When Ed Sheeran played the victim card after the Macklemore fallout, he did what all Israel appeasers do: he pretended genocide is too complicated to understand.
“Complex” doesn’t mean “balanced”. Israel has always pulled underhanded shit like extending its de facto borders by means of “settlements”. The Hamas/PLO fight also didn’t happen without its involvement. But there have also been factors like the involvement of foreign powers, German guilt, the similarity between Zionism and early Nazi deportation plans, and so on.
The conflict between Israel and Palestine has been a mess from the very beginning and it’s understandable that people were reluctant to get involved. Of course these days most of that complexity doesn’t matter and not taking a stand is a luxury we shouldn’t be able to afford.
(I’m saying “shouldn’t be able to” because honestly we routinely ignore genocides; this one just happens to be particularly hard to ignore because Israel is a spotlight hog with huge diplomatic influence.)
I agree. The whole history of that area is quite the mess, and Israel started as an one. It is oversimplification to say the chain of events leading to all this is simple… But the genocide is. There is nothing complicated in condemning a state trying to exterminate a group of people. There is no neutral stance to take. You either accept the genocide, by supporting it directly, or indirectly by not opposing it - or you oppose it.
“Complex” means “balanced” when people like Sheeran use it to mean there are “bad people on both sides” to justify not taking a stand. Which is the explicit usage we were talking about.
But yeah, other ways you can use the world “complex”, do not imply “balanced”. If that’s how you were using it, in this instance where it was being used differently, you should have stated such.
“Complex” doesn’t mean “balanced”. Israel has always pulled underhanded shit like extending its de facto borders by means of “settlements”. The Hamas/PLO fight also didn’t happen without its involvement. But there have also been factors like the involvement of foreign powers, German guilt, the similarity between Zionism and early Nazi deportation plans, and so on.
The conflict between Israel and Palestine has been a mess from the very beginning and it’s understandable that people were reluctant to get involved. Of course these days most of that complexity doesn’t matter and not taking a stand is a luxury we shouldn’t be able to afford.
(I’m saying “shouldn’t be able to” because honestly we routinely ignore genocides; this one just happens to be particularly hard to ignore because Israel is a spotlight hog with huge diplomatic influence.)
I agree. The whole history of that area is quite the mess, and Israel started as an one. It is oversimplification to say the chain of events leading to all this is simple… But the genocide is. There is nothing complicated in condemning a state trying to exterminate a group of people. There is no neutral stance to take. You either accept the genocide, by supporting it directly, or indirectly by not opposing it - or you oppose it.
“Complex” means “balanced” when people like Sheeran use it to mean there are “bad people on both sides” to justify not taking a stand. Which is the explicit usage we were talking about.
But yeah, other ways you can use the world “complex”, do not imply “balanced”. If that’s how you were using it, in this instance where it was being used differently, you should have stated such.