#and yes i have heard of ppl lying to the government for example

[credulouscanidae]

why is it whenever the topic of abortion comes up irl the person im talking to immediately brings up abortions georg who gets like 10 abortions in a row like. even if theyre pro choice they still complain about "those crazy women who take advantage of the system" cuz im quite confident saying that someone like that would be so rare that it's not even worth discussion compared to the millions of others who require abortions but cant get them.

idk it just reeks of that mindset of "oh theres people that take advantage of the benefits system by pretending to be disabled" like im sorry but i would rather a thousand people "take advantage" of the system if it meant the system was still there to support the multi-millions of people that need it.

[tornad001]

so i've been thinking about Israel, as one is wont to do following a terrorist attack from Hamas. this post is really not gonna sit well with a lot of my family but i can't sit by and continue to say nothing, to keep my mouth closed. to work under the double standard where they can praise Israel and shit-talk Palestinians freely, knowing Austin and I dont agree, but if i provide any pushback or counter-narratives, I'm the one being loud, pushing an agenda, making things political, causing trouble, etc. They use their connections as Jews with family living in Israel to justify their bad politics, but think me disingenuous when I claim my position is driven by the same connection. theirs is fine, cuz it leads to their politics, but i must be lying or mistaken or i don't really care about them for real or whatever bullshit they say at that time. but im gonna say what i have to say and they're welcome to ignore it if its too much for their political fragility.

there's a phrase i've been really into lately - informed simplicity. the world often gets more complex the more we know about it, and dealing with historical contingency is one of the better examples of this. but i never learned about it growing up. i was taught history as a series of "this group did this thing and that guy did that thing" rather than as a rich tapestry of political struggles and factional infighting and, yes often violence. but while history is complicated, where we're at is at times quite simple. yeah there's endless complexity to delve into the region's literal millennia of history, but thats then and this is now. Israel is wrong. its that simple.

but what makes it simple? it comes back to power and who has the ability to effect change, and in every single meaningful way, Israel has the political power, both locally and internationally, to change things and have intentionally denied Palestinians this political power. Gaza doesn't even have control of its own water supply, food sources, they have no freedom of movement, its the largest population density in the world and its ALL ghettos. meanwhile, the Israeli government has been pushing a project of settler colonialism to try and slowly wrest back control all for itself. take into account Israeli politics, the rise of Jewish Fascism, the frankly outright eliminationist rhetoric, the fact that its been decades now since there was any real push for peace or compromise, and where does that leave Palestinians?

the problem is that Israel has signaled time and again that it is fully committed to the eradication of the Palestinian people. to support this, i direct your attention to my mom and grandma (ill leave grandpa out of this for now) who I have heard with 0 reservations or qualifications say that all arabs could drop dead instantly and that'd be ok by them. and that's unfortunately not a radical position to hold if you poll the Israeli public. its actually outrageous how fucking bloodthirsty they are as a society and how open and honest they are. at least american Nazis have the good sense to not (usually) just outright say they wanna do Holocaust Part II Electric Boogaloo. and when they do, they're shunned by other Nazis for being bad optics. in Israel however that kinda rhetoric is just par for the course, with politicians regularly calling for increasing horrors to be inflicted on the palestinian people with no political consequences for them, they're just allowed to say that.

lemme relay a story i was told by an IDF officer while on birthright. him and his squad were sent to a Palestinian house at 3 am on what he admitted was not solid enough evidence for a warrant. when they got there they knocked, wait no they bashed the door down and rushed in with guns aimed. the family was about 8 ppl, 2 of whom were children. after arresting the 2 adult men, they proceeded to "tear up the place" (again this was his words, not my editorializing). they found nothing to give any indication anything bad was going on, but they still arrested the men "just in case". as they're leaving to go, he sees one of the kids, a young girl around 7 who was torn from her bedroom out of nowhere in the middle of the night and he personally had overturned her entire room, all her belongings. he explained that he had no choice but to step on her stuffed animals to make sure there wasn't anything inside. but he did feel a bit bad about stomping a kids toys right in front of her, and thats when it got wild for me, listening. he starts on about how he had this moral dilemma where he didn't know if he should bend down and clean up some of the room HE just DESTROYED, but came to the conclusion that he couldn't do that, cuz it would expose his back to (again, his words) "the enemy". the enemy here being a little girl, her little brother, and 4 women (cuz they already arrested the men, remember). oh and the 6 women and children here were being held at gunpoint with their hands above their heads, very scary group, i know, you're quivering how could u not. its just... something else to see someone so clearly and repugnantly warped by their hatred and fear of this group of ppl that hes describing an unjust raid on innocent civilians in this way. the paranoia on display was incredible and his inability to understand why the Palestinians might, ya know, HATE him and his ppl for what they've done and continue to do was even more so. thats the kind of brain-rot that this political rhetoric engenders.

lets look a bit at the Jewish Fascism tho, especially in contrast to Christian Fascism in america. just as the problems did not begin with donald trump but have been building in american politics for over half a century, the same is true in Israel. Netanyahu's far-right government isn't a bug, its a feature. The fate of the Israeli far-right has always been tied to the success of radical Islamic jihadis AND THEY KNOW IT. thats why they helped and funded Hamas, along with other extremist groups, and have to this day. because terror justifies and drives people towards reactionary right wing fervor. you have the perfect setup for fascism in terrorism, almost necessarily. its the perfect example of a threat which is everywhere and overpowering, but also weak and ineffectual. cuz terror attacks kill a lot of people and scare even more, but what they don't do is fundamentally challenge the status quo - its political violence that doesn't actually threaten to change anything. its a natural outgroup to other and spread hate about. in the US we usually default to immigrants and queer ppl, but Israel has a built-in "enemy at their doorstep" narrative to call upon

to talk about what actually happened tho, lemme draw a comparison to 9/11. i like to be provocative in saying that "america deserved 9/11" but what do i mean by this? i DONT mean that its good or acceptable for civilians to be hurt in a terror attack or that any individual americans deserved anything that happened that day. however, america caused 9/11 to happen through its foreign policy choices, and so any blood toll from that day, i place on america's head. our reckless disregard for others caused us to engage in geopolitics that all but insured right-wing religious extremists gained power, then we go all shocked pikachu face when Al-Qaeda lashes out in a futile attempt to stick it to American hegemony abroad. and would you look at that, it somehow turned out that the anti-american terrorism actually... helped the then GOP president. right wingers LOVE terrorism cuz they know it engenders rught wing sentiment and grows their political power. i mean does anybody think we would've gotten the prriot act without 9/11? obviously not. and the Israeli right is also aware of this

i think this is where i should address my views on Hamas itself, cuz i don't like them, at all actually. i think they're actually kinda evil, as much as im comfortable using moralizing language like that. but they make sense, politically speaking. when you take away people's hope, u doom yourself as well as them. political doomerism is rampant and it always drives people to radical politics. cuz if you see no possible route for change in the future, why not join hamas? at least they're doing something. the problem tho is that Hamas ISNT a revolutionary group, they're fundamentalist conservative religious extremists. they don't stand for palestinian liberation, they stand for their own power and religious edict, and they don't care who gets hurt in that pursuit, not even their own people. they're authoritarians who regularly abuse their own population to crack down on dissent.

but again, Israel caused Hamas. their blood toll is on Israel's head. and you can spin it whatever way you like, there's only 2 paradigms of solutions - unification or elimination. unification doesn't necessarily mean a 1-state solution, but even a 2-state solution will require unifying your goals and action. the only alternative is elimination in some form or other. its unfortunately clear that Israel has chosen the path of apartheid, ethnic cleansing, and genocide. so no, i dont condone rhe attacks by Hamas, i mourn the dead and those rhat must live on alike. but this moment cannot be about a single terror attack, it has to be about solutions. and there will NEVER be a solution as long as Israel is violating international law so brazenly, defiantly, and with the financial and military backing of the US.

i find it incredible how opposed people can be in one breath to the idea of an ethnostate and then in the next breath they're cluelessly talking about Israel, not even realizing its definitionally an ethnostate. who had the great idea post-WWII, "ya know that whole Aryan ethnostate thing was pretty bad, lets make a safe place for a persecuted minority by giving them their OWN ethnostate (and by give we mean the forcible displacement of a million Palestinians from the land they've held for generations)". some fuckin genius, thats who, obviously.

i don't claim to have a perfect solution. there is no solution i can see that doesn't involve mass immiseration and many people left disappointed. but that doesnt give Israel the right to maintain an apartheid state. its another example of how neoliberal thought processes and a lack of systemic analysis are the death of progress. people look at this terror attack killing a few hundred people and they rapidly clutch their pearls to their chests cuz oh my what a disaster. but the conditions of the 2 million citizens in the gaza strip, that they take as a given, something that just is the way it is and be patient change will come, we promise, dont look at our actual policies and see that we absolutely have no plan of changing anything.

its a pattern of institutionalized pain and suffering being made invisible. think back to the demon in human skin that is Raegan. if any president "killed" as many people as raegan did with the queers suffering with HIV, they'd be put on trial. but his plan wasn't to "kill" them, it was to "let them die" a very different thing indeed. its how the US can justify the millions we killed and displaced in Afghanistan over the 2000 ppl that died in 9/11. oh but speaking of a 9/11's worth of deaths, covid at its peak was killing more people PER DAY than 9/11, but we don't do anything to hold anyone accountable for Trump's mishandling of the pandemic response. his pandemic deaths, Raegan's AIDS deaths, the millions of deaths in Afghanistan, these were all institutionalized, so they're fine.

Israel is the one with the political power to change things, not Hamas, not Gaza, not the Palestinian Authority, and not the palestinian people. any and all blood is on the STATE OF Israel's head and as long as they continue in their eliminationist statecraft, it will continue to be so. Israel's policies will continue to get Jews killed because the more desperate things get for the Palestinians, the more it'll look to people like their only slim hope of change is through the extremism of Hamas. i mean they call the Palestinians terrorists when they do advocacy, peaceful protest, or politically morivated violence, so if the rhetoric about them is the same no matter what they do...? its time to let it go. stop the institutional violence on the Palestinians, give them their human and political rights back, and stop making things worse through your stubborn clinging to fear and hate. and if you dont let those go, then the future terror attacks and tensions are also on your head. the blood of every single jew is on your head as well, and i can only pray its a greater burden than you can bear.