This rhetoric of “both sides” implies that pain and fault belong equally to Palestinians and Israelis. It erases manifold, unmistakable, qualitative and quantitative differences at play in Israel’s attack on the Gaza Strip and the political-historical context in which this is taking place — most centrally, that what is occurring is part of a settler-colonial invasion.
“Both sides” rhetoric refuses to make even the easiest, most obvious judgment, to which any honest evaluation of the information points: that
Israel is massacring
Palestinian adults and children, 77% of whom are civilians, and subjecting them to
collective punishment; that Israel evidently claims for itself a right to extra-judicially execute anyone who it says is a Hamas member, a practice too few among even Palestine’s allies have denounced; that Israel is bombarding what is essentially a giant
refugee camp home to an
imprisoned population of a people Israel has
ethnically cleansed,
occupied, subjected to
apartheid, and
repeatedly slaughtered; that international law does not grant Israel a
“right to defend itself” against the Gaza Strip. And that international law does grant Palestinians a right to resist
using armed struggle.
To employ “both sides” rhetoric completely misrepresents the situation. It is not “both sides” who take thousands of
political prisoners. Both sides do not systematically
torture each other. Both sides do not control each other’s freedom of
movement, or access to the
sea, drinking
water, and
education.
