Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley):
You don’t need to understand every little detail about Israel and Palestine to oppose the genocide in Gaza. You can safely go with your gut on this one. You can and should research this issue, of course, but everything you learn will only make Israel look worse.
I say this because I see too many people get intimidated away from speaking out about Gaza by an erroneous but widespread notion that this is an issue best left to the experts. This notion is promulgated by Israel and its apologists throughout the western world, who try to frame this as a super duper complex issue which requires years of research to be able to comprehend with the requisite nuance and accuracy.
And it’s complete bullshit. The Gaza genocide is exactly what it looks like at first glance. I say this as someone who has been researching this issue extensively.
You don’t need to know everything about the history of modern Israel to know that it’s wrong to intentionally starve a civilian population. You don’t need to be able to defend your position to aggressive pro-Israel trolls online to know that it’s wrong to assassinate journalists, bomb hospitals, and rain military explosives on areas full of children. You don’t need any qualifications of any kind to see the horrific footage coming out of Gaza and denounce your government for facilitating those atrocities.
Israel and its supporters understand the power of narrative control better than maybe any other group out there. They even have a word, “hasbara”, for the practice of defending Israel’s public image and justifying its crimes to the western public. If you speak out about Gaza on any public forum you are likely to run into a hasbarist who tries to intimidate you into silence by knowing a little bit more than you about this issue and spouting a few talking points that you are not quite equipped to address just yet.
And I am telling you that you should definitely disregard these people and push past your initial impulse to be intimidated into silence. The reason “I ain’t reading all that, free Palestine” has become a meme in pro-Palestine circles is because Israel apologists have been trying to use mountains of verbiage to counter the public response to raw video footage documenting clear abuses in Gaza. It takes a whole lot of words to try and spin footage of mutilated children as the fault of Hamas, or photos of IDF soldiers mockingly dressing in the clothes of dead and displaced Palestinian women as fine and normal. They confront people with walls of text filled with apologia and talking points to try and overwhelm their common sense and empathy as they look at raw evidence of Israel’s depravity.
We saw a really glaring example of the way Israel’s defenders try to intimidate people into silence with the recent debate on Joe Rogan between Israel apologist Douglas Murray and Israel critic Dave Smith. Murray spoke in a smug, condescending tone the entire time and tried to suggest that because Smith has never physically been to Gaza then he has no business publicly expressing an opinion about it.
This is self-evidently insane. Obviously you don’t need to go to Gaza to know that the facts and footage you’re seeing coming out of the enclave are awful. No matter how many times you go to Israel and the Palestinian territories, it will still be wrong to bomb hospitals and intentionally starve civilians and create the largest population of child amputees on this planet. But Israel’s apologists are constantly using some version of this tactic to silence Israel’s critics by implying that they don’t have enough personal expertise on this issue to voice opposition to an active genocide.
Don’t buy into it. Speak out against the Gaza holocaust, even if you aren’t an expert and don’t understand every little detail just yet. Definitely keep researching and learning, but please do not be intimidated into thinking you need to be some kind of doctorate-level scholar on this issue before you can publicly oppose history’s first live-streamed genocide.
Israel’s supporters want you to believe this so that you will shut up long enough for them to purge the Gaza Strip of all Palestinian life. Your hesitation buys them time to do this.
Disregard their intimidation tactics. Dismiss them, block them, move away from them, and continue opposing the genocide.
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Feature image by Matt Hrkac via Wikimedia Commons (Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic)
