I can’t make a proper reply to this milquetoast tome because there’s not a single original thought, approach, or perspective here to latch onto. These brain-worm professors publish copypasta of every brain-dead Centrist take on every conflict ever.
Yeah I mean, slavery is wrong and all, but slave revolts are just as bad.
If the woman strikes against the rapist, she’s just as bad as he is.
The genocided are responsible for their disappearance if they fight back.
The truth is, no one actually believes these statements. The most innocuous, pastel-flavored white liberal knows that if someone were attacking them or their family, they would strike back. These kinds of arguments only hold water when we don’t see the put-upon as human, as like ourselves.
But reading these kinds of statements — whether from supposed intellectuals, celebrities, or the Hannah Arendt Center — confronts the notion of Orientalism and Occidentalism. Under overwhelming evidence of televised genocide and ethnic cleansing, these liberals can only BOTH SIDES such flagrant brutality if they intrinsically believe that Palestinians are themselves naturally brutal — only if they see Arabs, Muslims, and specifically Palestinians as fundamentally othered, as different, as weird and animalistic. To them, there is only Here, the Occident, and Over There, the Orient — the imagined place of hordes of uncivilized brutes.
This is the very ethos of racism.
There is no actual evidence for such claims. Palestinians have never turned off Israel’s access to water or raw materials, never shut down Israeli hospitals. Hezbollah never limited calories entering into Israel, let alone starved every Jewish baby, woman, kid, and man in a blockaded area. Hamas never forced Jewish people out of their homes. Palestinians— even the scary Hamas and Hezbollah — have been clear that they do not seek to do to Israelis what Israel has done to them. Despite the rhetoric used against such slogans as “From the river to the sea,” Palestinian freedom does not entail mass slaughter and refugee camps, let alone bombing refugee camps. Hamas never forced the evacuation of Jewish people from their homes only to bomb them in a designated safe area. The PLO nor the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine did not destroy Israel’s agriculture sector, have not bombed Israel’s power
But to hear the Orientalist Liberals tell it, Israel’s crimes are no worse than (if not superior to) Palestinians — even though Palestinians neither hold the power nor the violence. Even though it was the Palestinians not the Israelis who have been mass evicted from their homes at one or the other end of the rifle for roughly 100 years. This is not to say that Jewish people have not shared that fate elsewhere, but that form of antisemitism is largely a European invention brought about during the Holy Wars and heightened during such vile purges as the Inquisition, the Pogroms, and of course the Holocaust. However, this was not at the hand of Palestinians but of Europeans.
There is no justification for this liberal racism any more so than there is for the racism of the Biden administration or of the Republican Party. Nuanced genocide support is still genocide support. It still means that bombs must drop, hunger must rise, families must leave their ancestral homes, then be forced from their lands.
While it is true that most Americans and Europeans are raised to be Orientalist (how else can we believe that the US or France or England are civilized, after all their colonization, capitalism, and slaughter?), it is not an excuse. While it is common for Americans to believe propaganda that declares Israel is merely acting in self-defense, there is only so much bullsh*t we can possibly swallow before giving up our humanity. If you stepped on a face by accident, through no fault of your own, but then looked down, you would be obligated to move your foot and make recompense. At the least, you would help this person up and shake the dirt off, right? Maybe do that thumb thing that moms do to get the smudge of your boot off their face. But you would need to do something if not to make it right then at least to stop the violence that you are enacting on another. That’s basic human decency.
America as a nation-state may have no humanity, but we should.
