this post was submitted on 11 Oct 2023
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Yeah, it's one of those polarizing issues, where people on both sides decide that any opinion is binary and you either are all in for Israel or all in for Palestina and you can't have any empathy or understanding for both sides.
These past days people yelled at me in the fediverse that I chill for Israel's illegal occuption and also that I chill for Hamas and blame their atrocities on Israel. It's insane. You can hardly have any other opinion than either Israel all bad or Palestine all bad.
It's disgusting how many people on both sides support slaughtering civilians of the other side while at the same time saying that the other side are monsters for slaughtering civilians.
Welcome to modern politics, where the range of opinions that a person accepts is so small that it doesn't overlap with the range that a person on the other side accepts.
If you have an opinion in the middle, everyone will just hate you and having a discussion is impossible.
I blame Western media's fairness bias. Decades of pushing the idea that every issue has exactly two sides, no more and no less, and those sides are exactly opposite each other and fully equal.
Israel, represented by their hardline zionist governments, on one side. Palestine, represented by the hardline islamists of Hamas, on the other. Nothing exists off that axis, nothing exists between those poles but Enlightened Centrist fence sitters. Fairness.
The Israeli-Palestinian conflict has taken on symbolic importance to many people. In one sense whatever is going on there is not really important for most of the world. It's some kind of internal conflict/civil war with essentially neighbors beating each other up. But it doesn't really affect anyone else significantly. And yet everyone has a take on who is right and who is wrong and the thinking is very black and white and absolutist, even if you really don't know what's going on or the history behind it or the stakes.
Contrast this with other similar conflicts that most people have no opinion on. Like Ethiopia-Tigray or the ongoing civil war in Myanmar. Most people probably haven't even heard of this stuff and have no clue as to who is fighting who. Hell, how many people had the barest inkling of who Hamas was a week ago. And now they feel they can take some absolute morally superior position on the issue.
It's because the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has become symbolic of who you are. The other conflicts I mentioned have no symbolic meaning or importance to people outside those regions. The Ukraine war is another highly symbolic conflict and that's why it's often mentioned in the same breath, but the myriad of other ethnic conflicts going on throughout the world are ignored.
The power of symbolic positions is that they strongly ensure group cohesion. You wear these symbols on your chest like a medal or a placard. They superficially resemble personal opinions, but actually they're badges of membership. Most people don't actually think hard about these issues or try to understand deeply what's going on. Instead they are told what to believe and what to say by people that they trust and identify with. Once it's clear what the "correct" position is, people will wear it with pride.
Deeply thinking about a complex issue is extremely resource intensive and most people just don't care that much. We also want to clearly delineate things into categories of good/bad. It's a natural heuristic that feels good. Once you know a thing is "good" you cheer it on. If a thing is "bad" you loudly denounce it with your peers. If a big thing happens, but you don't know if it's good or bad then you feel uncomfortable mental dissonance. Big things can't just be left in a state of psychological limbo. You need to decide if it's good or bad. And so we do, collectively.