Palestine and Israel: A Line in the Sand
Speaking out in favour of either Israel or Palestine is risky business for any content publisher these days.
For those advocating in favour of Palestine and a cessation of the textbook genocide underway there by Israel, the cost is higher. There are literally hundreds of influencers worldwide who have been de-platformed for such advocacy. Many in the professional broadcast media space have been outright fired.
Even measured and balanced expressions of opposition to violence generally and advocacy for peace has seen censorship on the grounds of “antisemitism”. For the record, a “semite” is someone who is “a member of (or descendant of) any of a number of peoples of ancient southwestern Asia including the Akkadians, Phoenicians, Hebrews, and Arabs” according to Merriam Webster dictionary. So using the term “anti-semitic” to imply “anti-jewish” is just wrong.
Having no platform of any significance, the risk of censorship to me is of no concern. As a former publisher of unpopular and controversial opinion, I can attest to the dominance of algorithmic censorship by Google, Apple, Facebook, Twitter and Youtube from firsthand experience.
The atrocities being inflicted on Palestinians in retaliation for the Hamas attack on Israel on October 7 are not justifiable, are disproportionate, and unjustly punitive against a civilian population.
The damage that Israel is doing to itself in terms of global sentiment – and its own future on the world stage – has undermined its humanitarian reputation completely.
Developed nation governments in the G7 have uniformly sided with the Israeli side, and media platforms in those countries have dutifully banned Palestinian support in favour of Israeli support officially.
Also it is important to note that the major tech platforms cater to the Israeli cabal unequivocally.
This single geopolitical event has illuminated the destruction of objective journalism which can now be seen as complete in the G7 context. Journalism has become ideological propaganda.
Objectively, the Hamas attack was the result of 70 years of brutal occupation by Israel, whose very existence is a result of dominant nation horse-trading to avoid a domestic consideration of a solution to the fabricated “problem” of a Jewish state.
If separation of church and state is a fundamental principle of democracy, then how is it that Israel is the beneficiary of an exception? Any nation founded on a religious basis is fundamentally corrupt from the outset, because religion is matter of personal belief, and thus impregnates all other institutions of democracy with a preconceived agenda devoid of justice.
Non-jewish nationhood is unrelated to religion. The religious convictions of a nations’ citizenship is very much a personal issue, and religion has no business in government. Unsurprisingly, the majority of the founders of Israel were atheists, and so even the idea that the foundation of Israel was a religious cause is unsupported by historical fact. President Chaim Weizmann (in office 1949-52) and Prime Minister David Ben Gurion (in office 1948-54 and 1955-63) were both self-proclaimed atheists.
And let me point out that, on both sides, the argument as to “who was here first” is pointless and ridiculous; humanity evolved from a single organism originally. So differentiating ourselves on a minor differentiation in DNA is the epitome of naive.
Here is the solution: Israel is a wealthy nation with abundant financial resources from supporters around the world. Why don’t they just buy real estate next to each other, and then proclaim that a country? It would be far more palatable and defensible in the long term than stealing land from Palestinians and killing them.
The seventy year experiment called Israel has been brought to an abject conclusion, and it has failed. The sooner Israel realizes that and repatriates the Palestinian territory, the sooner history will accord them some rehabilitation of their otherwise tattered reputation.
