Alternate Reality Israel, And Other Reader Questions

Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley):

Let’s take some more reader questions.

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Freeman asks on Facebook, “I have quite a few friends/people in my life who somehow are against the occupation and genocide while also being for Israel. How would you tactfully explain to them why this is a problem?”

The most culturally consequential fictional fantasy land ever authored is not Oz or Narnia or Middle Earth, but the liberal Zionist creation of Alternate Reality Israel.

In the minds of its authors, Alternate Reality Israel exists in a parallel universe at the geographic location of actual real-life Israel, but never became a genocidal apartheid state. In this fictional timeline, Alternate Reality Israel magically came into existence without the mass murder, ethnic cleansing and land theft which would normally be required for the creation of a brand-new ethnostate dropped on top of a pre-existing civilization. Because of magic, Alternate Reality Israel has not needed to use nonstop violence and tyranny to maintain its existence as a theocratic ethnostate, and has instead been able to exist in peace and harmony with all the populations who were living in the area prior to its creation. The position of the liberal Zionist is therefore not self-contradictory, because the existence of Alternate Reality Israel is not at all incompatible with progressive values.

The problem, of course, is that Alternate Reality Israel does not exist, and has never existed. There is no alternate version of Israel that anyone can point to which does not include genocide, apartheid and abuse. The Zionist experiment has been run, and what we see before us is the one and only result of that experiment. This is it. There are no other timelines to compare and contrast this existing reality with.

So when someone says they are “for Israel” but against Israel’s occupation and genocide, maybe ask them which “Israel” they are referring to. It can’t possibly be the one that exists in this universe, because they said they oppose occupation and genocide. So where is it? Do they have some sort of magical crystal ball which enables them to peer into an alternate universe where Israel somehow isn’t doing these things? Show me this kindly, beneficent version of Israel, please.

There isn’t any. There never has been. It turns out it was always impossible to create a new state where people were already living and say that a new group of people gets to show up by the millions and run things there, without it looking like nonstop mass-scale abuse. There was never any magical way for that to happen in a way that aligns with human rights and liberal values. Israel was always headed toward this, and everything we’re witnessing is the result of what Israel has always been.

If liberals could point to any other Israel (or indeed any other brand new ethnostate placed overtop of a preexisting civilization of a differing ethnicity) which has existed without tremendous injustice, tyranny and abusiveness, then it would be reasonable to say that you support that thing that you are pointing to but not the thing that Israel is now. If they could go “Well with a bit of tweaking Israel could be like the thriving east Asian ethnostate of Zim-Zam” or whatever, then maybe that could be a position with some standing. But no such place exists. All they can say is that they don’t support the way Israel actually is in real life. Once they see that, they’re seeing clearly.

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Timothy on YouTube asks, “Why do you not support Zelensky?”

Anyone who still supports Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky is against Ukraine, because Zelensky is acting directly against the will of the overwhelming majority of Ukrainians. Ukrainian men are being violently assaulted and dragged off to fight in a war that a supermajority of Ukrainians now oppose. A recent Gallup poll found that 69 percent of Ukrainians now want a negotiated end to the fighting as soon as possible, with only 24 percent wanting to push on to victory.

But I also opposed the proxy war from the very beginning, because it was a completely unnecessary waste of human life which risked nuclear armageddon and could have been easily avoided with a little diplomacy. It is an extensively documented fact that this war was actively provoked by NATO powers, which was why so many western experts and analysts spent years warning ahead of time that the west’s actions were going to lead to war in Ukraine.

No other major power would have allowed a rival power to amass a credible military threat on its border the way NATO was doing to Russia in Ukraine; the last time anyone tried to place a military threat near the United States, Washington responded so aggressively that the world almost ended. It’s an unforgivable nightmare that should never have happened, and Zelensky’s cronyism toward the US empire helped make it happen.

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Isaiah on Substack asks, “When you’re not actively fighting evil or doing inner work to recover, what do you do for fun?”

Not much, honestly. Tim and I will spend time hanging out with family, we’ll sometimes watch a movie or a show to unwind, and I’ll play games on my phone here and there, but this is pretty much a 24/7 vocation for us. We don’t really have a social life, and fun doesn’t feature much. We’re generally either working, talking about working, doing inner work, or just loving each other.

We get our enjoyment of life from appreciating beauty everywhere we see it, and from loving, and from our work. To keep things fresh we’ll just change up what “work” looks like — that’s what the poems and paintings and other art stuff is about. We laugh and joke around a lot, but looking at the way we live our life you’d probably say that we’re very serious people.

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Snow Himbo asks on Twitter, “Given how horrifying reality is at present, what are some things you still have hope in?”

I still have hope in young people. Gen Z haven’t just been outperforming all of us on Gaza, they’ve been leading the charge. They’re simply a superior generation to the rest of us. This may be because they didn’t grown up marinating in the brainwashing of the mainstream media. It may also be because they’re the first generation in human history ever to have the ability to create their own culture without having culture imposed upon them by older generations; they’re learning about the world from streamers their own age discussing ideas while playing video games and TikTok personalities explaining politics while putting on makeup. The rest of us got our culture solely from our parents, teachers, Hollywood, and mass media propaganda. We were way more dumbed down, because knowledge was gate-kept from us.

I have hope in the expansion of consciousness. We’re growing so much more aware in so many ways, even as things apparently get darker and darker. Gaza is opening eyes at an unprecedented rate. We’re growing more and more acutely aware that all the people around the world are human beings with hopes and dreams and feelings and families just like us, even the people who our government and our nation exploit and abuse. People understand the concept of psychological trauma and healing exponentially better than they did just a few short years ago. We’re growing less racist and more accepting of differences, despite the most frenetic efforts of the worst among us.

I still have hope in the collaborative power of the internet. They’ve tried and tried to shut that down and manipulate it, but we’re still finding ways to network and share information at a wildly unprecedented rate, and this has dramatically altered our minds and hearts in some very interesting ways. Because of widespread internet access humanity has arguably changed more in the last twenty years than in the previous twenty thousand, even though we might look and talk more or less the same as we did in the nineties.

I still have hope in activism, because it’s working.

I have renewed hope in artists. We’re seeing more and more art being made about real things all of a sudden now that they’re starting to see how exciting and inspiring it can be to fight back against the war machine.

I still have hope in spiritual awakening. Humanity has a latent potential for radical internal transformation which we haven’t really tapped into yet, and it’s entirely possible for this potential to emerge as our existential crises push us into the adapt-or-perish moment for our species. If realized at mass scale this could turn things around on a dime.

I still have hope in miracles. I have witnessed far too many in my own life to rule out the possibility of something unexpected coming from way out of left field to knock us off our trajectory toward disaster and dystopia. I know from my own experience that there are dragons lurking within us that are waiting to be uncaged.

I still have hope because of the Palestinians. If they can keep going despite everything they’ve been through, then we’ve got a shot too. The other day I saw a guy in Gaza planting a tomato seed in a cut open milk jug, and he was laughing with his friend. They’re still finding ways to not only stay alive, but to keep the spark of living alive too. Life finds a way, man. We will find a way.

If you have a question you’d like answered, just write it in the comments section of whatever platform you’re reading this on and I’ll try to get to it.

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