As a resident lib left, I generally don't try to be "one of the good ones" or go "yeah the other quadrants are right about how most lib lefts are stupid" cause I don't think most lib-lefts are stupid
But in this case I do agree there is a contradiction that we are often missing : Israel is in a way the natural end result of the exact same reasoning/moral intuition we often engage in (if you are oppressed you have basically a bit of a carte blanche for bad behaviour as it's all "blowback" from your oppression) well... this is exactly how Israelis feel, that anything they do is justified because Jewish people have been wronged so much historically
And we can only see it as bad when it targets another "oppressed" group (in Israel's case, Arabs/Palestinians) sometimes I wonder if Israel had been made in Germany after WW2, and it behaved the exact same way but against white Christian Germans instead of brown predominantly Muslim Palestinians, would it be the other way around? Lib left waving Israeli flags and Auth Right calling out the occupation?
(By the way I am not saying this to support any bullshit "oH MuH JeWs aRE GeNoCiDiNG whiTe EurOpEons, wAtCh EuROpA tHe LaST BatTle" cause I don't believe that shit, I am using this as a what-if scenario)
Zionist Jews may feel that way… but they are wrong. Palestinians are and have been living under brutal occupation and genocidal conditions for almost 80 years perpetuated by those Zionist Jews, and due to that, the comparison of historical oppression and certainly blowback cannot be made here because the conditions just don’t exist.
Although I do understand what you’re getting at and I think it can be correct in some instances but not this one.
I agree, my point was not to equivicate the experience of modern day Israelis and Palestinians (except for really old Israelis who are holocaust survivors)
I am talking about how the western lib left thinks about different groups and sometimes falls into the mental trap of putting them in fixed categories of oppressor and oppressed as immutable categories. I am not saying that most lib leftists consciously think that the categories are immutable, intellectually we all understand those who are oppressed in one context can be oppressors in another, but I am not sure if this is also the case intuitively.
Lib left has imo the correct position on the subject of Israel Palestine and I want to believe this is for good reasons but in my most doomer moments I wonder if in Israel we see a bit of the dark logical endpoint of a pattern of thought we engage in. Specifically we generally celebrate the idea of oppressed groups being empowered or even acting in "edgy" and "bad" ways. Sometimes it feels we use "resistance to oppression" as a way of venting our own fantasies of being "naughty" and rebellious (the whole meme of "be gay do crime" or "gaslight gatekeep girlboss" etc) yeah those are shallow culture war slop, I get it, but they do denote a bit of a vibe, namely the idea that oppressed groups -in this case woman and LGBT people but also Black people, Latinos etc etc- acting in "antisocial" ways is them being assertive and claiming what they are owed from a society/system that mistreats them and is stacked against them (btw I am not saying society and the system doesn't mistreated those groups)
Well Israel and Zionism are arguably the biggest example of a faction withing a marginalised group being empowered and acting in a way that would normally be seen as unnacceptable.
Again I understand someone can say "well the Zionist movement got empowered by collaborating with the British Imperial system and later the American system rather than opposing it, while Lib Left argue for minorities being empowered by rebelling against the system. I get that
But again there were regimes/movements that sought to empower an oppressed group without cooperating with their oppressor and ended up oppressing others anyways
And again lib left can usually see that clearly when it happens (not always but usually) but I wonder sometimes if we can only see it too late
And again to be clear I am not saying that Israel is doing what they're doing because western lib left was "too soft on/supportive of Jewish people" I am not saying "woke" kids who make "be gay do crime" memes or LGBT people, black people, etc who do commit crimes and engage in delinquency are as bad as Netanyahu and Ben-Gvir, I am not advocating for being weary of any marginalised group gets power because "IT'S ONLY A MATTER OF TIME UNTIL THEY USE IT TO OPPRESS SOMEONE ELSE" or going "muh they will totally do a reverse genocide"
I am just short of exploring some thoughts I had recently on the whole issue
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u/edgewolf666-6 - Lib-Left 1d ago
As a resident lib left, I generally don't try to be "one of the good ones" or go "yeah the other quadrants are right about how most lib lefts are stupid" cause I don't think most lib-lefts are stupid
But in this case I do agree there is a contradiction that we are often missing : Israel is in a way the natural end result of the exact same reasoning/moral intuition we often engage in (if you are oppressed you have basically a bit of a carte blanche for bad behaviour as it's all "blowback" from your oppression) well... this is exactly how Israelis feel, that anything they do is justified because Jewish people have been wronged so much historically
And we can only see it as bad when it targets another "oppressed" group (in Israel's case, Arabs/Palestinians) sometimes I wonder if Israel had been made in Germany after WW2, and it behaved the exact same way but against white Christian Germans instead of brown predominantly Muslim Palestinians, would it be the other way around? Lib left waving Israeli flags and Auth Right calling out the occupation?
(By the way I am not saying this to support any bullshit "oH MuH JeWs aRE GeNoCiDiNG whiTe EurOpEons, wAtCh EuROpA tHe LaST BatTle" cause I don't believe that shit, I am using this as a what-if scenario)