I don’t see it as losing friends. I see it as realizing they weren’t ever actually friends - and that I had fundamentally misunderstood my place in their world.

I absolutely agree that there is no equivalence between Hamas and Israel, Anon.

Not in structure, not in values, not in accountability, and certainly not in conduct.

Hamas is a theocratic death cult with a charter that openly calls for the annihilation of Jews. It executes dissidents, persecutes minorities, censors the press, and uses children as human shields.

Israel is a sovereign democracy with universal suffrage, a functioning judiciary, LGBTQ+ protections, and religious freedom. Like all democracies, it is a deeply flawed work-in-progress.

You’re right that these can’t be flattened into being the same.

Casualties ≠ Moral Clarity

“Israel has killed tens of thousands of people.”

This is the kind of moral arithmetic that collapses under five seconds of scrutiny.

Civilian death tolls in war zones are tragic¹, but not all civilian deaths are war crimes. The laws of war distinguish between targeting civilians (which Hamas does) and collateral damage while targeting combatants (which Israel, like all modern militaries, attempts to minimize, using warnings, evacuations, and surgical strikes).

Hamas embeds itself among civilians deliberately, turning population centers into launch sites. Every war crime they commit becomes a PR win when it’s misreported it as Israeli aggression.

In your haste to announce a moral judgement without stopping to make a moral argument, you use a term you can’t define².

A rogue state is generally understood in international relations to mean a government that:

• Rejects international norms and laws
• Sponsors terrorism
• Commits egregious human rights violations as state policy.

Iran? Yep.

North Korea? You bet

Hamas-run Gaza? Damn skippy.

Israel? Not so much. Israel:

• Is a member of the United Nations.
• Has peace treaties and diplomatic ties with dozens of countries, including former attackers.
• Is governed by the rule of law, with judicial review, opposition parties, regular elections, and a free press which savages its government daily.
• Has no expansionist ideology, no interest in genocide, no state-sponsored terrorism, and no nuclear first-use doctrine.

You may not like Israel’s policies (there are some I don’t like either) but that doesn’t make it a rogue state. That makes it a state.

False Equivalence Is Not Moral Clarity

When you ask how Hamas could be compared to a Israel, what you’re really doing is:

• Dismissing the nature, motives, and methods of Hamas.
• Flattening all actors who use force as morally interchangeable.
• Equating a democracy defending its citizens with a terror group built to kill Jews.

While you behave as though you’re exposing hypocrisy, you’re erasing the difference between a military and a militia, between war and terrorism, between flawed governance and totalitarianism, between tragic collateral damage and gleeful massacre.

Israel is not perfect. It has bad policies, it has bad politicians, and it makes grave mistakes…just like the UK, the US, and every other democracy on earth.

“Democracy,” said Winston Churchill, “is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried.”

Like every democracy, it can be (and is) challenged from within.

If your moral compass places a pluralistic democracy and a fascist death cult on the same level, the problem isn’t just your ignorance.

It’s your ethics and your refusal to make a moral argument before announcing your moral judgement.

________________

¹You don’t actually care about casualty counts anyway. At least 150,000 have died in Sudan since 2023, but you haven’t said anything about that, have you? 600,000 dead in Syria in the last several years, but nobody in the “Free Palestine” camp cared at all. The war in Yemen has claimed about 35,000-400,000 people, but I doubt you’re even aware of that

²What you’re doing here with ‘rogue state’ has become common in the Free Palestine cult. You redefine words in order to use them as weapons.²

Since you’re allergic to dictionaries, here are other examples:

Genocide
Means the intentional and systematic destruction of a people. Israel protects its Arab population (2 million citizens with full rights) and has repeatedly called for civilians to evacuate before striking Hamas targets. That is not genocide. Hamas, by contrast, literally calls for genocide.

Holocaust
A unique historical atrocity involving industrialized, systematic extermination. Stop appropriating it to describe a war you don’t understand. You diminish actual Holocaust victims every time you weaponize the term.

Famine
There is no famine in Gaza. Malnutrition? Possibly. Humanitarian crisis? Yes, there was one. But famine is a specific stage of food insecurity as defined by the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC). Gaza never reached famine. Repeating the false claim doesn’t make it true.

Other examples of semantic distortion in the movement:

• War becomes genocide.
• Rape becomes resistance.
• National borders become the walls of an “open air prison.”
• Suicide bombing becomes heroism.
• Terrorists become “freedom fighters.”
• Civilian hostages become “prisoners of war.”
• A people reclaiming a part of their homeland become colonizers.
• The colonizers of the Arab conquests become “liberators.”

Words mean things. When you strip them of meaning to make a rhetorical point, you’re not helping anyone, least of all Palestinians.

(We’re talking about this post.)

Quite a lot, Anon:

1. Palestinians were never citizens of Israel.

Bantustans were designed to revoke citizenship from Black South Africans. The apartheid regime invented them to legally strip people of rights they already had.

Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza were never Israeli citizens. They were Jordanian (West Bank) and Egyptian-administered (Gaza) residents before 1967, and neither Israel nor the PA nor Hamas has claimed they’re Israeli citizens since.

No rights were stripped from them.

2. Palestinian leadership was not installed by Israel.

Bantustan governments were handpicked by the apartheid regime to establish a fake sovereignty with total external control.

The Palestinian Authority was created through mutual negotiation (Oslo Accords) and chosen by voters by internationally observed elections. Hamas won an election in Gaza.

Israel doesn’t select Palestinian leaders.

3. Bantustans were inside South Africa.

They were used to exile Black South Africans from citizenship within the country of which they were citizens.

The West Bank and Gaza are not inside Israel. They are disputed, non-annexed territories that were captured in war. The Palestinians are not a domestic population being cordoned off, they are a Self-identifying separate national group seeking independent statehood.

4. Israel never claimed Palestine as a final status.

South Africa wanted the Bantustans to be the final home of their Black population, permanently excluded from the state.

Israel has never claimed the West Bank and Gaza as permanent Israeli territory. Every Israeli government (left or right) has accepted in principle that the territories are subject to final-status negotiations.

Bantustans were the end of the conversation. Palestine is still in negotiation, even though it is stalled.

5. Bantustans had no international support.

Not one country on Earth recognized them. They were seen universally as tools of racial domination.

By contrast, the Palestinian Authority has diplomatic relations with over 130 countries, observer status at the UN, and wide support for eventual statehood.

Much of the international community sees Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank as a nation under occupation, not a racial group being excluded from their own country.

6. Palestinians have said no. Repeatedly.

The Bantustans were imposed unilaterally.

The Palestinian Authority has turned down multiple offers of actual statehood, including in 2000 (Barak/Clinton), 2001 (Taba), 2008 (Olmert), and more.

They are not trapped in a fake homeland, they’ve been repeatedly offered a real one and rejected the terms.

Bantustans were fake countries invented to justify racial domination inside a single state.

The Palestinian territories are nationalist entities stuck in a failed peace process.

They are not free. They are not sovereign. But they are not Bantustans. Claiming otherwise erases everything specific about both histories just to make performative bullshit work.

Anon, I get that you meant the question to be rhetorical instead of a prompt to dismantle it’s ignorant point - but if you’re going to try to weaponize historical comparisons…it’ll help if you actually study the history.

You’re right.

People talk about South African apartheid as if what brought it down was a track incorporating the talents of both The Fat Boys and Bruce Springsteen.

Artists United Against Apartheid was a great idea, it had a ton of amazing musicians involved, and the song was a banger in its time - but it didn’t bring down the apartheid regime.

But let’s take these topics in order.

What was South African apartheid?

South African apartheid (1948–1994) was a system of legally codified racial segregation and domination. It included:

• Pass laws: Black South Africans had to carry “passbooks” at all times and were arrested if found in “white” areas without permission.
• Bantustans: Black people were stripped of South African citizenship and assigned to pseudo-states with no real sovereignty.
• Racial classification: Every person was officially labeled (White, Black, Coloured, Indian) and access to housing, education, healthcare, jobs, and movement was legally dictated by this category.
• No political rights: Black South Africans couldn’t vote in national elections, hold political office in the state, or have meaningful representation.
• Legally mandated segregation: Beaches, hospitals, neighborhoods, schools, transportation, and even park benches were racially segregated by law.
• Interracial marriage was banned.

What brought it down?

The apartheid regime fell because of a combination of internal resistance, economic unsustainability, and shifting geopolitical pressures…not because Paul Simon declined to tour in Johannesburg.

Yes, the international boycott movement contributed morally and symbolically. It helped stigmatize the regime, but the decisive forces were both internal and geopolitical.

• Mass protest movements like the ANC and the UDF sustained over decades, despite imprisonment, torture, and massacres.
• Economic crisis, driven more by South Africa’s own economic dysfunction than boycotts, with capital flight, brain drain as skilled and educated people left the country, labor strikes, rising inflation, and the absurd costs of a shrinking white minority trying to dominate a majority through force.
• The fall of the USSR and the end of the Cold War changed the calculus. The West no longer needed the South African government as a bulwark against Soviet communism, and the ANC was no longer seen as a proxy threat working with the Soviets.

South Africa’s regime was economically isolated and functionally unsustainable…so its leaders negotiated their way out.

Now look at Israel:

• Arab citizens of Israel (~20% of the population) can vote, serve in the Knesset (parliament), sit on the Supreme Court, and have equal access public healthcare, public education, and public welfare.
• There are no pass laws, no racial classification system, and no forced population transfers based on ethnicity.
• Arab Israelis live in the same cities, attend the same universities, work in the same hospitals.
• Interracial and interfaith marriage is legal.
• There are no laws barring Arabs from public beaches, cafes, buses, schools, or hospitals.
• Arabic was an official language until 2018, and remains widely used in courts, government, and public life.

Does Israel have problems? Fuck yes. Discrimination? You bet. Ongoing occupation of the West Bank? Absolutely.

But that’s a conflict over land and sovereignty, not a system of racial domination by law.

In fact, the Palestinian Authority which governs the vast majority of the people of the West Bank, bans Jews from living in its territory by law.

Israel, meanwhile, has 2 million Arab citizens.

Which side sounds more like an apartheid state?

Calling Israel an Apartheid state requires knowing nothing about Apartheid, nothing about Israel, or being one of those special idiots who knows nothing about either topic…while lecturing others on both.

So, is BDS likely to bring down Israel?

If the hope is that boycotts will “bring down apartheid” in Israel the way they supposedly did in South Africa, it’s worth asking three questions:

1. Was that even how apartheid ended in South Africa? (Hint: no.)
2. Is Israel actually anything like apartheid South Africa? (Hint: Not even remotely.)
3. Is Israel vulnerable like South Africa was? Is its economy a mess? Do geopolitics align against Israel? (Hint: No, no, and no)

BDS isn’t targeting a regime that relies on racial categories to govern access to schools, jobs, and voting. It targets a democracy (flawed, like all of them) that’s locked in a violent, nationalist, territorial conflict where both sides have agency and blame.

So can BDS destroy Israel?

Fuck, no. The circumstances have almost nothing in common.

• Israel isn’t isolated. South Africa in the 80s had one major trading partner left: the US
• Israel today has free trade agreements with the US, EU, UK, Canada, Japan, South Korea, India, and more. The Abraham Accords added the UAE, Bahrain, and Morocco. Saudi Arabia’s warming up next because it will profit them to do so.
• Israel’s economy is globally essential in key sectors. Israel isn’t an agricultural economy vulnerable to divestment. It’s a tech superpower. Intel, NVIDIA, Google, Microsoft, and Apple all all have R&D centers in Israel…because Israelis are amazing at R&D. Israeli cybersecurity, chip design, water tech, and medical devices are deeply embedded in global systems. You’re not going to get the world to boycott a major source of its innovation.
• It’s a nuclear-armed state with robust alliances. South Africa had no security umbrella. Israel has the US veto in the Security Council, the Iron Dome co-developed with American funding, and tight military relationships with NATO members. No serious nation sees Israel as a civilizational threat- but they know Iran is.
• There’s no Cold War calculus forcing abandonment. The ANC gained Western favor in part because the Soviet threat vanished. There’s no equivalent shift happening now. If anything, the West is reassessing its reliance on Middle East energy and stabilizing with Israel, not distancing from it.
• Israelis don’t rely on foreign legitimacy for their sense of survival.
• Israelis are not waiting to be liked. They live in a neighborhood that has tried to annihilate them repeatedly and failed catastrophically every time. Israel and Israelis won’t collapse if American college campuses disinvite them, or if they can’t vacation in Ireland.
• BDS weakens the Palestinian economy more than Israel’s.
• Every time BDS succeeds in canceling a company or project in the West Bank, it’s often Palestinian workers who lose jobs.

BDS won’t dismantle Israeli democracy or solve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

So what does BDS accomplish?

It mostly succeeds at demonizing Jews in diaspora, polarizing campus discourse, and pushing actual diplomacy further away.

If your strategy depends on equating a messy, unresolved conflict with one of the most infamously racist legal systems in modern history, your history and your strategy are not just pointless, but entirely nonsense, performed for contemporaries, social media, and clout.