chapotraphouse

I guess I'm just worried we're falling in the same trap of painting all Israelis as bloodthirsty monsters - instead of acknowledging that some of them are just normal people that have been duped by the Zionist state into committing atrocities against their fellow humans and that black and white thinking only serves to uphold this cycle of hatred. (literal example from this very thread)

Duped into committing atrocities. Duped into committing atrocities. Those poor saps were just mislead into committing crimes against humanity, literal torture upon children. Your logic here is that we shouldn't paint them all as bloodthirsty monsters since some of them were "duped" into being... well, bloodthirsty monsters. Regardless of how they arrived there, that still makes them bloodthirsty monsters!

You are what you do. It doesn't matter whether or not someone was "duped" into believing the obvious lie that a Palestinian's life isn't worth as much as theirs, or that they were "duped" into committing (or even just supporting) atrocities. They still did those things. Those who were the victims of those atrocities are no less victims, no better off just because one or two of the perpetrators were "duped" into mercilessly murdering entire families. At this point, anyone who identifies as an Israeli but who is not actively fighting against Zionism and all who support it then they well deserve the title of bloodthirsty monster. They deserve far worse than just a label, honestly.

So no, we're not "falling in to the same trap" of painting with too broad of a brush, we're recognizing actual material reality. We're recognizing the material consequences of Zionism and correctly concluding what must happen to Zionism itself. This isn't black and white thinking, to the contrary it is recognizing the very real nuances that differentiate the colonizers from the colonized, and it is doing so without falling into the idealist trap that you have that leads down the same road as "well those Nazi concentration camp guards, hey some of them were just normal people trying to make the best of a bad situation." As usual, the problem is not that we as communists are failing to see that these monsters are human too, it's the liberal who fails to see that "normal humans" can and do become monsters. And whether or not one did so with giddy abandon or because their mind was already rotted to the extent that they believed (were "duped" by) propaganda telling them that they were righteous for trying to wipe out all Palestinian children, it doesn't fucking matter. Functionally, they are monsters.