I originally came up with the concept for this week’s comic probably about 10 years ago, and while I have long kicked myself for leaving it on my massive pile of unfinished projects and unrealized ideas, I am thankful that I never published it before now.

When I first wrote it, this comic was, in my mind, about feminism. It’s commentary was meant to be something about the asinine misogynist line of “Well if women want equal rights, does that mean we get to hit them now?” (barf)

Not to explain my own punchline here, but the whole idea hinges around the proportionality of a threat. In the view of any reasonable person, and, y’know, also, like, the law (supposedly), any kind of abuse, spousal or otherwise, is always wrong, regardless of the gender of the person committing it, and the only acceptable use of violence is in self-defense, when you feel that your life, or the life of another, is under threat.

So, if you are 6’2″ and 250 lbs, and your 5’2″ 120 lb girlfriend hits you because she’s mad at you, while it does sound like you may be in a toxic relationship dynamic, unless she is some kind of kung-fu master of the dim mak, can you really say that your life was in endangered by her hitting you enough for you to hit her back? Can you really claim that you would be acting in self-defense? Now, if your partner is a pro MMA fighter, regardless of if you weigh anything close to her weight, you may be under real threat of being harmed should you suffer abuse by her, and you may need to resort to some form of violent resistance just to survive her onslaught.

In any case, arguing whether or not roughly half of humans deserve equal rights around how you think it’s acceptable to hit your spouse pretty much just proves the point of why women need and deserve equal rights. The whole argument is asinine in the end, for to even entertain such a ridiculous sexist statement with a counter-argument is just giving too much oxygen to trash that isn’t worth anyone’s time.

But that’s just it…

Why are we giving so much oxygen to nonsense in public discussions?

At foremost in my mind today is the continual insistence of Israel’s “Right to Defend Itself” as counter to any admonishments of its war crimes and genocidal actions. Any condemnation of Israel’s actions brings the demand that you condemn Hamas, or to invoke October 7th as a justification, or swear that you affirm Israel’s right to defend itself.

Looking at the situation through the lens of the comic, how does the dynamic between Israel and Gaza stack up? Who has the potential to present the greater threat to the other?

Israel is a nuclear armed nation that gets hundreds of billions of dollars every year in weapons and military aid from the United States, Canada, the UK, Germany, and many other Western nations. This includes top of the line missiles, drones, fighter jets, weapons, and sniper scopes. Their air force budget alone is so massive that, if they had to pay for it themselves, it would take up all of their education, health, and social programs spending combined. Israel could not function as it currently does without massive foreign subsidy. That’s why protesters in Western countries focus on criticizing Israel over other repressive regimes around the world – our tax dollars are funding this apartheid and genocide, so conceivably we might actually be able to influence our own governments to put a stop to it. Short of going to war, what pressure could we put on Iran or North Korea that isn’t already being done?

But I digress.

Israel uses this massive defense spending to control every single border crossing into Gaza, and to hammer its people with more bombs in the last 20 months than were dropped in all of the Vietnam War (which was itself more than in all of World War II). By the way, we are talking about a strip of land roughly the size of New Jersey.

What does Hamas get? Well, they do have backers from around the Arab world. But since Israel controls every border crossing, there’s not a lot of material aid that can get into the area. Israel bans the entry of all construction materials and anything they say could conceivably be used to manufacture explosives – including cruel and ridiculous items like toys, candy, and sugar (wouldn’t want children to have any joy! They could make bombs out of it!) Virtually all of the explosives and rockets that Hamas and the Al-qassam brigade launch against the IOF and targets in Israel, are themselves unexploded ordinances that Israel launched into Gaza.

They are literally lobbing the scraps of Israel’s own genocidal bombing campaigns back at them.

What else can they do to defend themselves?

“But Hamas started it on October 7th!”

OK, so even if you ignore the fact that the Al-Aqsa Flood was the action of a generation of orphaned youths from previous Israeli bombing campaigns who had lived their entire lives in an open air prison, watching their people be slowly extinguished, if you ignore that the destruction of Palestine and its people has been an ongoing process of almost 80 years that has culminated in an apartheid system which persecutes and disenfranchises Palestinians in an effort to drive them out so Israel can occupy the entire region, and if you ignore that the Israeli government has intentionally empowered Hamas over the past 20 years so that they could have a more belligerent adversary in Gaza that they could use as an excuse for military actions – even if you ignore all that, these children on dirt bikes and kites managed to sneak through the concentration camp walls – past what is supposed to be one of the most powerful and expensive militaries in the world – and killed somewhere around 1000 people (about 200 of the 1,200 Israeli death toll that day were killed by the Israeli military in its clumsy counter attacks) and took about 200 people hostage.

I’ll do my due-duty here and condemn the killing of civilians. That’s not cool. I’m never going to say that is a good thing to do.

But I also can’t really get too worked up about this in the face of the death toll of Israel’s response, which has lasted almost two years, encompassed more bombs than the entire Vietnam war, destroyed every single university and almost every hospital in Gaza, and killed what any honest estimates put at well above 100,000 people. The low-end estimates of the children killed in Gaza alone is above 16,000. Almost 15x the total death toll of October 7th. The highest cohort of killed children? 6-12 year olds – can’t run as fast as adults, but too big to carry. This is to say nothing of the massive number of wounded, the psychologically scarred (can you imagine losing your entire family? or digging mutilated children out of rubble?), and the long-term poisoning of the land by chemical weapons and depleted uranium bullets (babies are being born without brains in Gaza now!)

So even if (and that’s a pretty big if), you give everything to Israel, and grant that this whole conflict started with Hamas’ aggression on October 7th, and totally wasn’t at all a provoked revolt against the keepers of a concentration camp, it seems as though Israel has paid back retribution in spades (can you say over 100 to 1 dead?) With their massive power imbalance, can what they’re doing be in any way reasonably called “self-defense”?

By the way, none of this even mentions the starvation of Gaza being enacted right now by Israel’s blockade on the region, or of their occupation in the West Bank, OR of the apartheid system within Israel proper, in which Arab-Israeli citizens are second class citizens. OR of their frequent invasions into Syria and Lebanon.

How does any of that fit into “self-defense”?

Of course, defenders of Israel will say that if Israel doesn’t do all of these terrible things to all of their neighbors and to their own citizens, then they will become the victims of a genocide by the surrounding Arab nations. They will say that protestors calling for the end of the occupation and destruction of Gaza, of the apartheid system in Israel and the West Bank, and for Israel to become a true democracy with equal laws and representation for all people living there, Jew and non-Jew alike, they will say calling for all that is somehow a call for the destruction of all Jews. This is extremely similar to what the White Afrikaners in South Africa said during the global campaign against their apartheid regime. Aside from the fact that this did not happen to the White Afrikaners (despite what Donald Trump, Elon Musk, and Grok might say), to do an evil thing, and then justify the doing of the evil thing by saying you fear the consequences of having done the evil thing, is not self-defense. It is cry-bullying, and we live in an exceptional era for it (future blog post on that to come). No person rallying for Palestine is calling for the destruction of Jews in Israel (or anywhere) – a great many of them are Jews themselves, and many more are members of persecuted minorities who know first-hand the pain and terror of ethnic cleansing. These people are simply calling for justice, for international law to be upheld, and for an end to senseless violence.

In traditional Okinawan Karate, one was not ever meant to use their karate in violence. The true purpose of karate training was to strengthen one’s body and one’s moral character, so that they could confidently approach any situation in the spirit of non-violence. Even should the other party assail them with blows, they would not resort to using the incredible violence that they were capable of, and their strong bodies would be able to withstand the attack until they can convince the other party to stop and be reasonable. Many, more modern martial arts masters have affirmed that, should they be robbed by a mugger, they would willingly give them their wallet, as there is nothing within it that is worth doing another person harm.

To be truly strong is to be in a position to show kindness and patience. To resort to violence is to lose control of a situation or to succumb to fear, anger, or selfishness.

True self-defense can never involve retribution for the sake of inflicting punishment, and it can never include gratuitous violence. What Israel is doing is no more self-defense than punching a toddler who slaps you in a tantrum. They hold this population in the palm of their hand, and any violence that occurs in this situation is ultimately on them.

What is amazing is just how resilient the Palestinian people are. Though, that they have to be is a failure on our part. This isn’t something they trained for, it’s something that was foisted upon them by people in foreign lands.

Maybe they will be resilient enough to withstand Israel’s blows until they are willing to be reasonable and work for mutual justice, rather than greed and domination?

One can only hope. (And protest, and fund raise, and have difficult conversations, and

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