• dannoffs@lemmy.sdf.org
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    7 months ago

    Yes, its almost like Hamas recognizes that their support stems from opposing the occupation as a whole and not Jews as an ethnic group. They literally changed their charter to reflect this. Thanks for making my argument for me.

    I was merely pointing out that you were completely misrepresenting the chain of events that led to the massacre, and even here calling an angry mob “militants” is still misrepresenting the situation. Listing more violent events doesn’t change my argument at all. There were probably tens of thousands of raids by Native Americans on white settlers and it still doesn’t justify the almost entire wholesale destruction of their population, eradication of culture, and relegation of the survivors to reservations.

    Almost no one on the left supports Hamas as an actual governing body (you know, given that they’re explicitly anticommunist and Islamic fundamentalist), or wholesale supports their tactics. We just recognize that they are the only force that are on the ground fighting for the liberation of the Palestinians as a people. I’d much rather the charge be led by the PFLP or even the PLO, but that’s not the world we live in. If Hamas hadn’t been propped up by Likud (who also want a theocratic ethno state, you know believe what they say) and the US hadn’t forced an election when the PLO was at its weakest we wouldn’t be in this situation.

    I call it an apartheid state because experts on apartheid like Nelson Mandela called it one and I call it a genocide because it’s as close to the textbook definition of one as it gets. If the Rohingya genocide, which is internationally recognized as a genocide, is one, this absolutely is as well. Hamas’s original charter being openly antiemetic doesn’t excuse that.

    If we were in the situation where Hamas was governing over a unified Palestine and were trying to ethnically cleanse the historic Jewish population of Palestine, I would absolutely be screaming genocide as well. But that’s not the world we live in, and it never will be. Acknowledging the realities of the situation means acknowledging that sometimes an oppressed people resorts to supporting extremists when they’re the only ones left fighting for them. The only two ways to get rid of Hamas are ending the oppression that feeds them or a full scale successful genocide of the Palestinian people.

    • JoeHill@lemmy.world
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      7 months ago

      I was merely responding to your point that people didn’t know history before October 7. We’re not going to agree on anything if you think murderous mobs aren’t militants.