The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is a complicated issue.

What is so "complicated" about a nuclear-armed settler-colonial state backed by the world's most powerful states imposing occupation, siege, ethnic cleansing, apartheid, and genocide on an entire people for over eight decades? It does not take a PhD to recognize oppression for what it is.

The idea that Palestine is "too complicated" rests on the false premise that this is a "conflict" between equal sides. In reality, one side is a settler-colonial state imposing genocide and apartheid, while the other is an occupied and colonized people resisting domination. This framing obscures the root causes of oppression, erases the vast imbalance of power, and normalizes colonial domination.

Claiming the issue is "too complicated" dehumanizes Palestinian survivors, journalists, advocates, artists, scholars, and civil society organizations, who for decades have paid a heavy price for documenting, exposing, and advocating against Israeli oppression, facing assassinations, imprisonment, torture, deportation, criminalization, and smear campaigns. To dismiss Palestine as "too complicated" is to dismiss the people who have spent generations resisting Israeli colonial domination.

The claim that Palestine is "too complicated" also collapses in the face of decades of international findings documenting Israel's systematic crimes and violations of international law. Israel faces International Criminal Court arrest warrants and investigations for war crimes and crimes against humanity, genocide proceedings before the International Court of Justice, more than 1,000 UN resolutions documenting systemic violations of international law, and condemnation by its own human rights organizations for apartheid, genocide, and other crimes. What, exactly, is so complicated about this?

That Palestine is still described as "too complicated" after Palestinians have endured a live-streamed genocide is extraordinary. The world watched six-year-old Hind Rajab trapped in a car surrounded by her murdered relatives as she pleaded for rescue before being shot with over 300 times. It watched displaced families burned alive in tents, patients and medical workers buried in mass graves at hospitals, starving Palestinians shot while seeking food, entire families erased from the civil registry, and prisoners tortured and raped. To still claim Palestine is "too complicated" reveals the extent to which Palestinian lives have been dehumanized.

Calling injustice "complicated" has long been used by colonial regimes to normalize oppression and discourage action. Defenders of apartheid in South Africa described it as complex, while defenders of slavery claimed abolition would destabilize the economy. Palestinians are similarly told that their freedom is unrealistic because the issue is supposedly "too complicated." These narratives aim to make colonial domination appear acceptable, permanent, and impossible to change, while breaking oppressed peoples' will to resist.

The claim that Palestine is "too complicated" is also a deliberate political tactic used by Israel and its allies to deflect responsibility and obscure complicity. Powerful states have armed, funded, and diplomatically protected Israel for decades. Framing the issue as endlessly "complicated" allows them to avoid accountability for enabling and profiting from Israel's violations of international law, military occupation, apartheid, and the first live-streamed genocide in modern history. The issue has never been a lack of clarity; it has been a lack of political will.