Apollonian
Guest Columnist
Israel Has Damaged Israel's Reputation Far Worse Than Its Enemies Ever Have
CAITLIN JOHNSTONE
NOV 25, 2023
Link: https://www.caitlinjohnst.one/p/israel-has-damaged-israels-reputation?utm_source=post-email-title/
Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix
Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley):Israel raging at Hamas for killing Israelis is like a man raging at his shadow for darkening his floor. It’s maddening to see grown adults acting like Hamas are these foreign invaders who attacked Israelis out of the blue because of a hatred for Jewish people, like they’re internet-radicalized neo-Nazis from eastern Europe or something.
Hamas attacked Israel because Israel is a murderous and tyrannical apartheid regime who butchers children and makes lives miserable for the Palestinian people. The violence on October 7 was the echo of the violence Israel has been inflicting on Palestinians for generations. Only a fool gets angry at his echo for talking back to him.
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Israel has done more to damage Israel’s image in the last seven weeks than anti-semites did in the last seven decades.
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If you’ve ever wondered why society’s most famous and influential voices all have dogshit status quo politics, just look at the current purge of pro-Palestine actors in Hollywood. If your own elite class interests and having loyalty to your rich friends isn’t enough to keep you supporting the empire’s information interests, you’ll just get thrown out.
The influence which comes with celebrity status means you’ll become a threat to the establishment power structure if you start sharing ideas and information which go against its interests. That’s why there are so many safeguards in place to prevent that from happening. If you’re forcefully critical of US foreign policy you won’t be permitted to rise to celebrity status by the Hollywood gatekeepers who are responsible for US cultural hegemony and propaganda, and if you manage to sneak past the gatekeepers they’ll throw you right out on your ass when you make it clear you’re not a trustworthy empire loyalist.
This has created a system where all the most influential and highly amplified voices in western civilization are those who support the political status quo, while the normal people who suffer under that same status quo are left almost voiceless. This helps create the false impression that the system is working fine and no revolutionary changes are needed, because all the most visible people are saying things are peachy.
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Fun challenge: try to name a famous westerner that forcefully and consistently criticizes US foreign policy who never gets accused of being an anti-semite and/or a Russian agent.
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One of the most evil things Trump did while in office was trying to cripple humanitarian aid to Yemen by designating Ansarallah a “terrorist” organization. Now Biden is considering the same action.
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The claim that supporting Israel doesn’t serve US interests is both true and false, depending on how you mean it. It’s arguably true that it doesn’t serve the American people and doesn’t help the US as a nation, but it most certainly serves the interests of the US empire.
There are absolutely arguments to be made that the American people don’t benefit from their nation’s wealth being continuously poured into a foreign state and that the US doesn’t benefit as a nation from backing nonstop aggression and militarism in the middle east, but there’s no way to argue that it doesn’t serve the globe-spanning power structure that is loosely centralized around Washington.
If the US was a normal country minding its own affairs and caring for its own people it would indeed be nonsensical for it to invest so much wealth and resources in Israel, but the US is as far from a normal country as can be. It’s the hub of a vast, undeclared empire made up of allies, client states, proxies, and systems of military, economic and financial coercion which keeps most of the world moving in accordance with the wishes of the empire managers.
History has shown us that this power structure can only be maintained by endless violence, threats, coercion, mass-scale psychological manipulation in the form of propaganda, and fear of nuclear annihilation. As a reliably US-aligned nuclear power which is intimately interwoven with the western war machine and the US intelligence cartel, Israel may not serve the interests of the people who live in the United States, but it is an absolutely indispensable component of the US empire.
Biden wasn’t fully lying when he said “Were there not an Israel the United States would have to invent an Israel to protect her interests in the region.” He’s just telling a half-truth, because by “the United States” he means the US empire, not the US as a nation.
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People always bitch and moan when I say Gen Z are just plain better people than all previous generations, but these last seven weeks have provided a lot of evidence for my position.
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You’re always hearing that Hamas has proven it cannot be allowed to remain in control of Gaza, when you should be hearing that the Israeli regime has proven it cannot be allowed to remain in control of Palestine.
