Andrea Hunter, a white woman who describes herself as passionate about dismantling systematic racism and police brutality and proudly adorns her social media bios with “BLM”, is unsure of where she stands on ethnic cleansing in Palestine.
“Supporting the Black Lives Matter movement is a no-brainer,” says Hunter, who has never gone out of her way to educate herself on the occupation of Palestine, but has confidently stated in the past that she believes it to be a “complicated issue”.
“In this country, Black people face targeted discrimination by a militarized police force,” Hunter continues, speaking of a police force with a decades long history of training with Israeli military officials on issues including crowd control, coordinating media coverage of violence by law enforcement, and heightened surveillance of marginalized communities.
“And if you’re neutral in the face of injustice,” Hunter adds, “you’re on the side of the oppressor.”
While Hunter lives in a country that gives billions of dollars to Israel in foreign military aid each year, she maintains that “everything going on” in Sheikh Jarrah is not her business.
“I’m just not sure, I feel like my whole life I’ve heard good things about Israel,” says Hunter, who supposedly spent the last year deconstructing the myths American ideological systems have handed to her. “Also, as a non-Jewish person, I’m not even sure I should have an opinion on it.”
A very aggravated Jewish friend of Hunter’s weighed in on the issue.
“My great grandparents fled Eastern Europe because of anti-Semitism over a century ago,” says Emma Friedman. “And the oppression they fought against was not so that one day a conservative government could violently colonize the homeland of another ethnic group. Anyone who says you have to be a Zionist to be a Jew is lying to you. That fucking idea is anti-Semitic.”
But Hunter remains unsure.
“Liberation is totally a global struggle,” she says. “But maybe I should just focus on BLM right now, and by focus I mean just have it in my Twitter bio.”
