The reason why Israel’s excessive, immoral, illegal, and reckless response to the attacks it endured, and its eighty year campaign of genocide against Palestinians, and its ongoing global initiative to silence all dissent on the matter, are so polarizing isn’t, for the most part, because of ‘the crazies’ on ‘both sides of the issue.’

The polarization is a construct by one side, an artificial binary choice between supporting oppression and institutional dehumanization or being labeled ‘other’ or ‘dangerous’ along with the victims of same. An artificial binary choice between silent acceptance of injustice or orchestrated exclusion from social validity by the unjust.

This constructed polarization is an in-built feature of all regimes, social, economic, political, religious, built upon disparity and dehumanization (that is to say, all regimes that have not reconciled with their colonial pasts or practically embraced the democratic human values they claim to represent and defend, which is to say, all winners in the global capitalist order, either nation or demographic within these).

Their right wing, their fundamentalists, are our right wing, our fundamentalists. Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, capitalist, fascist, atheist, authoritarian communist, red MAGA, blue MAGA, doesn’t matter. The applications of propaganda and the means of silencing and disenfranchising opposition are the same. The intentional withholding of knowledge and agency and justice are the same. The rhetoric and means of dehumanization and privation are the same.

They are the same and the ideologies of division and contrived hierarchical value all lead to the same destructive end, in every place. This is a global dispute, across lands and across time, as it always has been, between inclusivity and artificial exclusion for the benefit of groups who consider themselves intrinsically superior and entitled to gains reaped at the expense of the basic needs of other lives. The conflict is everywhere, and everyone who lives is party to it.