Not only should we be critical of how Israel wages this war, but we should also recognize the role of Hamas. Deliberate killing of non-combatants, civilian abductions, unguided rocket and mortar fire, use of human shields, perfidy and disguise, all war crimes and crimes against humanity.
Most of us here in the US don't have to worry about threats of terrorism like this. It doesn't excuse Israel's (many) war crimes but often we don't acknowledge the horror of Hamas on Israel and Palestinians when talking about this conflict.
But the West does acknowledge it, almost exclusively. Any criticism of Israel's war crimes are followed by "But do you agree that Israel has a right to exist?" and "Do you condemn Hamas and the attack they conducted in Oct 7"? Mainstream media only shows Hamas actions, and only recently started highlighting Israel's war crimes due to increased souring of their reputation among audiences. Hamas actions also shouldn't be taken in isolation, the atrocities of October 7 didn't happen in a vacuum, but as a reaction to a conflict that has been happening for almost 80 years that is overwhelmingly one sided.
> But do you agree that Israel has a right to exist?
I've started to think this worry about a particular nation's right to exist is really a great rhetorical trick: nobody is particularly upset the nation of east Germany ceased to exist, and you don't hear Erdogan opposing Kurdish independence with "Doesn't the Turkie have a right to exist?"
There is a basic human right of self determination, but if you think what follows is that you should get your own nation then look at how the soviet policies of providing exactly that worked out. They even created a the Jewish Autonomous Oblast in the far east!
Pin-pointing Hamas and Oct 7 is pretty much a logical trap, because Netanyahu and Hamas had been symbiotic -- which put them in the very same ballpark. Both enjoyed their own external threats, and, through that, established strong political influence.
The one difference is that Israel always had been able to control the situation for decades to its liking, while Hamas had been passively reaping the hatred that Israel had sown -- only until October 7.
So, Israelis fearing Hamas? That's a horror they created through their democracy, purely by abusing powerless people. Total hypocrisy.
Netanyahu literally created them because their alternative was getting too peaceful and if Gaza was peaceful they wouldn't have a justification to keep destroying it. This is well-known info.
What's the actual, concrete, material, actual reality that actually exists?
Is Hamas killing every Jewish person or is the Likud party of Israel actually killing the residents of Palestine?
Let's look at the actual material reality.
For instance, Israel intentionally destroyed all the farms and ruined the fields to grow crops. They have a naval blockade that stops them from fishing so you can't get food there either. They've cut off all external water supplies, blocked food aid from coming in and have openly said they are trying to starve the population to death. Actual, concrete, material reality, available on any news website, with interviews, videos, satellite photos, extremely well documented.
Amnesty International, Doctors without borders, Human Rights Watch, the IPC, the UN, all have been unequivocal in their condemnation of this. Even Haaretz and other Israeli newspapers have been critical of it.
There's two possibilities here: Either every international organization, news source, academic journal, independent third party, satellite, photographer,and videographer is controlled by a powerful invisible puppetmaster or reality is reality.
I know stuff like this is unwelcome but someone's gotta stand up for reality.
Israel is doing colonial violence to steal land and do ethnic cleansing. Hamas is doing anti-colonial violence to free themselves from people oppressing them.
You could argue that Israel is doing this because Hamas is so bad, but then you look at what Israel is doing in the other part of palestine not controlled by Hamas? Daily pogroms and violent ethnic oppression of all kinds.
The problem is that Israel is based on ethnic supremacy. The way the victims (the palestinians) react is not relevant.
It should be noted that Hamas exists because of the occupation and atrocities that Israel has been committing for decades and decades. All war is atrocious, the actions of terrorists are disgusting, BUT you cannot discuss the actions of Hamas in a vacuum and forget why they even formed in the first place and continue to carry out their actions.
It seems like a reasonable take. But when we look at any oppressed group, getting murdered at the hands of their oppressors, there often is no negotiation through peaceful means.
History shows us that the threat of violence or violence becomes a necessary point of leverage to bring about change.
American schools have washed the story of the civil rights movement, but MLK only had success because of Malcolm X.
There’s many other historical instances of this. Whether it’s the Indian Independence movement in the 1940s fighting from British rule, the 1500s-1800s of native Americans resisting our ancestors colonialization, our own American revolution, and even labor movements like the battle of Blair mountain in the 1920s.
We like to propagandize American history where non-violence was productive, but violence has always been an unfortunately necessary tool when it comes to changing oppression.
It's a thought that is intuitive and intellectually satisfying but you produce no evidence for your claims.
Blair Mountain was a total defeat for the miners. Union organizing in West Virginia collapsed afterward and only recovered with New Deal labor law in the 30s
For native Americans, well, do you really want to discuss the results ?
For India you could argue that it's not non-violence but the fact the empire was exhausted militarily that worked. But it's hard to make the case that violent uprisings, who were either suppressed or contained well enough, had an effect. If anything the popularity of the insurgents may have done more that the actual violence but you can get that kind of popularity with non-violence too.
The only time when insurgency is working is when you are able to hide, endure and survive until your enemy is down for other reasons. It can be quite long. Think Mao. Was it the case for India ? Maybe but it's not obvious at all
I actually agree about Malcolm X... except it didn't actually use violence. Only violent rethoric and advocating self-defense. Annnnnd biggest wins like the Civil Rights Act (1964) and Voting Rights Act (August 6, 1965) passed before the Watts riot (August 11, 1965) and the wave of urban uprisings that followed
Also, who exactly "loses justification": just the individual perpetrators or their whole collective? I hope you wouldn't say that every black slave lost their right for freedom after Nat Turner's gang killed civilians? [0]
if you mean that all war is unjustified, consider stating that plainly. if that's not what you mean, then perhaps there is some nuance left out of your statement.
> f you mean that all war is unjustified, consider stating that plainly
Most war is unjustified. Violent resistance is almost never unjustified if one lacks access to elections.
But violent resistance that targets civilians robs itself and its cause of justice until that rot is removed and regretted. It's not only morally wrong. It's strategically stupid. Terrorist tactics do not work–they radicalize the enemy and unfavorably polarize the alliance space.
Remember the videos Ukraine circulated of sharing tea with Russian POWs? Imagine if Hamas had only targeted military outposts and then shared images like that one from its bunkers under Gaza City?
A cause can be fundamentally justified but still piss away its advantages with poor strategy. At the end of the day, Hamas has acted in Iran's interests. Not the Palestinians'. (Same with Hezbollah. Same with the Houthis, though to a marginally lesser degree.)
> What if your ability to accurately target has been destroyed?
Prioritize a cease fire. If you can’t target you probably can’t run much of a modern economy either. Which raises the question of what you’re actually fighting for.
Preventing the systematic extermination of your entire ethnic group? Read your own comment back to yourself and imagine it's about the Jews in Germany.
> Preventing the systematic extermination of your entire ethnic group
But it doesn’t. It hardens resolve on the other side that you are actually monsters. It’s the same reason “strategic” air bombing campaigns like the London Blitz, designed to wear down a population, systematically fail.
> Read your own comment back to yourself and imagine it's about the Jews in Germany
German Jews weren’t systematically targeting German civilians in attacks. If they had been, it would have probably backfired. (They didn’t have a military to “strike” the Nazis in any conventional sense. The Poles in Warsaw did. Guess what they, too, didn’t do.)
I’m not saying I don’t understand the impulse. If I were occupied and facing extinction, I’d probably lash out. What I’m saying is I hope I’d stop and realize, not necessarily that it’s wrong and mis-targeted, but that it’s ineffective and likely counterproductive.
Aim at military targets. People can tell when you’re trying and missing versus conducting a terror campaign. And degrading the adversary’s military will save more of your lives than pissing off its civilians.
> There is no evidence that if Hamas stops attacking Israel, Israel would stop attacking Hamas
I never said to stop attacking. I said not to target civilians.
Forward looking, for Hamas to credibly swear off civilian violence, it would have to hold its leaders who ordered those attacks who remain accountable. I don’t see that. I do, however, see such an action pretty aggressively shifting attitudes in Europe and Asia, potentially also America, potentially even in Israel given they’re in an election where Netanyahu is on the back foot.
> Israel deposed the PLO and put Hamas in power instead
This was a concerted effort between Israel, America and Iran. (Hamas is pretty decently modeled as an Iranian occupying force. This analogy extends to Hezbollah.)
And yet we can and we should still make distinctions when we talk about those subjects
Estimates for the death toll of US and British strategic bombing, for instance, range from 300,000 to 600,000 in Europe and around 330,000 in Japan (including the atomic bombings)
Now compare that with 12–17 million civilians killed deliberately by Nazi Germany and the around 6 millions killed deliberately by imperial Japan
I'd like to point out though that Israel are unique in the sense that every single authoritative body on the subject have declared that Israel is committing genocide, Hamas for all their drama, is not.
It's not a war. It's US/Israeli propaganda to call it as such. Wars occurs between state actors. This is wholesale slaughter of people on land you claim that you've deliberately put in an open air prison and starved.
The level of violence is set by the occupier. Would there be pearl-clutching about the Warsaw Uprising, John Brown or Nat Turner? What about resistance to British occupation of Ireland (or India or any number of other British colonial projects)? The ANC in South Africa was incredibly violent in its resistance to apartheid. Resistance movements in occupied Europe were also incredibly violent (eg killing collaborators).
What you seem to have fallen for is tone policing a 78 year long resistance. A lot of people (generally, not you specifically) have this belief that things began on Oct 7. You will get questions of "why can't they resist peacefully?" Well, they have. Multiple times. Most recently with the March of Return several years earlier. Many don't know about it because it was barely reported on. What happened? For the "crime" of standing within a few hundred yards of the fence, the IOF used protestors as target practice. 500+ dead, 8000+ wounded. "Wounded" here is doing a lot of heavy lifting too because it included deliberately and permanently maiming people by blowing their legs off deliberately [1].
"Terrorism" is a political designation. And the US doesn't face such threats? Really? The police kill over 1000 people every single year. Mass shootings? Why isn't that seen as terrorism? Or the violence committed by ICE against random US citizens or detainees?
I'll leave you with this quote from JFK [2]:
Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable
In every such post you have people both-sidesing. Killing almost 100k people is not equivalent to whatever Hamas has done. Hamas bad, Israel worse. It's not very difficult.
Hamas has every right to resist. Unguided rockets? There's IDF in nearly every building in Israel. The excuses used to genocide Palestinians far more aptly describe Israel.
A new Haaretz investigstion found that on October 7 Hamas offered to release the hostages. Israel said no. That's because Israel needs the hostages to be hostages as a casus belli.
The main difference here is that Russia is not funded by western nations nor is it an ally to most of NATO countries. The gripe many of us have with Israel's actions is that we enable them directly by providing money, weapons and manpower. No nation in the west will hesitate to condemn Russia's war crimes, whereas just recently we started seeing some manner of blowback to Israel's.
But considerably less than before the war and the EU are making efforts to decouple themselves, it's just not a switch that could be turned off, certainly not in the same way that support for Israel could be or could have been in the past decades.
I support Ukraine with all my heart (and a little money) but whatabouting will get you nothing. This is a thread about the hamas-israeli war. There's no reason to change the subject and it doesn't take away ability to talk about Ukraine elsewhere.
Actually some people have mentioned the invasion and occupation of Ukraine in this comment section to draw parallels or make distinctions
ukranians massacred civilians in Izyum, Kupyanzk, Kursk, just to name a few, for not wanting to side with them. They arbitrarily kill people (elderly, women, children) who want to escape to the Russian side (or if they just want to exclude this possibility). These are facts (source: telegram channels, which, confronted with your "free journalism", are a more reliable source of information).
This is the war, which were not you around, would never happen.
> You forgot the extensive tunnel infrastructure dug under all these civilian areas. The fighting in civilian clothing. Weapon caches and tunnel entrances in civilian buildings. Booby trapping civilian structures to kill soldiers that attempt to search/enter them. Mining roads in civilian areas to inflict damage on invading forces.
Sounds a lot like how the colonists fought much of the revolutionary war here in America where I am from.
But that aside, how "honorably" would you fight back if your homeland were occupied and turned into an apartheid state and you were treated as a second-class citizen effectively living in an open air prison while armed settlers came in and claimed many of your neighbor's homes, possibly killing them in the process?
The IDF could have engaged in actual urban warfare, going house-to-house. ISIS does all those things far more than Hamas does, but Mosul is in far better shape than Rafah!
The allies bombed the heck out of Mosul and killed a lot more civilians than the IDF killed in Rafah. Those battles are very comparable in terms of number of combatants and number of civilians. Israel did much better.
Hamas was more prepared than ISIS. Better equipped. More tunnels. And the population density in Rafah was higher.
Also the British, Canadian, Australians, Americans, etc. did not send any of their soldiers to go house to house. They sent the poor Iraqis. After demolishing the place, killing a ton of civilians in the process.
Easy for you to say that Israel should have sent its soldiers to be ambushed house to house, blown up by booby traps in houses (which happened a lot despite the tactics), blown up on the streets by mines etc. I mean that's how Hamas wanted it to play out and obviously not the way Israel was going to do it.
> Those battles are very comparable in terms of number of combatants and number of civilians. Israel did much better.
Exactly incorrect. The Battle of Mosul is very comparable to the war on Gaza, but the IDF has done much worse in terms of civilian harm. US and allied forces killed significantly more combatants than they did civilians in Mosul; in contrast, the IDF has killed over 4 times as many civilians than combatants in Gaza. The IDF directly killed more children in Gaza than any other armed group in any other armed conflict in the 21st century—and the same for absolute number of adult women killed, as well as proportion of children among those killed.
Don't forget Israel gov 100% knew Hamas was going to attack on October 7th, and intentionally allowed it to happen because of the public outcry it would generate. The more hostages and the worse it was, the better the propoganda. They'll take the West Bank. They're taking Lebanese land too.
They knew the attack was going to happen and allowed the music festival to go on a day longer, one might guess they were frothing at the mouth at how good that propoganda was going to be.
Take a read of the book title The Palestine Laboratory - How Israel Exports the Technology of Occupation Around the World - and you'll even learn that Israel has a long long history of murder around the world, aint none of this new.
One side won the propoganda war, and it wasn't the dirt poor Palestinains.
Got that in more conspiracy? If you have evidence then a lot of Israelis would want to see that. Hopefully after the elections there will be more fact finding.
More conspiracy? Why does it take conspiracy level thinking to believe that the IDF missed plans for the attack when the head of security of Egypt personally flew to Israel to tell them about the attack?
How do you miss that exactly? You don't, you miss it intentionally.
IDF showed a few weapons "found" in al shifa is pretty much all they managed to show, and by found I mean obviously planted after being seen carrying them into the hospital in brown boxes.
Hey guess what, Hamas are terrorists, I can easily say that. I can also say that Israel isn't behaving any better while supposedly is the only democratic country in the middle east with the most moral army in the world. And really never since this conflict started because the goal of Zionism was always to take over more and more of the are and create an ethno state. Even the nakba was done because the ethnic composition of the would be Israeli state was not congruous with their democratic ideals so they needed people gone.
Because the alternative was seen as too corrupt. Which is kinda hilarious considering how Hamas then stopped elections and stole food that was shipped in by the UN to sell back to the population.
Most of us here in the US don't have to worry about threats of terrorism like this. It doesn't excuse Israel's (many) war crimes but often we don't acknowledge the horror of Hamas on Israel and Palestinians when talking about this conflict.