Exceptionalism fuels hate
There are some people that dont think like us.
Said Ben, as he held up a picture of a bloodstained bed.
How many Palestinians do you know Ben?
You will not hold me to account for the people who marched in Charlottesville. They are American, but they do not represent me. He says.
So then why is it OK to hold Palestinians to account for Hamas? to carpet bomb their houses and kill their children?
They dont think like us.
Actually they think a lot like you do.
The suggestion there is that Hamas are animals, they are less than human. That their hatred is ingrained. That is it in their blood. This is the language of hate.
But they have been living in the worlds biggest open air prison for 15 years. They are being slowly starved out, they are told when they can have water, when they can have electric, when they can have fuel. They see no future for their children, and youth unemployment is at 70%. This means there are lots of young men, with nothing to do except stew upon how their future is controlled by a people that hate them.
Palestinians are people too. If you prick us, we bleed, if you tickle us, we laugh, and if you wrong us, will we not revenge?
Vengeance is not a virtuous emotion, it is not constructive, but destructive and can trigger a cycle of destruction. But it is a legitimate emotion. If you had been imprisoned for 15 years. If you saw no future for your children. If you were afraid to even have children because of the ceaseless violence, is it not feasible that you might want revenge?
We make an eternal enemy of a man if we tell him his illness is inmcurable,. That he cannot be fixed. But for those who want to hate it can also be a convenient means of perpetuating hatred. A means of seeing not the man, but the caricature. “It’s in their blood”, they look like us, but they dont think like us.
Ironically Hamas dont think like me, but they think a lot like Ben, in that some of them believe that their enemies are incurably evil. The idea that “they dont think like us”, that “they are people, but not like we are people” is behind what a lot of the history of hatred of Jewish people has been over the centuries that led to the pogroms that culminated in the holocaust, of which the creation of Israel was the after effect.
If you continue to see the world in terms of different people that are different because of what is in their blood, you condemn not just the Palestinians but the Jews too. Because the history of the world tells us that the persecution of the Jews was done by people who believe, fully believed them to be scheming sinister parasites. In the same way that the history of palestine has been fuelled by israeli a-priori disdain for Arab lives. The resultant carpet bombing of Gaza is not a military offensive. It is not a ‘war’. In a war two sides meet to fight. It is a massacre of civilians designed to bring fear and kill innocent and guilty alike. It is the practice of revenge.
The cycle spins on.
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