Former President Barack Obama cautioned against ignoring the complexities of the Israel-Hamas war, warning that “all of us are complicit.”
“If you want to solve the problem, then you have to take in the whole truth. And you then have to admit nobody’s hands are clean, that all of us are complicit to some degree,” he said in an excerpted interview with Pod Save America released Saturday.
No. There is a lot of “return” mythologies you can name that is present in a lot of diaspora communities, but that doesn’t mean you see Rastafarians perpetrating settler-colonialism in Ethiopia or the Irish making the case for violently retaking Dublin from… the Irish. You could, if you wanted, make a case for Liberia - but once again, Liberia is a result of a white supremacist urge to get rid of a hated other by displacing said “other” “back where they came from…” which, now that we’re talking about it, most certainly does have parallels with Christian Zionism’s core antisemitism.
And who were Arab and African nationalists supposed to be white supremacist to? Whiteness defines itself by that which it is not… African nationalism is still, to this very day, beset by the racialized politics enforced onto it by white supremacist empires - Rwanda is merely one case of many - but the idea that sub-Saharan Africans have universally embraced the kind of comprehensive racialized caste system that European “race science” has normalized is ludicrous.
Maybe you need to tell the Israelis that.