Israel and Palestine: A True American Story
I will be upfront and let you know that nothing in this essay is about Israel or Palestine. In fact, its about how Americans use the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to highlight what a bunch of narcissistic pigs Americans are.
Conservatives use any conflict regarding Israel as a way to further the evangelical Christian narrative that Israel must be protected at all costs, an argument that pretends to care about Jews but is actually tied to a Christian biblical prophecy — that the creation of a Jewish state and the rebuilding of the Jewish Temple will bring about the Second Coming of Jesus, a deity that Jews don’t believe is the Messiah. Jews are essentially a conduit for bringing about the Christian end of the world, and evangelicals, in their pursuit to end the world in order to fulfill their apocalyptic death cult, use Israelis as a pawn for their own ends. It’s not so much that they are racist against Palestinians (who by the way, are the same ethnic group as Jews. That’s right, Arabs are semites, and to be anti-semitic is also to be anti-Arab, not just anti-Jew) as it is an indifference to Palestinians since their success won’t bring Jesus back. Its a marriage of convenience, like most American political marriages.
Because the American cannot imagine a world outside of its own worldview, the leftist version is just as abhorrent and self-serving. For the Left, Israel is a beacon of democracy in the Middle East, and many, many, many Jews are Democratic Party voters, and so we have to support Jews to keep their votes. But ALSO, the Left has an anti-colonial segment that is pro-Palestinian, and Palestinians are generally darker skinned, and the Democratic Party needs dark skinned people to support white liberal policies — after all, how can white liberals love brown people if they aren’t also their maids and raise their children? So we need to appease both sides, and the most non-offensive way of approaching this difficult situation is to call for a ceasefire in Gaza. Yes, we are on the side of peace, for everyone involved — in this way, we keep the anti-colonial radicals on the progressive left and we keep the Jewish entertainers who guarantee us California in presidential elections. Again, a classic American marriage of convenience.
Knowing this, I feel sorry for my activist friends, who are increasingly annoying me with their incessant posts about this war that has nothing to do with them. These activists, who have never done military service and know nothing of warfare, truly believe that their indignant posts will bring about a ceasefire, or a Palestinian state. These activists who act like this conflict is new, and that the one thing preventing peace in the Middle East was that the last conflict was before the dominance of social media. They really think — well let’s stop beating around the bush — these American activists, on one level or another, believe that what they have to say matters because they are Americans. They really believe that Palestinian and Israeli soldiers are in this conflict in order to get the approval of Twitter (or X or whatever the fuck Elon Musk wants to call it). These activists really believe that once soldiers in the middle of a battlefield check their social media accounts and see how angry people are about this conflict, they’ll see the errors of their ways and stop fighting.
It is enormously delusional. It is laughable, and it has nothing to do with Israel or Palestine. In fact, if these culture warriors truly gave a fuck about peace, they’d have been talking about the wars in Sudan and Ethiopia that are over a year old, or the oppression of the Ruhingya in Mayanmar, who have been in a genocidal conflict since 2017, or the political instability in Guatemala, where a Trump-like president is trying to steal an election. But that isn’t what the Left is talking about, because it isn’t popular to do so. Just like it wasn’t popular to talk about the French war in Mali in 2021–22, which was also colonial and genocidal in nature. The Left couldn’t give a shit about conflicts like that because it wouldn’t get them the attention that an Israeli-Palestinian conflict would.
That is because protesting human rights only matters when they are the right humans, and that is a problem with humanity. We only care about groups who affect us, whether it is personally or if it gets us approval on our social media channels. Americans are the biggest culprit of this practice because Americans are amongst the most narcissistic people on Earth. Liberal or conservative, white supremacist or anti-colonial, it is all the same thing — a group of insecure people with meaningless lives who have avoided warfare and extreme poverty trying to make themselves out to be victims, and using the truly suffering people of the world for their own gains.
Americans, you are disgusting, and I say this as a Puerto Rican, who has been suffering under this rampant narcissism since 1898. I sincerely hope the Israeli and Palestinian nations can achieve peace without the help of the United States. It should be their own accomplishment, and I hope the Americans have nothing to do with it, for their sake, and for the hope that a blow can be made toward the American ego — that other people in the world can figure shit out without a fucking American taking all the credit.