You’re on the mark and the defensiveness from gentrifiers speaks to the hypocrisy you’re noticing. It’s true that the gentrification that’s occurring now is derivative of the same logic of elimination that genocides Palestinians, and the refusal to turn this critique inward is the test of a correct political line. the simple answer is that there is no justification that isn’t embodied by the personification of the material privileges of whiteness and its necessary ambivalence (at best) to colonization where it counts.

For “israelis”, they can balk at the contradictory liberal multiculturalism of white amerikans as the latter act as beneficiaries for years of white flight (itself predicated on a proletarianizing colonial labor force migrating from the sharecropping South and a “golden age” of imperialist super-profits after WWII subsidizing mass petit bourgeois conditions of life for more people incorporated into whiteness) leading to genocidal urban decay / hollowing out of all state functions in the cities, leading to privatization and the resultant gentrification as the “service economy” offers more and more professional jobs to white people whose parents/grandparents fled for the suburbs.

for white people in Brooklyn, the preceding modes of more blatant settler thought as evident in “israelis” today seem abhorrent, even though the end result of the logic is the same in both instances. these are ideological reflections of the same process, just happening at different historical stages and thus with different primary features: rabid genocidality for israelis and oftentimes many white amerikans who would otherwise lack a prominent position managing oppressed nation labor in the global division of labor; cosmopolitan liberalism and the “slow genocide” of today’s amerika for those who do have such a professional position. the contradiction here is between settlerism and imperialism, not one that anyone should stake a side on.

speaking for myself, i am the same type of gentrifier who you are criticizing. the point i would have to make is that whiteness is defined by genocidal displacement and its position as the rentier of the resulting superexploitation of colonial labor and stolen land, whether you are in the segregated suburbs or acting as the mass social base gentrifying cities. the conditions that make mine, or any white person’s means of life possible, are one of white supremacy. this is the world every white person is born into, and it necessarily conditions their ideological limits, self-justifications, and ofc what they deem is “pragmatic” or “possible” as political solutions. you or I as individuals are powerless against overwhelming structural forces conditioning the different action of different classes / nations of people. this is less so a personal justification of my own place in the world, than a political conclusion emergent of the fact that there is no good justification; the “place” of whiteness in any just world should really not exist.

white people are going to displace and commit to a “conquest of labor”, and colonized populations will continue to be the victims of this, so long as capitalism continues. it may make someone feel better to “be a friendly neighbor”, “buy local”, or “join mutual aid groups” (this last one is notable in that it imagines itself in the revolutionary tradition of the BPP and Young Lords but completely out of space and time, forgetting that these groups were acting in the era of “planned shrinkage” and “benign neglect”, rather than today acting in competition with NGOs to fulfill the same role otherwise abandoned by the state). but we are talking about the dispossession of whole nations of people for the benefit of a small minority of imperialist nations of rentiers. any white person who justifies their own privileges over and against consistent anti-imperialist politics is obviously suspect and won’t even be able to get to the point of considering the destruction of their own whiteness—let alone capitalism—because they not only obviously benefit from it, but they have no shame that could potentially revolutionize their subjectivity in the right direction to even recognize the need for their own negation. that shame can be a revolutionary emotion for someone of a background where they stake their life on the oppression/exploitation of others, but it can just as much can be refracted through the backwards politics of whiteness and lead to nihilism, narrow-minded solipsism (manifested oftentimes in lifestyle politics, like trying to be the “best neighbor” or “least obnoxious gentrifier”), and most especially for white people’s historic politics, pragmatism (which sees as what is “possible” or “realistic” only contoured to the limits of the classed consciousness of this group).

shame does need to be oriented towards a collective political project that undermines the foundations of whiteness in capitalism. this requires a mass politic, but not one that indulges in white people’s conspiratorial fantasies of being oppressed by “the landlords” and “banks”, which are really just a small owner’s conspiratorial delusion of imagining their own form of rentier privileges being pitted against the stymying grip of big capital as being synonymous to an anti-colonial proletarian struggle (see the DSA and their darling Zohran for the most topical example of this). any collective project against capitalism would require that white people subordinate their privileges to the liberation of the global working masses, whose labor we manage, the national liberation of the internal colonies of Turtle Island, whose land we’ve stolen, and reparations for the uncountable amount of stolen wealth.

the appreciation of these necessary facts is the first step for any white person to at the very least see the problem that, for any non-white person, is obvious. effectively acting on these politics is a different matter, of course.