You have a nice opening with the bit about the girl who can’t choose sandwiches but believes everything her roommate tells her about Palestine. You might want to base a screenplay on it. But the rest of the article, although well written as always, does not live up to the promise of its title.
Firstly, You clearly do choose sides when you state that the idiot herds are running left. There are an equal number of idiots running right on this issue. Yes, you do bang on it some length about how complicated the question is, and that’s why you haven’t chosen sides. But when you call only one side of the controversy idiotic, most people are going to interpret the article as a defense of the anti-Palestinian side. Take a look at the comments you received, and that is what you will see. The fact that you took an off topic swipe at Islamic intolerance of LGBTQ+ rights made that interpretation even more plausible.
Secondly, your young friend, charming though she may be, is not a good representative sample of a pro-Palestinian lefty. There are plenty of them here in Berkeley, and I know the type quite well. Most of them, probably including your friends roommate, have spent hundreds of hours reading and watching documentaries on the topic, and will talk forever on it if you give them the chance. Many of them are Jewish, and used to be Zionist, and flipped only after tremendous emotional resistance. Unfortunately, once they do flip they become addicted to an informal fallacy called cherry picking. This fallacy is a byproduct of what you psychologists call confirmation bias, and it does not result from making the decision too quickly. it comes from being wired up to interpret the facts the same way no matter how much time you spend thinking about them.
Cherry picking is an informal fallacy, so it’s difficult to decisively diagnose. All arguments require selecting some facts and ignoring others, and judgments as to whether this is done fairly are themselves usually shaped by confirmation bias. But when arguments on both sides of a controversy are shaped by cherry picking, it usually leads to a formal fallacy called Tu quoque. Formal fallacies can be seen as fallacious by analyzing their logical structure, so they are usually easier to nail down. The logical structure of most arguments over the Israeli/Palestinian question looks like this:
The Israelis did horrible thing X
But the Palestinians did horrible thing Y
But the Israelis did horrible thing Z
But the Palestinians did horrible thing A
etc. etc.
Most of the time, all of these statements are true, but that doesn’t mean that they contradict each other. You can only refute P by proving negative P. You can’t refute it by proving Q, so this argument goes on forever, with no possibility of resolving.
Sadly, I think this is probably as good as arguments about Israel and Palestine are ever going to get. As you correctly point out, this whole situation is a massive clusterfuck, and I have given up on trying to keep track of which side is behaving worse on any given week. However, both sides are equally guilty of cherry picking and tu quoque arguing. Both sides have people like your friend, who rush to judgment with too little deliberation, and your friend’s roommate, whose extensive deliberations are poisoned by confirmation bias.
Because so many of your friends are lefties, it’s tempting to spend most of your time whacking the woke. But I would advise you to be more ecumenical in your whacking. Otherwise you might wake up one morning to discover you have been offered a post at Fox news, which could lead to you dying of a swollen bank account and an atrophied brain.
