Hamad said that Palestinians are the victims of the occupation, therefore no one should blame them for the events of October 7 or anything else, adding: “Everything we do is justified.”
Hamad said that Palestinians are the victims of the occupation, therefore no one should blame them for the events of October 7 or anything else, adding: “Everything we do is justified.”
Except there are a lot of people like the first half of the parent I replied to that have a “Israel reaped what they sowed on October 6” attitude. But somehow don’t have a similar “they have reaped what they sowed” attitude towards Gaza right now.
Which isn’t quite right.
No one wants to share their toys since 1917. Both sides have alternatingly done ugly things that are, to our modern sensibilities, probably war crimes and ethnic cleansing. Previously, it was just war.
We did the same/worse things to Native Americans. Spain and Portugal did the same/worse things to the Aztecs and Incas. Britain did the same/worse things to almost everyone.
I just don’t think either side is justified but pretending like Palestine is any more or less of a victim than Israel in this whole mess doesn’t really seem to ring true if you look at the whole history.
That’s only true if you think the colonized being exterminated and the colonizers doing the exterminating are equally bad for fighting. One side holds all the power, and that’s the side you default your moral alignment to because you are either a settler, or you benefit from settler colonialism.
But is that any worse than defaulting to the side with less power? At the end of the day if you have to side with one or the other, whoever happens to have power at the time seems like pretty arbitrary criteria. If instead Israel were the lesser power being bullied by a powerful Palestine, would you side with Israel? How about if Nazi Germany were getting bullied by Western powers, would you side with them? It wouldn’t make sense because Nazis are very obviously the bad guys. Anyway it’s not just about power.
This is nihilistic child-brained nonsense.
“Israel” can’t be “bullied” by Palestine, because “Israel” doesn’t exist independent of the theft of Palestinian land. They’re not neighbors. Palestine is a land with people living on it. “Israel” is what that same land is called after the people already living there have been murdered or expelled to be replaced with settlers.
Nazi Germany was a “Western power”. It wasn’t their relative size that made them “the bad guys” in my judgement, it was their theft of land and extermination of the people already living on that land to be replaced with settlers: the same thing being done to Palestine today. It’s also the same thing the other “Western powers” did to the Americas, which the Nazis openly drew inspiration from.
I believe all of those things are bad. The reason you believe it was only bad when the Nazis did it is because the Nazis did it to fellow whites.
Jews are native to that area and it’s not a race thing. If we can’t agree on those two facts then we have no basis for discussion.
Palestinian Jews are native to that area. No living non-Palestinian Jew had ever lived in Palestine or had immediate family living there before European colonization. This is an empirical fact. Your rejection of this fact isn’t born from observing material reality, it’s a pretext that you think must follow from your unstated premise that forcing living people out of their homes, murdering them, and then moving new people that have lived their entire lives elsewhere into those homes must be morally justifiable. You want to morally justify this because this activity is the basis of your society, and you don’t want to feel guilty about reaping the spoils of a society that does that to other people. The way you support doing that to other people while continuing to believe you’re a good person is by pretending that the dispossessed are somehow less human or brought it on themselves; that the settlers are actually entitled to the land by god, “natural law”, “manifest destiny”, or some other flimsy fictional pretext.
There is no basis for conversation, because you’re a white supremacist. That you don’t want to identify as such is immaterial. Segregationists would similarly maintain that they’re not racist and that “it’s not a race thing”. They maintain that they merely uphold “the natural order”. You’re firmly committed to the premise that people that seem like you are more human, people that seem less like you are less human, and that it’s therefore morally right to kill them and replace them with people that seem more like you. You’re unwilling to waver from that premise while it continues to materially benefit you, and so you’re unwilling to be convinced of anything that challenges that premise.
I can’t believe you spent that much energy creating an identity for me in your head.
Knowing the cause of something does not excuse it. Just helps you better understand it, and how to prevent it in the future.
Saying Israel’s actions have a direct relationship with Hamas activity is not supporting Hamas. Its saying their actions are antithetical to a peaceful resolution, nothing else.
How does this make any sense to you? Britain declared Palestine to be terra nullius while there were people living there. They did it so they could create a Jewish ethno state hoping they could get rid of the Jews in their country. They did it by bringing in the British army and shooting anyone who resisted.
Israel has no legitimate claim to its existence as a state, it was created by the globe-dominating imperial colonizer at the point of a gun.
And instead of spending the last century trying to make peace, Israel has been building an apartheid state and importing settlers from all over the world to illegally steal land from Palestinians, literally just showing up and taking over their homes, beating them, and summoning the militarized police to displace, beat, maim, and kill Palestinians.
There is just no comparing the two sides.