Might beats right 99% of the time. We speak up for the oppressed, human and non-human, not because there's much hope it'll change things

but because we can't live with ourselves if we pretend that we didn't see

Two contrasting views on Rumble this morning. Richard Medhurst sees hope in the military resistance of Hamas, Hezbollah, Iraq and Yemen who are humiliating Israel and says that the US has bitten off more than it can chew.

Norman Finkelstein says he can’t see any hope for Palestinians who will be annihilated or ethnically cleansed by Israel with the full support of the US and UK governments, mainstream media and many citizens.

He brings up two interesting comparisons with Black emancipation.

During the American slave revolts, which were bloody and gruesome, Black enslaved people were told to kill all White people. These events are now revered and celebrated in the US. They were seen as the right thing to do. Is it surprising that after years of oppression and humiliation by Israelis that Hamas, who were elected on their ability to provide social care, are also told to kill all Jews? Are Arabs materially different to Black people, or are Jews materially different to White people?

There was also the question of how slavery should be ended. Would sending the Black enslaved people back to their racial brothers and sisters in Africa or the Caribbean, instead of racial segregation, have saved thousands of lives from the (what know seems to us to be inevitable) civil rights protests? No Martin Luther King and no George Floyd? Would it have been the ‘right’ thing to do? Though Palestinians and their ancestors were born in Palestine ‘Israel’ should the Palestinians be forced into the Sinai desert to stop the war ? Expediency says that it would save lives. Does that make it the right thing to do?

Stopping oppression, slavery and ceasing the creation and funding of sectarian societies seems to be the right thing to do. However, how do we ‘fight’ the inevitable unrest that they produce? Yet more bombing, arms and partisan marches may produce even more division, resistance and unrest.

The cause of Palestine seems to be hopeless. And it probably is. The hypocrisy, racism and blood lust of our leaders and journalists seems to be endless. And it probably is. Whatever was done to them to make them this way will not be changed by bombing or shouting at them. Only they can do the work on themselves. Like only we can do the work of self-love on ourselves.

We speak because we cannot unsee but always remembering that ‘there but for the grace of god go I’. We were not driven to be politicians by whatever happened in our childhood. We cannot say that we would have reacted differently to the way that Israelis politicians, industrialists and whoever it is who ‘really’ rules the world have if the same things had happened to us.

We speak what we see but we remember that everything we see is through our own lens of conditioning as to what is right and wrong, good and evil.

We do what our conscience dictates, but accepting that this may not change the outcome nor make the world any more how we want it to be, I think, is on the path to wisdom.

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