Palestine
A community for everything related to Palestine and the occupation currently underway by the occupying force known as Israel.
Anti-Zionism is not anti-Semitism. Existence is resistance for Palestinians.
Please refer to Israel as Occupied Palestine, or occupied territories. The IDF is a fascist and ethnonationalist occupying force. Israelis are settlers. We understand however that the imperial narrative (which tries to legitimise Israel) is internalised in the imperial core and slip-ups are naturally expected.
We always take the sides of Palestine and Palestinians and are unapologetic about it. Israel is an occupying power whose "defence force"'s (note the contradiction) sole purpose for existing is to push Palestinians out so they can resettle their rightful land. If you have anything positive to say about Israel we do not care.
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It's a thought provoking article, but on reflection, I do find myself disagreeing on a key framing:
I don't think we have been made powerless. What I think we have been made is to believe in the supremacy of the individual; that the self-actualization of the individual is in an inherent good above other things, even if it comes at the cost of millions we don't know being gunned down; that the realization of an individual's personal dreams takes priority over collective good and humanitarian cause.
And through this, we are faced with a deep sense of constructed existential dread. If we risk sacrifice for humanity, we are faced with the prospect of the loss of those individualist dreams, of never being self-actualized, of being forgotten and treated like a fool or as mentally ill.
I don't condone adventurism, but there is another side to that coin, which is maybe what I'd called passionism (I have not thought the term through, I'm open to a better word); this is where you treat a crisis to humanity as a sort of side hobby while you try to do your individualist dreams anyway; you rationalize helplessness in this context, but it is not a totality of helplessness, rather it is a need to give up on some things you thought were essential to a meaningful life in order to fight for what is right. Some people struggle even to do this on a basic level of inconvenience via boycotting. The takeaway here isn't to scold those people or imply they are of bad moral character. The point is more that what is deemed possible and impossible sometimes has to do with what you are willing to give up and what you are willing to risk. And I'd argue some of that seeming prison of powerlessness, particularly in the US, is an existential one brought on by individualism.
You don't have to be reckless to sacrifice, but you may have to sacrifice some things you thought were essential. If not, with inaction, material conditions are going to catch up and force you to give up some things anyway. So it's more a question of whether you do it on your own terms or not, than whether it will happen at all.
Good point!