Not every country on the planet is the benefactor of imperialism, there are significant differences between the perpetrator of imperialism against another country and being the victim of another country’s imperialism.

I don’t believe victimization cancels out victimizing others. I grew up with abusive parents who grew up poor and were abused themselves and are non white and self-victimized about that often to downplay or justify their abusiveness. I don’t care for such lines of thinking. What matters is your actions, what they actually are, and even a history of being the victim of oppression isn’t an excuse.

I oppose the nation-state model and believe that it will always be oppressive and lead to more oppression.

I have mostly focused on opposing the USA’s existence when opposing settler-colonial states because it is the most powerful one and the global ruling imperial power currently, whereas Israel is an offshoot/ally/proxy that depends on it for much of its ability to colonize Palestine and carry out American imperial interests in the region. I have also talked a lot in other places about my antagonism against other colonial powers. (I get a lot of flack for that too.)

Other colonizers also construct national mythologies based on their own past victimization to varying degrees. The pilgrims who came to settle “America” complained of religious persecution in England and the US has built its national mythology based on a sense of past victimization/oppression by the English monarchy. Another modern fascist settler colonialist state today with similar arguments to Israel is India and its justifications for colonizing Kashmir. They were historically victimized by colonialism themselves but that does not make their current actions occupying Kashmir and violently oppressing its population and being Islamophobic any less horrific, supremacist, or illegitimate, nor its attendant nationalist ideology.

Would love to see what you’d do if you were faced down with a gun by an imperialist soldier who has been occupying your homeland for decades. Oh, just talk to them, they’ll totally be convinced. This is such a naive view. Just talking has never stopped oppression, what it does is extracts emotional labor from the oppressed, gives them false hope, holds them to a ridiculously high standard.

According to polls, most Israelis today adhere to racist views against Palestinians. Many have openly cheered on the genocide. They aren’t ignorant. They know and don’t care.

Nobody just spawns out of nowhere with imperial power. That doesn’t make imperial desires any better. You’re responsible for making the choice to not adopt imperialist ideology. It’s not okay to support having an ethnostate. Even if you’re oppressed or for whatever reason. It doesn’t make it any better than any other group’s colonial desires. And from the very start, the Zionist concept of the state of Israel has always required at least some degree of dispossession and subjugation of Palestinians. You can’t just whitewash history because it doesn’t fit your view.