Not Your Metaphor

The cost of seeing the world through only American eyes

There is something to be said carefully, because it is easy to get wrong and easier to be misunderstood.

The conflict between Israelis and Palestinians is not a chapter in the story of American race. It is not a parable about white and black, or a metaphor for colonialism, or segregation, or apartheid, or any of the other frameworks Americans reach for when they encounter suffering they want to make legible. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is its own thing with its own history and languages. When we flatten it into someone else’s story, we don’t illuminate it but just erase it.

I’m not saying that race doesn’t matter, or that the American conversation about racial justice is unimportant. The legacy of slavery, segregation, and systemic racism in the United States is obviously real and ongoing. This is not a piece that intends to dismiss any of that. This is a piece about what happens when a lens built for one context gets carried into another where it doesn’t belong.

You can see this lens at work everywhere now. In the classroom, where the Middle East conflict is taught as a case study in “settler colonialism.” On social media, where infographics sort Israelis and Palestinians into oppressor and oppressed. In the protest chants that frame Zionism as white supremacy, as though half of Israel’s Jewish population didn’t arrive as refugees from Iraq, Yemen, Morocco, and Iran. In the op-eds and the podcasts and the bestselling books, where American writers parachute into a conflict older than their country, spend a few days on the ground, and return with a story that slots neatly into the narrative their audience already knows.

At best, this represents a generational failure of education. A cohort of Americans has been taught to believe a framing that is historically inaccurate and determined to flatten an issue deserving of sophistication in order to fit an American framework and narrative. They have been handed a template and told it explains, well, everything.

At worst, it is something more deliberate. An attempt to construct a clear villain, and to draw that villain along racial lines. In this framing, those who are “white” are part of the evil, and Jews, regardless of their actual origins or history, get assigned to that category. Israelis become stand-ins for a white power structure they have never belonged to. Mizrahi Jews, who make up the majority of Israel’s population, are simply erased from the story because their existence complicates the plot.

The damage this does is not only to Israelis and Palestinians, who deserve to have their conflict understood on its own terms. The damage is also to Americans.

It makes us worse global citizens. A country that can’t understand foreign conflicts except through the mirror of its own history is a country that will misread the world over and over. We will back the wrong actors, miss the real dynamics, and be surprised when our interventions fail.

It makes us worse proponents of our own foreign policy. If the only framework we have for international disputes is the one we use for domestic civil rights, we will be incapable of making the distinctions that serious, real diplomacy requires. Not every asymmetry is oppression. Not every border is apartheid. Not every use of force is genocide.

And perhaps most painfully, it cheapens the history we claim to be honoring. The legacy of American racism is profound and ongoing. It deserves to be confronted with precision, not exported as a master key that unlocks every door. When we use slavery and segregation as loose metaphors for conflicts that have nothing to do with them, we dilute those struggles. We tell the world, and ourselves, that these words can mean anything, which is another way of saying they mean nothing.

The job of a serious person engaging with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is not to import clarity from somewhere else. It is to sit with the discomfort of a situation that resists easy categories. Two national movements with deep roots in the same land, tangled up in religion and memory and trauma, can’t be understood as a civil rights struggle. It’s a conflict between two peoples whose beliefs come from another framework entirely. That is harder to talk about than oppressor and oppressed, because it doesn’t offer a clean villain. But it is way closer to the truth.

The moment you decide you already have the framework, you are no longer listening. And no one in this conflict, on either side, needs more people who have stopped listening.