Comment by kmeisthax

Every injustice is homomorphic to the Israel-Palestine crisis. Ergo, people will use their opinion about the crisis as a proxy for their own politics.

In much of the west[0], you're pro-Israel because fuck Nazis - NEVER AGAIN. In America, you're pro-Israel if you're Republican, pro-Palestine if you're Democrat, or pro-Israel if you're Democrat. If you're anti-colonial, you're pro-Palestine. In Ireland, you're pro-Palestine because fuck England, or you're pro-Israel because fuck Irish nationalism. If you're Muslim, you're pro-Palestine because Zionism is an existential threat to you[1]. If you're an Islamofascist you're very pro-Palestine, if you're a Christofascist you're very pro-Israel. They're just labels you stick on yourself to signal virtue.

This is, of course, terrible for actually discussing the Israel-Palestine conflict, because anything you say about it gets a bunch of mutually contradictory political positions tacked onto it. It's especially difficult to delivering nuanced takes like "Israel and Palestine both have a lot to answer for and we'd be way closer to an actual peace agreement if every politician in both countries dropped dead tomorrow[2]", because I just stepped on like five different rhetorical landmines with that one sentence.

The homomorphism is also bijective: those political labels you're being slapped with get colored with the side of the conflict they're associated with. The most obvious example being Nazi Germany, whose war crimes and crimes against humanity are viewed through the pro-Israel lens. We talk a lot of the 6 million dead Jews but not so much of Hitler's political opponents, Soviet PoWs, black people, gay people, the Roma[3], Jehovah's Witnesses[4], Freemasons, ethnic Poles, Slovenis, and Slavs, and the mentally ill[5]. That's another 11 million victims that we just... don't even think of as victims of the Holocaust. That's how much we link everything to this one crisis.

[0] Japan inclusive

[1] Or at least this was the case in the 1970s

[2] Ok, maybe this doesn't sound nuanced to you. That's the standard of debate here... :/

[3] In America we still use "gypsy", which is terribly offensive in Europe

[4] Which itself has inspired a meme among JWs that lying to protect the faith is A-OK, which is really strange.

[5] This includes autistic kids, who were sent off to Hans Asperger - YES WE NAMED THE DIAGNOSIS AFTER A NAZI WAR CRIMINAL BECAUSE WE LEARNED NOTHING