Look, I understand the “ride or die” concept. There are people who have my back or whose back I watch over who qualify as ride-or-die—either the way they feel toward me, me toward them, or both.
But like so many sentiments and philosophies, when it’s taken to a certain point, it loses positive meaning and becomes toxic and destructive. If you’re “ride or die” with your buddy and during a road trip they decide to drag you along for an interstate robbery spree, are you going to keep riding all the way to prison or death? If so, what does that say about you?
Sure, I’d do almost anything to protect my children from harm, but if they were pursuing actively vile endeavors that harmed others in horrid ways and I continued to protect them, I would no longer be protecting them. I would be aiding and abetting them.
And that’s the thing about “ride or die” relationships. At a certain point, if you don’t stop supporting that friend or family member or partner or—better yet—get them to pull back from their dangerous path, you are enabling them. That’s not healthy.
And yet that’s exactly where the United States stands now as we wait to see how Israel responds to a massive drone and missile strike—ultimately with little effect—by Iran. Now, let’s be clear: Iran didn’t attack Israel out of the blue. On April 1, an Israeli airstrike against an Iranian consulate building in Syria killed 16 people, including some civilians. It’s not entirely clear why, though there may have been a meeting there between Iran or Syria and people connected with Hamas—and of course Israel has been absolutely destroying Gaza and harming/killing Palestinian civilians there since the recent terrorist attack on Israel by Hamas.
But here’s the thing: You don’t attack embassies, even if you want to claim they aren’t really embassies. You need to tread carefully when you bomb nearby or neighboring countries just to keep them in line or remind them you aren’t friends. And Iran, to its credit, waited almost two weeks before it retaliated, so it might have actually done some homework before deciding for sure Israel was responsible, since the Israeli government didn’t readily take credit for the attack.
Or at least you shouldn’t attack embassies, But neither should the Israeli government be imposing famine conditions in Gaza or destroying schools and hospitals. I don’t want to get into a big discussion of whether Israel should or should not exist as a nation, but when you recreate a nation post-World War 2 after it’s been gone for numerous centuries and displace and disenfranchise the people already living there to do so, you have to expect problems.
And Israel has dealt with those problems in a variety of ways, not all of them good or proper. Sure, the same can be said of the United States in so many parts of the world. Nations doing nasty things is nothing new. My point is that with the current situation in Gaza, the Israeli government has crossed a line into territory that is, frankly, overtly villainous. It simply is. Those being punished are not those who carried out the Hamas attack. A whole people are being punished. And all the while, the United States has continued to support Israel and fund it so that it can remain heavily weaponized and heavily defended. The U.S. government has chosen to ride or die, at a time when it probably should be pulling Israel aside to convince it to take a less violent and cruel course.
But we haven’t tried to rein Israel in. We’ve co-signed the abuse and slaughter of Palestinians. We have clearly chosen sides and it seems we are pledging to stand by Israel if it sparks a regional war by responding to Iran’s counterattack for the consulate airstrike.
Do we really want to encourage Israel to do more damage to whatever peace exists in the region? Do we really want to be pulled into yet another Middle East war after decades of previous involvement in war in the region?
Sadly, if Israel does escalate, we will probably follow them right into the fire. The United States distrusts and/or dislikes almost every Arab nation as a matter of policy. And neither the Democrats nor the Republicans will likely risk relations with Jewish supporters. In the end, the Arab people, especially Muslim ones—whether abroad or in the United States—have been seen as expendable. So, we stand on the brink of possible war, and if so, likely a horrific one.
All because we decided to go for ride or die instead of something more constructively supportive all these decades.
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Image by Amin Noveyrian via Unsplash
