Like they agree with me in terms of being “team Palestine”, and understands my analogies of the initial Hamas attack being like if slaves in the 1800s had tried to stage an uprising etc but still “you can’t tell me terrorism is good because it’s never good”, even when I explain to them how non-violent protest actually working (like when schools taught us about MLK JR/civil rights etc) is propaganda…fun times.
Same. Basically exact same scenario, except I’m Jewish and she isn’t. That gives me a bit of leeway but she’s still totally anti violence, and anti ‘terrorism’. At the end of the day, that sort of liberalism simply doesn’t make sense. All you can do is try to erode it over time.
I went down the route of ‘Israel and the West created the conditions that enable Hamas existence and necessity to exist/fight.’
Ok, but innocent people died.
‘more innocent people have been killed by Israel than the other way around by a very large margin, and the relations are the opposite. Hamas rises up against colonial power. Israel enforces power upon a colonised underclass.’
yes but violence is wrong, innocent people on both sides shouldnt be harmed
‘Should they just sit there and live in Israel’s enforced squalor? If conditions continue the way they have for the past 70 years, Palestine will simply no longer exist. Violent uprising is all they can do’
Well I wouldnt be violent, I don’t have it in me
‘You have never lived even remotely close to a warzone, or lived in conditions at all similar to what they have. To say that you are simply different and wouldn’t react to social factors is to imply that you are genetically peaceful or civil. That is eugenecist thought.’
…
I just think there’s better ways of doing it.
‘of course, you, a person with no combat experience or anticolonial resistance theory knows better than the group born into and forged by that conflict…’
That’s sort of the lines of the conversation. I probably wasn’t as clear, and her views were more nuanced, but I think the essence is there. I definitely word things differently to be kind, and to not show how much it actually frustrates me sometimes.
Small rant.
If you truly cannot resist violence with violence, then you are usually killed by your aggressors. It’s easy for pacifists to exist in the first world where they’ll never have to lie down and let themselves be killed. They can just sit at home while the system they accept the continued existence of does the killing for them.
Ironically, it’s those comfortable material conditions that have shaped her “violence is bad no matter what” ideology, because seeing violence makes her feel bad, and she doesn’t have to see it when it’s inherent in the system.
I’m sorry you have to have these conversations often, because they’re indeed uniquely frustrating, especially with loved ones.
Yeah. Definitely. That’s well worded. I think many of us have a probably been peace-fetishists at some point in our lives, and now we’re here. So I hold out my hopes that I’ll get through some day.
Daaaaaaaaamn I’ve never ever considered that before holy shit