When I read the news this morning, the first thing I did was open twitter for the first time in 2 weeks and retweet a bunch of tweets celebrating the Iranian attack on Tel Aviv. It felt cathartic and deserved, like they were finally getting what had been a long time coming and like the genocide might finally stop. And while the Iranian missile attack hasn't even done a fraction of the unimaginable destruction the Zionist entity has inflicted on any of its neighbors, there's still something gnawing at the back of my mind: "Don't ever become like them."
Israel has shown us some of the absolute worst that humanity is capable of. The cruelty and sadism even normal Israeli civilians have displayed towards the Palestinians has been appalling and shocking. But I don't want to believe that the majority of people in Israel are ontologically evil, irredeemable psychopaths, I want to believe that they are normal people at their core. The inhumane hatred they feel for the Palestinian people isn't some unique phenomenon exclusive to Jewish settlers or Republican congressmen, but something any of us could experience for another group of people under the wrong circumstances.
And while it's nowhere near that level, I can't deny that what I'm feeling right now and what I've been feeling for the past 20 months is hate. I hate Israel, I hate everything it has done and continues to do, I hate its fascist leadership, I hate how my own country's government makes me feel like I'm going insane by unconditionally supporting these rabid nazis, and I won't lie, I have developed a certain hatred for Israel's population as well. A part of me would love to see videos of Israelis being thrown out of their stolen homes and suffer even half of what they made the people of Palestine suffer. A part of me wants to see Tel Aviv razed to the ground just like the Gaza strip was.
But I don't want to be like that. Right now the damage done to Israel is negligible, but should it experience serious devastation, I do hope we can remember our humanity. Let it never get to the point where we take our families on a hill and watch other families get massacred for entertainment. Let it never get to the point where we cheer for some IDF general to get murked alongside 7 members of his family. I want to still be able to feel empathy (though not necessarily forgiveness) for people who have lost everything, even if 6 months ago they were supporting ethnic cleansing.
I don't wanna chastise anyone for joking about Tel Aviv getting nuked or for telling Israelis going "oh noo bomb shelterinos" on TikTok to pound sand. It's one thing to say that while Israel is still the dominant force and receiving unconditional support from the West. But when the point comes where the Zionist entity has been defeated (inshallah it will be soon), I hope we can restrain ourselves from indulging in cruelty and sadism. Nobody, not even Benjamin Netanyahu or Itamar Ben-Gvir, deserves having to pick up a family member's remains and stuff them in a plastic bag. Even the most despicable Zionist you can think of deserves better than what the Palestinians are going through.
Sorry for the ramble, this has been going through my mind all day. Also main I guess.
Ugh. You’re right, of course. I’ve been feeling the exact same way about Americans in the last couple years. I need to work on that. It’s hateful and stupid and not the right way to think about things.
I think every person is capable of feeling this way, and resentment is a natural response to chronic powerlessness. There's nothing wrong with feeling like that, God knows I feel that way, too.
But this is why many cultures have developed ways to keep those impulses in check. Many Indigenous peoples' justice (and reward) systems take grievance settling and conflict resolution to a collective place, based on kinship and mutual care. When the revolution comes we must rely on our collective compassion to prevent individual atrocities.
I feel you. I'm struggling with this too when it comes to Germans. I think everybody deserves a second chance, but looking at the country I was born in and grew up in, I sometimes wish the Americans had dropped the nukes here instead of Japan. I know it doesn't make anything better, and you know... It's hateful and stupid and not the right way to think about things.
Japan conducted genocides of their own - their crimes are not lessened because they arent "white", the us brutality is not lessened is not absolved because they aren't "white". And dropping the nukes would have made people only more confident in revisionism a bigger dresden. You cant "punish" the fascism out of people. You cant bleed it out of them. Guilt is not a replacement for restorative justice or revolutionary struggle, something the german left sadly continues to misunderstand & "punch left for" - to the detriment of the non-israeli peoples of the middle east.
A peoples history are made by the material circumstances of their reality. Israel is a settler colony therefore ideologies attached to such a system are inherent to its people. BRD vs GDR or tsarist russia vs the soviet union are just one of the myriad examples that provide empirical data for that.
I keep forgetting how the quote goes, but it's from Lenin addressed to Rosa, mentioning how Germans would buy train tickets to get to the revolution (there was a precedent for that, but I don't remember the details). So it comes as no surprise to me that you describe "the left punching left", and the non-stop adherence to established rules seems to be the highest virtue, instead of protecting or saving people from being killed. The deeply ingrained racism of this country is so omnipresent that I sometimes choke when I'm on the train, just listening to people start conversations with "Well I'm not racist but..." and continue to say the most unhinged shit possible.
I guess why I'm bringing this up is because of how Germany, after getting a second chance, didn't take it, and is now fueling yet another genocide alongside others. What pains me so much is how there seems to be virtually no resistance to this, apart from some demonstrations and opinion pieces in non-mainstream media. There's polls conforming that a lot of Germans don't want to supply Israel with weapons anymore, yet there is no resistance to the state just doing what they've always done.
In short, I hate being German, because I live in a society that is so concerned with pretending not to be racist and covering their own asses, that they'd rather watch millions of people die than do something about it. And that's why I sometimes wish the nukes hadn't gone to Japan but Germany. I don't think anybody deserves to be nuked, I'm angry that nobody's willing to listen and do something/anything.
I agree with you, restorative justice, let alone revolution, won't be reached through guilt. But Germans these days don't feel guilty. Some pretend to, others are openly proud of the Holocaust and the Nazis. There's very few who try to move into a better future, but those are mostly the people getting beaten to a pulp by the cops during demonstrations.
Sorry for the long as rant, these feelings have been boiling for a couple of years by now. Hope it's not too confusing.🙈