In the Q&A session after a talk about living under occupation in Gaza and the West Bank by two gentlemen (one in his late 30s the other in his fifties) who moved to the US after growing up there, a member of the audience stands up and says (I paraphrase)
“Well I don’t have a question but I do have a comment. I want to say that I am disappointed in this talk because all I’m hearing is a one sided narrative and the use of inflammatory words like “occupation” and nothing about peace. How can peace be achieved with Hamas? and all you talked about is how bad Israel is! Palestinians were offered the two state solution but they undermined it at every corner” I don’t even know where to begin with the audacity of this individual but he illustrates a few points that are worth discussing - how lived, authentic, experiences of Palestinians are 𝘴𝘶𝘮𝘮𝘢𝘳𝘪𝘭𝘺 𝘥𝘪𝘴𝘮𝘪𝘴𝘴𝘦𝘥. He didn’t event offer as much as a “I’m sorry you had to endure this” but rather he skipped over all their accounts of arbitrary curfews, water rations, settler violence, constant army harrassments, arrests, detentions and killings of family members and, ever so appallingly, he places the blame on the victims for discussing and describing their victimization. - he subtly, but really not so subtly, tried to pivot the discussion to achieving peace. A very noble cause indeed but a merit less and disingenuous one when the root cause of why peace does not exist in the first place, i.e. an occupation that terrorizes the indigenous people of the land, is not part of the equation - whataboutism as a tactic of deflection, in this case the mention of the two state solution, to shift focus from the root cause and direct the discussion away from the issue at hand - blaming the victim again by placing the failure of the two state solution primarily on the shoulders of the Palestinians, whose land was occupied in the first place and who are negotiating with a superpower that is backed by superpowers This was not a random encounter. Events where Palestinians try to expose the constant subjugation of their humanity, express their desire for freedom and self determination, or to simply ask the world not to standby while they are literally blown to pieces, are visited by such individuals who misdirect and mislead in their whataboutism and zero sum contextualization
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October 2023
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