What follows was published two weeks after October 7, 2023. It was almost immediately pinned to the top of the feed there, and it has remained there atop the dormant husk of that account ever since. At some point this week, I encountered a couple shitheels on the social media site to which I have migrated who proved entirely capable of characterizing my views as singularly Zionist — supportive of Netanyahu, his government, his policies or his or his coalition’s role in the horror show that has engulfed the Levant.
False. Rather, the criticism that I am “both-sidesing” this disaster would be precise. Simplistic and empty, but precise.
If ever there was a century-old tragedy that encouraged — no, demanded — that civilized human beings refuse to sign up for the bloodletting of Hamas or the brutalities of Netanyahu, it’s this one. There is a singular, shared and grievous history here and if you know it in full, you know that both sides have standing. Just as both sides are complicit and stained. Both sides must be heard and their future addressed. And each must acknowledge the reality of the other as a preamble to any possible solution. On this premise — my unwillingness to embrace any outcome that doesn’t guarantee full Palestinian national aspiration or an extant Israel and, further, my absolute refusal to accept that violence and extremism is the path to either goal — I wrote what I did only days after the initial butchery of October 7 and the beginning of Netanyahu’s military reply.
Nothing in my view has changed since then. Not a word. And so, this now finds a new home here on my own site and secondarily, by way of the occasional link, on Bluesky.
Time for bed and I’ve wasted a day arguing with seemingly every useless, part-of-the-problem, I-know-half-of-this-story shitmonger on this hellscape of a platform, and by that I mean every mook who thinks you can rationalize the barbarism of Hamas, or every scrote who thinks that the affront of the settlements and the increasing ruthlessness of the West Bank settlement policy is anything but a disaster for any peace process, or every submoron who thinks Jew or Arab, Israeli or Palestinian has a clean, clear purchase on this complicated history, or that either side can ever wash itself clean of complicity in trying to avoid the inevitable reality — that two wounded peoples need to share a land, that some portion will be a Jewish homeland for another 75 years, but not unless there is corresponding statehood for Palestine, and that any festering shitbag ideological rage-harvesting liar who wants to pretend that all this hate and violence will drive 9 million Jews into the sea or make their Semitic brethren ever concede that their national aspirations will not be realized, is simply another cell on a long, metastasizing cancer that devours innocent lives, well, add your trollery, anger and singular, one-sided imaginings to this thread and come morning, I’ll wipe you all clean in one devoted burst of blockage. You’re no good to anyone — Israeli or Palestinian, Arab or Jew. You’re just another small part of the great heaving, clogging fistula of shit that bars the way to the only plausible future that isn’t caked in blood and gore. Fuck Hamas. Fuck Netanyahu. Fuck the Iranians. Fuck the settlers. Fuck everyone ready to monologue on one half of this long, ornate, tragic tale of a half century or more while magically forgetting every last shard of your brother’s half.
You will share the same narrative, and begin at least to contemplate the whole tale and everyone’s shared complicity, or you will keep preaching to your rancid, rote-brained choirs and bleed together for another few generations. You will either learn to share the land, to cede some fair measure of a shared future or you will, along with every useless, hate-engorged squib on every side of this horror, learn to bleed into the same gutter. If you think you come away clean from your history, your religion, your ideology, you are a fool and you will never begin the long march back from hell. And there are so many of you assholes that, admittedly, it will be a long road indeed.
But honestly, in the name of Yahweh and Allah both, and Christ himself if he’s fool enough to show up, go fuck yourself to hell if you seriously think that you know enough to claim to be with anyone clean in this maelstrom. In the very claim, in your hunger to be singularly right and to have the other soul be singularly wrong, you reveal your amoral greed, your ahistorical stupidity and your corrupted, empty soul. Fuck you all. And to those remainder with the capacity to think in human-scale complexities and never let go of anyone’s human spirit, I’ll see you tomorrow when maybe I’ll write exactly what I mean and we can coherently discuss. And, conversely, to everyone with anger, hate and cheap certainty in their soul who shall be angry at me in equal measure? Again, you assholes at both extremes holding all of us and peace itself by the throat — you can eat an overstuffed bag of stale, unsalted dicks. You’re useless to any actual solution ever. You are the fucking problem. And that is enough sincerity for one man on the end of a bad day.
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