alyaza

alyaza, 1 year ago

If they are targeting civilians, then why are they warning them?

aren’t we like, three days removed from the IDF killing obviously surrendering Israeli civilians including a civilian they basically hunted down? the argument that Israel can’t possibly be targeting Palestinian civilians because they “warn” those civilians seems to stand clearly at odds with even the simplest things such as “how they treat their own, surrendering citizens–much less the citizens of a state they don’t want to exist”

What we should do is support Israel in the eradication of Hamas while also getting as much help to the civilians caught in the crossfire as possible and put pressure on Hamas to release the hostages and surrender.

…or we could actually solve the issue here by demanding Israel stop indiscriminately murdering civilians (the actual root of the problem and a thing that even Joe Biden kind of thinks they’re doing now) in a misguided attempt to eradicate a terrorist group when the “shock and awe” strategy has never worked in contemporary warfare and has only guaranteed further resentment and conflict against the state doing the shock and awe!

alyaza, 1 year ago (edited 1 year ago)

When Israel does actually make concessions, like when they pulled all settlers out of Gaza, invited tens of thousands of Palestinians to work for several times the wages they would get in Palestinian territories, they get thanked with more violence in return, showing the Israeli public that extending the hand does nothing to calm this conflict down, so with each terrorist attack, they shift further to the right politically, electing politicians who promise strength and keeping Palestinians at bay instead of compromising. That’s how you get injustices like indefinite detention of Palestinians. Cause and effect.

i mean this is just cringe apologia for Israel, respectfully. “benevolently” stopping your settler colonialism in one part of the Palestinian state you don’t want to exist and almost immediately transitioning into an ongoing permanent blockade of said part of that state after you do is not actual benevolence or a “concession” in any meaningful sense of the word–that should be the baseline expected of Israel. you’re also completely ignoring, in saying this, the much more impactful apartheid under which Palestinians live and the encroachment of settlers in the West Bank that Israel aids, abets, and funds, and has for decades. in pretty much any other circumstance what Israel is doing to Palestine would be widely accepted as a casus belli for war. the implication underlying everything you’re saying here is that the root of the conflict is all Palestinian, but that’s demonstrably incorrect and actively revisionist to a point where i don’t think you’d get most Zionists to agree to it.

alyaza, 1 year ago

So unguided rockets vaguely aimed at cities, suicide bombers (including the use of children and mentally impaired people as suicide bombers), random stabbings, random shootings are “armed struggle” now?

well yes, definitionally, that’s how armed struggle is manifesting in Palestine currently. there’s nothing you or i can do about that.

but that’s a little besides the point, which is that i think you at most selectively take issue with morally depraved military actions. almost everything you’re charging Hamas with has an established and equally immoral analogue in Israel’s strategy toward Palestine to this point. it’s conspicuous to me, for example, that you do not seem to comparably weigh Israel damaging or destroying 70% of Gaza City with Hamas’s unguided rocket attacks–especially given that both have led to large numbers of civilian deaths? like, do you think that 70% of Gaza City harbored Hamas militants, or, alternatively that it was militarily necessary to do that sort of damage even though it was inevitable large numbers of civilians would be caught in the crossfire? that seems like the only way for this to not boil down to vibes of who’s “good” and “bad”

and mind you, i have no issue with saying that Hamas is a depraved terrorist group who should never be in power and that it’s very, very bad for the region that they are now the primary credible opposition to Israel in Palestine. if i had my way, they would be unilaterally eradicated in favor of Fatah who at least seem willing to work toward a peaceful resolution. but i don’t have a magic wand, and Hamas does not exist in a vacuum. the Israeli state is directly complicit in making them that primary credible opposition, both through its military strategy and through selectively looking the other way when money and weapons are funneled through back-channels to the group. even Israeli outlets admit to this sort of arrangement under Netanyahu.

alyaza, 1 year ago

I wonder what happened in between those two things. Have you ever looked up what the blockade was actually blocking?

i think it is a moral imperative (or at least, unambiguously morally justifiable in all cases) to wage armed struggle against a country doing apartheid like Israel, so it’s basically irrelevant for my purposes that Israel’s justification for the blockade is “these people waged armed struggle against me”–the oxygen of that armed struggle as it currently exists is the apartheid. if anything it just demonstrates that Israel’s government so devalues Palestinian life (as is also being demonstrated by their cavalier attitude toward murdering civilians) that it’d rather continue the oppression that’s led many Palestinians to jihadism in the first place than ever reconsider whether that approach will lead to stability in the region and long-term peace

alyaza, 1 year ago

I honestly don’t know,

respectfully: if you yourself have to begin an answer to these questions with “I honestly don’t know,” and then go on to talk about how Israel might be prioritizing its own soldiers over civilian life because even the civilians “have been taught from the crib to kill all Jews,” perhaps you can understand how some of us would conclude that Israel might not care very much about Palestinian civilians and consider them both acceptable collateral damage or actual military targets based on the sheer number of them they’ve killed to this point