Support for Israel is an American construct

The young actor from the popular show called Stranger Things on Netflix faced enormous backlash when he held a sign that expressed love for Zionism. Many called for the boycott of the show. However, what missed much of the conversation around that issue was that he had touched upon a very important aspect of the American identity.

I was once in a class of graduate students during my PhD, which I never finished. I was doing a presentation on a topic, which included some discussion about Israel. Obviously, I was very critical of the actions and the role Israel was playing in causing violence and terrorism. There were some international students in class who were in complete agreement with what I was saying, including some Africans who were open to knowing things they never heard before. The American students, especially the white ones, not only disagreed with everything I was saying about Israel, they were not even willing to pay attention to the facts I was presenting. They rejected everything outright and their rationale was that Arabs or Muslims hate Israel and that it was the same old movie they had seen before.

But their rejection of these facts and their refusal to be open to form an opinion based on facts had something disturbing for me to detect. Support for Israel was part of being an American. It was cultural for them to stand by the only victim state out there, which in their minds was Israel because of the endless noise about Holocaust that had hit their eardrums since as long as they could remember. Being white, being Christian, and being an American meant that you supported Israel and Israel bashing was what the Arabs and the Muslims did. The mindset was that Americans stood with the underdog, which again, was Israel in their minds.

To better understand this, let us look at similar things that the Muslim world and the South Asian countries do. So, for example, the rhetoric around freedom for women or equal rights for women. Islam provides equal rights to women more than in any faith or society I know about. But somehow, every time we hear that rhetoric, our immediate reaction is to dismiss it as western culture. Equal rights for women is confused with women wearing bikinis and the immediate reaction is that that is what the western society does, not us. We dismiss any discussion of women rights exactly as the white and Christian America dismiss any discussion of Palestine.

The greatest trick the devil pulled was to convince people that he didn't exist as the guy in the movie The Usual Suspects says. The greatest trick the Israelis pulled was to make the American people think that they (being devils and killers) don't exist. And that they are merely victims of hate and violence from the Arabs that surround their tiny homeland, which was promised to them 2000 years ago. Just like humanity is made to believe that they do evil things not because the devil pushes them to. And that is when evil is the most effective. Americans support evil things and are made to believe that it wasn't because the devil is pushing them to but rather they do it naturally in the absence of any devil.

So, that actor holding that sign in support of Zionism is not wrong about the western society.

It is cool to believe the earth is flat, that winners smoke and losers don't, Americans support Israel and Arabs don't.

When a group of people stop seeing their actions and beliefs as immoral, then evil gets a free hand and there is no limit to how much devastation they can bring upon the world. Bin Laden thought killing innocent non-Muslims was what true Islam meant. Americans think killing innocent Muslims who hate Israel is what being an American means. Both are wrong.