Just want to say how thankful I am that this place exists for discussion about crises like what’s going on.
People here can have nuanced takes where they disagree, because they’re not raging dickheads.
On the other site I greatly value Yuv’s perspective, and he’s handling whoever this Jake character is with way more grace than I would be, if I was huddled in a bomb shelter with my phone.
I’m willing to be convinced I’m wrong, but man does it seem like everyone involved is wrong.
I feel like it’s almost fundamentally impossible to solve in a just way. I’m not historian but seems like for history of humanity groups of people fight for control of land and whoever wins gets control of the land. Which is obviously a terrible way of doing things but that is the precedent so hoping humans to cook up a new way to settle things feels a little hopeless when you see what’s going on with Ukraine/etc. Like ultimately all the diplomacy/etc just still boils down to who able to win a fight.
Noted Woke Mind Virus infectees the … (squints at notes) Russians
Actual victims are fake victims. The powerful are the real victims if the oppressed lash out against the status quo.
Doesn’t sOrOs fund BLM? Clearly makes sense he’d fund Hamas too!
Don’t go trying to apply logic to the web of galaxy brain conspiracy theories.
The Israeli/Palestinian situation is incredibly complex, however in this particular conflict it looks like Hamas are the clear bad guys. They’re committing atrocities that cannot be whatabouted.
The “whatabout” is that it seems basically certain that the IDF is going to rack up a Palestinian civilian body count much greater than what Hamas did, even if they do so in a more civilized manner, with drones, bombs, artillery, and missiles rather than with hostage taking and small arms. The sad thing is that I’m not sure the Palestinians have any better options than committing atrocities (not that those will accomplish anything positive). Yuv over on UP was like, oh, they should do boycotts. There is no one they can trade with other than the Israelis, so, uh, sure? I guess they can boycott their one trade partner and thus starve themselves to death? Maybe a mandatory hunger strike on the populace will magically win the sympathy of the world before they all die off?
I don’t know what we can expect the average Gaza resident to do. Like, if they sit tight and behave, they’re in a de facto prison forever. If they lash out violently, they face a 10-fold retaliation with no hope of looking like the victims to anyone with any power to rein Israel in. And their options for nonviolent resistance are, I mean, shit, I got nothing better than hunger strikes and begging for international intervention that is unlikely to come on their behalf. So is it really all that surprising that some guys stuck here choose to go out in a violent blaze of imagined glory rather than be stuck in a prison with no hope for themselves or their children or their grandchildren?
Where does Hamas fall on the scale between “repressive dictatorship” and “chosen representatives of Palestinians in Gaza”? It certainly doesn’t help their situation to have a terrorist organization for a government.
I’m not sure what difference it makes? Granted, it’d be morally convenient to absolve the average Gazan from any culpability for what their government does, but at the same time, what government could they elect that would help their station? Of course they are angry, and of course they see little hope. Why should we not expect at least some of them to lash out violently, or elect leaders that make that happen?
Well, literally any government would be more helpful to their cause than one that sends soldiers to slaughter civilians at a music festival.
I feel like this is a bit of an inversion of the general conversation we had around Ukraine, where the Mearsheimer argument was “why should we not expect Russia to react like this?” and every sane person in the world was like “shut the fuck up, John” (which, to be clear, I’m not saying to you now). And the argument there wasn’t that John was wrong necessarily, but rather that when you’re talking about launching a war to inflict tremendous human suffering…who cares?
Certainly the power dynamics are different here, and certainly we’re (a lot) more sympathetic to Palestinians than Putin, but I feel like the same principle applies: you might expect that, but so what? Plus the fact that Israel is going to respond to this with a heftier-than-usual dose of war crimes that the rest of world is going to turn a blind eye to…it’s unconscionable.
I’m curious what you think about this, I’m having a hard time comprehending the level of barbarism here (both what Hamas put on display, and the conditions Israel subjects millions of people to live under in Gaza).
Russia is a sovereign state that has enough natural resources and land to provide for its citizens as-is, and, at least before inflicting violence on other states, it could freely trade with other people for other goods. Russia owns its own sea ports, and it owns its air space.
Gaza has no such freedom. It can hardly provide the basics for its own citizens by itself, and it is wholly dependent on Israel for anything else.
Russia wants to bandy about claims that its claim on Ukraine is necessary for its own survival, which is obviously bullshit. Gaza is totally subjugated by Israel, and it does actually need, at the very least, massive change to the status quo for its citizens to have a basic quality of life. If, minimally, Gaza controlled its own airspace and sea ports, it could trade freely with other countries, and its citizens were free to go to other countries, sure, we could treat it as a country lashing out violently at another country, but as of right now, it’s by no means a country. It’s a prison. It’s a prison that people get born into and are incarcerated into based on no crime of their own, without trial, and in perpetuity.
How much pressure are you willing to put on Israel here? Because it’s not just them locking gaza down I think.
Massacring a music festival full of teenagers and kidnapping the elderly off the street is never justified justifiable, or explainable.
Russia is to the Luhansk/Donetsk Russian speaking peoples as Iran is to Hamas in this scenario. This is a proxy war with Iran because Israel was getting too cozy with Saudi Arabia. This may end up in a shooting war with Iran.
Plenty of blame to go around for the general mess. The state sponsors of Hamas/Hezbollah, the hard right Israelis, the settler movement, the so called more friendly oil states that are happy to let the Palestinians rot instead of funding improved standard of living. The states that support hard right Israel (looking at you USA).
But what was done is no different than any other terrorist act. Of course it would be great if the response was precise but lolIraq and lolAdghanistan would like a word. And the US at least attempted to be discerning.
Just a fucking mess with bad actors all over the place.
Interestingly the target selection there is itself a sign of bad faith on the part of Hamas. If they had attacked some big right wing settler social event it would seem different to all of us I think. Instead they took the lowest hanging fruit there is, a soft target full of secular people who probably would have voted to end all of this bullshit ages ago if the fanatics didn’t have 116 kids per family.
Does anyone on the face of the planet think carrying out a full scale massacre at a music festival is going to push the Israeli’s toward peace? No of course not the more secular crowd isn’t going to forget this for at least a decade. This will be used to justify making things even worse in Gaza, which not coincidentally helps Hamas politically.
Huge mess. Huge. And the guy who probably really caused this to happen, Putin, isn’t going to get what he wants out of it either. The US has more than enough weapons to supply Israel and Ukraine at the same time. When will people stop underestimating the USA’s ability to produce weapons? Absolutely crazy to me that’s still happening 78 years after WW2 ended.
It is definitely the product we are best at making.