Always blaming the victims
Prompt: An old, worn textbook with faded pages
- Because it is textbook victim blaming. Get it?
Not only are Hamas and Israel causing untold suffering and death to innocent civilians, as I mentioned here, but the war has also been an opportunity for people all over the world to gleefully express the hate and racism they usually try to hide.
Since the war between Israel and Hamas began there has been a notable increase in verbal and physical abuse directed towards people of Jewish descent as well as Muslims, or anyone who looks like they could possibly belong to either group.
It seems like something so obvious that a child can quite easily figure it out and yet it needs to be said, clearly:
Hamas is not Palestine, and does not represent all Palestinian people, or all Muslims.
Israel is not the Jewish people, nor does it represent all of Jewish people.
The current war is the product of cruel, power hungry, narcissistic, hate filled leaders on both sides of the conflict that regularly choose to use the well-being and the very lives of the people they claim to lead and care for as a currency to purchase more power or glory for themselves.
This is not an issue of Palestinians being evil.
This is not an issue of Israelis being evil.
As is virtually always the case, the evil people sit at the top on both sides of the conflict.
The blame belongs with Israeli leaders, the leadership of Hamas, the people who support these monsters, and all of us all over the world who are all too happy to turn a blind eye to the violation of human rights. It would be great if we could all focus on the actual villains rather than constantly blaming victims and bystanders.
Also, if bigots using a war for their own ends wasn’t enough for you, apparently there are plenty of anti-free speech types using any expression of sympathy for the Palestinian people as an excuse to “crack down on hate speech and anti-semitism” — also known as threatening employees and students to limit their free speech because they happen to think that the murder and oppression of Palestinian civilians is at least as wrong as what Hamas did.
Who knows, maybe someone will come after me for this article or another one in which I express the evil opinion that neither Palestinian or Israeli civilians should be threatened, oppressed, or murdered.
A clear cause, an obvious solution.
The history of the region and the fact that the Palestinian people were never given any say in the seizure of their homes for the formation of the nation of Israel is enough to explain the tensions and violence in the area. It has nothing to do with a religion, or a group of people, or anything else. The issues in the area are human issues, caused by human decisions and emotions and fueled by human ignorance and our childish propensity to hate and fear anything and anyone who presents as even a little different.
This is not to say that, after decades of violence, there is no reason for tension, for people to have grudges, for there to be a strong sense of enmity. But consistently choosing to respond to the very real plight of the Palestinian people and their historical grievances with apathy or violence is simply ensuring that Israel will never see peace and the suffering in the region will never end.
The Palestinian people have been pushed and harassed for decades.
They have seen international law fail to protect them for decades.
They have watched as the rest of the world has seen their suffering and they have watched as we chose to turn a blind eye or even encourage their abuse.
The people of Palestine had their homes stolen, they had their nation seized, and over the past several decades they have seen all their hope for a better tomorrow taken from them, with no signs that anything will ever change.
Other people have written about all of these things for decades, and yet nothing has changed, there or here.
Over and over again we do this to people: we do this to foreign nations, we do this to our own mentally ill or homeless, we do this to groups of our society we simply deem as less worthy for their skin color, or their lack of wealth.
We take groups of people, we rob them of dignity, we steal away their hope, we treat them with inhumane derision and cruelty, we blame them for the harms and injustices that we heap upon them and then we stupidly wonder why some of them are “so evil and full of hate” when they reach their breaking point.
When you and your children have no future, what is the downside to trying to take a future through force?
When there is no legal way for you to earn a decent living and hold on to even a few little scraps of dignity, what is the downside to turning to crime?
When nothing you do, no matter how hard you work, will ever allow you to crawl out of the hole you were shoved into or have fallen into, what harm is there to losing yourself in drugs or alcohol to numb the pain?
None of us are invincible, none of us are above despair when we are backed into a corner with nowhere to turn.
When we steal an entire nation’s homes, when we take their past and their future, when we treat them as lesser things and when we top all of that off with outright physical threats and violence we cannot be shocked that some of them will become violent in turn.
This is the same reaction that has always happened in these circumstances, there is nothing new here, nothing bewildering, nothing that is difficult to understand if you are willing to spend just a few short seconds imagining yourself in the shoes of a Palestinian. You are either old enough to remember a time when there was still a little hope and you can see just how bad things have become, or you were born into a hopeless world that has hated you from before the moment of your conception.
Desperate people do desperate things, and this world is filled with desperate people who are in very dark places through no fault of their own.
It is mind boggling that so many people seem to willfully fail to understand very basic cause-and-effect relationships about how people work and why they might respond violently to decades of abuse, harassment, and hopelessness.
