Why are so many GC women pro-Israel?

I suspect this might be true too!

I agree with @SionnachRuadh , and I think this is a really fascinating question: How you get your list of approved underdogs is another matter, and it doesn't do to question this - how do these causes get approved? Why Palestine + TWAW, and not, say, Palestine + women’s rights? And what makes Palestinians so much more supportable by TRAs than, say, Uyghurs?

And you see , that is where you are going wrong. Because you think Israel is in conflict with Gaza as an act of ' revenge' rather than fighting for survival against a coaltion of enemies explictly dedicated to its destruction, and where Hamas has explicitly stated its attempt to keep on committing October 7th attacks, and has fired 10s of thousands or rockets into Israel since Oct 7th and is still sending terrorists into Israel to murder civilians.

What other country would be expected to tolerate this?

I agree with this.

Also, i think it can be a bit shallower. That they have so much fun at one protest, they agree to met at the next one, regardless of the cause. And they never think to ask who's deciding the next issue.

Oh yes, and i'm sick of the weekly demonstrations outside my locals station. A pile of a mixture of white retired champagne, socialists and ethnic minorities all standing around with whistles and, wooden spoons, banging tins and waving flags. Who knew a wooden spoon was an effective tool to end a war.

What honestly do they think they achieve. They actually accost you on the way into the station, and they stand right in front of the exit, so you can't get in or out without having to interact with them, which I don't want to.

.I'm sick and i'm tired of it and i'm not supporting the cause. It's their war it's nothing to do with me.

Supposing palestine, get what they want.You really think there'll be a utopia. It will turn in to yet another arab, failed state, a hot bed of terrorism and political instability.And mass suffering of the people. That's what we take.The place of israel, if they ever get what they want, which thankfully they won't.

The display over iran and how defenceless they were in the face of air strikes proved everything. Taking on any one of these failed states is like shooting fish in a barrel. They simply are all talk and don't have the defensive capability to achieve their aims. Which is why they should accept a deal and end this. But they won't, because they want to annihilate jews.

Palestinian leaders absolutely failing the Palestinian people for decades by preferring to pick repeated fights in the region and not just with Israel either!

Even PA President Abbas admitted Arab leaders were wrong to reject the 1947 UN Partition Plan.

Reject then fight ad nauseum is s terrible, terrible plan as Saudi Crown Prince Mohammad Bin Salman pointed out as they have no real power in the region & should accept a deal. Rejection is a tactical response to a situation they don't have a strategic ability to achieve.

You don't get better deals long after rejecting the best deal there ever was on the table (1947 UN Partition Plan) as all subsequent deals can never be as good.

As to why the TRA waving the Palestinian flag, it's not terribly surprising to witness when their first thing was to force team with LGB, which has nothing to do with the T.

GC women are less likely to be performatively pro-Palestine, because we've seen where mindlessly waving flags, chanting mantras and applauding celebrity gobshites leads.

I think the rise of the Omnicause is part of the gentrified left having mostly abandoned class and economics as its central driver, and adopted Foucauldian postmodernism and critical theory.

What you get instead of class is an unthinking identification with any group identified as the underdog, based on an idea that they're all rebelling against the same power structure (call it capitalism, Yankee imperialism, the cisheteronormative patriarchy, The Man) and are therefore part of the same cause. How you get your list of approved underdogs is another matter, and it doesn't do to question this.

That's why you not only get Palestine flags on trans protests, or trans flags on pro-refugee protests, you get constant attempts to rationalise why these are actually the same thing. I stay in touch with what lefties are saying, and I'm currently hearing stuff like "those Epping mums who say they're worried about a migrant hotel near their daughters' school are just repeating racist lies about brown men's sexuality which are the same as terfs scaremongering about transwomen in toilets".

You know anyone in the left activist scene, you hear this sort of reasoning constantly. All their key issues are connected and somehow Palestine is the crazy glue that connects them.

And because of social pressure, people I know who'll privately admit that the left has both a misogyny problem and an antisemitism problem can't bring themselves to think that maybe their pet issues of trans and Palestine provide cover for lots of nasty impulses to hide in plain sight.

The right has its own omnicause tendencies, but they seem to me to be less severe, because the right is inherently less ideological and less driven to make every issue part of one consistent narrative. So someone like Douglas Murray is massively pro-Israel, but he doesn't feel the need to mention Israel when he's writing or speaking about unrelated issues. Compare that to say Owen Jones.

I'm not sure I'd say that I've moved right, though some people would say that. It's more that, having been cancelled from the left, I'm now free to not take all my opinions as a job lot. I can examine things I thought I believed, think about why I believed them, weight up the views of people I wasn't supposed to listen to, and maybe conclude I was wrong about certain things.

And finally: if people can lie to you that men are women, what else are they lying about?

I am GC and support Israel's right to exist and fight for the safety of its people.

I think people who are GC are likely to be better at critical thinking, and less likely to go along with the crowd, so are more likely to support Israel.

I have always been left wing, and vaguely supportive of Palestinians, felt it was important not to label criticism of Israel as anti-semitism, but didn't think much about it. I was shocked by October 7th, it made me aware that Hamas are truly evil, and I think any country that suffered such a horrific attack has the right to take steps to prevent it happening again. It's obviously awful when civilians, especially innocent children, are killed and injured in wars, but the actions of Hamas have greatly contributed to the numbers of civilian casualties in this war.
I've also been shocked by the levels of anti-semitism I have seen in this country since the attack.

After what I've learned since the trans nonsense began, I've been a lot less shocked by the left wing press uncritically publishing Hamas propaganda, and the numbers of left wing sheep taking part in the anti Israel protests when they have zero knowledge or understanding. Not even knowing which river and sea they're chanting about.

Maybe gc feminists run into reputational trouble in lefty milieux because they are thoughtful and can see both sides, instead of having a knee-jerk 'support the underdog' response. And what's with being 'pro' either of the two peoples? It's not a football match.

Kissinger famously said of the Iran-Iraq war 'its a pity they can't both lose'. My feeling about the present conflict is that its a pity they can't both WIN. There was a time when this seemed like a possibility, but I don't expect it now, in my lifetime or, indeed, ever. It's unutterably sad.

And I think it is probably a personality type that links GC with pro-israel stance. Being curious,(so that you investigate topics before forming a view), and placing a strong value on personal integrity ( so being prepared to hold a view that follows the evidence even if its not the popular view).

If any GC women want to support British Jews at this time, then please come to the March Against Anti-Semitism on Sunday 7th Sept in London.

antisemitism.org/march/

I think one part of it is stepping outside the progressive orthodoxy. That promotes independent thinking, and it’s healthy and unsurprising that GC people end up with a wide range of views on Israel as a result.

Being pro-Gaza/anti-Israel isn’t an inherently left-wing positon. So leaning to Israel is not a rightward shift.

Both Israel and Palestine are liberation movements. Both are ethno-nationalist (one side stridently, one heavily caveated). Both shelter persecuted minorities. Both impose religious strictures (one overtly and violently, one administratively). Neither has an economics that is straightforwardly left or right.

I haven't seen the minimising of anyone's deaths.

I am pro- the state of Israel existing and GC. I think the overlap between the two is being able to think for yourself and investigate what is really happening, rather than believing something just because it has gained traction in society.

I was horrified by the October 7th attacks and ever since I have been horrified by how Hamas has been completely written out of the narrative of what is happening in the ME. Normally when people act with deliberate brutally we recognise it exacerbates the horror of their actions and motivation (such as when the JIhadi 'beatles' beheaded people). Yet there was no such reaction to the deliberately provocative brutality (the murder and torture and burning alive of babies, children, men and women and the sexual assaults and rapes) of October 7th. I suspect many never even bothered looking into what I had really happened - parents and children were tied together with wire and set alight, a baby a few months old was shot in the head in their bed. Instead, pro-palestinians were organising marches in the West, as the attacks were happening. And then in the immediate aftermath too. The tearing down of hostage posters, the immediate denial of atrocities on October 7th despite the overwhelming evidence of it, recorded by the perpetrators, reminded me of Holocaust denial. The tearing down of the posters of hostages was utterly stomach churning in its dehumanising repugnance.

And ever since then the fact that Israel since October 7th has been reacting to the actions of Hamas is completely obliterated from the narrative. And that shows the deep bias against israel and against Jews. No other state is held to the standard that Israel is. The deaths in Gaza, inflated as they are by Hamas who include fighters in the death counts, adults as children, and include all deaths regardless of whether they are caused by the conflict, are not high for an intense urban war and would be even lower if Hamas sheltered its citizens in its tunnel network, as other governments would do in wartime. And of course none of the deaths from the combat would have happened if Hamas had not started the war through murdering Israeli citizens and taking hostages to deliberately and knowingly provoke a war.

The destruction of Rafah was due to Hamas evacuating most of the civilians and then booby trapping all of the buildings to kill IDF soldiers operating there. So that is why the IDF responded as they did. But that's left out of the narrative.

We have all seen how Israel created a safe passage for Gazan civilians to return in the previous ceasefire.( remembering that they left as Israel warned them so they could get out safely , a courtesy Hamas did not extend to Israeli citizens). Yet somehow this does not register as Israel seeking to preserve civilian life.

Hamas were using supply of food aid to support their fighters, to keep the civilans under control by controlling their access to food, and to raise funds as they were selling the aid to their civilians. This is why Israel took control of the food supply. Which Hamas has been seeking to disrupt ever since as they need the power and money and food to maintain control.

And of course the 10s of thousands of rockets Hamas and Hezbollah have fired into Israel since the Oct 7th rarely makes the news, nor do the terrorists they have continued to send into Israel to murder civilians. Nor does the fact that Hamas have been open that they will commit Oct 7th atrocities over and over and over again. Nor does the fact that Hamas are open about needing the death of their own civilians to further their cause.

The bias against Israel is shown by the absence of the narrative about Hamas, or about how Israel is responding to Hamas's chosen actions at each stage of the conflict. The culpability of Hamas is utterly absent from the narrative, so that all the blame lands on Israel.

At the end of the day many of the pro-Palestinians don't think Israel should exist, so they don't care about the death of Israelis, but I do. They don't care if Israelis are left at risk from Hamas so of course they have always wanted to war to end immediately, as they don't care about the risk and death that exposes Israelis to. I also care about the death of Palestinians, which is why I hate Hamas and hold them responsible for the consequences of their actions. I cannot understand why pro-Palestinians aren't also raging about Hamas. When I speak to them, they excuse them, minimise them, justify them or simply seek to move the conversation off Hamas and their culpability.

A lot of westerners also don't understand the mindset of Hamas so seem to see them as a 'normal' western enemy government, but they are not. You can talk about a two state solution all you want but Hamas do not want that. They want the destruction of Israel and Jews.

And most of all, I am anti-racism and the blatant racism against Jews has been starkly exposed since October 7th. People won't even name it as a racist, murderous atrocity which it very clearly was. Hamas literally filled themselves walking through the Kibbtuz repeatedly saying ' where are the Jewish dogs? where are the Jews?' yet people still won't name October 7th as a racist atrocity.

So yes, as with gender ideology, I look into things for myself and I think for myself, and the blatant distortion of the narrative against Israel has appalled me. I'm not a war strategist, and neither are those opposing Israel, so I am not going to defend every action, but I've seen and learnt enough to see the utterly unbalanced narrative and blatant prejudice against Israel and it appals me.

Here are few links for people who might be interested in a wider lens than is normally cast on this situation.

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You're quite literally pulling a page from the TA playbook. Acting like just because women here agree on one issue we have to agree on everything.

You make a contradictory statement in your post. One second you say, as a feminist, you're against Muslim nationalism and a sentence later you question why women here criticize fundamentalist Muslims. All of the criticism about Islam I've read here is about how women a treated under that type of regime which imo is appropriate for this sub.

The war in Gaza is complicated and tragic and based in hundreds of years of history I know little about. All I know is, presently, one side is controlled by fundamentalist terrorists who, by law, put LGB people to death and committed absolute atrocities including using rape as a weapon and gruesomely murdered innocent civilians and children. And those individuals are still holding people hostage and refusing to surrender. The other side, some could argue, is now overreacting in their response and not taking into consideration the massive, disproportionate number of innocent women and child casualties they're causing. As an agnostic myself who doesn't subscribe to Judaism or Islam, it's hard for me to take a side for or against either as that seems to be the driving force behind their conflict - and if they're allowing their religious beliefs to drive them to this level of violence what on earth can I do about that? There's no point in taking a side bc there's literally nothing I can do about it other than hope and pray that both sides, neither of whom I have a personal connection to nor agree with their beliefs, somehow find the peace to move forward.

I have seen a lot of discussions about Gaza and Israel on here, and I would say Israel is more supported than I would have expected (though as a fence-sitter myself I'm not judging that especially). But my main impression of a link between GC and pro-israel comes from other social media, like twitter where people display flags in their bios.

I wouldn't want to put any political flag in my bio or by my name - I don't like it at all (except maybe a yorkshire one...)

Interestingly I was quite ‘anti Tory’ for many years. It was thanks to the combination of Rayner’s ‘Tory scum’ along with Brexit and Boris Johnson withdrawing the whip for all those Tory MPs refusing to back a Brexit without an agreement that made me revisit my knee jerk politics.

Like others, I’ve come to appreciate that it’s no longer a simple of equation of Left = good and Right = bad. The authoritarian left has much in common with the authoritarian right.

there seem to be a hegemonic positioning among British "terfs" (siding with Israel and even denying the genocidal aspect of its actions)

I disagree that British women critical of gender imposed retrograde norms (I don’t use ‘terfs’ myself as see it as simplistic and misleading) share a hegemonic position on Israel and the Palestinian conflict. How can you know anyhow? Going by this thread, we see a wide variety of quite thoughtful reflections.

Some posters find the term omnicause offensive but there’s no denying that a lot of teaming goes on by those who see themselves as politically left/far left. My wider view is that many on the left are often unreflectively sympathetic to the ‘underdog’. I see this in my own union where every possible left wing cause is advocated for apart from the ones that are meant to be the main purpose of our union. And IMO, it’s the single biggest reason that TRAs/MRAs have been able to asset their anti-women agenda by the back door with so little attention or resistance.

Yes, there is an awful lot of vitriol and intolerance on the left from those who consider themselves to be morally righteous and on 'the right side of history'.
You are supposed to " hate" all sorts of things, even though the social justice movement is supposed to be founded on the formation of a more loving, tolerant and kinder society.When I witness the behaviour, or are subject to the disdain myself, it really makes me think I'm not sure i'd like the sort of society many claim they want to create - if this is how people would treat each other within it.

A kind of totalitarianism group think has taken over...which projects all of its own shadow onto others.....then fights against it. It is like a form of religious fundamentalism whereby if someone is not "saved" and part of the church, then they are necessarily under the influence of the devil and must be cut out altogether. Fundamentalism makes ever increasing and more extreme demands in its bid for ideological purity.

Agree. I'm a regular reader here and I've never once seen a single post about Gaza or Israel.

I think what the OP has done is say 'oh people who think men can become women are also pro gaza that must mean'...and filed in their own blanks.

There are hundreds of years of conflict in that region, which cannot and should not be down to being on any one side, and im not sure anyone actually has a viable answer to solve the situation. I'm sure if the OP is in that position, make a call to the higher ups and get it done.

This. I’ve never seen racist attacks on Gaza in FWR. I’ve certainly seen rolled eyes at the omnicause/ queers for Palestine etc but I would assume that’s a lot more to do with the people doing the protests than the suffering in Gaza.

That’s interesting and I don’t actually mind sharing my GC views with right-wing people (it’s evidence and common sense-based apart from anything else) - just have been surprised sometimes. I do think I have thought through my left-wing position carefully too and that’s partly why there are a number of exceptions to the general lefty dogma in my views.

One thing that has always pissed me off about the left, even as a teenager was the tribalism and how you have to hate and shun tories. I don’t agree and I think friendships and debates across that divide (and many others) are a good thing.

Like some others I look at this from the other side - why are so many TRAs anti-Semitic/pro Hamas? I also agree about the omnicause - slap a Palestine flag in your SM bio alongside a trans flag.

Also, and others my know this better than me, but Zionism, the belief in a Jewish homeland (next year in Jerusalem) is quite inherent to Judaism, so I find this idea of “I’m not anti-Semitic I’m anti-Zionism” to be quite troubling.

To be fair I can see why TRAs would support Iran as that country carries out the second highest amount of sex change surgeries in the world. They conveniently ignore the fact that homosexuality is illegal, and it is a result of attempting to trans the gay away.

I used to be on the left and am now firmly on the right. This is partly because of a shift in the Overton window, but mainly because the batshittery of transgenderism (and critical race theory) made me rethink many of my beliefs, and to do a really deep dive into why I believed those things. I started listening to people I would previously have dismissed and found that they were saying things that were more provably true than the position I'd previously held. I came to realise that I had never truly examined many of my left wing beliefs, but simply inherited them from my parents, my peers and my social group. I'm also old enough to have seen that certain left wing viewpoints are ridiculous, eg. men and women are the same, or that people from different cultures are all interchangeable. I just don't believe many things any more, and transgenderism let the sunlight in so I could have a good clear out.