I’m betting that Hamas sees it more like: “Israel killed a lot of Palestinian children first, therefore it’s payback.”
Don’t get me wrong, child-killing is wrong regardless of who does it. But the way you phrased your argument makes it sound as if Israel has killed no kids and Hamas is the only one doing kid-killing.
(And yes, I know, Israel has not purposefully targeted kids - they’re collateral damage in IDF strikes - while Hamas did purposefully do so - but telling that to a grieving Palestinian parent whose kid died may not seem that fine a distinction.)
And that’s something many of us have pointed out before and criticized, including in threads about the current conflict, without resorting to equivocating between Hamas and Israel, as Hamas’ good friends abroad like to do.
No. No no no no no. “Israel” hasn’t killed any kids. Soldiers working for Israel have killed kids.
If Hamas were solely targeting members of the IDF or of the Israeli government, I might accept the argument that it’s payback. But they are targeting children who did nothing.
Children who live in Israel aren’t legitimate targets for payback. I can’t believe this has to be said.
Hamas fighters (not Palestine, not Gaza) kill a bunch of Israelis, many of military age, who were at least off-duty and not killing Palestinians right at that moment. They get some foreigners & children too. They take hostages.
The Likud government (not “the Jews,” not Israel) takes this as an excuse. Under their direction, IDF bombs entire city blocks to rubble in Gaza, a ghetto controlled by the Israeli government; bombs houses that supposedly weren’t targets, murders families from the air like the cowards they are.
The white supremacist West: “Israel is clearly the (only) victim here.”
And here you can clearly see why Hamas has support in the West. All it takes is a little creative framing, and suddenly Israel are evil white colonizers subjugating the natives. It doesn’t mattet what Hamas does, because in this framing Israel is part of a long legacy of colonialist projects and bears all of their sins.
The “White Supremacist West” that foolsguinea is so eager to invoke tried to murder every single Jewish person not all that long ago. But suddenly Israel is their cherished representative on Earth? Give me a fucking break.
If someone described non-Hamas Palestinians as “Arabs of military age who aren’t killing Israelis right at that moment”, you’d be shocked and outraged, and rightfully so. Yet here you are, turning that hateful rhetoric on Israel.
Agreed. I suspect the hostage-taking was at least partially a means to lure the Israelis into futile rescue attempts, but keeping the hostages alive was not in the plans, beyond long enough to video their killings for broadcast when useful.
I’m sorry, does anyone really expect people living under what they understand as Israeli oppression to make a distinction between soldier & civilian, Israeli & guest of Israel, adult & child, once they get loose?
“Nits make lice,” is cruel rhetoric, but it has a logic to it. If Hamas operates within a tribalized nation-vs.-nation paradigm, as much as the Israeli youth who shout, “Death to all Arabs”; then killing anyone they find probably makes “sense” to them.
Will this act of terror pay off long-term? Why wouldn’t Hamas think so? The State of Israel was born in terror; modern terrorism was practically invented by people like Menachem Begin, and he did quite well off it. Certainly, showing that Hamas can break out of Gaza makes them look less weak.
Deplore it all you want. Israel constantly does worse, and the West makes excuses for them. This is for a simple, brutal reason: Western media & Western state leaders are white supremacist, hate Middle Eastern people, and accept Israel as an ersatz Crusader kingdom so long as its political heads are of pale skin and European descent.
And this is why Hamas will always have allies in the West. For some people, nuance is unheard of. Jews = Whites = colonizers = bad; Hamas = oppressed = good.
Well, not suddenly. Zionism as a movement has been successfully displacing people and using dehumanizing rhetoric about those people for 76 years now. And they started before that.
A) It does matter what Hamas does. It also matters what IDF does.
B) “Israel” does not bear my ancestors’ sins. Their own are sufficient.
The white men of European descent who lead Israel are obviously the closest thing certain Europeans see to “people like us” in Asia.
The cancer’s treatment, a restrained response and having your security systems actually work, is going to be long and miserable. But is least poor for the patient.
The violent response is more Laetrile. A false promise of cure.
It would be nice if guerrillas followed the rules of honorable war. It is unsurprising when they don’t.
What I do believe is that nothing succeeds like success. A Hamas that can engage in sudden acts of terror looks stronger than one that seems successfully trapped & caged. One that goes after women, families, children, tourists, and so forth could seem more dreadful for being less restrained.
This is self-destructive policy, as Machiavelli would tell you; the ruler’s objective is to feared, but not hated. But so far as Hamas can see, Israel is mostly hated, and they get non-stop support from across the globe.
Hamas is a kind of stupid, racist cult of destruction and terror. In this they are very much like the fascist wing of Israeli politics, who decided long ago that they preferred seeing Hamas in power to the relatively respectable “secular” parties in Palestine.
One can certainly criticize Netanyahu and Likud’s policy, even hold them responsible for the current situation, without equivocating between them and Hamas. But I suppose that would mess up the neat little narrative of EVIL COLONIZERS vs NOBLE SAVAGES that some like to cling to.
I mean, they’ve tried. They left voluntarily, left behind billions in stuff and infrastructure, and support Gaza at great expense, and in return, Hamas came to power, dedicated to killing all the Jews in Israel.
Honest question: What is Israel supposed to do to “fix” this? Fully withdraw from Gaza? Did that. Provide food, water, electricity? Did that. Leave behind infrastructure? Did that. Hamas literally tears in up to turn into rockets with which they try to blow up Jewish people. They could help fix the airport, of course. Lift the blockade? The blockade - an international thing, not just Israel - was only imposed because of Hamas, because they refused to live in peace with Israel.
The irony to me is Israel really is guilty of a great deal of cynicism and bad faith in their dealings with the West Bank, but that’s not where the murderers are coming from.
At some point you have to forget arguing about who is more to blame historically and focus on where we go from here.
No nation on earth would tolerate what Hamas just did to their civilians. Israel must and will destroy Hamas, and the only way to do that is with ground troops. Israel has a duty of care to try to protect civilians, but not at all costs, not if that entails the survival of Hamas as a threat. If Hamas refuses to allow the safe segregation of civilians, that’s on Hamas. I don’t believe that most Palestinians cannot understand that supporting a group that advocates and attempts the destruction of Israel while using Palestinian civilians as shields is going to end badly for them. And any Palestinian who still thinks Hamas were good advocates for their rights now has a bleak opportunity to reconsider, because when Hamas is destroyed and thousands of people on both sides are dead they will have a new choice. We cannot advocate for Palestinian self determination and simultaneously assume that Palestinians are incapable of making positive choices. It’s not clear exactly what that choice will look like, but when Hamas are destroyed there will be huge impetus and international support for change, and that can be positive change.
Any good way forward must entail dealing more decisively with those who oppose good outcomes. Any group or state that refuses to countenance both the right of Israel to exist and the right of peaceful Palestinians to self-determination and a meaningful future must be marginalized. Prominent among these is Iran, so it will be important not to let this derail accords between most other regional powers and the West. And it certainly includes the far right in Israel, but there’s every indication that this can be a turning point in Israeli politics.
Iran and Hamas have precipitated a dramatic change in the status quo, but the status quo was pretty awful for Gaza anyway. There’s no point in handwringing, saying that for Israel to act is to “give them what they want”. Iran and Hamas have removed inaction as an option. What Israel and the world must do after the necessary destruction of Hamas is to ensure that the change that comes about is not what the death cultists wanted, but ultimately positive change.