The palestinians have a right to violent resistance to the occupation. On the Gaza strip they're denied international relations and trade so they can only make very primitive military equipment, which means that to reach an effect at all they pretty much have to fire unguided rockets into Israel. When they tried non-violent protest against the occupation, the "March of Return", by demonstrating at the border they were systematically mutilated by the IDF.
There is an alternative, sure, prepare for a year and then invade Israel. Which they did, after decades of "mowing the lawn" as the israelis call it.
The terror organisation classification of Hamas isn't as much about the political party or its affiliated militia as manufactured consent to relations with Israel and traditions among colonial states. The modern 'West' usually calls its enemies terrorist, like it did during the Mau Mau uprising. This is why so few states agree with this classification.
You don't have to like Hamas but compared to the PA they're not very corrupt, and since they stopped doing suicide bombings they've been quite successful as a resistance movement. Since several years back they've also been quite good at unifying and coordinating the political parties and militias on the Gaza strip in preparation for and during periods of israeli military aggression, including with their main competitor in Palestinian Islamic Jihad, socialists from PFLP/DFLP/Fatah movement, Iran's Mujahideen movement and so on.
Hamas isn't just a political party with a militia, it's also a charity movement. To most people it seems weird to call people terrorists because they take care of their vulnerable neighbours and run soup kitchens and the like.
Nobody has the "right" to kill other people. That's not a right.
Gaza was not occupied, so they specifically didn't have the right you claim they had that doesn't even exist.
> On the Gaza strip they're denied international relations and trade.
This is also not true. When Israel left in 2005 they pretty much had control of their destiny. They chose to elect Hamas, that said its goal is to kill all Jews in the world. They chose to keep attacking Israel after Israel left. The full blockade on Gaza from the Israeli side was only imposed after Hamas came to power in 2007. Gaza still has a border with Egypt where they were free to negotiate any trade or relationships they felt like. Except the Egyptians didn't like them any better than Israel because they supported ISIS in Sinai.
> People keep saying “right to a violent resistance” but it’s not a thing
Your link says it is a thing:
“In international law, the right to resist is closely related to the principle of self-determination. It is widely recognized that a right to self-determination arises in situations of colonial domination, foreign occupation, and racist regimes that deny a segment of the population political participation. According to international law, states may not use force against the lawful exercise of self-determination, while those seeking self-determination may use military force if there is no other way to achieve their goals.”
> Gaza was not occupied,
Gaza was openly occupied until 2005, and after that Israel “disengaged” but still actively patrolled Gaza’s waters, maintained what was in effect a free fire zone on the Gaza side of the border (with declared entry rules and prohibitions within certain distances, but the shootings occurred both well beyond the declared distances and when civilians were complying with the declared conditions), and otherwise used military force to effectively dictate conditions inside Gaza.
Moreover, Palestine remains occupied whether or not the Gaza piece of it is.
Israel withdrawing its soldiers from Gaza doesn't mean that Gaza is not under occupation. There's no Palestinian soveriegn state. All of Palestinian lands and the entire Palestinian population are under occupation, and according to International law, the responsibility of the occupier, and have the right to resist.
I agree with almost all of this, but you lose me at "the right to resist". What, precisely, does that mean? The right to blockade roads in Gaza, to use force of arms to prevent IDF vehicles from entering Gaza? That makes sense. October 7th, though? Obviously not.
Nobody calls them terrorists because they run soup kitchens. People call them terrorists because they take children hostage and kill civilians. Destroying the Israel and killing its inhabitants is literally in their founding charter, and they act upon it whenever they get the chance. That is why they are terrorists.
No, they got the designation because they used suicide bombings in the nineties. But OK, so you'd call Israel a terrorist state then? And consider Israel the bigger problem due to the scale of their actions?
The Hamas charter is from 2017. Do you have any specific complaints about its contents?
There are dozens of sites collecting footage that Hamas itself put out during the attacks. There are hundreds of witness accounts. There are countless news articles from reputable news organizations corroborating all these accounts.
If you're honestly looking for the truth, it's not hard to realize what that it is.
> Thank you for posting this. Honestly, my social media bubble exposed me to exactly 0.5% of the videos on this site.
Those are just the tip of iceberg, unfortunately. A lot of the more disturbing stuff was censored to protect the families, but you can see journalists describing seeing a 47-minute compilation of... harder scenes.
> While I still think Israel is making the same mistake we did after 9/11, these videos help me feel a little of the vitriol fueling the IDF's actions.
Quite possibly. Though let me make something clear about my views - revenge is never ok, and doubly not ok if it's carried out against innocent Gazans.
Hamas invaded Israel and slaughtered civilians, and in addition effectively shut down the country by launching dozens of rocket attacks every day for weeks, and have promised to do it again if they remain in power. So removing them from power is morally and legally right. But revenge should never be the goal.
OK, so you remove Hamas and al-Qassam brigades. Now what?
Business as usual, for sure. PIJ would likely fill the vacuum, continue _their_ rocket attacks, and not be as restrictive and predictable as the al-Qassam brigades. Mujahideen brigades and DFLP:s and PFLP:s military wings would also fire some rocket salvos when they think it's appropriate, for example when people affiliated with them in the West Bank are arrested or harassed by Israel.
And you could go on, keep starving and bombing and on and on like Israel has done for more than a decade. Either you commit genocide or you endure the violent resistance or you make peace, and every time you 'mow the lawn' you raise the barrier to peace.
You obviously having been following this for more than six months, October 7th is where history starts for you. Very little in the footage on that web site is worse than what palestinians suffer more or less constantly, from the IDF and from settlers. Most palestinians in Palestine know someone who lost a toddler due to very treatable starvation or israeli gun violence or whatever.
> OK, so you remove Hamas and al-Qassam brigades. Now what?
If it were up to me - you help someone who wants peace fill the gap that Hamas left, you:
1. Make every effort to help Gaza recover. Directly as much as possible, and by getting the world involved.
2. Help a better government form in Gaza, one that actually cares about the people, about economic development, and that wants peace.
3. Work towards peace with whoever you can possibly find that is willing to talk peace.
> You obviously having been following this for more than six months, October 7th is where history starts for you.
That's ridiculous. I've lived in Israel for 30 years, do you really think I believe that "history started on October 7th?". In addition, you can find plenty of comments of mine where I am extremely critical of Israel's actions over the last 15-20 years, both in not pursuing peace, and in actively blocking peace in many ways. (I'm also fairly critical of the settler enterprise which goes back much further.)
> Very little in the footage on that web site is worse than what Palestinians suffer more or less constantly, from the IDF and from settlers.
Maybe if you only look at the specific video footage I sent. But in general, that's a pretty wrong statement. The majority of Palestinians, especially Gazans, never interact with the IDF, until the once-every-few-years back-and-forth between Hamas and Israel. And until October 7th, there wasn't any operation near its scale.
Palestinians aren't mass taken hostages, despite lots of rhetoric to the contrary. The IDF doesn't enter random civilian's homes and kill a grandmother they find, while live-streaming the slaughter on her own Facebook account for her friends and family to see. Etc.
I don't understand this constant desire to see everyone as equally bad here. You can think Israel does a lot of bad things (I certainly do) without having to think Hamas is equally bad.
> Honestly, my social media bubble exposed me to exactly 0.5% of the videos on this site.
Social media is cancer when it comes to delicate political conflicts and nothing exemplifies this more than the Israeli-Palestinian (formerly Israeli-Arab) war, where both "sides" get stuck in echo chambers. The roots of this conflict go back at least to the end of the 19th century (if you leave out the complex histories of the Jewish and Arab peoples before that) and both sides have legitimate grievances as well as their fair share of blame. For every claim that someone's going to make, somebody else can make a counter-claim.
OK, when I look under the "mass rape" tag there, it's just Amit Soussana, who says vague things like 'at one time a guard forced me to do a sexual thing'. The rest is people who probably suffered torture or could be just about anyone.
It also shows Hellfire-burnt bodies at Nova and seems to claim Hamas killed them.
Could you be more specific about what footage there is so important? I mean, there were obviously civilians who were killed by palestinians during that day, which isn't surprising or something I contest. But sites like that and the documentary I've seen, what they show isn't a lot, it's nothing like the torture and arbitrary detention and murder Israel has been engaged in for decades.
> Amit Soussana, who says vague things like 'at one time a guard forced me to do a sexual thing'.
What do you mean by vague? That's someone who was raped recounting her rape. That tag also includes other testimonies of witnesses who saw people being raped.
Other testimonies and videos there show the militants entering villages and shooting civilians.
Look at around the 1:10 mark, you can see some more examples. There's also this website, though I can't access it: https://saturday-october-seven.com/, so I'm not sure what it contains.
> I mean, there were obviously civilians who were killed by palestinians during that day, which isn't surprising or something I contest.
So what are you saying? 1,200 Israelis died that day. Hundreds who were at a music rave. Hundreds who were families in their homes in various villages. We have footage for some of these deaths, but obviously not all 1200, so even if I show you twenty videos, you can still say "well that's just a few". What exactly are you looking for?
There are hundreds of articles of journalists who got access to the 47-minute video compilation that is not publicly available, but contains far more material showing the various things Hamas did. E.g. this Tweet/video I randomly found by Chris Cuomo: https://twitter.com/ChrisCuomo/status/1735473602806399155?la...
Look, it's totally right to criticize Israel, but denying the many atrocities committed on October 7th is pretty indefensible. If you're engaged enough with this subject to discuss it in online forums to the extent you are doing, I don't think there's much I can say that you haven't seen, or that you can't find with fairly cursory searches. Thousands of mainstream media sources, of all political stripes, document exactly the same thing, and there's plenty of footage.
And for what it's worth, just talk with almost any Israeli, like me, and we can just tell you about the many people killed. Without doing any searching for it or anything, I can tell you I know about 8 people who lost loved ones, friends or family, on October 7th. It's just as anecdotal as seeing random video footage, I know, but I'm a real person who's been here on HN for many years.
Many of those 1200 or so were soldiers. If you think numbers are important it's probably 797 or so you'd want, but it's unclear how many of those were armed. It's very common in Israel to be carrying a rifle as a civilian. It's also unclear to what extent the IDF killed israelis. We can be quite sure almost no palestinians managed to return to the Gaza strip though.
And yeah, it's just a few compared to what Israel is doing. In July last year Israel killed kids in Jenin with airstrikes. Up until September almost fifty palestinian kids in the occupied territories were killed by Israel, as everyday routine.
I don't think the resistance groups in the Gaza strip ought to have killed as many civilians as they did, but I find it somewhat understandable. It would have been better if the perpetrators were prosecuted than Hellfire:d together with israelis, to the extent that it took weeks before genetic testing lowered the death toll by a couple of hundred because the corpses had at first been counted as israeli and blamed on "Hamas".
I'm not denying any atrocities, but I'm very sceptical until I've seen very strong evidence due to the large amount of lies and half-truths that have been circulated by Zaka, IDF and israeli politicians. There were just one baby killed in the kibbutzim, by crossfire. Much of the reporting about sexual abuse has turned out to be hearsay or straight up lying. The woman who said she had identified sperm from many palestinians just relayed some made up stuff she had heard about. And so on.
I think the reaction to the violence of October 7th should have been 'OK, maybe we should adhere to international law and seek peace' rather than 'finally, let's become the ten plagues, let's eradicate Amalek once and for all'. I'm well aware that this is a minority position in Israel, and it's not for me to judge israelis, but if October 7th justifies undermining women reporting about rape and starving two million people, what wasn't the palestinians justified in doing on October 7th?
Your response reminds me of back when Noam Chomsky was going around saying that Khmer Rouge cannot possibly as bad as Americans say they are, and most of it is probably a CIA psyop anyway.
(The fact that he was wrong was not, of course, a valid justification for what US did in Cambodia back then.)
Relevant here is the probable alternative reality that the Khmer Rouge very likely would not have taken control and become "as bad as Americans say" were it not for the United States-backed military dictatorship of Marshal Lon Nol that they fought against and the horrific tonnage of American bombing directed at them in support of that US dictatorship (that exceeded WWII bombing tonnages in Europe).
I'm not making a strong anti US statement here, more an observation about the behaviour of the post WWII US and former colonial powers in SE Asia and elsewhere and the lengths they went to retain control of former colonies rather than foster democracy and self determination.
A lot of bad policy was undertaken which seemed to all result in far worse outcomes from the pushback.
Chomsky was publishing on this after the "evacuation" of Phnom Penh, though - and claimed that it wasn't a mass murder. Which is why it reminds me of Hamas apologetics after 10/7 that claim that nothing particularly horrible happened on this day (in fact, in some far left circles that I hang out, people even seriously say things like "they were all colonizers and therefore combatants", "there were no civilians killed, it was all legitimate targets in a war of national liberation" etc).
As far as Israel in general and US foreign policy specifically with respect to it, I'm pro-BDS, now more strongly than ever. I just don't see why that should somehow translate to viewing Hamas as anything other than the murderous thugs that they are. It's not an either-or.
The people that executed the October attacks on civilians committed murder, just as any forces that kill children are also murderers.
The people that executed those October attacks swore fealty to the Hamas of 2023 and represent the Hamas of 2023.
That Hamas is very different to the barely elected Hamas of 2006 who were then the lesser of other evils and swore blind to the people that they sought peace with Israel.
The bulk of the people in Gaza did not elect the Hamas of 2006, nor support the Hamas of 2023, nor deserve to be starved and murdered.
Somewhere in both stories lie similar questions; what actions transformed the Khmer Rouge that opposed Norodom Sihanouk in 1970 into the Khmer Rouge of 1975 more aligned with Sihanouk and prepared to murder those that ousted Sihanouk, what actions transformed the Hamas of 2006 into that of 2023. Both stories prompt asking what justifies, if anything, the slaughter of tens of thousands.
I don't dispute that Israel has been doing the kind of stuff that has produced the likes of Hamas for a very long time now. Nor that what Israel is doing right now is well into war crimes & genocide territory, and should be treated as such- i.e. no military aid whatsoever, severe international sanctions, its leadership subject to arrest and trial if it sets foot into any civilized country, and ideally a UN-sanctioned military intervention in Gaza to stop the bombings, by shooting down Israeli planes if necessary.
That said, by 2006, Hamas already had a fairly long track record of killing "collaborators" and "deviants", as well as several clear-cut terrorist acts against civilians (e.g. blowing up bus stops). The radicalization happened a decade earlier.
You say you don't deny atrocities, but you keep making statements that seem to "excuse" Hamas or make it seem like they weren't specifically targeting civilians for slaughter. And I don't understand. It is incredibly well-documented that they did target civilians. Not just by "Israel", mind you - there are thousands of articles showing this. Thousands of reporters who saw a fuller atrocity video and explained just how awful some of those acts were.
It's fine to think Israel is bad to, but how can you possibly deny acts that are so well-documented, or seek to excuse them? I'll show what I mean by some examples:
> If you think numbers are important it's probably 797 [civilians] or so you'd want, but it's unclear how many of those were armed. It's very common in Israel to be carrying a rifle as a civilian.
You write "unclear how many were armed". What's the logic here? If someone in their city is armed, because they are afraid they'll be attacked in their homes, and then someone attacks them, you think the attacker is then able to say "oh well but they were armed, so I'm justified in killing them"? What is the relevance to whether civilians in their own homes are armed for protection, in deciding whether or not it's an act of murder/terrorism to kill them?
And btw, I'm fairly sure the hundreds that were slaughter in a night-time rave were not armed, except for probably some security for the party. (Well there was security with guns there, does that make it a legitimate target?)
> Many of those 1200 or so were soldiers.
Let's be clear. Killing soldiers is not automatically legal or moral either. Invading an army base - fine, legal (though obviously, an act of war!). But shooting unarmed soldiers (as happened) and not allowing soldiers to surrender after you've taken over the base - not moral and not legal.
Also, some of those "soldiers" are counted because they are off-duty soldiers, e.g. ones that were in their homes or in the Nova party. Yes, they are technically soldiers, but again, not legal to kill them either.
> It's also unclear to what extent the IDF killed israelis.
Unclear in the sense that we don't know a precise number, sure. And some were definitely (confirmed) killed by the IDF. But... it's clear that the number is tiny compared to the overall dead. So yes, you can say "unclear" and be accurate, but that's exactly the kind of motte-and-bailey argument that only serves to obscure Hamas's culpability.
And btw, anyone killed by the IDF by accident is still Hamas's fault, because they were the ones who put everyone in this situation! It can also be some IDF commander's fault, and they might have to answer to Israelis about it, but that doesn't mean it's not Hamas's fault for attacking a village!
> We can be quite sure almost no palestinians managed to return to the Gaza strip though.
Do you understand that 250 hostages were captured and taken to Gaza? Do you think they walked there by themselves? Thousands of Palestinians had to drag those hostages in to Gaza, and you can see the triumphant videos of them being dragged around the streets with cheering crowds. So no, "almost no" Palestinians managed to return doesn't pass even a cursory sniff test here.
> And yeah, it's just a few compared to what Israel is doing.
Compared to what Israel is doing now? Yes. Israel is stronger. If it gets invaded and has its citizens slaughtered, it is able to inflict far more damage in return. Such were all wars in history won (e.g. compare casualties in Germany/Japan vs the Allies during WW2).
Maybe it would make sense to condenm Hamas even more strongly, both because they did despicable acts on October 7th, and also because of the horrible situation they've put Gazans in. And let's remember, they built an entire array of tunnels to hide in and keep attacking Israel, while building zero protection for any Palestinian civilians. Kind of the opposite to what Israel has done by spending vast wealth on things like Iron Dome to protect its citizens (and btw, this also protects Gazans in some sense too - because absent Iron Dome, the IDF would've had to stop the rocket attacks with overwhelming military force many times in the past!)
> I don't think the resistance groups in the Gaza strip ought to have killed as many civilians as they did, but I find it somewhat understandable.
Clearly.
> It would have been better if the perpetrators were prosecuted than Hellfire:d together with israelis,
Most weren't hellfire:d, and definitely not together with Israelis.
And yes, I would've loved for them to be arrested too - which many were. But are you really suggesting that priority 1,2 and 3 wasn't to stop them by any means necessary, while they were running around inside of Israel for two days?
I'm against anybody dying, ever. But in such a situation, if an arrest can't be made, then obviously killing them before they kill more civilians is better than not.
> I'm not denying any atrocities, but I'm very sceptical until I've seen very strong evidence due to the large amount of lies and half-truths that have been circulated by Zaka, IDF and israeli politicians.
Great. Don't listen to Israeli politicians or the IDF or Zaka. (Which is a convenient way to discount most of the people with the relevant facts, sure.)
So just listen to the thousands of reporters, to the governments of the US, UK, Germany, etc, who've independently verified much, or just listen to the Israeli public. Israel is a democracy - its government doesn't usually get away with lying, but even more importantly, there's freedom of speech. It's not exactly hard to confirm the hundreds killed, there are literally interviews with thousands of witnesses to the murders that occurred on that day.
> Much of the reporting about sexual abuse has turned out to be hearsay or straight up lying.
There are many cases where witnesses saw acts of sexual violence performed on women that were then killed. There's an NYT article about it, there's a UN report about it, that all say the same things.
There are a few hostages who've described what is happening to the hostages in Gaza. And yes, they're being somewhat vague on the specific acts that occurred, because they don't want to upset the families of hostages or their own families even further. But claiming there's no evidence because a witness says "I was sexually assaulted" but doesn't describe the specific acts done on them is... disingenuous, to say the least.
> And so on.
Great. So your strategy is to take the many wild stories that came out, most of which circulated not by official Israeli sources, but some that were and were later retracted. Take those stories, disprove them, and then say "well that proves there's no way to believe anything".
And then discount the thousands of witnesses, articles, examinations etc that have been consistent and proven since day one.
You say things like that, or like this:
> to the extent that it took weeks before genetic testing lowered the death toll by a couple of hundred because the corpses had at first been counted as israeli and blamed on "Hamas".
With the often-implied idea that things being retracted or later proven false is proof that you can't trust these sources.
Except it's exactly the opposite! The fact that wrong stories are shown to be wrong, that the death count is lowered when more info is available, is exactly proof that Israel is a democracy that's working correctly and that the truth is uncovered!
Under autocracies, you never have retrospectives and leaders saying they made mistakes. It's just deny, deny, deny. And you look at that, and praise them for their consistency, thinking that that makes them more honest.
> I think the reaction to the violence of October 7th should have been 'OK, maybe we should adhere to international law and seek peace'.
Great. Let's forget about the immediate aftermath of October 7th, which demanded a resposne while Israel was literally being invaded and attacked.
What is step 1 of your plan to "adhere to international law and seek peace"? Is it perhaps removing all soldiers from the WB, dismantling all settlements there, pulling back to the original borders? How is that different from what happened in Gaza in 2005? Which led to rocket attacks and eventually to October 7th?
You seem to think if Israel would just unilaterally give Palestinians all of some unspecified things they want, suddenly they would be peaceful. All of the history of this conflict has shown the oposite to be true - when Israel seeks peace, more terrorism happens. When Israel pulled out of Gaza, it led to this mess.
I'm very pro-peace, I think Israel has acted immorally for 15 years at least in not pursuing peace, and that Netanyahu carries a lot of moral culpability in the situation we're now in. Second only to Hamas.
But being pro-peace doesn't mean you get to throw out all logic or pragmatism. Quite the opposite - you have to be extrmeely pragmatic to get peace, since it's so hard and so important. If your step one of a peace plan would immediately be followed by Israel being invaded and quite likely attacked catastrophically, then it's a stupid peace plan which will only result in the death of far more Israelis immediately, and Palestinians in the counter-attack.
So without vague platitudes like "adhere to international law", what specifically would you have Israel do right now, given the current situation, given that Hamas is in charge of Gaza and that they have promised to carry out attacks again and again, etc. What is your step 1 that doesn't get followed by "and then a massive war breaks out in which hundreds of thousands die"?
I gotta say it's been interesting finding online discourse that denies an atrocity that occurred only a few months ago. Never really paid attention when people talked about holocaust denial and denial of the Armenian genocide but now finding comments implying hamas did not torture, rape and murder their way across southern Israel when we have literal video footage of these savages enjoying their orgy of violence makes me understand those people a bit better.
The footage picked out for, I think, the #Nova documentary doesn't really corroborate that claim. In swedish it's called Massakern på musikfestivalen, I'm not sure which name it has internationally.
It shows some indiscriminate killing, for example throwing handgrenades into rocket shelters.
Soon after October 7th there was a lot of video material circulated, claimed to be from Israel but which was really cartel snuff and similar. If you have some material you are sure isn't in this category then I'd like to see it.
Don't be obtuse, there are many more forms of terrorism than suicide bombing. Israel should be more careful with the Palestinian population as a whole, but Hamas specifically have always been shitbags, are still shitbags and deserve every single shell coming their way.
Maybe there are, but the reason they got designated as a terrorist organisation by a rather small number of states were the suicide bombings in the nineties.
Sure, they might be shitbags, they're led by politicians after all. Have you considered sending the IDF a message and ask them to change their priorities and start aiming their shells mainly at al-Qassam brigade militants?
2016 was the last suicide bombing by Hamas. Keep in mind those didn't stop because Hamas changed. They stopped because Israel built walls around the West Bank and Gaza, many other security measures, and joint effort between the PA and Israel to stop these. While suicide bombing attacks were thwarted there have been many attacks against civilians through the years (something around 13 attacks in 2023 preceding Oct 7th) using assault rifles or vehicles e.g.
Hamas are terrorists, yes. But that doesn't mean you destroy them at all costs. It doesn't mean you can "mow the grass" in Gaza at such high civilian cost. And while destroying Israel is Hamas's stated goal, it's about as delusional as thinking the Jan. 6 rioters could have overthrown the US government. 30,000 Hamas fighting with crude weapons against the IDF, one of the most powerful and advanced armed forces in the world? Come on.
Hamas is armed with pretty fine weapons including the latest AKs you can't even get outside Russia, Dragonov sniper rifles, RPGs etc. The attackers on Oct 7th were very well equipped, comparable to most modern military's infantry. This story about how primitive their weapons are is at least partly a lie.
The environment they operate in neutralizes a lot of the IDF's advantages. Dense urban, many civilians, tunnels. You can't bring F-35s to bear if you have battles inside your own towns. It took the IDF about 3 days to recover from the initial attack including scenes like tanks firing into Israeli houses.
There are a lot of Israelis with military background that claim that the Oct 7th attack wasn't far from being an existential threat. Hamas was planning to connect with the west bank and also to proceed much farther into Israel than it managed to. There were some heroics e.g. from the police in stopping that on the roads leading out of the south. In combination with a land attack from Hezbollah in the north that could have been a scenario that has some probability of getting 10's or 100's of thousands of Israelis killed at the very least. It's hard to imagine but then Oct 7th was also hard to imagine.
I haven't seen any sniper rifle besides the al-Ghoul in their combat footage since October 7th. Neither in PIJ:s, PFLP:s, DFLP:s, Mujahideens Brigades, or in Intifada al-Fatahs or the People's Resistance Committees'.
Claiming that IDF infantry and the armed resistance groups in the Gaza strip are pretty much equal in equipment is just insane. It's, you know, not even wrong.
How long would it take to walk to the West Bank? Are you sure they planned to "connect with the West Bank"?
People can have different opinions on the way Israel is conducting this war. I know I am conflicted.
But Hamas is not a legitimate resistance movement. It is a fundamentalist, oppressive, terrorist regime. You do not stand to gain anything by associating with them.
I don't care whether they're considered legitimate or not, to me that's up to the palestinians to decide. Currently they're the most successful faction.
They've also shown a lot of ideological pragmatism compared to e.g. Hezbollah, and their main competitor on the Gaza strip is a splinter called Palestinian Islamic Jihad which considers Hamas too pragmatic, too invested in 'soft' projects like social or charity work. I'm not as sure that the alternatives are better.
> I don't care whether they're considered legitimate or not, to me that's up to the palestinians to decide. Currently they're the most successful faction.
Except they killed all opposition.
Someone will have to root them out like the German nazis, put the area under military occupation until they are ready to elect a new government - just like postwar Germany - and sadly that someone is Israel since no one else steps up.
I'd personally love if some other country told Israel to get lost, rooted out Hamas and administered Gaza until they were ready for elections.
> You don't have to like Hamas but compared to the PA they're not very corrupt,
If your society's two choices are a.) lots of corruption, and b.) less corruption but with terrorism, then you've pretty much shown that you're incapable of self-governance as a people.
> and since they stopped doing suicide bombings they've been quite successful as a resistance movement. Since several years back they've also been quite good at unifying and coordinating the political parties and militias on the Gaza strip in preparation for and during periods of israeli military aggression, including with their main competitor in Palestinian Islamic Jihad, socialists from PFLP/DFLP/Fatah movement, Iran's Mujahideen movement and so on.
Sounds like if Israel didn't exist, these guys would just be fighting against Fatah instead. Or fighting between themselves.
Yeah, possibly. In the West Bank militia groups have been fighting PA forces recently due to them harassing and killing militia men and generally assisting the IDF in the occupation. After the 2006 election the PA tried to oust Hamas from the Gaza strip and got violently expelled.
On the other hand, over the decades since 2006 Hamas has co-existed with lots of political movements in the Gaza strip and helped make sure their militias continued recruiting and exercising. It has been a politically repressive environment for sure, in large part because you can't survive as a political movement under occupation without developing a serious paranoia.
Has HN descended to such lows as to idealize Hamas now?
Hamas terrorizes Palestinians, threatening those who dissent with cutoffs from basic amenities and even certain death. All of the aforementioned militia have good reason to distrust PA, because PA is the recognized representative of the Palestinian people by every single country in the world. No country gives a shit about Hamas. When aid is delivered to WB or Gaza, it's delivered in the name of the PA, even if they have lost control over Gaza for so many years.
And why does Hamas oppose PA? Because their ideal government is one with roots in the Muslim Brotherhood, which is a designated terrorist organization in the West as well as every surrounding country in the Middle East.
One could argue that Hamas is the rightful representative of the Palestinian people. But is it really? Elections held in Palestine are often a sham affair, with threats and coercion abound. But even if they won with a resounding majority, the fact that Palestinians en masse chose to elect an organization that cuts their water supply to make rockets from pipes says a lot more about the kind of people Palestinians are, and why they shouldn't be supported too much (something which every Arab neighbour of theirs has figured out pretty much).
It's unclear what you mean by dissent. Before October 7th dissent was likely the majority political position in the Gaza strip, they weren't very popular. Suspected collaboration with the occupier or its affiliates has been dealt with harshly for sure, and to some extent this has hurt LGBTQ persons specifically since Israel likes to identify them and pressure them to become collaborators.
Hamas opposes the PA because they are collaborating with the occupier. The ikhwan movement is feared by regional dictatorships because it is relatively egalitarian, hence they designate them as a terrorist organisation. It's been decades since they stopped using political violence, IIRC they did before Hamas began using it.
Elections aren't often held in Palestine, so they can't often be anything at all. Abbas knows he'd be ousted if he called elections, so he won't. His buddies in Israel and the US also prefer that he stays in power, so they won't pressure him to call for elections either.
As for aid, it goes through Israel rather than the PA. Same goes for money, the palestinians aren't allowed to have their own currency or financial system. Israel enjoys having the ability to refuse to pay out taxes they collect, for example.
Israel routinely cuts water supply to the Gaza strip, and in the West Bank it forbids palestinians to collect rain water through a rather nasty bureaucratic regulation while at the same time destroying or stealing wells. Under such conditions it's somewhat reasonable to use infrastructure to try to get rid of the occupier, don't you think? What would you do?
> Under such conditions it's somewhat reasonable to use infrastructure to try to get rid of the occupier, don't you think? What would you do?
Probably recognize that 30 years of violent resistance only ever ends up harming me more, and strive to elect leaders that will opt for trying a truly peaceful approach. Instead of starting wars every few years with a far more powerful neighboring country, maybe... not starting such wars is a better idea.
Abbas refuses to call elections and Hamas was trying to get in the PLO.
Hamas drove out the israelis from the Gaza strip, that's generally considered a success among palestinians and something many palestinians in the West Bank and Jerusalem wishes they had too.
When another country occupies yours, then it's not you that's starting a war when you attack them.
For the sake of other people who might run across your comments, the West Bank that Israel now occupies was captured during the Six-Day war from Jordan, who had previously illegally annexed it.
> that's generally considered a success among palestinians
Success narratives exist on both sides. From an Israeli perspective, peace talks with the Palestinians never went anywhere (unlike with Egypt, btw) - yet, whenever Israel went to war, it won. So it's not hard to understand why the mainstream Israeli stance has increasingly hardened. I fundamentally disagree with this, I think peace should be attempted over and over again until it works, but if you're going to apply realpolitik thinking to the Palestinian side, you ought to do the same for the Israelis.
- dealt with harshly -> torture and summary executions. Tied with a rope to a car and dragged through the streets. Thrown from a rooftop of a tall building. That sort of stuff.
- "Suspected collaboration with the occupier" -> being associated with the Fatah, PA, or just not doing what Hamas orders you to do in any civil or other matter. Basically any person that crosses Hamas members in any way. Think Mexican drug cartels hanging journalists from bridges and you won't be far off.
- occupation -> the existence of the state of Israel in any borders. occupier -> Israel.
- Gaza's occupation -> The blockade Israel imposed after Hamas took over Gaza by force and started launching attacks at Israel from Gaza. Please ignore the border with Egypt or Egypt's control over the Egyptian half of Rafah. Egypt doesn't exist. Waiting for the Muslim Brotherhood to take over there but in the meantime let's support ISIS in Sinai since an enemies enemy is my friend.
- "Israel routinely cuts water supply to the Gaza strip" -> Israel supplies water, food, electricity to what is essentially an enemy state that attacks it continuously. Gaza has its own power station, it has a desalination plant, it has wells, and it can also get all these things from Egypt or use the international aid money it's getting towards becoming more independent. Nah- let's dig tunnels and build rockets. Think Ukraine supplying Russia with water, food and electricity. Or South Korea supplying North Korea.
You are right that Hamas would win an election. Even more so after Oct 7th. The Pro-Palestinian crowd does its best to pretend it ain't so. They artificially separate Hamas, who the Palestinians want to represent them, from the Palestinians. Palestinians are peace loving people that need to be protected at all costs and the Hamas are people from another planet that just happened to have landed in the midst. There hasn't been an elections since 2006 so Hamas is not the legitimate government of Gaza and so we can't treat the Gazans as a side to this war. Even Israel says the same thing, our war is not with the "Palestinians" our war is with Hamas.
Yeah, sure. What would you expect? Israel tortures, maims and kills to pressure palestinians, how would you compete with that if you were a politician in the Gaza strip? At least there's a kind of brutality forced upon them that explains it, unlike US allies in the region, like the house of Saud, that doesn't have to publicly execute people but does anyway. Who, by the way, are ambigous about the palestinian issue because they suspect that Hamas is too egalitarian, too democratic, to warrant their support.
If they were that bloodthirsty, how come they haven't killed more in their own population? How come they weren't ousted by the local population?
Israel controls the means for sustaining life in the Gaza strip and uses that power arbitrarily, that's occupation. If you treat a couple of million people that way they will for sure try to hurt you badly. And it's not weird that they do, it's not surprising or savage, it's rather very reasonable to do. You would too.
Who are you quoting? Sinwar is popular because he successfully organises resistance towards the occupation and apparently doesn't do it to enrich himself.
Russia had reasons, but I don't think they were particularly good reasons or enough to warrant the invasion.
What means do you think would be justified for Ukranian resistance? Would launching rockets at civilian quarters in Russia be OK? Or stabbing ordinary Russians in public transport? Is shooting at cars indiscriminately OK? At what point you think the western countries would consider withdrawing their support?
You have an interesting opinion of "successful resistance". What happens in the West Bank and Gaza is really difficult to call "success" for Palestinians. Can you elaborate what you meant with "successful"?
Happy to hear you don’t think rape and hostage taking are legitimate resistance. To follow up on this point – you believe Hamas didn’t do that? Or how do you simultaneously call them "charity resistance org" and disapprove of the extreme violence?
Not sure what you're getting at. Contemporary stabbings in Jerusalem and the West Bank are mainly aimed at soldiers, same goes for shootings. There are exceptions, but doesn't seem very common.
I'm not following the conflict in Ukraine as closely but aren't there militia factions there attacking into Russia?
Hamas has been relatively successful, more successful than their competitors. What success in some universal sense would look like, I don't know. Currently Israel has pretty big problems though so it seems kinda successful in some general sense?
What do you mean by "extreme violence"? Reading this I get flashbacks to photos of people run over by israeli tanks and the kid who in november last year filmed himself when experiencing a lack of drones for the first time, so I think that's the kind of violence that has made the strongest impression on me from the last six months or so. Impulsively throwing handgrenades at people in a shelter is gruesome, but it lacks the calculation and sadism of running someone over with a tank and turning them into mush, or forcing kids to grow up under the constant hum of weaponised drones.
As far as hostage taking and 'legitimacy', it's hard to come up with alternatives. Israel routinely takes palestinian kids off the street in occupied territories and put them in military detention centers, commonly abuses or tortures them, and keeps prisoners indefinitely on weak or non-existent grounds. To force Israel to release prisoners through other means than hostage exchange would likely require quite a bit more violence, and I'm not so sure that is preferable.
I didn't call Hamas a charity organisation, I mentioned that they also do social and charity work. Which they do, and that's how they started.
It's very common in the area to hand out sweets to other people.
Where can I read about the toddler case and "slashed throats of elderly"? It's somewhat understandable though, almost every palestinian knows about a toddler killed by the occupation, a grandparent killed by the occupation, a family deprived of their home and land on some flimsy justification, and so on. That some of them lash out at anyone should be expected, people tend to become abusive from abuse.
Yes, some palestinians see the conscription as something that makes every israeli guilty in the occupation. Some israeli jewish leftists have a similar view, they see israelis that don't engage themselves politically against the occupation as part of it. Still, as far as I can gather, most of the militant activity in the West Bank and Jerusalem seems to be aimed at soldiers in service at the moment. In Israel there has been some attacks with cars, where at least one, I think in Haifa, hurt civilians.
Still, nothing that compares to deliberately and proudly starving a couple of million people.
Controlling the borders, airspace, communications, finances and so on amounts to occupation.
Israel does not have "equal civil rights for every citizen". It's not just about palestinians being discriminated against, but also LGBTQ-persons and women. You know that Israel does not allow same-sex marriages, right? If you're gay and want to get married you have to travel abroad. A lot of things are done in religious courts, and some of them have weird powers, like being able to decide that a dead soldier's sperm can be harvested.
It's not "a few". I didn't mention carpet bombing. Israel kills about 75-200 palestinians in the Gaza strip per day over the last month or two, most in bombings of people who are sleeping in their homes with their families. Many while they are out looking for food, or helping with food distribution. Israel is habitually deceptive or straight out lies about its behaviour in the Gaza strip.
If sensible is an ideal to you, how do you explain Israel's incessant attempts to escalate against much stronger foes than the palestinian militias? The IDF is already in trouble against people in flipflops carrying RPG:s, why are they seeking conflict with forces that are equipped with targeted munitions, air force and the like? Why are they killing UNIFIL personnel? Is it sensible to kill US citizens in the Gaza strip?
And if "media and others" bother you, shut them out? I see some embarrassing haiku headlines in passive voice from NYT sometimes, but it isn't more than I can handle because I keep my exposure to bourgeois and imperial mass media to a minimum. I think Eylon Levy got fired and started his own media bureau, maybe you could watch only that for a while and then pick some of his favourite tropes and try to fact check them for a bit of 'reality check'?
> Georgia, the Baltic states, and Ukraine have all been drafted into an American campaign to surround Russia
None of this is true. The US government has for decades preferred to accomodate Russia at the expense of the security of their neighbors and chose to ignore imperialistic ambitions of Russia until the position became untenable. Even now, when Russia has launched the largest war in Europe since Hitler invaded Poland, the US is withholding military aid out of misguided hope that Putin will take the exit ramp that the Americans are offering. But Russia does not have a Khrushchev, instead they have a Hitler-like debiloid who keeps doubling down on a mistake of historic proportions.
If Russia became a normal functional European country instead of being an expansionist dictatorship, my country wouldn't even need a military because Russia is the sole reason why that exists at all. The fact that everyone bordering Russia are arming up is the result of Russian abusive behavior towards its neighbors in the past and in the present. If you go around looting homes, then don't get offended when people start setting up fences and security cameras - or as you'd call it, a vast anglo-american conspiracy to encircle honest thieves.
> Remember the Cuban missile crisis? How the US panicked over Russian presence in Cuba? There's an analogy here.
There is no analogy here. Europe had been rapidly and unilaterally demilitarizing until 2014, whereas Russia moved nuclear weapons nearer and nearer to Europe, recently installing them into the unstable dictatorship in Belarus. Russia just announced that they will be forming two new armies, larger than the ground forces of UK, France, Germany, Spain, Italy, Poland and many other European countries COMBINED. Instead of responding to a threat (as their propaganda tries to depict), Russia is exploiting the historic weakness of European countries that have tried to build mutually beneficial relations with Russia over the past few decades instead of maintaining Cold War confrontation.
A much better analogy are the naive attempts to seek peace with Hitler in 1938 and 1939, believing that surely Hitler will stop at Poland, and the incredible discussions at the time whether it's ethical to bomb military infrastructure in Germany in response to the invasion of Poland or if the risk of damage to private property is be too large. Kicking the can down the road meant that four years later, allied air forces were carpet bombing German cities day and night without any disregard for such trivialities. Is that what you want, B-52s over Moscow?
European countries that had such relations with Russia now have them with Azerbaijan instead, as a proxy. Could for example look at trade in automobiles, or fossil gas.
Are you suggesting that palestinian militants routinely use sexual abuse?
If so, how come the reports from released hostages are so vague about it? Why would any media give credence to stories from Zaka-affiliated individuals if there were decent primary sources that didn't have financial incentives to make stuff up?
And if you have a problem with sexualised abuse, I take it you react negatively to the IDF undressing people and forcing them to participate in propaganda videos or parading them in humiliating and degrading ways?
There is an alternative, sure, prepare for a year and then invade Israel. Which they did, after decades of "mowing the lawn" as the israelis call it.
The terror organisation classification of Hamas isn't as much about the political party or its affiliated militia as manufactured consent to relations with Israel and traditions among colonial states. The modern 'West' usually calls its enemies terrorist, like it did during the Mau Mau uprising. This is why so few states agree with this classification.
You don't have to like Hamas but compared to the PA they're not very corrupt, and since they stopped doing suicide bombings they've been quite successful as a resistance movement. Since several years back they've also been quite good at unifying and coordinating the political parties and militias on the Gaza strip in preparation for and during periods of israeli military aggression, including with their main competitor in Palestinian Islamic Jihad, socialists from PFLP/DFLP/Fatah movement, Iran's Mujahideen movement and so on.
Hamas isn't just a political party with a militia, it's also a charity movement. To most people it seems weird to call people terrorists because they take care of their vulnerable neighbours and run soup kitchens and the like.