8/ And the answer is simple and desperately needed:

treat Israel like a normal country, whether you defend it or oppose it or are (somehow) ambivalent about it.

This breaks an illusion that many pro-Israel forces actually want to sustain.

7/ On the right, this belief “Israel will destroy me if I criticize them” is louder and more explicit, especially these days.

But many self-styled liberals share the same idea in subtler form.

6/ You’re exposing and reinforcing your own prejudiced worldview, including toward the very people you imagine your silence is somehow simultaneously both shielding and protecting you from.

5/ It boils down to this:

if you can watch a genocide unfold — carried out by a modern ethno-supremacist project rooted in 19th–20th century ideology, not an ancient faith — waging destruction across a region and destabilizing the world, and still choose silence, you’re not just perpetuating war...

4/ That notion actually has deep antisemitic roots.

And in trying to avoid “controversy,” many of these pundits end up perpetuating the very prejudice they claim to reject.

3/ This instinct to tiptoe around Israel is not neutrality, certainly not now.

It rests on — and reproduces — an old, harmful idea that Israel or its supporters wield some extraordinary, almost mystical power capable of punishing dissent.

2/ It’s no longer just careerism or “risk aversion,” but an unexamined belief that Israel is shielded by a uniquely punitive, almost omnipotent force — that speaking honestly about Israel carries a singular cost.

5/ Israeli analysts' Telegram channel:

"In Beit Jann they are occupied with the funerals of those who were eliminated, and in the background you can hear the noise of the Israeli aircraft circling overhead."

4/ Israeli analysts such as Yossi Eliezer frame the protests as justification for more Israeli intervention in Syria.

They regularly invoke Syrian “minorities” to legitimize their involvement.

3/ Syria is also seeing large demonstrations backing the Al-Sharaa government and condemning Israel.

They come just days after Al-Sharaa’s anniversary speech marking his rise to power, where he urged Syrians to take to the streets and “express joy” over Assad’s fall.

2/ Yesterday, in the latest Israeli incursion into Syria, Israeli forces killed at least 13 Syrians, including children.

Most casualties were civilians fleeing artillery and air strikes Israel used to pull out a military unit.

www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/11...

14/ Apartheid South Africa's lesson for Israel is clear: ethno-supremacist projects built on regional destabilization can last a while on western indulgence & manufactured existential threats, but they can't indefinitely survive legitimacy crises, isolation & economic attrition.

13/ And the cooperation then was extensive: Israel became Pretoria’s top arms supplier, built up its weapons industry, shared missile and nuclear know-how, provided uranium, trained its security forces and offered the political cover that kept apartheid afloat under sanctions.

12/ Both Israel & Apartheid South Africa pursued regional domination through cross-border invasions, proxy warfare, and economic coercion designed to destabilize neighbors and keep them weak and dependent.

11/ Pretoria justified wars of aggression by invoking the western “bête noire” of the time — the Soviets — much like Israel frames its regional campaigns around Iran.

Both used an external scapegoat to mask the permanent militarism needed to sustain their political systems.

10/ The parallels between the two apartheid states aren’t just in their domestic repression of a subjugated population, but across every critical dimension of state policy, including and especially their regional strategy.

9/ For South Africa, the ultimate result may have come across as paradox to its former rulers:

The pursuit of absolute military dominance hastened the internal & external conditions for apartheid’s collapse.

Militarism bought time, but it made collapse inevitable.

8/ And strategically, the "Soviet bogeyman" project to sustain apartheid failed.

Zimbabwe rejected Pretoria’s vision of a South African-led bloc & instead helped build regional solidarity against apartheid.

For most of Africa & the world, apartheid was “more evil than socialism."

7/ But South Africa's vast militarized project ultimately sped up apartheid’s collapse. The brutality of regional destabilization deepened South Africa’s isolation.

By the late 1980s it couldn’t maintain both regional dominance and internal repression.