> I do not pretend to have or be able to gain any knowledge that could help this thousand year conflict
Why do you think this is a "thousand years conflict"? It started in 1917 when the British government initiated the process of handing over Palestine to jews in return for Lord Rothschild's money that they needed to keep fighting WW1 [1]. Jewish population of Palestine at that time was only around 7%.
Subsequent immigration of mostly European jews into Palestine, resulted in about 30% jewish population by the time Western powers decided to declare an independent Jewish-dominated state of Israel on top of Palestine in 1947. How could it be jewish-dominated when they were a minority? Well, you just forcefully displace everyone who isn't a part of your group, of course. Oh, they refuse? Massacre a few villages [2] [3] and then most remaining people will flee on their own. Sure, sure, you allow a small number to stay within the borders of the new country that you now claim, so that they can consistute about 20% of your population and you get to claim that you aren't a nationalist supremacist nation.
There is nothing "thousand years old" about this 20th century European white supremacist colonial settlement project.
> Would you agree that "Palestinians should suffer for what Hamas did" is a decent summary of the view you describe
I'm not the person you are responding to, but sheesh that is an unsympathetic reading of their comment. I do not know if the person you replied to does or does not believe that, but nothing in their comment would imply that.
> I do not pretend to have or be able to gain any knowledge that could help this thousand year conflict.
Well first step would be listening to what people say instead of adding your own interpretations.
Yeah, I realize that was dangerously close to ragebait territory, sorry about that.
It's just that I saw it as an opportunity to glimpse into the reasoning made and I couldn't find myself with a charitable interpretation that didn't include something very similar to that statement, so why not pop it out there to find out more what the person disagrees with?
Feel free to ignore the question, it probably won't change anyone's view anyway.
I don't know why people find the reasoning so shocking. It plays out the same in pretty much every country. Look at US during 9/11 or world war 2.
Some sort of attack happens, people get scared (often legitamently), they support measures they think will get their security back. Sometimes those measures are reasonable, sometimes they are more wtf, more often they are somewhere in between.
As the saying goes: hurt people hurt people.
That's not to say they are neccesarily illogical. There are real threats out there and sometimes the options to defend one self are limitted to unsaoury things. Most people if given the choice between shooting someone or being shot themselves, chose to shoot the other person.
No matter where you live, you have probably seen people react this way, even if just on a very small scale.
Under 7% of Palestinians in Gaza (before losing 1-3% of their population in this genocide) voted for Hamas. The rest either didn't vote for them, or are too young to have voted.
Should the US be nuked because ~51% voted for Trump (or Bush, Obama, Clinton, pick the one you hate)?
"Should"? I don't think that was a "should" statement. I think it was a cause and effect statement. Bad people in power leads to suffering in the population. This observation goes way back, at least as far as the book of Ecclesiastes: "Woe to you, O land, when your king is a child, and your princes feast in the morning!"
Will the US suffer for putting bad people in power? Almost certainly, even if it doesn't come to the level of being nuked.
> Should the US be nuked because ~51% voted for Trump (or Bush, Obama, Clinton, pick the one you hate)?
During a declared wartime? It happens. I mean, what can you do? It's war!
The allies didn't care that there were non-nazis when they carpet-bombed Dresden, nor did the US care that Hiroshima and Nagasaki possibly had large numbers of people against the Japanese rulers.
So, yeah, should the US enter a hot war against a sovereign government that can strike back, that government will not care that only 51% of the population voted for the current US government.
That's how war works, and that's why no one (short of actually insane blood-thirsty killers who are in it only to see corpses) wants to escalate a cold war to a hot war. If a population collectively elects leaders who provoke an escalation into a hot war, they can't very well be surprised at the response.
OTOH, the US voting population has not had first-hand experience with a hot boots-on-the-ground-invasion war, hence they can be so cavalier about their choice of rulers. They haven't seen first-hand the result of engaging in war.
The Palestinians and Israelis, however, have plenty of first-hand experience of the horrors of war, so those bastards have no excuse for supporting pro-war leaders.
