Thread by @estherzelda0514

Palestine is all of these issues, but not the way the activists want it to be. Here's a 🧵

https://twitter.com/steamyporkbuns/status/1796452339492278277

Starting at the top, racism. Palestinian advocacy has embraced racism as a trolling tactic. They argue Jews are not a race or alternatively white when it suits their needs. They divide Jews by race as if we Jews recognize such divides or believe they will spare some of us.

They deny the extreme racial animus for anyone who is not Arab in most of the Middle East and pretend destroying Israel will solve racism in the region. When they targeted Black Americans who supported Jews, they used racist symbolism.

When asked by Black people to stop being racist, they doubled down and provided cover for racist memes in their midst, such as accusing Black people of being thralls to Jews and spreading historical lies such as accusing Jews of masterminding the slave trade.

While, of course, denying the historical reality of the Arab slave trade and how many racial minorities are current held in quasi indentured servitude in Arab majority countries to this day.

Now let's do capitalism. Advocates for Palestine have pretended that they are destroying capitalism by wanting to destroy Israel. They are not. Israel has a robust welfare state while the Arab nations around it hold people in shackles and Egypt exploits Palestinian refugees.

They buy keffiyehs on Amazon from Chinese companies and expensive tents, discarding them on college campuses for lesser classes to clean up after them. At Columbia, they took a janitor hostage while rallying behind a trust fund nepobaby with a long rap sheet.

Okay, now environmental terrorism. Palestinian advocates provide cover for Hamas's horrible records on the environment. Hamas has burned fields and tires, sending incendiary balloons into Israel to decimate agricultural lands.

When Israel pulled out of Gaza in the mid-2000s, it burned the greenhouses they turned over to them to the ground. It refuses to use land to grow food for its people and subjects them to the instability of reliance on international aid behind a blockade.

Israel, on the other hand, is a world leader in green technology. It holds a lot of its land in trust, encouraging density instead of sprawl. It has brought back so many native flora and fauna to the area that have not been seen there for centuries.

It has breathed life into a region that was decimated by endless Arab and Ottoman warfare, neglected for eons. Now it is one of the most important places in the world for migratory birds and protects them with strong criminal penalties.

Now on to settler colonialism. Other people have posted at length about this, but Gaza and the WB are functionally Egyptian and Jordanian colonies. Israel itself was once colonized by the British and the Ottomans.

Israel has proved refuge to hundreds of thousands of Jews wrongfully expelled from where they lived for generations. It tasks its military with daring rescue operations for those refugees, when others turned them away because of their religion or race.

It is a multicultural country with protections for minorities that may be flawed, but are totally absent from the surrounding countries in the same region.

Last and certainly not least, patriarchy. Israel is one of only three countries with some reproductive rights for women in the Middle East. Women have equal rights to men and can hold property and walk freely in public in ways they cannot elsewhere in the region.

Everywhere else you travel in the Middle East women are held to high modesty standards while women sun themselves in bikinis on Israeli beaches. Israel has had a female head of state, even America hasn't.

Israel is one of the most abortion friendly countries in the world, with no known prosecutions from it. You can obtain one by requesting it online from a health clinic. There are no waiting periods.

Israel has had a fully integrated military since foundation, it has conscripted women even before independence and military service for women as is mandatory as it is for men, only 5 countries in the world do the same. Women are not prohibited from serving in combat roles.

Gender representation in the Knesset is generally on par or better than even the US Congress. Women were able to vote in Israel prior to its independence. There is no record of female genital mutilation or any of the horrid conditions plaguing the surrounding area in Israel.

So yes, Palestine is not a single issue. Advocates for Palestine have lied about every single one of those areas, demonizing a fairly progressive country and making excuses for some of the most brutal regimes in the world.

They have distracted and detailed advocacy in all five areas by demanding people like women's rights advocated pledge allegiance to Muslim Brotherhood propaganda and fund Palestine over reproductive rights.

Advocacy for Gazans is important. But if it is premised on lies and the hijacking of every other cause, it will achieve nothing for its stated goals and tear down everything else it touches.