COMMENTARY: By Caitlin Johnstone
UNRWA is Hamas. The hospitals are Hamas. The ambulances are Hamas. The journalists are Hamas. The schools are Hamas. South Africa is Hamas. People tweeting unfavorable things about Israel are Hamas. Basically everyone Israel and its supporters want killed is Hamas.
❖
Defunding UNRWA over a handful of alleged Hamas members who don’t even work there anymore makes no sense from a humanitarian perspective or a military perspective, but it makes a ton of sense from a genocidal perspective.
❖
Cutting off aid to the most aid-dependent population on earth would be a psychopathically monstrous act all by itself, even without having caused their extreme needfulness in the first place by backing a genocidal bombing campaign on a giant concentration camp full of children.
❖
The Pentagon has admitted that it has no evidence that Iran was behind the attack on a US base on the Jordan-Syria border which killed three American troops. The one and only reason the US government and its stenographers in the western press mentioned the word “Iran” a zillion times after that attack was to administer propaganda to manufacture public hostility toward a government long targeted for regime change by the US empire.
❖
Don’t talk to me about October 7. Don’t talk to me about hostages. I don’t care. I haven’t cared for months. Many, many times more Gazans are dying and suffering than the number of Israelis who died and are suffering. That means the death and suffering of Palestinians is much more urgent and matters much more than the death and suffering of Israelis. The only way to disagree with this is to believe Israeli lives are worth much, much more than Palestinian lives.
The longer the mass atrocity in Gaza goes on for the less tragic and worthy of sympathy October 7 becomes. It’s already been diminished to a fraction of the significance it once had, and it’s getting smaller and smaller as this nightmare stretches on. This is not the fault of people like me, it is the fault of the people conducting this genocide. You don’t get to murder tens of thousands of people and then demand everyone weep over you losing a thousand. That’s not a thing.
It’s so obnoxious how Israel supporters keep acting like actions a tiny fraction as impactful as what’s been happening in Gaza are where all our sympathy and attention should still be going, nearly four months after the fact. Idiotic bullshit.
All of Israel’s actions since October 7 have revealed why Hamas did what it did on October 7. This is the kind of murderousness and depravity Palestinians have been living under from the Nakba on. Israel is so murderous and depraved that one of the most common talking points of its apologists when responding to opposition to the atrocities in Gaza has been “Yeah, what did Hamas expect would happen?” That’s not a sane or acceptable way for human beings to talk about acts of genocide and the butchery of thousands of children, but Israel apologists think it’s normal. Because that’s what Israel is.
In the eyes of the world, Israel has retroactively legitimized the acts of violence the Palestinian resistance has been inflicting upon it. It has legitimised those acts by showing the world its true face.
❖
You should never feel any sympathy for Israel, because Israel uses sympathy as a weapon. It uses weaponised sympathy to justify mass atrocities and endless abuses. When somebody’s using a weapon to hurt people, you take their weapon away. Stop giving Israel weapons. ANY weapons.
❖
Biden supporters literally believe the January 6 riot was worse than what their guy is doing in Gaza. They actually, truly, sincerely believe that. That’s how stupid and crazy party politics makes you.
Biden is doing all the very worst things Democrats claimed Trump would do if re-elected. If it had come out in 2020 that Trump was plotting a genocide and ethnic cleansing campaign in which his victims would be cut off from humanitarian aid, the shrieking from Democrats would have broken glass.
❖
It’s good to block virulent Israel supporters on social media, not so much because they’re bad people (though they are) but because they’re literally trolling for engagement with an acute awareness that time you spend arguing with them is time you’re not spending harming Israel’s image.
Like the astroturf NAFO op, Israel apologists are not merely reacting to posts they disagree with, they’re engaging in a conscious effort to protect the information interests of their prefered power structure and have a fleshed-out system and a working theory for doing so. They know that draining your time by dragging you into pointless debates and draining your emotional energy by saying things that upset you keeps you from spending your time and energy harming the information interests of their favorite ethnostate.
Caitlin Johnstone is an independent Australian journalist and poet. Her articles include The UN Torture Report On Assange Is An Indictment Of Our Entire Society. She publishes a website and Caitlin’s Newsletter. This article is republished from Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix with permission.
