the reason it is necessary to educate yourself on colonialism and specifically on settler colonialism is that it is very easy to be stupid and think about asymmetric power as bad strategic decisions in a war, like the average blue-check replying "FAFO" under every palestinian death toll. there is some kind of comfort in believing that a colonial power can be out-strategized or appealed to and that palestinians somehow have been making the same strategic mistakes for 75 years which is why they're being genocided (this is what stupid people believe and evil people are trying very desperately to get stupid people to believe)
but once you understand it is a colonial struggle and not a war, patterns begin to emerge. no colonized people "lost" a war because no colonized people have ever asked for a war nor have they engaged in one. colonialism imposes war upon indigenous people. colonizers come to you in your home, where you are a civilian, and force a fighter out of you. every civilian is now engaged in an existential struggle simply due to the bad luck of existing in a home coveted by colonizers.
many complexities have been manufactured to disguise this simple truth. but across the world—in canada, in algeria, in south africa, in the united states, in australia, in lebanon, in the philippines, in hawaii, in puerto rico, in argentina, in sudan, in india, in every region that has experienced colonialism (and that is almost every region in the world) this remains the base truth of it. and it is also instinctively why everyone recoils at the images of idf soldiers gleefully dancing on the ruins of gaza. it doesn't look like victory in war, does it? there's no honor nor achievement in it. the more they kill, the ease with which they do it, more obvious it is. it looks like what it is.
