Two things can be bad at the same time. For example, Isreal stealing land from Palestinians is bad, and Israel doing a genocide on Palestinians is also bad. Those 2 things are bad at the same time!

I find that, more often that not, the people who say those words will later proceed to disproportionally condemn only one of those things and bother themselves little with the other. "Both China and the US can be bad", they say, and then proceed to spend infinitely more energy and time condemning the former and barely acknowledging the latter. Empty words, nothing more.

"Both sides bad" is how liberals adapt to the cognitive dissonance of personally disliking the idea of killings while living in a society that requires ongoing killings to function. If they really didn't care, it's way easier be a full-throated Zionist in the empire. It's popular, it costs you nothing, and you don't even have to think about it. To acknowledge that the empire requires every death to maintain the imperial standard of living is to completely alienate yourself from the rest of imperial society. Well adjusted people that don't already hate their lives generally aren't in a huge hurry to completely alienate themselves from everyone they know in real life over an issue that only exists on TV for them. Their humanity is in conflict with their class interest, and the adaptation is to focus their attention on the killings that don't put them directly at odds with their imperial peers: You're allowed to cry for the civilians as long as you condemn Hamas. You can criticize Netanyahu as long as you support "Israel's right to defend itself". You can dislike war, police shootings, mass incarceration, and poverty, so long as you pay your taxes and keep voting for people who will keep doing those things.

I do agree with the liberals that it's bad when Hamas kills civilians in their fight against Israeli apartheid, which is why I believe Israel must be destroyed and replaced with a non-apartheid Palestinian state where Jews and Arabs can live together, so civilians stop dying.

The hostage thing is a great example of how liberals start from a conclusion and then find evidence to fit that conclusion: Hamas is bad not only because they killed people but also because they took old women and children hostage, the monsters. Meaning that, even if Hamas had not killed anyone, only taken hostages, they would still side with Israel. I have zero doubts that if Hamas had only kidnapped IDF soldiers libs would still be demanding unequivocal condemnations and talking about Israel's right to defend itself.

"Two things can be true at the same time" has the exact same energy and scent as "neither Washington nor Beijing"-- and I know for a fact no one who's ever said "neither Washington nor Beijing" meant the former part of the line.

Libs downvoting without responding… come on, at least tell us why?

Being bullied by zionists into condemning Hamas is weak shit tbh.

Actual zionist supporters live very ineffective political lives, and the most expression they have is online.

When I first read the post title I thought it was gonna be about Hegelian Dialectics, very good post tho, especially the point about the “kidnappings” and hostage situation

Thank you.

Whataboutism

Thank you for the essay. I learned (or perhaps unlearned) a lot from it, and have more than enough links for further reading.

However.......

I hope that you will eventually find Hamas' line on the issue of state secularity, because "Hamas not secular!!!" honestly has been my biggest, like, liberal brainworm wrt the Palestinian liberation conflict, and the essay didn't manage to fully excise it from my noggin.

So my take on the war basically has been, "Support the PFLP and other explicitly secular leftist/anti-Zionist groups in the region; support the flight of Israeli refugees and their welcoming back to their true homelands around the world; support aid for Palestine, food, medical supplies, psychological support, so forth; support sabotage of Israeli infrastructure and economy; support strikes/resignations and sabotage at foreign weapons and munitions factories supplying Israel; agitate against Zionism; support Jewish and Palestinian communities around the world; etc." — so basically, every way to support the Palestinian cause except direct support for Hamas (which I guess is really just, like, indirect support for Hamas, anyways...)

I have seen comparisons between Palestine now and China under its occupation. Essentially the type of stuff that Lenin wrote about in A Caricature of Marxism & Imperialist Economism, which I recently listened to S4A's audiobook of. That the struggle for national liberation must be fought first before a socialist revolution can take place, and so all groups fighting for national liberation must be supported, including those which are not socialist or secular — that this lays fertile ground for socialist revolution later on. This is how things played out in China: the CPC and KMT fought alongside each other against Japan, and then the CPC fought against the KMT and pushed it to Taiwan.

This feels like a lot to gamble on, though — essentially that after the liberation conflict, there will be another conflict where the folks who we uncritically support will very definitely and certainly win — although... a free Palestine, even under a (")reactionary(") leadership, is still going to be better and more humane than the settler-colonial regime, so... What point am I even trying to make here?

...Honestly, I don't know.

Some final notes:

• Some non-leftists seem to be under the impression that non-Jewish Palestinians want to expel Jews from Palestine, and I do not understand this. Aside from the fact that Palestinians are just not bloodthirsty savages, and that Palestine has always had Jews, and all that... Once the colonial system has been torn down, its last vestige would just be millions of highly skilled and educated immigrants, which is pretty useful to have after a liberation war, right?
• The current war, I've heard, has allowed for more "parallel governance" or however you call it to emerge in the region. That as infrastructure is destroyed and the Israeli government focuses on the war effort, that common people are replacing government services with their own popular ones. I don't know much about this but it was mentioned in connection with anarchism.

I'm also curious about the history of Labor Zionism and of religious and ethnic minorities in the region, in particular Circassians. Can you point me to any good resources about these topics?