The Wise And Brilliant Israel Apologist
- Caitlin Johnstone
I used to be pro-Palestinian, you know. I thought Israel was wrong for carpet bombing Gaza and using siege warfare on civilians.
But then I ran into a very wise Israel apologist who changed my way of looking at things forever.
I was walking down the street and I saw him leaning against a lamp post, smoking a pipe as wise men do.
“Your shirt says Free Palestine,” he said from behind a plume of smoke.
“Yep!” I replied.
“So I guess that means you love Hamas then?” spake he.
I stopped in my tracks. I’d never thought of it that way before.
Could it be? Could my opposition to murdering civilians really be indicative of a deep affection for a Gazan militant group? Maybe I really did love Hamas and think everything it did on October 7 was great and wonderful?
“Is this really how I want to live my life?” I thought to myself.
“I — I — I…” I said out loud.
“Or perhaps,” he said with a raised eyebrow, “you just HATE JEWS??”
I fell to my knees.
Oh my God. He really had a point. What possible reason could anyone have for opposing military explosives being dropped on buildings full of children besides a seething lifelong hatred of adherents to the religion of Judaism? How could anyone possibly oppose siege warfare tactics which cut off civilians from food and water and electricity and fuel and medical supplies unless they harbored dangerously negative opinions about members of a small Abrahamic faith?
“Who… who are you?” I asked.
“That’s of no consequence,” he said, casually blowing a smoke ring through another larger smoke ring.
“But… but the children,” I stammered as my entire worldview crumbled before my eyes. “The civilians! They’re dying! Isn’t it bad that they’re dying?”
And then he delivered the coup de grâce.
“Have you considered,” he said before a pregnant pause, “… that all of those deaths are the fault of Hamas?”
It was like a 50 megaton nuclear explosion went off inside my brain.
I fell flat on my back. The world was spinning. A trickle of blood ran down into my hair from my ear.
I felt all the anti-colonialism leaving my body. I suddenly could no longer remember why I thought it was bad to rain down military explosives on a densely populated concentration camp.
Everything went black.
When I finally came to, the mysterious stranger was gone. But his wisdom and profound insights into Israel and Gaza will always live on in my heart.
While I broadly agree with the view that debate was sometimes a part of religious institutions in the past, this changed dramatically in the 20th century, especially with regards to Islam, perhaps due to the fall of the Ottoman Empire. When is the last time you've heard of a madrassah teaching that homosexuality is natural? Not to be Muslim-phobic, I am aware if the rich history of debate and science in the Middle East, but the material conditions have changed now, conservatism has been on the rise since the 70s.
You speak of mahaviharas, but Buddhists I have met are just as conservative as the average religious person when it comes to women's rights, feminism and gay rights. Madrassahs were not 'open', even during the Islamic golden age. Even when Islam was less rigid, Mansoor al-Hallaj was executed for saying 'Ann-al-Haq', Omar Khayyam had to go on a pilgrimage to prove he was pious, al-Qadir ordered to kill every Mu'tazilite in Baghdad and no doubt there are countless other stories of persecution. That rational thought survived when people were religious is hardly to the credit of religion, and even in periods of prosperity when religious institutions weren't on the defensive, such things happened anyway and under the sanction of religion. As long as religion is under an institution, it is the nature of institutions to cling to power and hence, suppress dissent.