explaining to a crying dust-covered Palestinian child that they can’t have an opinion about their parents and cousins all being torn to shreds by US-sourced Israeli-fired bombs because
“There are too many variables! We can’t tell what is going on” is simultaneously the reason we can’t have health care and the reason we have to keep dropping bombs all over the Middle East.
If anybody tries to tell you that a geopolitical situation is “too complicated” to understand, in 99.9% of situations they’re some combination of a) trying to make you stop caring about it because they know it counters their ideology, or b) they don’t understand it themselves and don’t want to embarrass themselves trying to explain it. The vast majority of people on planet Earth have the capacity to understand what is going on in Palestine.
There’s certainly a good amount of history there, but most history can be adequately simplified, and this conflict is no exception: it began with the British Empire giving away their Middle Eastern colony to fledgling Zionists, and the Palestinians who were native to the land were forcibly driven off in the late 1940s. The land that the Palestinians occupy shrank over time due to continued oppression and wars until the present day. The Zionists fought wars with neighbouring countries like Egypt and Lebanon over the decades, with both victories and defeats, and have conducted sabotage and economic sanctions across various countries in the region with the help of the United States to crush states that would not bend the knee to them (Syria, Lebanon, Yemen, Iran) and install Zionism-friendly leaders in other countries (Egypt, Jordan, the various gulf monarchies outside of Qatar). Zionism, by definition, relies on settlers to come along and take land that was once owned by Palestinians, and their explicitly stated, proud goal is to expand their settler-colony across a wide swathe of the Middle East, into Iraq and Egypt.
Not a single word of that was remotely opinionated. I could give that summary to a Zionist and they could think I was being pro-Zionist, and I could give that summary to a Palestinian and they could think I was being pro-Palestinian. Many (I would hope most) people would agree that settler-colonies that drive people off the land are an anachronism that belongs to, like, the 19th century, and not the 21st. Zionists think that doing all that is fine because they believe that the Palestinians are subhuman; I know this because - beyond all the ones you can find online telling you that that is what they believe and being proud of it - believing a certain type of people to be subhuman is a prerequisite for approving and conducting bombing raids that kill tens of thousands of civilians with only a very minor military advantage to be gained.
With all that out of the way, I also expect this person believes that the Russia-Ukraine conflict is extremely simple (Putin = very bad evil man, Ukraine = epic good guys Avengers), despite, again, there being significant history there that MUST be understood. It’s not a difficult history to learn if you have about half an hour of free time and, most importantly, an actual willingness to learn that information.
“I haven’t done ANY research on this topic, but I keep getting owned by people who have done A BIT of research on this topic. Clearly this is because those people are a bunch of arrogant nerds who are so smart that they are stupid. My purely vibes based take on the situation I got from passively consuming popular media is the moral and nuanced take on the issue!”
-Every Lib Ever
Don’t you know that you need a PhD to understand that genocide is bad?
