These "people" are so off-the-wall genocidal that even calling them liberals feels somehow misleading. I know that liberalism is the moderate wing of fascism, but it feels as though there is no moderate wing left. I know this is not so much a departure from there normal mode of thinking as a particularly ugly contextual manifestation of the white supremacy they hold so dear. But my God, things are rapidly getting out of hand.
Best case scenario, I see them frame the conflict in Palestine as a conflict between religious extremists. How far up your own ass do you have to be to make such a claim? Pushing back on this idea, insisting instead that the operative identities here are colonizer and colonized, oppressor and oppressed, and that the conflict will only end when the oppression ends, someone was more than happy to call me a "terrorist sympathizer" (lol) and told me that I should be gassed.
"Israel's right to exist" is a thinly veiled dogwhistle for genocide apologia. "Terrorist" is functionally a racial slur, now more than ever. "It's a complex situation" is a lazy yet effective strategy for muddying the waters long enough for their Final Solution to be enacted yet again. Shaking liberals awake causes them to lash out violently and retreat into the dark crevices of racism and profound ignorance. It feels so hopeless.
I feel like I am in some kind of nightmare, where all of these people I previously thought could be reached have gone fully mask off and revealed themselves to be monsters with scarcely a soul to share. They are subhuman, blood-sucking fiends who need to be eradicated like one might eradicate cancer.
The worst thing, as I've already revealed, is that it makes me into the worse fucking person imaginable. I genuinely wish all these people would be shot. I find myself regularly thinking that the population needs to be culled, decimated until these psychopaths no longer disgust me with their breathing. Surely, if we just get rid of the bad people, everything will improve! Now look who's Hitler.
I just don't know what to do anymore.
I've been chatting with friends about this same issue, and here's what we have observed... Many people wanted to "choose sides". They did, and now they can't discuss anything. I believe that is the wrong approach. Because when you choose sides, you choose the starting point, and then you can point to a single horrible event that happened the other day, or fifty years ago, or whenever, and then everything after that is justified because it's "revenge" or "justice" or "they deserved it". And then you either end up justifying terrorism or genocide.
So it's hard to reach people on this issue, but if there is a way, I think it's by actively reframing things. "What is your short-term goal? Do you want to stop the killing? How can we stop people from dying?" By focusing on saving lives, we can sometimes force people to confront the basic problem that their current stance advocates mass murder. Most of the time, you can't reach people, at least not now. But sometimes you can, and even if you fail to make progress right now, sometimes the words you say can give people a hint in the future of how they, too, can act like a decent human being.