Despise Israel AND The Entire Western Empire

Reading by Tim Foley:

Everyone hates Israel now, which is as it should be. But we all need to understand that Israel has never acted alone.

If Israel were acting alone, it would be an asshole with a pointy stick instead of an asshole with an attack helicopter. The west gave it the attack helicopter.

An asshole with a pointy stick is not much of a problem. The world is full of assholes with pointy sticks. Get yourself your own pointy stick and you can deter their aggressions without much difficulty.

An asshole with an attack helicopter can ruin everyone’s day. He can fuck everything up and kill whoever he wants — even people who have pointy sticks. He doesn’t need to negotiate with anyone. He doesn’t need to be polite or diplomatic. You just have to give him whatever he wants or he’ll fly over there and chain gun you and your family.

The US and its allies are responsible for ensuring that Israel remains an asshole with an attack helicopter instead of an asshole with a pointy stick. They’ve created this situation where Israel doesn’t have to get along with its neighbors like any other normal country on the planet, and can instead exist in a perpetual state of war.

It is right and good to despise Israel; Israel is a genocidal apartheid state which should not exist and should never have been created in the first place. But political maturity means carrying that disdain forward to the entire western power structure under which we all live.

Hating Israel without hating the western empire is nonsensical, because Israel would not exist without western weapons, military support, narrative control, and diplomatic cover. It’s like hating Bonnie without hating Clyde. Like hating Butch Cassidy but not the Sundance Kid. There are laws against being an accomplice to murder because we all understand that if you aid and abet a murderer then you necessarily share moral culpability for the killing.

And it’s not like the western power alliance has been a virtuous little cherub apart from its participation in Israeli violence; the US is terrorizing socialist states in Latin America as you read this. The right-wing narrative that the west would be a wholesome and beneficent society without Israeli interference is contradicted by the entire unbroken history of western civilization. We have always been a remarkably tyrannical and genocidal people. We have yet to mature beyond this as a society. That’s why Israel is our partner in crime.

Oppose Israel, and also oppose the entire murderous western power structure. The abusiveness of the former is not meaningfully separate or separable from the abusiveness of the latter.

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