Everyone hates Israel now, and what’s funny is this wouldn’t have happened if our society had been the tiniest bit normal about Gaza.
If everyone wasn’t constantly being forcefully told they’re not seeing what they’re seeing, it wouldn’t have become so personal for them.
If western governments had just said “this is bad” when news came out about Israel bombing a hospital instead of “THIS ISN’T WHAT IT LOOKS LIKE THERE’S A HAMAS BASE IN EVERY HEALTHCARE FACILITY YOU ARE BEING ANTISEMITIC”.
If the news media had just said “this is bad” when Israel systematically exterminated journalists in Gaza instead of reporting “three killed in what IDF describes as strike on terrorist vehicle” over and over again.
If we’d just been allowed to say “this is bad” when we saw raw video footage showing children ripped apart by military explosives without getting fired and de-platformed and told we’re evil Nazis who need our free speech rights taken away.
That’s all it would’ve taken to keep Israel from being a front-and-center issue for so many people. There would still have been critics of the Gaza holocaust, of course, but opposing Israel wouldn’t have become this massive mainstream cultural phenomenon if our own western leaders and institutions hadn’t exposed themselves as lying, propagandizing, murderous sociopaths.
It’s not hard to get westerners to ignore the victims of mass military violence, even when it’s mass military violence their government is directly orchestrating. Westerners, by and large, are indoctrinated human livestock who think whatever they’ve been programmed to think by the imperial propaganda machine. What opened so many eyes to Israel’s criminality wasn’t the slaughter itself, it was our own government, media and social institutions trying to gaslight us about what we knew we were looking at.
It’s one thing to see a cruel government doing bad things on the other side of the world. It’s quite another to be shown in vivid detail that your own society is ruled by monsters, and that those monsters have a vested interest in deceiving you and controlling your words and your actions in order to advance the most depraved agendas you could possibly imagine.
That’s what made this so personal for so many people. It’s not that Israel exposed itself, it’s that the whole of western civilization did.
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Caitlin Johnstone 