Category: War and Peace (Page 1 of 4)

There is a difference between understanding something and supporting it.

2023-12-04 / The Woke Contrarian / 0 Comments

It is worth trying to understand why some Palestinians fight with Hamas, or why some Ukrainians actively collaborate with the Russians, why some Israelis equate non-eliminationist Palestinian liberation movements with antisemitism, or why the Ukrainian government and its supporters have become even more ethnonationalist than they were before the full-scale war started.

Understanding the fault lines in Israeli and Ukrainian society can lead to healing. If we don’t understand what is happening, then we will be at a loss to end the suffering.

But this understanding need not—must not—justify Netanyahu’s genocidal aims, Vladimir Putin’s brutal invasion, Kiev’s petty ethnic nationalism, or Hamas’s slaughtering of civilians and hostage-taking.

On throwaway politics

2023-12-04 / The Woke Contrarian / 0 Comments

The world has seen an epidemic of throwaway politics over the past decade or so. What do I mean by “throwaway politics”? Throwaway politics is the practice of treating entire demographics as expendable, useless, superfluous. Throwaway people are second-class citizens, Others, subalterns. They are often ethnic, racial, religious, gender, or sexual minorities, but not always—for example, Black South Africans were throwaway majorities under apartheid.

Politicians and constituents who adopt throwaway politics are usually on the right, but the right doesn’t have a monopoly on the practice—consider left-wing Hamas supporters’ callous attitude towards Jews, or certain left-wing politicians, such as Sahra Wagenknecht, who vilify migrants to outflank their right-wing counterparts.

The demographic characteristics of throwaway residents may vary, but the underlying dynamics are the same: there are some people who are less equal than others. In Europe and European-influenced countries, typical throwaway people are often Muslims, immigrants from the “wrong” countries, refugees from the Middle East (who are typically Muslims), LGBTQ+ people, and occasionally Jews.

Once you’re a throwaway, nobody cares about your rights. You’re not worth listening to. You may as well not even exist. You are no longer deserving of empathy or consideration.

We know where this leads: the events of 1933–1945. Hitler’s primary target was Jewish people, but Jews were not the only throwaway Germans. Disabled people, dubbed “ballast existences,” were targeted through the Nazis’ Aktion T-4. So were the Roma. The Nazis didn’t care much for Russians, either. Queer and trans people were also fodder for Hitler’s hate machine.

Why the hell are exclusivist ideologies, or the remnants of exclusivist ideologies, given any credence in supposedly inclusive (most Western democracies) or anti-fascist (Russia) societies? We know where this can go. It’s not as though we’re in 1920 and had no record of an industrial-scale genocide. Hitler’s Germany is still in living memory. Why are TERFs’ arguments taken seriously, especially when their “sex-based rights” model is a few steps away from Kinder, Küche, Kirche? Why is the Russian government endlessly pursuing LGBTQ+ people and claiming to be “anti-fascist” when their attitudes towards the community are little different from those expressed by the Nazis? Why are Christian fundamentalists, whether American Protestant or Russian Orthodox, treated as a legitimate political constituency when the same liberal or progressive politicians see right through their Islamist counterparts? Why do American police officers disproportionately target Black people with violence? Why are US presidents calling neo-Nazis “very fine people” and calling for the “complete and total shutdown of Muslims entering the United States”? Why is the new, modern, liberal, European government in Kiev treating ethnic Russians and Russian-speakers as fifth-column traitors, in a shadow of what the US government did and has done to Arab and Muslim Americans after 9/11 and now the Hamas attacks? Why is the Israeli government bombing Gaza instead of trying to live alongside the Palestinians? And why are supposedly “woke,” enlightened people claiming that every Israeli Jew is a throwaway person blocking Palestinians from their freedom?

A queer antinationalist on Ukraine and Russia

2023-12-02 / The Woke Contrarian / 0 Comments

I am queer. I am also a vehement antinationalist. These facts make it impossible for me to offer ideological support to either Moscow or Kiev.

Let’s start with the obvious one: the Putin regime. Russia has heightened its repression of LGBTQ+ people, including a new Supreme Court ruling that effectively outlaws pro-queer activism as “extremist.” LGBTQ+ activists face the risk of fines and imprisonment up to 12 years. Putin has already used these tactics against dissidents like Boris Kagarlitsky, Alexei Navalny and Vladimir Kara-Murza. Putin’s Russia tries to contrast itself with the “decadent” West with its persecution of LGBTQ+ people, even though our right-wing politicians hold views that are just as bad as Putin’s. Like western conservatives, Putin weaponises religion—in this case, the Eastern Orthodox Church, rather than evangelical Protestant denominations or the Roman Catholic Church—to impose an authoritarian social agenda. And I could go on about Russia’s other reactionary, repressive policies and laws, but there’s already ample coverage in CNN, the New York Times, NBC, The Guardian, etc.

Ukraine, for its part, is aggressively pursuing an ethnonationalist agenda that conflates Russian ethnicity and language with Putin’s vile regime. Even soldiers in the far-right, extreme nationalist Azov Battalion have been attacked for speaking Russian, primarily by the now-fired Lviv Polytechnic professor Iryna Farion, who used to be a member of the Nazi-adjacent Svoboda party (link in Russian). Nationalism has infected even otherwise progressive circles in Ukraine: according to the Kharkov-based anarchist group Assembly (link in Italian and English; English is on the bottom), many feminist and LGBTQ+ activists are closely tied with Ukraine’s nationalist movement. Instead of uniting the entirety of the Ukrainian people against the Russian state, the Ukrainian government and many of its supporters have chosen instead to create even more divisions. As I’ve said before, Kiev’s own-goals push people towards supporting Russia, even though it’s unlikely they’ll get any more freedom there than they do in Ukraine.

The situation is undoubtedly worse for people who find themselves ostracised from both sides—for example, I can’t even imagine what it feels like to be a queer leftist in occupied Eastern Ukraine (especially one who primarily speaks Russian) who runs the risk of being persecuted by Kiev or the Russian occupiers. Or for pro-Ukraine (or merely anti-war) Russians who want to leave the country: many of Russia’s European neighbours have closed the border; Ukrainians, Latvians, Lithuanians, and Poles distrust Russians, regardless of their support of Putin; and Putin’s dictatorial rule has made it impossible for them to stay home in Russia with the people they love the most. They’re being told that there is something inherently evil inside them for being from Russia, and they’re also being told that there’s something inherently wrong with them for opposing the Russian regime.

I can’t support either position. Both Russia’s anti-LGBTQ+ repression and Ukraine’s ethnonationalism are incompatible with a functioning pluralist society. They imply that if you’re not an ethnic Ukrainian who speaks Ukrainian, you’re not a real Ukrainian, or that if you’re gay or bi or trans, you’re not a real Russian. If you’re not a nationalist, you’re not a real feminist. If you’re a leftist, you’re not a good Ukrainian. If you’re a liberal or progressive, you’re not a good Russian.

And once you’re no longer seen as a real member of your society, you’re open to persecution, since civil rights and liberties are reserved only for real people, not superfluous ones.

I don’t know what the right answer is, either to put a stop to Russia’s increasing repression or Ukraine’s nationalist obsessions. I don’t think anybody does, no matter how many thinkpieces are written, no matter how many declarations are made on TV, no matter how much people rant and rave on Telegram and Reddit and Twitter.

What I do know is that people are suffering, dying and praying for a better chance for themselves, their families, their friends and their communities. And neither Russia’s sexist repression nor Ukraine’s reactionary ethnic nationalism will bring their people the peace they so desperately deserve. You don’t want real liberation or justice if your goal is to make a new group of second-class citizens.

You can capitalise “Nazi,” but not “Russian”?

2023-11-25 / The Woke Contrarian / 0 Comments

A Ukrainian fact-checking website has failed to notice that writing “Nazi” with a capital N, but using a lowercase R for “Russian,” makes them look as though they have more respect for the Nazis than the Russians. Considering Ukraine’s track record with Nazis and Nazi collaborators (Stepan Bandera, Roman Shukhevych, Symon Petliura…) and their apologists (especially Volodymyr Viatrovych), and the Russians’ false claims that Ukraine is a “Nazi regime,” this is an especially bad look. It’s the kind of thing Russian propagandists would seize on: “Look, those Ukrainians love Nazis so much that they lowercase ‘Russian’ and capitalise ‘Nazi’!”

But this case isn’t unique; it’s part of a pattern of petty and juvenile behaviour from certain Ukraine supporters. I’ve seen one Ukrainian software company get rid of the Russian localisation of its app and replace it with a Ukrainian one. Before that, they had only Russian and not Ukrainian. Why not both? Russian is spoken in multiple countries—why punish other Russian-speakers because Putin is a shithead?

And some Ukrainian news sites will write “Russia,” “Putin,” “Belarus,” “Russian,” and other words connected with Russia (and sometimes Belarus) with lowercase letters, which sounds as though a twelve-year-old dreamed it up. I also saw one quoting someone using “Kiev” (rather than the government-approved “Kyiv”) and writing it with a lowercase K… presumably because it’s “russian.” Even Russian propaganda doesn’t lowercase “Ukraine.” (They just refer to it as the “Kiev regime,” the “Nazi Ukrainian regime,” or “the Zelensky regime” in every other article.)

Most Ukrainians or overseas supporters do not do this, but there are enough of these people to piss me off. I don’t remember the Allies writing “Hitler,” “Himmler,” “Japan,” “Germany,” “Italy,” “Mussolini,” “Tokyo,” and “Nazi Party” with lowercase letters. I saw people writing “Trump” with a lowercase T on forums and social media, but no news site or paper, no matter how left-wing they were, would print “trump” instead of “Trump.” I’m fine with the flags and “Support Ukraine” fundraisers. But this crap?

My horse, my horse, my kingdom for a horse…

2023-11-25 / The Woke Contrarian / 0 Comments

…I mean, a left movement that manages to avoid the following things:

Praising Hamas or other theocratic terrorist organisations (eg, Al-Qaeda, ISIS, Boko Haram, Palestinian Islamic Jihad or Hezbollah)
Writing in a way that’s inaccessible to the people they claim to stand for (usually the working class, and sometimes disabled people if it’s disability-studies scholars who sound no different from their non-disabled counterparts in all the worst ways)
Politicising identity to the point that people turn into two-dimensional “oppressor” and “oppressed” classes (usually based on ethnicity, race, or gender) without nuance or distinction
Thinking that YELLING LOUDLY WITHOUT CLARIFYING YOUR POSITION is a GOOD WAY TO MAKE A POINT IN AN ARGUMENT. Extra points if you use the clapping 👏 hand 👏 emoji 👏 or repeat your sentence three times, first time in regular type, then italicised, then boldfaced
Promoting ideas that are impossible to implement on a large scale unless there’s a transitional period between the current and ideal states
Claiming that state propaganda organs like RT (Russia), Sputnik (Russia), TASS (Russia), the Korean Central News Agency (North Korea), Xinhua (China), Press TV (Iran), Global Times (China), TeleSUR (Venezuela), Prensa Latina (Cuba), Al Mayadeen (Lebanon), or Orinoco Tribune (Venezuela) are real “anti-imperialist news”
In contrast, relying solely or primarily on Western state media like Radio Liberty/Radio Free Asia (USA), BBC (UK), Deutsche Welle (Germany), or France 24, though this is more of a centre-left phenomenon. Although these sources are much more reliable than their Russian, Chinese, or Iranian equivalents, they tend to gloss over the faults of pro-Western regimes like Ukraine, South Korea, Japan, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia
Using only pro-government sources (there are sites that criticise the government without defending Russia) about the Ukrainian conflict, including Kyiv Independent, Kyiv Post, Ukraine Crisis Media Centre, Euromaidan Press, and Ukrainska Pravda. Ukrainian propaganda is less likely to make shit up than Russian propaganda, but it often treats Kiev’s repression and ethnocentric nationalism as a good thing
Using conspiracy-theory-laden websites like The Grayzone, MintPress News, Donbass Insider, and Moon of Alabama as reliable sources about China, Russia, or Syria
Spreading conspiracy theories in the name of “anti-imperialism,” including debunked claims about Syria’s gas killings and Ukraine’s purported biolabs
Treating activism like the Oppression Olympics, even though that’s a game nobody actually wants to win
Creating new political parties instead of trying to push existing ones further to the left (yes, I’m kind of an entryist; deal with it)
Related to the last point, running presidential or other candidates that have no chance of winning—why run anyone for office if you know damn well that a candidate from the People’s Socialist Party of Freedom, Equality and Liberation has zero chance of winning against the Democrat or Republican (or mainstream equivalents in other countries, like the Tories and Labour in the UK, or the German Christian Democrats and Social Democrats)
Refusing to build coalitions across the left because purity politics makes it impossible, thereby allowing the right to split us up and indirectly help leaders like Donald Trump, Geert Wilders and Jair Bolsonaro come to power
Expressing essentialist ideas about genders, races or cultures (“Russian culture exists to oppress Ukrainians,” “Indigenous Americans are noble sages,” “men are all rapists,” “‘real’ women are delicate flowers who need ‘sex-based rights’ to protect them from evil trans women”)
Calling anyone who disagrees with them “reactionary” or “pseudo-left” (Trotskyists do this a lot)
Focusing more on style than substance (“trans women” versus “transwoman”, #KyivNotKiev)
Venerating past and present tyrannical dictators like Joseph Stalin, Mao Zedong, “respected comrade” Kim Jong Un and the rest of his family, Bashar al-Assad, Vladimir Putin (who isn’t even a leftist, much less a communist), Xi Jinping, Ho Chi Minh, Fidel Castro, Hugo Chavez, Nicolas Maduro, Daniel Ortega, ad nauseam
Focusing on foreign policy to the exclusion of domestic policy
Focusing on domestic policy to the exclusion of foreign policy
Treating Volodymyr Zelensky (and by extension the bumbling Ukrainian central government) as though the were the second coming of Winston Churchill
Throwing around jargon like “anti-imperialist,” “settler colonial,” “decolonise,” “bourgeois,” “proletarian,” “imperialist,” “neoliberal,” and “geopolitical economy” without being clear about what they mean
Reducing all relationships of dominance and oppression to the control of the means of production or the lack thereof (which is silly, since racism, all sexisms and xenophobia can occur under any economic system, including socialism)
Supporting right-wing authoritarian states because they’re opposed to US policy (mostly Russia and Iran)
Supporting authoritarian communist or socialist states because they’re opposed to US policy (mostly China, North Korea, Venezuela, Nicaragua, and Syria)
Treating politics like a sports game
Spouting ableist views—including fat-shaming—because their concept of class or identity organising completely ignores the idea that disability is political
Treating the writings of Marx and Engels (or somethings Lenin, Stalin, and Mao) as holy writ
Siding with anti-Western states because they’re “anti-imperialist” (as though China and Russia weren’t expansionist empires, which is the analogue of Japanese, Ukrainian or Taiwanese boosting of Western imperialisms because they’re against China and Russia)
Supporting reactionary, xenophobic movements like Brexit (a common view among some British communists, as well as the perennial candidate and professional fruitcake and anti-vaxxer Jill Stein) because they’re against the EU’s neoliberalism
Dismissing reports of sexual abuse because they’re a “distraction” from the class struggle
Denying genocidal actions of anti-US regimes (China in particular)
Claiming that their movement, whether Trotskyism, orthodox Marxism–Leninism, anarchism, or any other tendency, is the only way to solve society’s problems
Uncritically defending Ukraine or other pro-Western countries with deeply problematic policies (more common in North American and Western European mainstream media, though views like this sometimes appear among social democrats and other more moderate leftists)
Dismissing, defending or promoting racism, misogyny, homophobia or transphobia on the grounds that feminism, pro-LGBTQ activism and antiracism distract from the class struggle
Constantly putting political one-upmanship over the real lives, concerns and feelings of actual human beings

Unfortunately, this seems impossible to find, at least for now. I know I can’t agree with everything I find, but the lacuna between my views and theirs is staggering. (But mainstream centre-left politics leaves me unsatisfied, too, and anything on the right is obviously out of the question.)

Right-libertarianism and Marxism are more similar than you’d expect

2023-11-24 / The Woke Contrarian / 0 Comments

I use “Marxism” and “right-libertarian” loosely to refer to ideas that, respectively, focus on the dichotomous struggle between the bourgeoisie (owners of the means of production, especially people who extract labour from their employees or consumers) and the proletariat (people who have nothing but their work to give), or the dichotomous struggle between the winners (those who benefit from capitalist conditions) and losers (those who have not managed to pull themselves up by their bootstraps).

Both these ideologies present a zero-sum view of humanity, though they take different perspectives: Marxists focus on the conflict between collectives, and right-libertarians seem these conflicts as individual. Both have a zero-sum character that reminds me of Social Darwinism. For one to survive, the other must be eliminated. This kind of winner-takes-all thinking is pervasive and seems to have brought us nowhere.

The frustrating thing is that right-libertarians often have valuable things to say about freedom of speech and expression, though they are often dismissive of how groups of people experience systemic oppression. A lot of them think that sexism, racism, homophobia and transphobia will be vanquished in the free marketplace of ideas—or that these forms of prejudice are even justifiable because they continue to exist. And Marxists have an acute understanding of how economic inequality and exploitation lead to poverty, suffering and misery—but they don’t always care about individual rights and support the suppression of dissent. And like their right-libertarian counterparts, they may pooh-pooh racism and other systemic oppressions—or uphold them—because they’re secondary to the class struggle. (And then you have the identity-reductionist counterparts, but they are distinct enough from Marxists and right-libertarians that I’ll deal with them separately.) All these are counterproductive, reductive mindsets that ignore the complexities inherent to human existence.

Vengeance is not justice.

2023-11-20 / The Woke Contrarian / 0 Comments

The key to breaking the cycle [of tragedy] is to move social discourse away from the quest for vengeance (often mislabelled “justice”), to the goal of building a society together with one’s former enemies.

—Nicolai Petro, The Tragedy of Ukraine

EU gives Kiev carte blanche to weasel out of accommodating Russophones

2023-11-14 / The Woke Contrarian / 0 Comments

Don’t worry, I haven’t forgotten about Ukraine’s continuing efforts to impose a rigidly ethnonationalist agenda on a deeply divided country. Ukrainian officials have claimed that ethnic Russians and Russian-speaking Ukrainians aren’t a “real” ethnic minority—they’re just Ukrainians who happen to speak Russian—and don’t need special protection under the law, unlike Hungarians, Romanians, and Tatars who live in Ukraine. Go ahead and force them to stop speaking Russian—after all, they’re not a real minority worthy of protection. The EU has no plans to intervene on Russophone Ukrainians’ behalf, either. (Link is in Russian.)

I think this is yet another own-goal by the Ukrainian government. One of Russia’s “justifications” for invading Ukraine was the country’s supposed oppression of Russian-speakers. By constantly doubling down on anti-Russian-language laws and statutes, Kiev is simply giving the Russians talking points. If I were less informed about Moscow’s propaganda, I would have thought Putin was telling the truth. (In general, Russia has a tendency of noticing real problems—Ukrainian ethnonationalism and its connections with Nazi collaborators, racial tensions in the US, labour disputes in France—and using them to justify its own actions and deflect criticism.) Remember, the best lies contain a grain of truth, and this is no exception.

(To learn more about the divisive nature of Ukrainian nationalism, I strongly recommend reading Nicolai Petro’s The Tragedy of Ukraine or some of the articles that preceded the full book.)

There is no one “Zionism” or “anti-Zionism”

2023-11-07 / The Woke Contrarian / 0 Comments

Despite what the media and loudmouthed activists on both sides would have you think, there are multiple kinds of Zionism and anti-Zionism. Some are worse than others. This isn’t a scientific study; it’s based on my observations as an armchair (though not amateur—I went to grad school for public policy) analyst of the situation. I’ll order them from one extreme (eliminationist Zionism) to the other (eliminationist anti-Zionism).

Zionists

Some Zionists want to wipe out all Palestinian Arabs from Israeli territory and ensure that the entire Land of Israel is reserved for Israeli Jews. Prime Minister Netanyahu and his coalition clearly fall into this category. This kind of genocidal Zionism is to be condemned. It is these Zionists who exemplify settler colonialism, since it is their goal to displace all Palestinians, who are merely an obstacle to their version of Manifest Destiny. They are typically Islamophobic and associate Muslims with terrorism, even though most Muslims are peace-loving, just like anybody else. They have forgotten, like their extremist anti-Zionist counterparts, that both Jews and Arabs are native to this part of the Middle East. Rightists with identitarian politics (those who treat certain races, genders, religions or nationalities as virtuous or damned, no in-between) often hold these views—well, except for neo-Nazis and other antisemites, unless they want to deport all diaspora Jews to their own Bantustan.

Other Zionists will allow Palestinians to live, but only in squalid apartheid conditions. This was the status quo in Gaza for several years, even after the Israeli government claimed it would disengage from Gaza in 2005. This kind of Zionism is also to be condemned. These people typically want Judaism to be the state religion. Like the genocidal Zionists, segregationists are Islamophobes and think that keeping people in an open-air prison for 16 years is an acceptable way to fight terrorists—even though a large portion of the Gazan population is children and adolescents. They typically support the West Bank settlements.

And other Zionists are against the apartheid system and Netanyahu’s genocide, but they still prefer to maintain a single Jewish state in which Palestinians are not afforded the same rights. They may or may not support the West Bank settlements. This kind of Zionism is also to be condemned, since it is a mirror image of Middle Eastern Jews’ experiences as dhimmis (a protected but subordinate group) under Islamic rule. These Zionists are probably worth having a dialogue with, since they are opposed to the obvious crimes against humanity committed by the Israeli state.

Some Zionists support the existence of the state of Israel, but they are open to a two-state solution or something else based on the wishes of both Israelis and Palestinians. They generally want to end the occupation of the West Bank and the apartheid regime in Gaza. Like the single-state Zionists, two-state Zionists are worth having a dialogue with. Most western governments fall into this category. The problem arises is when two-state Zionists try to appease the more extreme factions, which some of them do.

Anti-Zionists

Some anti-Zionists want to end the West Bank occupation and apartheid system and want a single secular state that includes both Jews and Arabs. Zionists are often opposed to this solution because it would create a Palestinian majority and dilute the Jewishness of Israel—and possibly open its residents to the antisemitism they escaped in Europe and in the Arab states before the establishment of the Israeli state. (This can probably be circumvented with laws explicitly protecting Jews from antisemitism and honouring the history of the Israeli state, even if it is now secular, as well as quotas for Jewish and Arab representation.) This group of anti-Zionists is usually worth talking to. This flavour of anti-Zionism is common among some leftists, typically Marxists. A variant of this view is anarchists’ anti-Zionism, which opposes both Israeli and Palestinian nationalism—and the existence of any states, regardless of the ethnicity or religion associated with them. Some of these anti-Zionists may support the uprising in general (and show a disturbing lack of regard for Israeli civilian deaths), though they usually disapprove of Hamas’s theocratic beliefs and desire to wipe out all Jews in the area.

Other anti-Zionists want a single state whose official religion is Islam, though they will allow Israeli Jews to remain on the territory. This would be a return to the dhimmi status to which Jews were subjected before the creation of the Israeli state. These anti-Zionists are possibly worth talking to, though their desire for a theocracy means that they are less likely to be reasonable than supporters of a secular state.

And finally, there are anti-Zionists who want to dismantle the state of Israel and kill or deport all the Jewish residents to establish an Islamist Arab ethnostate. This is the view held by Hamas, Hezbollah and some other Islamist groups, as well as some “decolonial” supporters who (wrongly) liken Hamas’s terrorist acts to those by Nelson Mandela’s African National Congress and other resistance fighters. (The currently jailed Marwan Barghouti is a better analogue to Mandela.) Unfortunately, this group of anti-Zionists tends to dominate the conversation, and they really shouldn’t. Leftists with identitarian politics (the lefty version of right-wing fascism or religious fundamentalism) can fall into this category. I find this group the most offensive since they claim to speak in the name of social justice and fairness, but they’re advocating wanton violence and defending terrorists who slaughter civilians instead. I expect right-wing Zionists to be heartless, but not people who are supposedly on “my side.” The sad thing is some tankies—yes, the ones who stuff their articles with quotes from Stalin and praise North Kor—I mean, the “DPRK,” as many times as they can—have been more reasonable than the identitarians. Tankies at the very least usually reject Islamism, even if they frequently fail to condemn Hamas’s killing of civilians. Identitarians don’t give a shit about theocracy if it’s not Jewish or Christian. The idea that a religious or ethnic group can be an oppressed minority in the West and an oppressive majority in the Middle East has not occurred to them. They also tend to see Jews, regardless of race, as white settlers who have displaced native Arabs, even though a plurality of Israeli Jews have ancestors from the Mediterranean or Middle East. They outnumber Ashkenazi Jews, though in Western countries, Jews are typically associated with Ashkenazim because of 19th- and 20th-century immigration patterns. (I spend more time criticising this group than any other because I am surrounded by identitarian leftists who spout this antisemitic genocidal bullshit. I don’t know any Zionists who are calling for a genocide, just progressive Zionists who want equality for both Israelis and Palestinians, as well as the other ethnic groups living in Israel/Palestine.)

The Woke Contrarian’s Views

I lean toward the two-state solution or a single secular state. Either is better than the current situation or anything else Jewish or Islamic theocratic nationalists are proposing. Unfortunately, the Israeli regime and Hamas are pushing the worst possible solutions—singular, monoethnic, theocratic states with no room for compromise or coexistence.