they have been (for whatever reason) studying about wars currently going on in the middle east since apparently brazil doesn’t document on this enough, as well as reading up on zionism. they’ve been seeing “a LoT oF eXtReMiSm FrOm BoTh SiDeS” and assured me that they weren’t trying to “question in defense of zionism because they don’t know everything about the subject and that they are just a student seeking further information about it”
i was already thinking of:
- showing them pictures of disgusting zionist settler colonialists sitting on roofs watching IOF genocide and bomb on palestinians live
- showing them pictures of the barbarianism committed by the IOF (stuff like them descerating a lifeless palestinian’s body? wearing a bra on their genocidal missions? idk, pics of them had surfaced on lemmygrad some months back)
- that one video where a zionist settler-colonialist goes “if i don’t steal it, someone else will” to a native palestinian
- a news article where despite having the deeds to the house, zionist settler colonialists just up and start living on the palestinian’s house and kick them out
- mention how the IOF murdered palestinian babies and pulled an US by expanding more than they were permitted to
- mention that it’s pretty disgusting/insensitive to paint this as a case of “extremism from both sides” when it’s clearly about a group of oppressed people being genocided on their own lands finally fighting back against the show of power they’ve been doing for the past decades. (i wonder if they’d ask “further proof” of this)
- show proof about the zionist project’s existence being only a recent thing over palestine’s, which had existed for a long time (though i wonder if they’d try to pull the bible verse about “israelis” and shit)
is there anything else i’m missing here? or am i good to go?
Maybe go back to the Nakba, but I’m not sure of a good resource on it offhand. I think it fast becomes pretty evident if you skip past the both sides narrative and go to how the zionists acted from the start, how murderously violent. I think before I understood it, that part was left out in what I’d heard about the “conflict.” I would tend to hear about it as something that had been going on for a long time between “both sides” rather than as something that one side started (the zionists) and that required violence displacement in order to begin and further its (the zionist) project. That there was never a real interest in peace or coexistence from the zionists and never has been; quite the opposite.
When you strip away the veneer of it being portrayed as a longstanding both sides dispute, it’s naked colonialism and empire.
But anyway yeah, anything and everything you can show them, that helps demonstrate the brutality of zionists may help. Just remember, the more you ground it in fundamentals about this kind of stuff (like colonization) the harder it is for counter narratives to sway them in another direction. Understanding, for example, that israel pathologically lies about what it does and the western empire and its tendrils pathologically lies for them as well, so most things they say on the subject are suspect at best. People need to know that it’s not an isolated incident of settler aggression, but an arm of something much larger and more destructive in various forms across hundreds of years, through the British empire, through French colonialism, through the US. Which could be a lot to try to explain to someone right away, but I think is important for being as grounded as possible and being able to understand what’s happening with Palestine in the broader anti-colonial, anti-imperialist struggle. Partly because even if the zionist project were to fall apart tomorrow, that would not mean imperialism and colonialism as a whole are now over and a thing of the past.