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IPFS News Link • Israel

Good Westerners Don't Start Off Hating Israel, But Truth Eventually Leads Them There

• https://www.caitlinjohnst.one, CAITLIN JOHNSTONE

We grew up learning about the persecution of the Jewish people, watching movies and reading books about it and vowing "never again" like everyone else. 

So for entirely sensible and good-natured reasons we tend to start off viewing anything to do with Jews and Judaism in a sympathetic light.

It's not until we start learning and paying attention to Israel's actions that this view begins to change. We come to understand that Israel is in fact profoundly evil, not because it is full of Jews but because it's a western settler-colonialist project that's inflicting the same kinds of genocide, ethnic cleansing, theft and abuse on the indigenous population of the land that other western settler-colonialist projects like Australia, the US and Canada inflicted in earlier centuries.

And we learn that this evil doesn't just pervade the Israeli government but all of Israeli society — not because of Judaism or Jewishness, but for the same reason hatred and racism pervaded the societies of the Jim Crow south and apartheid South Africa. Israelis are indoctrinated from birth to view the non-Jewish indigenous populations of the region as less than human, because otherwise it would make no moral sense for there to be a state where one ethnic group receives preferential treatment over the others, or for that state to have been dropped on top of a pre-existing civilization without the permission of the people who live there. This indoctrination is the glue that holds the whole settler-colonialist project together.

We learn that this is what we are seeing when we translate comments Israelis make in Hebrew on social media which look like a page out of Hitler's Mein Kampf, or when we see photos of Israeli soldiers mockingly dressing in the clothing of dead or displaced Palestinian women and playing with the toys of dead or displaced Palestinian children, or when we read polls of Jewish Israelis supporting Israel's daily massacres in Gaza and Lebanon. This is just what it looks like when an entire society is indoctrinated from birth into viewing their neighbors as mindless savages.


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