Important distinction that might help you: Being against this war doesn’t make you “Pro Palestinian,” it just makes you anti-war, and especially, anti-genocide. On the flip side, being anti-war/ anti-genocide doesn’t make you anti-Semitic.

Genocide is NEVER justified.

This is a lengthy question, but it comes from a place of positive intent and genuine inquiry.

As someone stateside with Jewish friends in JVP as well as Palestinian sympathies of my own, this is context that I’m missing. I read about the refusenik movement and the Likud Party’s stances on conscientious objectors. And similarly, Holocaust denial on the Hamas side and openly cidal rhetoric. I read a bit about the original treaty between Mohammed and the other local tribes, as it was a founding document for sharia law. As a result, the subsequent Jewish exile shaped the lives and culture of the diaspora. Not just their religion, but their philosophy and morality. The genocide of the Holocaust led a number of German and European Jews to be given the option–from the bloodied hands of the Nazi regime–an opportunity to instead be deported to Palestine as part of the Haavara agreement. The following Nakba, what Israel describes as the War of Independence, was described by neutral parties in the region as a massacre by extreme-right settlers who killed Palestinian Arabs (regardless of religious denomination) and Jewish sympathizers equally. Subsequent laws drawing the lines of Israel by the 1948 lines drew Palestinian Arabs as blatant second class citizens in what I, as an outsider, percieve as a reflection of Sharia law. Gaza’s creation as an open air prison complex is, by national convention, a collective punishment.

This is the context as far as I understand it. Forgive the gaps in my knowledge, I’m a white American with no religious or familial ties to either. But if both the Israeli system treats non-Jews as an other to be eliminated, and the pro-Caliphate extremists favor nearly identical conditions for non-Muslims, which is better? Each regime results in an apartheid-driven ethnostate. Each party having, at one point or another in the past several hundred years, perpetrated several wars and genocides against one another in a struggle for a piece of land that has formed the axis of every major Abrahamic religious conflict since the 8th century, is… a lot.

Is returning a genocide for a genocide right? Is it equitable to vow the extermination of an outsider as vengeance for a crime that their great grandparents don’t remember? Obviously, my fluency in both cultures is severely limited, and I’m trying my best to understand. But if the sanctity of life and the forgiveness of one’s enemies are values held by both cultures, what is the catalyst for this genocide as it stands currently?

If this sounds like an attack, I swear it isn’t. I haven’t had a conversation with someone actually from Israel concerning the matter, believe it or not. So my picture of the situation has been incomplete. Obviously, this was never about October 7th. This started long before that. But where, and when? And why?

October 7th? Seemingly unprovoked?

Do they not understand how Israel was created and how it’s maintained ? It’s like if the Europeans who invaded, pillaged and settled in North America also stole their identities afterwards to spin the narrative! After all, Germanics and Eastern Europeans are as Semitic as I am a lady (I’m a hairy dude). The only moral thing to do is to condemn Israel as the European colonial project it always was, and not to take part in the killing at the very least.

But how can “Jews” (Moses killed ONE man in a way that one Palestinian could kill one low level IDF soldier and that was enough for him to realise that wasn’t the way… how do they claim to fear God? Lol) talk about it in earnest when their hands are covered in blood? The cowardly, weak and irresponsible way of acting will follow their personalities and they’ll just have a tantrum not to accept the reality of things: if you were part of the IDF, you 100% murdered innocents and have probably earned your place in Hell (definitely if you never repent!). I understand how sensitive that can make one feel, at the same time I understand they’re truly horrible human beings who will make any excuses and believe any lies necessary, so honest dialogue is impossible…