Why I Haven’t Yet Weighed In On The Israel and Palestine Tensions

Sometimes even Argumentative Penguins know when we’re beaten

The phrase ‘Free Palestine’ has been cropping up a fair bit on Instagram, the only social media platform to make a comeback after the great social media cull of 2018. It comes highly recommended

I don’t go on Instagram as frequently now that lockdown is over and the crushing isolation of being locked in the house has somewhat subdued. For the most part and I use it as an electronic motion detector to see which way the idiot herds are stampeding.

Today it seems they’re running left.

A good friend of mine has a problem when it comes to making choices, one that manifests itself in obfuscation, procrastination and second-guessing herself. I’ve stood with her as she’s tried to choose a supermarket sandwich to buy for lunch.

It took an age. That’s why I was surprised to see Free Palestine crop up on her stories.

Why would a young woman who struggled so hard to pick between a BBQ chicken wrap and a BLT have suddenly worked out which side of a complex international incident to be on? It didn’t make any sense.

Then I remembered. She’s got a new housemate. A childhood friend of hers.

Said housemate is vocal about almost everything, sitting proudly in the ‘if you say nothing, you’re guilty’ style of Kafka trappery I strongly detest. In her binary view of the world, you’re either part of the solution or part of the problem.

There’s very little nuance here, she is never the problem because she’s always right and she’s never an ‘ist’ — except when it’s expedient to virtue signal your own ‘ist’, then she’s all over it. In her world, if you aren’t an activist then you may as well be out there suckling at the teat of Satan himself.

She’s a rebel without a pause. A one-woman crusade against injustice in all its forms.

As my friend has been reposting her housemates posts, I’ve got to see the vast amount of stories, pictures and insights she has been curating about the Middle East issue. She’s been incredibly vocal about the Israel and Palestine confrontation in the way that posh girls from Oxford often are.

Drawn to comment on this conflict like a moth to a flame.

I’m 95% sure if I asked her to point to either country on a map that she’d struggle.

Meanwhile, next door…

The Jewish family next door are worried. Their eldest daughter lives in Tel Aviv with her husband and the whole family have been watching the situation unfold with increasing unease.

They’re a very liberal family and abhor violence in all forms to all people. It’s one of the reasons why I like them so much. That and the dogs.

Their youngest daughter shares a classroom with many young Muslim students, some of whom have families scattered around the Middle East. It’s a difficult time for anyone with connections to that region. Whether or not we think global tensions should be played out in classrooms around the world is irrelevant and beyond our control. It already is.

Her class also contains a lot of very inspired and very fauxgressive white youth born and raised in West London who are making things worse. Their modus operandi is in much the same vein as the aforementioned housemate, hashtags, sharing images, sharing slogans and preaching from a place of under-informed ignorance.

Until recently most of them believed Hamas to be a lemony flavoured chickpea derivative you had with pitta bread. These young men and women invariably all want to Free Palestine.

A position I’d describe as rhetoric heavy and information light

I’m sure many of them would be horrified to learn about the Hamas stance on LGBTQ+ rights. As that’s not the ‘Sous-Chien de la Jour’ they’ve chosen to ignore it completely. What happens to the LGBTQ+ youth if you replace a liberal democracy with a religious autocracy?

Not glitter and unicorns that’s for sure.

You’re Anti-Palestine then are you? You filthy racist Penguin!

No. I’m anti-idiot. That’s my default stance on most issues. It’s not that I don’t care. I can see why emotive arguments are being released by both sides. I can see why the leftist tendency to side with the underdog has been evoked so easily in young people with social media accounts.

Viewing the sheer imbalance of military forces is a done deal from their point of view. They likely don’t know or haven’t explored why that imbalance exists.

I am happy to take a neutral position that pleads for a de-escalation of tension without involving myself in anything else. There’s nothing inherently wrong with doing this. Inaction is not the same as indifference and I have nothing useful to add to the dialogue.

I once sat for five hours straight and listened to my neighbours explain the history of Israel. I’m a relatively intelligent young penguin and I appreciate that I was likely getting a biased view — so, as always, I went away and I did my own research.

Based on that five hour discussion with a Jewish family and following my own comprehensive research over the following days, I drew the following conclusion. This is really really really really complicated. A lot more complicated than almost all of the things I regularly write about.

This is about the British, the Americans, Israel, Palestine, Jordan, Egypt, Syria, the second world war, the Cold War, historical anti-semitism, discrepancies between Abrahamic religions, territorial disputes, local governance, religious tolerance and intolerance, clandestine wars and spying, military supremacy, human rights, complex foreign machinations by multiple nations, the human propensity for in-group/out-group thinking, liberalism vs conservatism and the right to self-expression and self-determination of multiple groups of people with competing claims.

For those reasons, ‘Free Palestine’ doesn’t quite cut it. Not for me and it likely shouldn’t for you either.

It’s not that there’s anything wrong with these two words. It’s just a meaningless phrase, similar to MAGA. It sounds good when you’re typing it into your social media accounts — but what do you mean exactly?

Free from what? To do what? What’s your comprehensive and well thought out solution here? Given this issue has been running for seventy years and experts in international relations haven’t found a work-around, why do you insist these two words provide an adequate solution?

Or did you get your information from a single tweet or instagram post without considering that it might’ve excluded some of the aforementioned complexity?

For most people on the left, it’s about making a knee jerk instinctive guess about oppressor and oppressed and then trying to be ‘on the right side of history’. I’ve read the history. There is NO right side. The whole thing is an absolute clusterfuck of the highest order.

Oh, and whilst I’m on a roll, BLM and Free Palestine are not the same thing. Not even a little bit. Conflation of the two is dangerous and carrying over your ebullient indignation from one to other as though this is a simple maths problem is fundamentally flawed. Not just flawed, stupid.

If you’re wondering how I know this, it’s because I’m not an idiot and have thought about it for more than eight seconds. I would advise you to do the same. Not everything is racism even though it’s become a popular stick to hit your enemies with in the modern age.

Boiling this down to hero and villain is a maladaptive and ill-informed approach to this situation. You’ve gone full Dunning Kruger and you probably have no idea why.

‘Free Palestine’ looks great on paper but it’s no more a solution than just yelling ‘Eat More Fish!’ at the top of your voice.

So what exactly is the Penguin view?

I don’t want people to die. I don’t want children to be orphaned and I’d like everyone to get on better than they do. I prefer liberal democracy to religious autocracy but that’s probably because I live in a liberal democracy and I’m not religious.

If you’ve read my work before you’ll be well aware I’m not against taking a controversial stance. I don’t have one here other than I’d like to see a lot less death and a lot more talking wherever possible.

I’ve got intellectual limits. The Israel and Palestine conflict is so complicated and tied together with so many other factors that I’ve got nothing of use or insight to add other than telling idiots to shut up.

I don’t want the absence of vocal support to be seen as a tacit endorsement of warfare— because that is a reductionist and stupid argument. To both Israelis and Palestinians caught up in this, I wish things were different and I hope sensible heads prevail.

To everyone else chiming in, why not try letting the sensible heads do their best work and prevail.

I’m always wary of people who treat entire groups like a homogenous entity, there are ‘good’ and ‘bad’ people on both sides of this. The conflict has knock on effects outside of the countries themselves — and so we must be careful to check whether we’re part of the problem.

I’m also wary of people who provide simple solutions to complex problems and I don’t think there’s a more complex problem in the world than this one. There isn’t a simple solution that can be wished into being by the will of the ignorant majority. If that were the case, we wouldn’t be seventy years into a continuing dispute with no sign of a resolution.

What the world needs more than anything else is for most people not to get involved. Under-informed social media activism is unhelpful and counter-productive. Sharing flags and slogans doesn’t solve the problem — it amplifies the already entrenched positions of the combatants.

Like all centre ground people who think further than their echo chamber, I’m also very wary about a rise in anti-semitism off the back of left-leaning inflammatory ignorance.

Articles have been written on the platform and elsewhere by Jewish writers highlighting this as a growing problem. I’d encourage the left-leaning population of Medium to read them carefully.

I don’t want my neighbour’s teenage daughter to be tearful at school, firstly because I like her and she’s a sweet kid who doesn’t deserve to be vilified for a conflict that began before her parents were born. Secondly, I don’t want her life to be made worse because people who ordinarily can’t choose a sandwich under pressure have decided this is a simple binary matter

As for me, I know what sandwich to pick under pressure. When faced with a complex selection of sandwiches, ham is my go to choice. Sometimes I have hummus instead of butter. As always, I do my own thing and think my own thoughts. You should try it (both the sandwich and the free thinking).

Unsure why ham would be a bad choice for both sides of this conflict? Want to support the Hummus regime? Sit down before you hurt yourself.

Want to read an article where I’ve definitely taken a position?