gaza

To My Dear Conservative Friends

by damagecollateral
Conservatism. The fake kind.

I share your conservatism. Heck, I’m more conservative than half of you on the stuff you supposedly care about. My conservatism actually informs my worldview, which apparently makes me some kind of radical. Because when my conservatism sees over 12,000 children transformed into hamburger in Gaza, it doesn’t shrug and change the channel. It doesn’t wait for permission from a think tank to feel something. My conservatism—the actual, functioning version—makes me want to do something about it right friggin’ now.

My conservatism also tells me that if someone shows up at my door claiming they own my house because their great-great-great-grandfather’s cousin’s neighbor maybe lived here three millennia ago, I’m not handing over the keys. I’m reaching for the gun you people won’t shut up about. And if they start “mowing the lawn”—that’s the term, by the way, that’s what they call it—slaughtering my family and turning me into a refugee, you bet your bum I’m using violence.

Are you seriously telling me you wouldn’t? You, with your Gadsden flags and your Toby Keith ringtones and your entire personality built around the Second Amendment, you’re going to lecture me about “peaceful resistance” while your kids are getting vaporized? Please. Spare me the performance.

My conservatism puts me on the side of people who don’t surrender their homes to satisfy someone else’s delusional sense of divine real estate entitlement. My conservatism tells me I don’t owe reparations for some Bronze Age exodus that may or may not have happened when people were still figuring out the wheel. That’s conservatism. Or it used to be.

My conservatism makes my blood pressure spike when I watch foreign lobbies actively work to abolish my First Amendment rights—making it literally illegal to boycott a country or criticize an ideology. They’re doing this right now, in state legislatures, in Congress, attaching it to highway bills like a tumor. How’s your conservatism handling that? Or does it only activate when someone says “Happy Holidays”?

My conservatism believes in fiscal responsibility, which is apparently now a fringe position. So when we’re shoveling tens of billions to a government conducting a livestreamed genocide while Americans can’t afford insulin and cops are working second jobs at Walmart, my conservatism gets twitchy. Does yours? Or is yours only concerned with deficits when a Democrat’s in office?

So here’s my question: when does your conservatism kick in? What’s the activation code? Do you need Tucker Carlson to say it’s okay first? Or did you buy some premium version of conservatism that only works when it’s convenient, that somehow malfunctions every time it might cost you something real? Because from where I’m sitting, it looks like you’re running a demo version that only boots up when the TV tells it to.

How you know Israel is doomed

by damagecollateral

You know it by the renewed reminders of Israel’s origins. Every time the Palestinian strife is in the news, a lot of the online educational content among Palestine supporters (which is most people around the world and most social media influencers) is about what happened in 1948 and about how Zionism began in the 1800s.

That is to say, the historical examination does not stop at how Israel has been illegally occupying the West Bank and Gaza since 1967. No, it almost unfailingly goes back to Israel’s establishing. In other words, the very legality of the existence of Israel is always being subjected to scrutiny.

This is profound. Consider over 7 decades of complete Western acceptance of Israel, journalistic complicity and endorsement, billions spent to prop up and maintain Israel, countless tours for Westerners hosted by Israel, military and intelligence complete integration with the West, thorough corporate endorsement.. All of that, and yet Israel’s very right to exist keeps being reevaluated.

By now, it’s safe to say that this reevaluation will never go away so long as Israel is in existence.

If I were a philosopher, I would be fascinated by this. It is a strong example of the universality and permanence of certain moral values. Despite all efforts, time lapsed, and all attempts at revising history by erasing all mention of the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in 1947-1948, the establishment of Israel never became right, Israel remains an uneasy anomaly and the truth about Israel’s founding could never be concealed. The validity of Israel’s founding is always being questioned and even lamented among large swaths of intellectuals in the West.

To be fair, though, there are factors without which this renewed examination of Israel’s establishing may not take place. If, for hypothetical example, there were no Palestinian resistance, if said resistance were too meager to be of much significance, if Palestinians were not as numerous, if Palestinians were not relatively homogenous culturally, if Palestinians were not relatively universally oppressed, the balance may have tipped in favor of Israel being an easy fit into the collective conscience of the world.

Regardless of the causes and factors, the end result is the same. Israel’s right to exist is always in question despite all efforts, and that’s astonishing and damning at the same time.

American foreign policy strategists should start to envision a future without Israel

by damagecollateral

It should have never made sense. A country created by importing foreigners to steal the lands of the locals and ethnically cleanse them, and in the heart of the Muslim world? On one of Muslims’ main holy places?

Just thinking about the idea feels exhaustingly anti laws of nature. Whoever thought it would work for long cannot have been thinking clearly. If I had to guess, I’d say it was power drunkenness. What we’ve been seeing since 10/7 (and for most of the year in the West Bank) is not some glitch in the code. It’s not an anomalous breakaway event that needs to be corrected so we can go back to the same old program. Rather, what we’re witnessing is the only possible natural consequence for this unnatural project called Israel.

Israel is the way we chose to treat Muslims in the East Mediterranean. The question I keep asking myself is: why did we in America choose to treat Muslims based on a European narrative? Why did we have to transfer Europe’s Crusader baggage into our mindset? After all, it was Muslims in Morocco who were the first to recognize the US after its independence. In fact, Muslim sentiments were in favor of the US since Americans revolted against, and gained independence from, an enemy of Muslims called Britain. Muslims loved the American ideal of freedom from oppression and, after our independence, welcomed our convoys and embassies with open arms.

So why, then, did we decide that we need to stick this thing called Israel as our colonial outpost in the heart of the Muslim world to keep Muslims under our boots? Which brilliant think tank came up with that one?

It could have been much different. We could have chosen to have the whole Muslim world be our friends. Things could have been much more peaceful even without us losing our power or influence in the world. But instead we chose to create an entity that would upend world peace for decades, spend billions to preserve it, and have the planet witness so many wars and conflicts because of it.

Why?

To what end? That is the question that needs to be on the minds of American foreign policy makers. How did the idea that Israel is good for us come to be and how is it actually good for us? It’s ok to rethink basic questions like that every now and then, and for us, it’s about time we do so.