We should not take sides and remain neutral.

The two sides frame assumes a symmetry that does not exist. The reality is about a coloniser and the people it colonises, a nuclear-armed state backed by the world's most powerful militaries against a population it holds under occupation and siege. One party controls the land, water, borders, airspace, electricity, and the movement of every person under its rule. The other lives under that control. Presenting this as two sides of equal weight does not describe the reality. It disguises it, lending the appearance of balance to a structure built on domination.

Asking people for neutrality and balance in a case of systemic injustice is choosing the side of injustice. When an occupying power dispossesses a people and that people resists, treating both as equally responsible excuses the party that created the situation and punishes the one subjected to it. Refusing to name oppression does not sit above the struggle; it sides with the oppressor. Demanding that Palestinians accept half the blame for their own colonisation launders domination into a dispute.

The standard is never applied to any other colonial context. No one asks us to weigh both sides of Belgium's occupation of the Congo, or the French colonisation of Algeria, or the settler conquest of the Americas. In each case the coloniser is named, the crime is named, and a demand for balance would be recognised at once as an apology for atrocity. Palestine alone is made the exception. The same crimes recognized and condemned without hesitation everywhere else is reframed as a two-sided dispute the moment the coloniser is Israel. The ones condemning them are accused as biased, or worse, antisemitic.

The demand to see both sides is only ever placed on Palestinians. They are required to condemn, to qualify, to preface every statement about their own dispossession while acknowledging their coloniser's fears and feelings.