this post was submitted on 03 Nov 2024
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Depends really. What do you value in your life? What ethical framework do you use? Do you value freedom and self determination, do you value people different from you as much as people of your nationality/race? Or perhaps do you value the Western stability, growth, dominance and wellbeing at the expense of the economic South more? There's no objective answer, it depends on you and your viewpoint.
If we do away with the propaganda and misinformation we are left with this question. Because the US and Europe would never support anyone for the sake of them being the only democracy in the middle east or fighting terrorists or whatever. If that were the case the US wouldn't have been complicit with the dictatorships of the gulf countries or any other of the innumerable dictatorships they have established throughout the years in the world. And they would also not be funding the ISIS or other terrorist groups in Columbia, Cuba, Nicaragua and so many other countries.
No dominant organisation in the world like the US state would give a significant amount of money(like it does for Israel) for something that doesn't serve their material interests, namely the perpetuation and/or increase of their power and influence.
So what do you value? Freedom and dignity for all, or more power for the Western states and corporations (- and whatever religious crap you want to excuse colonising and ethnically cleansing a nation)?
If you see this, it'd save you a lot of time from arguing about every single event of the conflict. If you see every human in the world as equal and deserving of freedom, then you'd see that Israel and the West is bringing these people at the brink of extinction, torturing, killing, humiliating, starving them, expelling them from their land, destroying their vital civil infrastructure, stealing their land and property for 75 years now. And when you see all this (not from Western mainstream media though), you'd recognise the right for armed struggle against a colonizing entity that Israel is. No civilian casualties are acceptable, but the ones affected in 7/10/23 would have to turn against their government for ethnically cleansing Palestinians, bringing them to that desperate point of retaliation, not Palestinians.
I disagree with the notion that dominant organizations would never give significant of money away in a manner contrary to their material interests. If anything, the opposite is true: if you are dominant, then you have more freedom to get away with acting against your material interests (intentionally or not).
I think that our treatment of Israel is an example of this. All of the money we have been throwing at them does not buy anything at all, since the Israeli government does not even seem to be that grateful for it but just expects it as a matter of course. They seem hell-bent on bringing the entire region into a war that would pull us in and cause a ton of damage to our material interests, and we have barely any ability to stop them from doing this. Worst, this situation is entirely avoidable because we could, at the very least, put strings on our military aid and then enforce them, rather than just giving Israel whatever it wants and ignoring whenever it crosses any of our supposed lines.
Just to be clear, I am not arguing that our material interests are the only reason to care about what is happening or to criticize our government's actions, I am just saying that it makes no sense to just take as given that a dominant organization will always act in its own best material interests in this way.
US leaders repeatedly tell you why supporting Israel is in the US's interests: its a giant unsinkable aircraft carrier in the middle east to project power on this resource rich region. The US would never support even another colonialist project with the same values, unless it was in its material interests.