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.
True and yet also true of Waffen SS. Of Auschwitz guards, of many leadership in Nazi Germany so it rings a bit hollow and academic. In the sense that they were not born this way and if plucked by time travel at age 6 into the USSR and the red army they would have been entirely different individuals. These aren't demons summoned from beyond but humans. But their choices make them monsters as do their thoughts and support of these criminal acts.
Our hate for them is pure. It's not a hate born of who they were born as but who they chose to be. As Marx said, we will not apologize for the terror.
The only innocents are underage children, perhaps those under 24 or so as well as you can't necessarily instantly leave a place once you hit 19, you need money, resources, job prospects. But you can't make an omelet without breaking some eggs, empires don't fall without good people suffering too. Blowing up the death star may have killed some slaves or janitors who didn't even want to be there and were just trying to work through yet it was the correct thing to do. Shelling Berlin resulted in some kids dying, some people who probably hated the Nazi regime dying, yet it wasn't avoidable, their deaths, their blood is not on our hands and should not be on our conscious, it is on their neighbors and those of the majority around them who supported and created this. We are blameless for taking action to put them down and should feel no guilt over the matter. We should feel relief at the deaths of the fascists and should shrug at the few innocents lost among them, writing them down not as victims of us but of fascism.
We, I, will save pity and sadness and empathy for Gazans, for the Palestinian victims of the genocide, for Iranians now suffering and probably going to suffer more from this war, for those in Lebanon, for the resistance in Yemen and elsewhere. There's not room in my heart for sympathy for the perpetrators, for the aggressors.