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I see it in my family. My dad is not an idiot, but we have a lot of disagreements about politics recently, and the main difference between him and me is his underlying faith in the system. He believes that the system we live under is fair and just, the people in charge are competent and acting in good faith, and if bad actors enter the picture (orange man) the system will correct itself.

He can believe this because the system greatly favors him, a well-educated, wealthy white family man in the European suburbs. We have clashed a few times in the past few days over the Gaza conflict, and while he's usually a debate lord who will argue until the heat death of the universe, this was the first time he told me to "just drop it", to just stop talking about it. He didn't wanna hear it.

Yesterday the topic was brought up again, I specifically talked about how shockingly one-sided our newspaper coverage was, how in 4 entire pages dedicated to the conflict, there was not a single mention of the Palestinian death toll. I talked about how Israel bombed the evacuation routes, how their defense minister referred to Palestinians as "animals". And my dad's reaction was different. Before, whenever I talked about how our newspapers were indeed doing propaganda when everything was about Ukraine, he basically scoffed at me as if I was some conspiracy crank. But yesterday, he admitted that the coverage was biased. He couldn't deny it anymore. He was still justifying it (We're German, so apparently we owe some debt to Israel), but his conviction was noticeably shaky.

I often compare my family to the Park family from Parasite, blind to systemic injustice around them, taking the luxury of civility for granted, complete faith in a system that has always favored them. They don't want to know when the system is lying to them, they want to believe that what the newspaper says is fair and true, because if it isn't, it would mean that their life of luxury might not be fair either. They want the news to protect them from their own empathy, but they can only deny reality for so long when confronted with it because they're normal people, not monsters.

Israel is going too far for the propaganda apparatus. We are empathetic beings at our core, we cannot stand to see others suffer and the pictures, videos and stories from Gaza are too visceral for even the most detached, brunch-loving liberals to ignore. This isn't Russia vs Ukraine, where a foreign superpower is invading another nation and the nuance lies in complex geopolitics, this is one of the most advanced military forces in the world bombing hospitals in a region deprived of food, water and medicine. The system is overplaying their hand by standing with Israel, and while this won't turn my parents into communists, they are coming closer to accepting that their beloved system is in the wrong here, that the system lied to them, and I will remind them of this in the future.