I wish it were that easy, but it's not - one of my best friends from high school is an Israeli-American, and if you asked him to pick a side, it would be anti-Hamas/anti-Iran. It doesn't mean he hates Palestinians, nor does it mean he supports Netanyahu or the Israeli government (he doesn't support either). He's got a bias that he could be excused - his son was called up to active duty after last October, and he had friends/family who were caught up in the shit that went down , but his anger is reserved for the people who did what they did. He's my goto 'weather rock' for what's happening there, since his dad's company, and now his company, has dealings out of Houston and Israeli and had employed Palestinians for decades. He has a much more restrained outlook on things that many Americans that I know, because he has to live with what actually happens. It's similar to family from Oklahoma or Arkansas trying to tell me about border issues. They've never visited the border or have friends/family down there, so when they try to paint everything as black and white, I have to push back and say it's a lot more gray than they'd like it be.
I honestly didn't give a shit about any protests this week, given how many hundreds/thousands of protests that have happened since I first set foot in Austin back in the 90s (the anti-abortion ones were the worst IMO), and I felt like it was just another such protest that will never been seen or heard outside of Austin. The woman who caught the 30-pound koi out of Town Lake this week was far more interesting to me.
But seeing how it was handled and what went down, I do give a bit of a shit. These people could have been protesting for the right to kill baby owls and I'd be down there hanging with them tomorrow if I was able to. I'm used to Texas looking like it does as far as the rest of the nation goes, but I can at least pretend UT was staying above the fray as much as possible, at least until yesterday's shit gets blasted across the nation. Now I've had multiple relatives chiming in on Facebook asking if I'm worried about terrorists, and what's happening in Austin, etc., and yet they aren't interested in seeing videos that contradict what they believe.