fraction of a percent of the population. Killing six million Jews was genocide. Killing over a million Armenians was genocide. Ranging through the streets of Rawanda hacking Hutus apart with machetes was genocide. Collateral damage when bombing a military target is not.
Also, thousands of deaths in intense urban warfare is not uncommon or a war crime. Falluja, Germany, ISIS all had similar results. Further, nobody knows how many of these deaths are Hamas fighters. Hamas recruits teens who are technically children, so even if Hamas claims of children killed is correct, we still don’t know much.
The New Left often throws up such nonsense to argue against practices (colonialism, genocide) that do not exist.
Apparently there’s some arbitrary threshold of the number of civilians that must be killed before we are allowed to use the ‘genocide’ word. The death toll in Gaza was 10,000 when this article was published in November 2023. Now (April 2024), it’s estimated to be over 32,000.
I guess we’re not allowed to call something that’s starting to resemble a genocide a genocide until it’s been completed and the final death toll is tallied. Only then, can we compare it against some arbitrary qualifying threshold and determine if we’re allowed to use the word.
I wonder if anyone called the Holocaust a genocide when the Nazis were only a few months into the project and had killed ‘only’ 30,000. Would it have been wrong to speak out about it at that point? Would this author intervene and scold us for throwing that word around prematurely?
This sort of writing conjures up a dystopian mental image in my mind of a group of reporters being led around a war zone by minders reciting Orwellian doublethink in a cheery tone:
Nevermind those — just some graves. This is all just ‘collateral damage’ — so definitely not genocide. Besides, no one really knows much about the actual age or number of dead. Why worry. It’s just Palestinians after all. We don’t know much.
There’s really nothing to see here folks. These are not the atrocities you’re looking for. Let’s keep moving... Oh, and don’t listen to people who say they are — they’re just suffering from the ‘woke’. Just a friendly reminder: colonialism and genocide aren’t real!
Hope you’re enjoying the tour!
Just to be clear: colonialism, slavery, tyranny, oppression, and wars of imperial conquest are very much alive and well today, perhaps more than ever!
This is classic atrocity apologia tripe.
It’s almost as if there’s an intentional campaign afoot by the Zionist apologists to de-humanize the Palestinians. For something that’s not a genocide, it’s starting to tick a lot of boxes, including the propaganda.
Our Options Today
If we apply the slavery analogy to the conflict in Israel, how do the options line up? What are the options today? The way I see it, it’s something like this:
- Option A: Express horror and shock at the brutality of Hamas and sympathy for the victims, but also point out that the fundamental issue at hand is imperialism, especially US Imperialism that uses Israel as a vassal or client state to maintain a foothold and base from which to project power and manage its interests in the region. Powerful ruling class interests in the US coordinate with the ruling class of Israel to exploit the people and resources of the region for their own gain. This includes Palestinians and Israelis. Though Palestinians suffer the most and face the more extreme oppression, Israelis suffer too. The average citizen of Israel has more in common with the average Palestinian, than either does with their ruling class. The average Americans has more in common with the average Palestinian and Israeli than they do with their own ruling class as well. Both Hamas and the US-backed state of Israel represent a deadlocked spiraling conflict with no end of horror for common people who are drawn into terrorism, victims of terrorism, drafted into the IDF, or killed by IDF bombs.
- Option B: Express support for Hamas and violent Palestinian ‘resistance’. This is somewhat akin to the slave rebellions. Their tactics of terrorism against Israeli civilians are fueled by rage and desperation. However, just as violent slave rebellions accomplished little on their own besides giving the state an excuse to bear down even harder in their oppression of Blacks, terrorism against Israeli civilians accomplishes little more than exacerbating the conflict. It provides Israel with an excuse to engage in increasingly catastrophic reprisals, ethnic cleansing, and forced displacement against them.
- Option C: Become an ardent apologist for the Israeli Zionist ruling class and their US backers. Lobby for increasingly destructive military attacks against Gaza using Hamas and terrorism as a justification. Engage in the dehumanization of Palestinians to justify these increasingly atrocious and wanton military assaults and indiscriminate bombings. Refuse the right of Palestinians to have a state of their own, or to govern themselves. Dehumanize them. Continue to support efforts like settlement building that exacerbates the conflict, and makes peace and reconciliation even more difficult the longer it continues. Insist that the only solution is to completely wipe out terrorism, and consider no other option. If people object, you accuse them of violating Israel’s right to self-defense, picking option ‘B’ and terrorism against Israel. The fault of the conflict rests entirely on Hamas — they’re the ones that attacked Israel on October 7 after all, just like Nat Turner’s slaves. Peace is entirely dependent on Hamas: whether they surrender, release the hostages, stop the terrorist attacks, or are eliminated. Once the problematic savages are dealt with violently, then we will have peace once more! The slaves must stop rebelling and understand their place in our system!
Have you ever pondered how you would react if you were alive in the United States in 1860? Or Germany in 1936? Would you be savvy enough to see through the ruling-class propaganda? Would you realize how the ruling class and those in power were cynically manipulating and dividing those they reigned over using race and religion? Would you speak out against their system?
Or… would you rally around the cause of the Confederacy and participate enthusiastically in the Nuremberg rallies?
Most likely, you’d do then as you’re doing now. 100 years from now, people may look back on 2024 and the conflict in Israel and judge us by what we are choosing now.
Many are continuing the sad, cowardly tradition of choosing ‘C’. Choosing not to swim upstream against the tide of imperialist propaganda and the status quo is the easy way out, though history will likely judge you harshly. We tend to know who these people are, because they are quick to lash out at anyone who refuses to ride off with them and their Confederate flags into the wrong side of history, disgusted with how ‘woke’ the world has become.
A growing number are coming to realize the oppression the Palestinians have endured and sympathize with their plight. They do not fall for the rhetoric that all Palestinians are sub-human animals undeserving of rights or freedom of self-determination as the apologists would have us believe. They correctly see that for what it is: grooming a population to tolerate genocide. Repulsed as they are by this, they might be drawn to option ‘B’ (terrorism) thinking there are no other options.
But, there is another way — option ‘A’. It’s the one the abolitionists pursued in a revolution to end slavery in the United States.
The ruling class at the helm of this conflict really doesn’t care whether you pick ‘B’ or ‘C’. Continual conflict serves their interests (and war profits). Lesser-evilism is their most effective tool to maintain power. It makes people think they’re picking between good and evil when in fact, either serves the ruling class just fine.
Lesser-evilism is like one of those choose your own adventure books, where you kind of feel like you’re getting to decide the ending of the book, but really all the possible outcomes have already been scripted. Regardless of which ‘adventure’ you pick, you’re still just reading the book someone else wrote for you. This particular book is an awful one, always ending in perpetual wars and genocides, no matter which of the 2 paths you pick.
Those that pick option ‘A’ think it’s time to throw this book out (along with the ruling class that wrote it) and write a new one ourselves!
If you think this is impossible, it’s not without precedent. Yet again, we can turn to history for an example.
End the Ruling Class! End the War!
The Bolsheviks in Russia in 1917 turned to option ‘A’ when Russians were forced to engage in the bloody horror of WWI. The Czarist government at the time was allied with Britain and France and fought against Germany and Austria-Hungary. However, the workers, peasants, and soldiers of Russia had no interest in this war of imperial conquest, in which they were sacrificial pawns.
Under the Czarist regime, speaking out against the war was a crime, and so was suggesting peace. Any talk of this immediately labeled you a sympathizer of the enemy, unpatriotic, a German agent, etc. Sound familiar? Yep, it was lesser-evilism brought to you by your local neighborhood imperial apologist (working on behalf of the Czarist regime): “You either support the country and this war as a patriot, or else you aid the German enemy.” You were either for the war, or a traitor.
Fortunately for the Russian working class, the Bolsheviks saw through the lesser-evilism trap and lead a successful revolution that toppled the Czarist regime. A peace was negotiated with Germany. The Russians successfully extricated themselves from the war and off the bloody chessboard of imperial conquest the Czar was sacrificing them on.
Option ‘B’ would get them shot for treason (or dead as a soldier fighting for a different side). Option ‘C’ would have kept them embroiled in the war in the name of chauvinistic patriotism which only served the interests of the Czar and the ruling class. Option ‘A’ — revolution — is what got them out of the human meat-grinder of WWI.
As with slavery, the real solution was to abolish a system — in this case the Czarist Monarchy — not merely stay stuck in its endless conflict and oppression.
Something similar is possible in Israel. This conflict is being driven by the forces of imperialism, as evidenced by the United State’s political, financial and military backing and support of Israel. This is an arrangement that benefits the ruling class in many countries, but the working class of none. It certainly doesn’t benefit the Palestinians either.
Americans have a large role to play in this, due to the US government being the most powerful empire in the world. If workers in the United States began organizing to challenge their own ruling class and its enabling of the carnage in Gaza, this would perhaps be the most significant thing to happen in this conflict for decades. Workers could stop the flow of arms and bombs to Israel and turn those efforts to humanitarian aid instead. This would have an immediate effect in alleviating the suffering of the people of Gaza. Working class Americans have more in common with Palestinians than they do their own ruling class, or that of Israel. It’s not in Americans’ interest to spend billions of dollars of the money they earn to arm a tyrannical regime engaged in siege warfare, ethnic cleansing, and forced displacement of people within its borders.
The ruling class of Israel is divorced from the interest of the working class of Israel too. Prior to October 7, Israel witnessed some of the largest demonstrations in its history in protest of Netenyahu’s government. The public is angry at the Israeli government for the way it is handling the military assault on Gaza, and prioritizing eliminating Hamas over rescuing hostages. Discontent is rising. The hostages’ families are furious, protesting and lashing out at various government officials.
Apologists point out constantly that Hamas uses “it’s own people” as human shields. However, the Israeli government does the same to its own citizens, albeit in more a abstract sense, as I explain in this linked comment.
The ruling class of the US, Israel, and the world use all of us as shields and pawns to secure their own interests and in their terrible wars of greed and conquest. Their interests lie in holding power and accruing wealth, not ending wars that the working class are made to fight in. In fact, war is terribly profitable for them. This is why they do not care if you pick ‘B’ or ‘C’ — just as long as you don’t pick ‘A’. Ultimately we all lose while the ruling class sits safely out of range and in comfort, managing their fat portfolios.
Empire apologists enable a vicious cycle of violence with terrorists that sends people off to war. The increase in terrorism worsens the security situation for people all around the world — particularly Americans and Israelis. The terror attacks are used to justify ever more violent reprisals against the Palestinians who are incurring the dearest price of all. Around and around it goes.
Final Test
In the original article, the author asks:
So both groups [Israel/Palestinians] have crimes and bad behavior to answer for. Which side should we be on?
This is the wrong question, though there’s a partial truth contained within in it about “both groups”. The two groups however, are what the author would rather have us ignore: the oppressor, and the oppressed.
The oppressor is the ruling class. The oppressed are the rest of us. “Crimes and bad behavior” stem from the crises created by the capitalism and imperialism of the ruling class (like slavery and apartheid).
With that in mind — and with all we’ve learned from history — let’s now ask the right question:
The ruling class is profiting from endless imperialist wars at our expense. Which side should we be on?
Our side! The side of the working class! The only side that can replace the ruling class system of endless imperialistic wars and occupations.
Through revolution, we can overrule the ruling class and establish a peace that does not sacrifice us on the altar of capital gains.
