[News] This Is Israel

Wed Jun 4 11:53:16 EDT 2025

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  This Is Israel
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Caitlin Johnstone <https://substack.com/@caitlinjohnstone>

Jun 4, 2025

<https://substack.com/@caitlinjohnstone>

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/Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley) 
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This is Israel. This is what the Zionist project looks like. The dead 
kids. The blown-out hospitals. The desperate, starving civilians. This 
is it.

There is no alternate version of Israel where these things are not 
happening. The liberal Zionist vision of a two-state solution and a just 
and peaceful Israel exists solely in the imaginations of the people who 
envision it. Nothing like it has ever existed. Everything about the 
modern state of Israel is unyieldingly hostile to that vision.

You either support the existence of the Israel you see before you, or 
you support the end of the apartheid Zionist entity. There is no hidden 
third option. There are no other positions on the menu. To pretend 
otherwise is to live in a fantasy land.

You either want to burn children alive, or you don’t. You either want to 
deliberately starve civilians, or you don’t. You either want to bomb 
hospitals, or you don’t. You either want to deliberately assassinate 
Palestinian journalists while forbidding foreign journalists entry into 
Gaza, or you don’t. You either want to deliberately massacre civilians 
and systematically destroy civilian infrastructure in order to force the 
removal of Palestinians from a Palestinian territory, or you don’t. And 
if you don’t, you must oppose the state of Israel.

That’s Israel, the state. Not just Netanyahu. Not just extremist 
settlers. Not just “far right elements within the Israeli government”. 
Israel itself. Because everything we are seeing Israel do is the result 
of everything Israel is as a state.

Everything Israel is doing is the result of everything it has always 
been. As soon as the west decided to drop a settler-colonialist state on 
top of a pre-existing civilization wherein the new immigrants would 
receive preferential treatment over the indigenous inhabitants who were 
already living there, it became inevitable that Israel would wind up in 
the condition it’s in today.

Because there was no way to uphold that status quo without mass 
displacement and nonstop tyranny, violence and abuse. There was no way 
to set up a tiered society where one tier is placed above the other 
without indoctrinating the public to accept that apartheid system by 
systematically dehumanizing the members of the disempowered group.

Set up a status quo of dehumanizing a group of people and manufacturing 
consent for violence and abuse against them, and you will inevitably 
wind up with a far right apartheid state which is committing genocide, 
as surely as dropping a stone off a building will result in a stone 
falling to the ground.

What we are seeing in Gaza today was baked into the state of Israel ever 
since its inception.

All those dead kids on your social media feed are the fruit of a tree 
whose seed was planted after the second world war. That tree has been 
bearing more and more fruit, and it will continue to for as long as it 
remains standing. Because that’s just the kind of tree it is. The only 
kind of tree it ever could have been.

Saying “I support Israel but I don’t support the actions of Netanyahu in 
Gaza” is like saying “I like this apple tree but only when it sprouts 
coconuts instead of apples.” That is not the kind of tree it is. The 
apple tree will only produce apples, and the genocide tree will only 
produce genocide.

Israel’s supporters avoid confronting obvious truths like these. Support 
for Israel depends on mass-scale psychological compartmentalization. 
Everything about it revolves around avoiding unpleasant truths instead 
of deeply and viscerally reckoning with them.

Averting the eyes from the video footage of Israel’s atrocities in Gaza. 
Averting the eyes from the contradictions between the values they 
purport to hold and everything Israel is as a state. Averting the eyes 
from the mountains upon mountains of evidence staring us all in the 
face. That’s the only way support for Israel is able to continue.

In order to become a truth-driven species, we need to stop hiding from 
uncomfortable truths. And one of our favorite hiding places for 
uncomfortable truths at this point in history is the modern state of 
Israel, and the western empire’s support for it.

________________

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© 2025 Caitlin Johnstone
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