Amy Falk
Contributing Writer
During the confrontation at January’s Ceasefire for Gaza demonstration, those opposed to the demonstration made a familiar argument. Their argument was that Israelis are suffering alongside Palestinians; that there are two sides to every conflict; that the overwhelming scale of the violence Israel inflicts on Palestinians — killing at least 28,000 Palestinians including 12,000 children at time of writing — is not relevant because both Israelis and Palestinians have been killed.
Those of us at the demonstration were not surprised to see that argument rear its head that day, and we won’t be surprised to see it in the weeks and months to come. It is a form of genocide apologia that has been working to protect apartheid Israel for decades.
The “bothsidesism” employed by Israel apologists is intended to hide very simple power dynamics. Like the United States, Israel is a settler colony, a kind of country organized around settlers and their descendants. As a settler colony, it is founded on the genocide of indigenous people. In North America, Native Americans are indigenous and the U.S. and Canada are the colonizers. In occupied Palestine, Palestinians are indigenous, and Israel is the colonizer.
The founders of Israel understood this — Israeli founding father David Ben-Gurion said that if “I were an Arab leader, I would never sign an agreement with Israel. It is normal; we have taken their country.” Israeli officials used to be very honest about the colonial nature of their project — it’s only today, now that colonialism has become a dirty word, that Israeli officials pretend to be something else.
Israel is not the only country to use bothsidesism to hide oppression. In America, it has been used for decades to hide our own racial caste system. “Yes, Black people have it bad in America, but White people don’t exactly have it easy,” the argument goes. “There are tons of White Americans who hate Trump, and Black people can be anti-White too, so really, isn’t it all just too complicated?”
We can’t fall for it in the US, and we can’t fall for it in Israel. In issues of apartheid and genocide, it’s really not that complicated.
