Zohran’s latest statement is disgraceful. It hides behind the language of morality while reinforcing the same frameworks that dehumanize Palestinians.
He begins by calling October 7 a “horrific war crime,” centering Israeli suffering as the starting point of the story. That framing erases the decades of siege, occupation, and systematic killing that led to that day. It makes Palestinian resistance seem like senseless violence rather than a response to unending colonization.
He follows with mourning for Gaza, but only after reaffirming that Palestinian resistance must first be condemned. This is what passes for “balance” in liberal politics: treating a colonized people’s fight for survival as a moral failure while describing their annihilation as a humanitarian tragedy.
By calling for “diplomacy, not war crimes,” Zohran implies that both sides are equally guilty, softening the reality of a one-sided genocide into the language of “conflict.” He refuses to name power, which is the easiest way to protect it.
Invoking “universal human rights” sounds principled, but it empties the struggle of its political meaning. Palestinians are not asking for abstract ideals. They are demanding freedom, return, and liberation from a settler state built on their destruction.
At a time when Gaza is being erased, statements like this do not show courage. They show complicity.
OK so he can’t even get the correct stance on Palestine.
Oct. 7 was only “horrifying” if you willfully ignore the context in which it occurred, that of 75 years of settler-colonial violence.
Everyone instinctively understands the concept that victims have a right to defend themselves. Show them a video of someone physically assaulting someone who’s pleading to them to leave them alone, but the assaulter continues until the victim finally snaps and breaks their nose,then the assaulter cries foul. Everyone will say “FaFO, that mf had it coming and doesn’t get to cry about it”. So why would anyone look at 75 years of isntreal carrying out horrible violent atrocities against Palestinians and not side with the Palestinians who decided to fight back?
The most horrifying thing about Oct. 7 is that isntreal made it happen by forcing Palestinians into violent resistance instead of just not doing settlers colonial land theft, apartheid, and a slower-moving genocide. You think those Hamas fighters wanted to die young violently instead of getting to live a long and full life of peace? Absolutely not. But when your people are being slowly strangled, and all peaceful protest is met with violence, what else can you do?
Not to mention, Hamas wouldn’t exist if Isreal hadn’t eliminated the PLO. Netanyahu even funded Hamas back in its infancy. Like if you don’t want a “”““terrorist””“” organization launching attacks to take hostages, maybe don’t kill all the diplomats trying to negotiate a two state solution?
Of course, Isreal’s goal was always total extermination of the Palestinian people. There is no rock bottom to the depravity they’re willing to unleash to further that goal.
And they’re still killing the people they’re negotiating with. They’ve done it with literally every force they’ve negotiated with in the last two years, from Hamas to Hezbollah to Iran, in Gaza, Iran, Iraq, Lebanon, Qatar, and probably other places I’m forgetting.
When you make a peaceful solution impossible, what do they expect the oppressed to do?