Appropriate Bothsides

 (ed note: sorry for late posting, if you care. weird day)

Jon Chait like to bothsides a lot of issues even while saying that the Right is worse. "Both Trumpists and leftists want to ban certain books, but - yeah - Trumpists are worse." That sort of thing.

He does hit on a good example of really egregious conduct and speech on both the far left and right with regards to Gaza. Leftists - by that I mean those who see Bernie Sanders as a sell-out - have rallied around Hamas and given them cover behind the very real list of Palestinian grievances. They are a small but very vocal number. On the right, you basically have calls for genocide in Gaza. 

As Chait notes, both positions deny one side's humanity. For Palestinian sympathizers, Israelis aren't people, they are oppressors. For a certain faction of Israeli sympathizers, every Palestinian in Gaza is culpable and if they die, they die.

Not to be too on the nose, but this mindset is precisely why the Palestinian question has not and likely will not be resolved. No one really wants the Palestinians to have Israel except maybe Iran and Syria. Egypt won't open its borders to Gaza anymore than Israel will. Palestinians are also not especially eager to live anywhere else except what they see as their homeland. Israel can point to this weekend and note that there really is no negotiated settlement possible with Palestinians.

At no point is there any incentive to see the warring sides as human beings. If you live in Gaza and see the daily misery there, how can Israelis be anything but inhuman monsters? If you see the atrocities and crimes against nature were perpetrated by Hamas, how can Palestinians be anything but inhuman monsters?

This is how the cycle of violence replicates over generations. Israel is wrong. The Palestinians are wrong. Israel is right. The Palestinians are right.

Needless to say that sort of paradox and nuance is not the currency of online aggrievement and outrage.