Paul Cantrell
Please read this, from @chargrille, and take a moment to digest it:
https://progressives.social/@chargrille/111365004926590504
The parties who want genocide — Netanyahu’s government and Hamas, among others — are allies, a coalition of enemies united in the quest to make genocide thinkable. They need atrocities to justify atrocities. They need each other. A coalition of enemies.
This is not some rhetorical flourish. Read the post above. It’s literally true.
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Paul Cantrell
It’s so hard to get our heads around this — we are so heavily trained to think about conflicts in nationalist terms — that even when •know• Hamas and Likud want each other, we •still• fall into the trap of trying to figure out which nation’s team to be on.
I thus propose a thought exercise: re-analyze this moment treating “Likud-Hamas” as a single party, a coalition for genocide standing in opposition tot he coalition for peace.
An oversimplification, but as an exercise, it’s instructive.
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Paul Cantrell
Likud-Hamas funneled money into their Gaza branch, while winning the election in Israel.
Then Likud-Hamas undertook a terrorist massacre in Israel. This galvanized public support in Israel for Likud-Hamas to invade Gaza.
War crimes in Gaza, such as Likud-Hamas’s successful bombing of Palestinian refugee camps, spurred support for Likud-Hamas in Palestine.
This strategy has allowed Likud-Hamas to effectively push peaceful resolution off the table for the foreseeable future.
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Paul Cantrell
Who bombed that hospital? With this framing the answer is easy: Likud-Hamas did. They wanted it bombed. Obviously.
This thought exercise breaks down at a certain point, but sit with it for a minute. Let it be an antidote to our nationalist assumptions. I’d argue that, though incorrect, it’s still far more accurate than analysis that imagines “Israel” or “Palestine,” all the people of each and their government, as single entities with a single mind.
/end
Paul Cantrell
@donaldball @chargrille
YES. I was yelling this from the rooftops through W’s whole tenure: Al Qaeda and Bush/Cheney were on the same side.
Donald Ball
@inthehands @chargrille Among the awful truths of the GWB era "war on terror" was that Bush's and Osama bin Laden's popularity levels (in their target audiences!) rose and fell in tandem.
Paul Cantrell
@julieofthespirits
This is very, very true, and nothing about the way our press, our politics, or our social animal instincts work are doing us any favors here.
Masonic Cowgirl
@inthehands I feel like it's way easier to understand in situations where we have more distance - if we're reading about medieval wars or whatever, we can understand that the prince who wants a war in one kingdom likes it when there's a prince who wants a war in the kingdom next door
It's only hard for us to understand when we're close to the situation
Masonic Cowgirl
@inthehands also that modern wars are much more ideological than they were a thousand years ago, when the conflict was an end in itself, with only a few exceptions, but now there's a whole superstructure attached, but often the superstructure distracts us from what's really going on
Paul Cantrell
@julieofthespirits
I’m sure an actual historian would quibble, but in some ways, I think this conflict is far more like those conflicts of old than we imagine. It’s fundamentally a conflict over land, not ideology. (Religion is a catalyst, but not a cause.) It’s a conflict with modern origins, a territorial dispute that developed over the last ~100 years. 19th-century nationalism makes it unlike 1000 years ago, true, but it’s not so unique as we imagine.
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