Conflict Is Not Abuse: Overstating Harm, Community Responsibility, and the Duty of Repair

by Sarah Schulman

Settlers are scarier than the army here because they kidnap and torture openly.

There is nothing holding the settlers back, they do what they want without facing any repercussions.

These are the children of the nationalistic and racist generation—Netanyahu’s offspring.

Here we see the phenomena of asserting one’s own pain as exclusive and paramount, and as the justification for cruelty towards others. Here, again, is pain from the past being blamed on the wrong party.

In the Jewish state there is pity and human feelings only for Jews, rights only for the Chosen people.

The new sabra (Jew born in Israel) … has never met his Palestinian counterpart, but knows everything about him—the sabra knows he is a wild animal, intent only on killing him; that he is a monster, a terrorist.

Being left wing or a seeker of justice in the Jewish state is deemed a crime, civil society is considered treacherous, true democracy an evil.

CHILDREN MAY BE DYING IN GAZA, BUT HEY THERE’S AN AWESOME CLUB SCENE IN TEL AVIV SO IT’S OKAY.

The government had known almost from the beginning that the boys were dead. It maintained the fiction that it hoped to find them alive as a pretext to dismantle Hamas’ West Bank operations.

Goldberg reported that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had immediately placed a gag order on the deaths. Journalists who heard rumors were told the Shin Bet wanted the gag order so their search would be unhindered.

This of course is the classic paradigm: that the telling of the truth is the crime, not the truth itself. And then he used the rhetoric of the compensatory mothers as a stand-in for nationalism and vectors of male control.

According to the United Nations, 77 percent of those first hundred Gazans whose lives he saved by killing them were civilians. Twenty-one were children.

“You can’t defend yourself when you’re militarily occupying someone else’s land. That’s not defense.” - Noam Chomsky

Rihanna became the first US pop star to respond to the murder of Gaza. She tweeted #FreePalestine, and then deleted it eight minutes later. But 7,000 people had already retweeted it.

Demonstrations erupt in Ramallah in the West Bank as people protesting Israeli murders in Gaza were stopped by Palestinian Authority security forces. Then four young boys playing soccer on the Gaza beach are murdered by Israeli soldiers on camera.

Israeli ambassador in Canada allegedly blamed parents of 4 murdered Gaza children for letting them play on the beach

That same day, France becomes the first country to specifically ban pro-Palestine demonstrations.

To them, everything Israel did was right. It’s like the big man in a small town who can never apologize, and is surrounded by a partner, family members, and friends who reinforce his sense of perfection at the expense of the scapegoat, who embodies his very real flaws. But now it was an entire country. With an unrestrained military.

Instead, it is the bystanders who actively avoid the responsibility of intervention by invoking the theory of “both sides.” This claim allows cowards an excuse not to act, not to confront the self-righteousness of the bullies. The Jewish Bully, like any bully, cannot be wrong, therefore cannot negotiate, and so defends their lack of self with a claim to moral superiority. The bystander refuses to engage them and instead insists that “time” will produce change, so that they don’t have to.

Pro-Palestine protests & marches are now illegal in France, but that didn’t stop 1000s from marching in Paris today.

Last 48 hours: Hamas kills 5 Israeli soldiers. Israel murders 110 men, women & children, bombs civilian infrastructure & cuts electricity

I shared a video, from Al Jazeera in Arabic, of a stunned young reporter strapped into a helmet and bulletproof vest standing in front of a vista of bombed homes and apartment buildings billowing smoke. He starts to speak to the camera, then trembles, falters, and finally breaks down in tears. This, after all, is what we who were actually paying attention were seeing all day long: people wailing, people screaming, people’s hearts literally torn out. The Palestinians, whom we shunned for decades, whom we have silenced so we could blame, were now in our lives daily and they were crying.

Netanyahu accused Palestinians of displaying their “telegenically dead.”

The police ritual was designed to enforce obedience, an exercise in overreaction, overstatement, projection, dehumanization.

And still some of the Palestinians talked back. It was incredible to watch. They may have been afraid, but they knew that what they were saying was true, whether they were saying, “Don’t hurt him” or “This is our right.” They spoke in Hebrew, which added another level of poignancy.

The creation of the idea that Palestinians are the bad guys here is probably the most effective propaganda of the modern era.

US Jewish community needs to do more to prevent its youth becoming radicalized and going overseas to join “IDF” death squads in Palestine.

Zionist on campus, “My cousin lives in Israel…” 469 Palestinians no longer live in Gaza because they were massacred by Israel.

I’ve worked in a newsroom for more than a decade but the images coming out of Gaza are the worst I’ve seen. Utterly horrific.

43% of #Gaza’s total territory has now been warned to evacuate. But borders are closed. Where are people supposed to go?

He then outlined changes in rhetoric in Israel as an “ongoing process of delegitimization of Palestinian citizens and of the Jewish left,” and pointed to legislation introduced in 2009 that started framing anti-war protesters and human rights NGOs as “traitors in our midst.”

I blame you all for Gaza. I blame the students who didn’t care to ask their universities to divest from companies that make this occupation and expansion of settlements possible. The citizens of states who didn’t ask their government to stop sending military aid to Israel that ends up in the form of bullets in the chests of Palestinian children.

On a daily basis I was watching the reports from Gaza and then reading posts with every element of distorted thinking: the self is inscrutable, the other is turned into a specter. Different standards are imposed on the self and the other. There is no empathy, but rather an illogic, a distorted system of thought that is delusional about both the self and the other.

“There were no Hamas in 1948 neither in 1967 neither in 1982, So stop your ridiculous excuses Israel, you’re simply murderers”

Rebecca Vilkomerson, the Executive Director of Jewish Voice for Peace, and seven others were arrested in New York for entering the office of Friends of the Israeli Defense Forces and reading out loud the names of Palestinians murdered in Gaza.

Simultaneously, twenty-four American Jews participated in the first ever Jewish National fund JDate singles’ trip to Israel, an insane juxtaposition.

Since the state of Israel had now murdered 600 people in Gaza because they claimed they were “defending” themselves, many people on social media were openly wondering how Israel could simultaneously insist that the place was safe enough for tourism.

I attribute all of this pain, suffering, cruelty and annihilation to bad groups.

That horrifying false sense of “loyalty” where blaming, scapegoating, shunning, removing, occupying, and killing somehow means you’re a good citizen. Where uniting to destroy other people means you are perfect, superior, and right. A system of no self-criticism, no honest negotiation, no efforts towards reconciliation, no recognition of your own mistakes. That’s how we get genocide, folks.

A bunch of provincial thugs living in a hall of mirrors have a chance to face themselves and choose instead t...

Half of the Jews in Israel do not come from countries that experienced the Holocaust.

Unprocessed trauma. The holocaust was unimaginable trauma that was never processed and when trauma is not processed it is repeated. In this case identification with the aggressor. How could it have been processed. There is no simple answer to this- when a whole culture had been traumatized. But we as human beings need to discuss and figure it out- because this is unacceptable!

Just to say, this is not a “mutual” problem where we just need to “get along.” On the contrary, Jews have been subjugating Palestinians for 66 years.

But as someone who came to reality about all of this very late in the game, I have to recognize that there were Jews all along who knew this was wrong and said so.

any vestiges of the kind of supremacy ideology that makes it impossible for people to admit that they were wrong, the group re-enforcement of that lethal pathology has to be dismantled as we spend the rest of our days in truth and real accountability for this sick nightmare of cruelty for which we (Jews and Americans) are responsible.

Arlene, the occupation is wrong and people resist it. There is no way to maintain an unjust system without reaction.

Audrey, similarly, anti-apartheid movements in SA generated considerable corruption, sociopathic behavior. Proximally unpleasant behavior by resisting populations is not uncommon and not limited to Hamas. It is not central to the issue.

Audrey, well, my main point is that we (Jews and Americans) are locked into ideology, actions and systems that are not viable. A concept of “defense” that relies on mass murder at the worst of times and oppression and denial of basic rights as status quo, is not acceptable.

I’m supposed to be grateful that you are not doing this? Why is this even up for discussion? What you are doing is ghastly enough.

Release the pressure, end the siege and occupation, admit that the crime of dispossession was done to the Palestinians, get on the table and negotiate honestly, and then assess what happens.