Good Westerners Don't Start Off Hating Israel, But Truth Eventually Leads Them There

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

Good westerners don’t start off hating Israel. When our hearts are in the right place we start off giving Israel the benefit of the doubt and assuming the situation must be more complicated than it appears, because we’re not just going to reflexively assume the Jewish state is evil like some kind of neo-Nazi. We grew up learning about the persecution of the Jewish people, watching movies and reading books about it and vowing “never again” like everyone else. 

So for entirely sensible and good-natured reasons we tend to start off viewing anything to do with Jews and Judaism in a sympathetic light.

It’s not until we start learning and paying attention to Israel’s actions that this view begins to change. We come to understand that Israel is in fact profoundly evil, not because it is full of Jews but because it’s a western settler-colonialist project that’s inflicting the same kinds of genocide, ethnic cleansing, theft and abuse on the indigenous population of the land that other western settler-colonialist projects like Australia, the US and Canada inflicted in earlier centuries.

And we learn that this evil doesn’t just pervade the Israeli government but all of Israeli society — not because of Judaism or Jewishness, but for the same reason hatred and racism pervaded the societies of the Jim Crow south and apartheid South Africa. Israelis are indoctrinated from birth to view the non-Jewish indigenous populations of the region as less than human, because otherwise it would make no moral sense for there to be a state where one ethnic group receives preferential treatment over the others, or for that state to have been dropped on top of a pre-existing civilization without the permission of the people who live there. This indoctrination is the glue that holds the whole settler-colonialist project together.

We learn that this is what we are seeing when we translate comments Israelis make in Hebrew on social media which look like a page out of Hitler’s Mein Kampf, or when we see photos of Israeli soldiers mockingly dressing in the clothing of dead or displaced Palestinian women and playing with the toys of dead or displaced Palestinian children, or when we read polls of Jewish Israelis supporting Israel’s daily massacres in Gaza and Lebanon. This is just what it looks like when an entire society is indoctrinated from birth into viewing their neighbors as mindless savages.

And we gradually come to understand that just as Jewish Israelis are indoctrinated in a way that warps their perception and their conscience, we ourselves were indoctrinated to see Israel in a sympathetic light. All our news media constantly frame Israel as the victim in whatever violence it is involved in, and all our politicians constantly frame Israel as a friend and anyone who opposes it as an enemy. This happens for the same reason the western political-media class lies to us about every western war: because Israel is a crucial component in the western war machine. That’s the only reason its settler-colonialist project is supported by the western empire.

Joe Biden has often said that if there wasn’t an Israel, the United States would have to create one to protect its interests in the middle east. Having a state which is both (A) artificially constructed from the ground up by western forces and (B) fully dependent on the support of the western empire gives the empire a permanent tool with which to justify the nonstop military presence necessary to dominate a crucial resource-rich region, and to create the violence and chaos necessary to keep the middle east from uniting into a mighty superpower bloc which isn’t beholden to western interests.

This is why Israel is so important to the western empire, which in turn is why we’ve always been bombarded with mass media messaging telling us we should support Israel. Good westerners don’t start off hating Israel because we grow up marinating in an information environment which programs us to support it, and which exploits the historic persecution of the Jews to manipulate us into backing a murderous apartheid state which cannot exist without nonstop war.

Good westerners don’t start off hating Israel, but, if they are truly good, they end up hating Israel. A sincere dedication to truth, justice and kindness can only lead one to view the Zionist project with complete revulsion after learning the facts about what it really is, what it really does, and why our western governments really support it.

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