Palestine

Should this end up escalating into a broader regional conflict, then my thoughts go out to a certain someone in Isr*el right now. A very familiar type of deeply and to some extent willfully ignorant, faux-progressive liberal Z*onist, who nevertheless hates Isr*eli society to such a point where they usually refuse to even label themself or be labeled as Isr*eli, and in fact half-jokingly asked for one's hand in a marriage of convenience just to GTFO quicker. That familiar type of deeply idealist pick-me autistic non-binary person who one can't have a conversation any deeper than a centimeter with, because it near-invariably results in them saying something that one finds patently offensive. That type of person where one constantly wonders why they're even still on one's contact list, aside from the inertia of having known them for years, having assumed naïvely until recent revelations, that they had better politics; but where one also feels like this person has talents and some charm and doesn't necessarily intend to do harm, and in fact has plenty of personal struggles they're quietly working through — but is still just a deeply flawed human being, indoctrinated materially and spiritually into the society they grew up in as its apparently unwitting pawn, where the first step to their recovery would simply be their extraction from that society, because breaking through all the propaganda remains too difficult when it's materially reinforced.

You have a bunker, dear — everything you might experience in the coming while is only a small fraction of what your country has done to its natives and its neighbors, but I'm sure that some sort of cosmic justice on the scale of entire nations isn't much reassurance for you as a simple individual.

All your neighbors have bunkers, too — virtually everyone in Isr*el, really, and you've all trained for years and years to use those bunkers in case the missiles were to hit you for once... Now I might maintain that the bunkers and the training was all a part of maintaining this grotesque simulacrum that you regrettably must call your country of citizenship, not just as part of the militarization of society to make resistance to the colonial project more difficult, but in building and maintaining a whole national culture of isolation and fear and constant danger; but in the near future those bunkers are perhaps for the first time in your life going to actually be useful for you in their designed-for purpose.

I hope you stay safe for the coming nights and days, dear, and I believe you will; and I hope you get out of the country safely and quickly, and spend the rest of your life teaching English and Hebrew like you always wanted; and I hope you realize when you can finally look at Isr*el through non-Isr*eli eyes — when you live in a distinctly bunkerless country outside of the settler-colonial dynamic — just what absolute insanity it was that you were living under, and just how wrong half of your beliefs were. I hope that you will some day come to truly know yourself and your place in the world, having unlearned all propaganda and atoned for everything.

An old Iranian phrase: "this too shall pass".