Jon Butler

Oh fuck you. FUCK you. You don't get to do this now. You don't get to turn around and go "Oopsie poopsie, we made a mistake!" This was YOUR genocide, motherfuckers. YOURS. You chose it. You own it. Forever. The stench of the rotting corpses in Gaza will follow you for all time.

Basically every Israel-Palestine debate goes like this: "Israel did X." "Yeah, because the Palestinians did Y." "Yeah, because Israel did Z." "Yeah but only because the Arabs did A." But if you bring the debate back far enough in time, eventually you get to the part where the western world forcibly dropped a brand new ethnostate on top of a pre-existing civilization without the permission of — and to the extreme detriment of — the people who were already living there. Sure you can go further back and say "Oh yeah well the Jews lived there thousands of years ago," but that's just silly. There's no valid reason to believe some Jewish guy in New York City even has any meaningful lineage connecting him to that land more strongly than any random Muslim in Turkey or wherever, and even if there was, it would still be absurd to cite ancient history as the basis for a territorial claim. I'm only a few generations removed from my ancestry in Ireland and Scotland, but it would be ridiculous for me to show up demanding the home of someone who lives there. So the original source for the grievance is clearly the artificial creation of an ethnonationalist state in the mid-20th century, and the push by Zionists and western imperialists to make it happen. And how has that decision worked out? You see the results before you. Generations of nonstop violence and abuse, culminating in the slaughter and chaos throughout the middle east today. This means that creating Israel was a mistake. A mistake that needs to be corrected. Zionists will collapse into a shrieking pile of vitriol and hyperbole when you say this, claiming you're calling for the extermination of Jews, but this is false. Certainly ending a national order premised on putting the interests of Jews before Palestinians and righting the wrongs of the past would inconvenience a lot of the Jewish people who've been living there, but there's no basis for the claim that it would entail their deaths. Apartheid South Africa was dismantled without the extermination of millions of white people, and there's no reason to believe the dismantling of apartheid Israel would entail the extermination of Jews. The Israel experiment has been tried, and it has failed. It is time to try something else.