GrimTuesday

Yeah, no shit they are a terrorist organization, basically every single struggle for liberation has involved some level of violent resistance. As I said, I strongly disapprove of their methods and as a leftist, I am certainly opposed to the fact that they are right wing fundamentalists, but I recognize that the Palestinians have basically been backed into a corner where their only path forward is either violence or extinction. This is in no small part because Israel has set the conditions to ensure that Hamas is seen as the only avatar of Palestinian liberation. Actually, it does matter how they see themselves. It matters because that is how you assess what their goals are and what it will take to deal with them. For example, ISIS was not a liberatory movement, they were religious fundamentalists who were seeking to create a global caliphate. Hamas on the other hand has more in common with the IRA, and the ANC were or the PKK are now, in so far as their aim is to create a state for a ethnic group who are currently occupied by a more powerful, oppressive state actor that is able to enact violence upon them with impunity. The only way to defeat a liberatory movement is through negotiation (it has to be good faith, which has almost never been the case here) and by addressing the oppression that they are resisting. Of course, the solution addressing their grievances cannot in any way mean that harm comes to Israelis including dispossession or expulsion much less violent ethnic cleansing as Hamas called for in their original charter, and any solution must ensure a better future for both sides of this conflict. My acknowledging of this does not in any way "give Hamas a pass". I was disgusted by their actions on October 7th, it was horrific and the brutality visited upon Israelis was inhuman. The loss of life on both sides is horrific and frankly, in fact I think every Hamas fighter should be imprisoned for the rest of their lives, and we should certainly take a good hard look at those who have overseen the Israeli operation and some of them should probably join the Hamas folks behind bars. While violent resistance is, according to the UN itself, permissible, that does not mean that those who perpetrate it should be immune from punishment after the fact. Worry about your own moral compass, mine points true north.

Whether you accept it or not, Haas sees themselves as being a liberatory movement seeking freedom for themselves and their countrymen, who have been brutalized, bombed, and robbed of all hope. They will never lay down their arms because to them, that is another step on the road to their extinction. You can talk about them being antisemitic or being Muslim fundamentalist all you want, but reality is that whatever crimes they have committed, the ones Israel is committing now are orders of magnitude worse and that is on top of living for the last the last 75 years under an apartheid in their own homeland which criminal in its own right. The fact that Israel maintains an apartheid state is provocation in and of itself, and while I wish they used different methods, Hamas is meeting violence with violence. The lose of human life in any circumstance is awful, it doesn't matter on which side, but just putting the blame entirely on Hamas rather than the ones dropping bombs on what is overwhelmingly a civilian population is ghoulish. I said it once before, one day after all this is over, we will all say we were against this, and now I add to it that I hope the words you said here fester in your soul at the knowledge that you excused the murder of children and innocents.

There have been numerous Republican politicians who have made genocidal statements regarding Palestinians, and literally the only person who is being rebuked for it is Rashida Talib, the only Palestinian in the legislature, who was censured by the House of Representatives the other day for using a slogan expressing the aspiration of Palestinian freedom and Israel and it's propaganda arms have decided to try and paint as antisemitic. Josh Gottheimer, a Democrat, even said that all Muslims are guilty for the October 7th attack and nobody did shit about it. It's amazing how all these elected members of the Israeli government are totally just irrelevant and not in any way representative of the Israeli government's policies.

If Israel dismantles the West Bank settlements, there will be a blood bath, this time perpetrated by the half a million Jewish settlers who inhabit those settlements.

Of course those who are in favor of a single state are "in the tank for Palestine" because that is the side that doesn't have a state and what would be a theoretical Palestinian state is so fragmented (which was a purposeful strategy on the part of Israel) that it would render it infeasible. Israel is welcome to give up their nukes, just as South Africa did, and in that case, it would be equally as motivated by racism. The sheer amount of Islamophobia and anti-arab racism that just goes completely unexamined is so fucking gross. The vast majority of Muslims, just like people of every other race and religion, just want to live good lives of dignity, they're not some gang of genocidal psychos hellbent on killing Jews any more so than white Christians, and the reality is that in many cases, those who are like that are the direct result of American/western foreign policy that sought to empower the most radical/religious fundamentalist groups because they were opposed to communism during the cold war, and now those chickens have come home to roost.

I would blame the Israeli state for creating a situation where 2.4 million people are trapped in a concentration camp and perpetually starved and brutalized thereby creating the conditions for a terrorist group and then assassinated/discredited all the leaders of the secular/left wing groups because it was harder to paint them as the bad guys to the western world and then actively supported said terrorist group behind the scenes to ensure they were the only group seen by the people of Gaza as being a liberatory force and thus they never had to worry about actually entering into peace talks to end the conflict. Israel is the greatest recruiter Hamas has ever had.

Your insistence on excusing ethnic cleansing is as impressive as it is disturbing. If you do even the tiniest bit digging you will find the bus attack in question is thought to have been a response to the assassination of five members of a Palestinian family that Lehi (You know, the guys who tried to ally with the Nazis) suspected of being informants for the British (You know, the folks governing the provience) 10 days prior. It should also be noted that the place where the attack too place was in Fajja, which had largely significantly depopulated by that point due to attacks from the Zionist paramilitary groups that started as early as May 1947. Here is video of Al-Azhar University being destroyed, there is now no longer any institutions of higher learning in Gaza.

Alright, I'm sick of this bullshit, "From the River to the Sea" is not hate speech and it is not inherently a Hamas slogan. It was created as a slogan by the PLO to express a yearning for freedom that the Palestinians might live between the river and the sea, which they did prior to the creation of the state of Israel. It is also a call for a single state, and it has genocidal implications if you assume that the only way that a Palestinian state can exist is through the genocide of the Jews, which despite how people paint Hamas as being the singular representation of the Palestinian struggle (As Bibi and the Israeli government sought to do), is not the aim expressed by most Palestinians. Of course, this assumption of genocide is the same justification that was used in South Africa, where no such thing happened, and in the American south, where southerners were convinced that in the event the slaves were freed, they would enact vengeance upon them. In both cases, what happened was people were freed, and they moved on and tried to live their lives the best they could. That said, there will need to be some some level of reconciliation where leaders on both sides are made to answer for their crimes.

You say that as if knowledge of the holocaust in any way should inform the reactions to Israel's apartheid state.

Obviously there are plenty of Nazi shitlords who want to see the murder of Jews, but in the instance of that specific poll, your only options are Israel, which at the time of the poll had already been bombing the shit out of Gaza, and Hamas, which is being presented as the only option to express support for the Palestinian people who have been subjected to Israel's apartheid state for 75 years. I'm sure if you rephrased it from Hamas to Palestinians you would be even more alarmed. Young people are being exposed the realities of life as a Palestinian and Israel's propaganda is losing it's potency as a result.

This is so fucking pathetic. That is a bullshit poll because it is only setting it up as the two answers being Israel and Hamas. Basically, you're forcing people to answer that you either support Israel, who at that point had already killed thousands of Palestinians in the bombardment that commenced almost immediately after October 7th or Hamas. That is an incredibly loaded question that I would have refused to answer but completely understand why someone would say Hamas. When people in the immediate aftermath of the Hamas attacks were celebrating, it was wrong and I certainly wasn't excited at the prospect of that operation because I knew what was coming no matter how successful it was. That said, when you watch a people get brutalized and humiliated for decades, there is something exhilarating in seeing them finally get a chance to strike back in a meaningful way outside of just fruitlessly lobbing rockets in the direction of their oppressors. Doesn't mean it is right, but that is a very human reaction. It is also worth noting that much of the celebrations took place prior to the exact extent and brutality of the Hamas attack became clear, that shit went away really quick once we got details abut what was happening in the kibbutzim.

Yeah, these guys really seem to have been making a good faith effort to create something more workable. Bear in mind Deir Yassin took place in April 1948, a month prior to Israel being given statehood.

Numerous members of the Zionist project described it as a colonial project, Herzl himself said as much. Beyond that, stop pretending that the Palestinians aren't indigenous to that land, 50% of Palestinians and 70% of Jews share a common male ancestor 3000 years ago, they're literally cousins.

Europeans and Americans are so desperate to absolve themselves of their historic antisemitism that they project it onto the middle east. For example, The Ottoman Empire actively attempted to rescue Sephardic Jews from the Spanish Inquisition and granted them the right to settle in the empire. It got to the point that the Greeks started resenting the status that was given to the Jews within the empire because of the informal pecking order that they had seen themselves as being at the top of. Which of course lead to pogroms in the European part of the empire. The fact of the matter is that while certainly things weren't all sunshine, buttercups, and rainbows, prior to the colonization of the middle east by Europeans powers, the actual historical record shows that Muslim lands were seen as a refuge for Jews.

Do you know how many people are killed by H20 every year? Truly a fearsome weapon.

I think you find those were dangerous H2O chemicals used in the process of developing a drug meant to create Hamas super soldiers, the start of a Hamas doomsday device that harnessed the power of the sun, ships belonging to the fearsome Hamas Navy, and well, the generator was just a generator that was keeping retired Hamas fighters alive so that obviously had to go. Drake called for a cease fire before Bernie Sanders, what a dark timeline we live in. I highly recommend this podcast with Israeli historian Ilan Pappe.

Jesus fucking Christ, way to completely take what I said in the least charitable way possible. I especially enjoyed the part where you referenced one of the Ur texts of antisemitic books as if I was somehow endorsing that perspective. The reality is that countries of all types engage in brainwashing their population, it is just how nationalism works. I think In addition, we have Jewish folks in these threads who have spoken about how, as Jews, they are always cognizant of the fact that there are people out there who wish them harm simply for the fact that they are Jewish, and I am sure that goes doubly so for people in Israel who are told from the day they are born that they are surrounded on all sides by enemies who are actively plotting to do them harm. Of course there are those who the propaganda doesn't take hold as deeply, there are many groups within Israel that oppose the actions of the state and see Palestinians as full people, but just like in America, those people are generally the exception. Obviously There are exceptions, I saw a video that Vice (if I remember correctly, might have been Abby Martin) put out and part of it was following an Israeli peace activist who would take a Palestinian flag to the protests and he was talking about how he was actively harassed by other protesters for it. There are a lot of wonderful, kind people in Israel who do not agree with the government and it's actions, it is certainly not monolithic.

It isn't a vast conspiracy when you have an army made up of people who are brainwashed from birth to believe that every action Israel takes is necessary in the defense of the Jewish race and are compelled to serve in the military, therefore forcing people to rationalize the crimes that they are forced to be complicate it if not directly, than certainly those done by their friends and family. I would also add that citing the protests in Israel regarding the attacks on the judiciary is not really a good argument to show how moral or upstanding Israelis are. Those protests were never even remotely considering the treatment of Palestinians either in Gaza or the West Bank. It was exactly like the Trump voters from desperately poor areas in West Virginia who were mad that the abuses of the state were also now being done to them rather than just those they considered the rightful recipients of that abuse. There was never a notion of shared struggle, it was always about the privileged being worried about suddenly potentially being demoted to the same status as they see as beneath them.

Way to leave out the fact that I said I do not necessarily agree with Hamas' actions. The fact is that Hamas uses certain truths and liberatory language to justify their unjustifiable actions but that does not delegitimize the Palestinian struggle as a whole no matter how much you parrot Hasbara talking points..

Frankly I'm disinclined to accept your interpretation of my statements. Iran regularly calls for death to America, do you think I give a shit about that? Power is what matters, it is the only thing that matters, and only one side of this actually has the power to achieve it's goals. Yes, I did explain that, I did not endorse them. Refusing to understand why things are happening is a key method of dehumanization of an enemy, you don't want to see them as humans because then you would have to acknowledge that what has happened to the Palestinians is criminal and unconscionable. Hamas uses the the language of liberation and use facts to justify their actions. Just because we use the same language and cite the same events, it does not mean that we agree upon what actions must be taken to address the situation in Israel. If you don't want people to accuse you of supporting ethnic cleansing, apartheid and genocide maybe don't do that. Defending the Zionist project is to defend those actions. Also you're delusion if you think a two state solution is still possible. Israel has made sure that it is impossible to disentangle Israel from a theoretical Palestinian state, and have actively been undermining groups that are more amiable to peace, this has been state policy for decades. The only viable solution at this point is a single state where all people are afforded the same rights and given a right to return. Sorry if that doesn't allow for an ethnostate, but thems the breaks.

The only way you could read everything I've said in the course of this discussion over the last three weeks and come to that conclusion is if you are either acting in bad faith, or you're just so indoctrinated by Israeli propaganda, you've completely lost the plot. Explaining something is not the same as endorsing it. But by all means, keep defending your beloved apartheid state. History will remember people like you the same as those who supported South Africa.

Israeli leaders have, since the beginning advocated for the forced removal of Palestinians, the entire nation was founded on it. in the 75 years since then, those polices have continued unabated. That is why Hamas says what it does. Palestinians aren't born hating Israel, it is the result of systemic violence that empowers the most extreme right wing elements and has been supported and enabled by Israel to undermine the secular left wing Palestinians that were harder to demonize. I don't give a shit if you or the ADL or some other Israeli propaganda cutout consider it antisemitic, Israel is committing if not genocide, then certainty ethnic cleansing and that is unacceptable. Keep defending your apartheid state though, I'm sure dismissing criticism of Israel as simply being antisemitic allows you to ignore the crimes being committed against a people that have been declared as subhuman by the state of Israel.

Pretty laughable that the person who is defending ethnic cleansing is accusing others of being Nazis. The fascist, genocidal Israeli state has more in common with Nazi Germany than Hamas does. You're neck deep in Hasbara propaganda, and it's pretty fucking pathetic. Except for all the Nazis that were left in positions of power in West Germany. Of course, I guess if you consider the formation of West Germany a good thing, it kind of undermines the idea that there is no way to proceed with Hamas figures in a governing capacity as part of a peace process.

Israel is already committing war crimes, they exceeded the "law of Armed Conflict" on day one with their utilization of collective punishment. Hamas cannot be defeated with bombs, the only option is peace and reconciliation.

Turns out it may not have been The Gaza Health Ministry that lied about the hospital bombing death toll, it seems to be a mistranslation by the media