Why I Don’t Care What Your Stance On Israel Is
Publicizing injustice doesn’t equal justice
I’ve always had an appreciation for global conflicts and discussing the big issues in our world. During my years of competitive high school policy debate, I would spend hours upon hours pouring over issues like Egyptian military aid, Syrian violence, the impact of farm subsidies, and whether or not High Fructose Corn Syrup is really that bad for your kids.
Content warning: Ranting without much closure or information. Read with caution.
While many of the issues I studied weren’t about me and didn’t affect my life in an all too significant way, studying them made me a better student of the world and a more critical thinker.
“What’s really happening”
Fast forward to today, and I can’t go online without someone telling me “what’s really happening” or someone asking me to donate money to a certain segment of the issue. I feel for the innocent people no matter where they are in this conflict, but it begs the question, why now?
Countless of my acquaintances and the influencers I follow online suddenly have a stance on an issue that they were most likely unaware of beforehand.
There’s this world of cultural pride in being able to go online, read a few articles, and say that you “stand with Israel”, or are in “solidarity with Palestine” as if you have any real understanding of what that statement means.
I don’t discount the sentiment or the respect for innocent lives and the refusal to support terrorists, but wasn’t that a given?
I assume, until proven otherwise, that the people I encounter in my day-to-day life and online are not proponents of human suffering, supporters of terrorism, or deniers of the right to live well. I hope that others assume the same about me.
No matter who started it, who’s going to end it, or what in the world is happening in Israel and in that conflict, I don’t believe people should die, particularly innocent people in brutal ways.
I believe in the right to life, the protection of freedoms that I believe all people deserve, and that people be treated with respect and dignity by their peers and their governments. I don’t know how to achieve that, but it’s what I believe, no matter the circumstances.
When I go online for my daily Instagram scroll or check in with my FaceBook friends, I’m not asking what they think about Hamas terrorists or the Gaza Strip.
In the same way that when BLM became a roaring movement again in the Summer of 2020, I wasn’t worried about what my close friends and family thought about black people — because it was a settled issue.
Politics is so often, if not always, about being on the “right side of the issue”, often out of fear, something I don’t believe should guide our decisions, our interactions, or our understanding of the world.
It’s as if we’re expected to spend the appropriate time thinking about and pondering over an issue, feeling sorrow for an isolated set of incidents happening in one or two countries across the globe, sharing that we feel bad for them and disagree with what’s happening, and then we’re off the hook.
Suddenly, because it’s getting enough coverage in the news, I’m supposed to be praying for Israel, sending money, and “educating myself” on the issue so as not to be ignorant.
Gone are the days of school shootings, racial injustices, police brutality, homelessness in America, and healthcare disparities — because I’ve already sent my thoughts, prayers, and condemnation to those situations.
Our cultural attention span is slim to none — we forget about an issue until the next one calls upon us to share our statements of agreement or disagreement and signal boost to the world that we aren’t terrible people sitting “in silence” at the latest travesty.
But who cares about my opinion anyway? My thoughts and beliefs won’t help anyone…certainly not countries away in a situation I can barely wrap my brain around.
We’ve become conditioned to expect statements from big companies, too, as if we needed them to guide our decision-making on how to think about a certain issue.
At the end of the day, I don’t really care what anybody thinks about a situation unless you’re a first-person account telling me what it’s like to be in the middle of it, or a historian or sociologist trying to explain to me the objective context of what’s going on.
I’m worried, at the end of the day, about what you’re doing to make the world a better place.
It doesn’t take much effort, thought, or understanding to share a post or to make a statement about what you think, and there are places for that. It takes a big person to, on a daily basis, set themselves aside and fight for the rights of broken and lonely people, whatever that looks like for them in their community.
The average person spends about 2–3 hours on social media every day. I wonder what the world would look like if we took some if not all of that time and started turning it into time to serve those around us. We might not resolve the Israel situation in a day, or stop terrorism in its tracks, but we’ll have less to talk about and signal boost about online — and I’d say that’s a win for everybody.
I stand ready to hear people’s stories and experiences different from mine, and try to be a student of the people and life around me.
But I don’t need to signal boost that to the world in a sort of defensive act of grandstanding for my particular set of beliefs and opinions. No one cares. Or at least they shouldn’t.
Anyone can make a statement. But it takes someone who really cares to actually live in solidarity with a cause, with an issue. And they should be able to do that regardless of what country they live in or what’s going on in the world at the time.
We can do better.
