Put aside the UK government and the BBC. Now find people in Britain today who call themselves liberals and also support Israel, there won’t be many. In fact you won’t find many people who do at all. It doesn’t matter what a trifle meant in the past, it only matters what it means to people on the street today, and that is openness, tolerance, and freedom.
Liberalism essentially encompasses the entirety of what is broadly considered acceptable within western politics, which is why you’ll sometimes hear the term ‘western liberal democracies’, but for our purposes we are usually referring to the less immediately fascist genocidal end of the spectrum that like to consider themselves progressive pro-Palestine because they engage positively with identity politics denounce the genocide of Palestinians.
They aren’t truly progressive unsupportive of Israel because they don’t fundamentally challenge the systems and power structures that enable these kinds of political developments Israel’s settler-colonialist project and the proliferation of the “culture war” Zionism in the first place, and are very often minimizing and hostile towards those who do take a principled stance against these systems. The extent of their political understanding is largely bound by establishment liberal media that has a clear stake in the continuation of that very same system Israel’s statehood which is threatened by any real material social progress the existence of Palestinians on their own land. This contradiction often leads liberals into defending those systems and power structures even at the expense of the marginalized groups that a liberal would purport to defend the Palestinian cause, and lashing out against those to the left of them for not “Knowing Their Place” considering the feelings and safety of the Israeli settlers in a system that has for a very long time been ratcheting starving, removed, beating, generally dispossessing, and apartheid-ing itself towards fascism all-out genocide.
It’s easy to denounce genocide and say you don’t support Israel but if you aren’t challenging the systems that led to this point; which even still in the face of this genocide are working overtime to normalize it in whatever angles they can; and confronting the relationship you have with settler-colonialism by default as a person born in the west, you aren’t anti-genocide in any meaningful way that could actually end the genocide or prevent another from occuring. You are only reacting to the aesthetics of genocide; exclusive of the mechanisms that produce it; which makes you an unwitting, vibes-based cog in the genocide machine.
Put aside the UK government and the BBC. Now find people in Britain today who call themselves liberals and also support Israel, there won’t be many. In fact you won’t find many people who do at all. It doesn’t matter what a trifle meant in the past, it only matters what it means to people on the street today, and that is openness, tolerance, and freedom.
Let me re-apply my analysis for you
It’s easy to denounce genocide and say you don’t support Israel but if you aren’t challenging the systems that led to this point; which even still in the face of this genocide are working overtime to normalize it in whatever angles they can; and confronting the relationship you have with settler-colonialism by default as a person born in the west, you aren’t anti-genocide in any meaningful way that could actually end the genocide or prevent another from occuring. You are only reacting to the aesthetics of genocide; exclusive of the mechanisms that produce it; which makes you an unwitting, vibes-based cog in the genocide machine.
Supersonic goalpost movement there, blue fash