Then arguing with people about whether the kernels popping is “justified”.
Trying to focus on the slaughter of regular Israelis and whether it’s good or evil to attack civilians is just such a ridiculous approach to me. The question has no meaning in this context. If you don’t want kernels to pop take the pot off of the flame, if you refuse to do that then shut the fuck up about it.
Like obviously it sucks that everyday people were intentionally killed but the blame is just being put on the entirely wrong place, it’s just individualist moralism that works to strip the event of any context. It feels like it’s a rhetorical funnel whose function is to push those who engage in this moralizing to the next logical point in the talking-point journey: whether Israel has a right to defend itself.
The reason you can’t boil this down to “both sides” is because there is one party (Israel) who can end all the suffering in Gaza and the West Bank tomorrow. The other party (Palestinians) has ZERO ability to end the suffering. If they play nice with Israel, that only ensures they get an easy, slow ethnic cleansing as opposed to a more rapid one. This is what is happening in the West Bank right now if you think I’m exaggerating. PA tries to work with Israel and every day, Israel just turns the screws on them harder with more and more settlements and more humiliations heaped on them. Israel has an EASY option to end it which requires no violence at all (ending the occupation), while the other side has no other option but violence. And the way things are structured, there is no way they can try and liberate themselves without violence that is likely to get non-combatants involved. But the blame lies squarely on the party that has the non-violent options and chooses not to use them.
All decolonization involves incredible violence. Because colonization itself involves orders of magnitude more violence. Don’t like it, don’t colonize.