That’s what I find insane. It’s like people have lost the ability to say, “what Israel is/was doing was fucked, but also fuck Hamas for mass murder and rape”. People get upset when you say, “I feel bad for the Israelis and Palestinians”. You’re either pro-hamas, anti-israel or pro-israel, anti-hamas. You’re either pro-palestine and anti-israel, or anti-palestine and pro-israel.
You know you can be sympathetic to the civilians on both sides and hate the extremists right?
And when you take that stance, you get called an enlightened centrist. I lack the words to express my frustration. Why is life so cheap to these people? Do they even fathom what’s being lost?
Doesn’t help that people conflate Hamas with Palestinian civilians.
This is why I mostly stay out of that conversation. I don’t know enough about the history or politics or general demographics of the region to have an informed and nuanced perspective. I just know it’s not good
Yeah, it’s one of those polarizing issues, where people on both sides decide that any opinion is binary and you either are all in for Israel or all in for Palestina and you can’t have any empathy or understanding for both sides.
These past days people yelled at me in the fediverse that I chill for Israel’s illegal occuption and also that I chill for Hamas and blame their atrocities on Israel. It’s insane. You can hardly have any other opinion than either Israel all bad or Palestine all bad.
It’s disgusting how many people on both sides support slaughtering civilians of the other side while at the same time saying that the other side are monsters for slaughtering civilians.
Welcome to modern politics, where the range of opinions that a person accepts is so small that it doesn’t overlap with the range that a person on the other side accepts.
If you have an opinion in the middle, everyone will just hate you and having a discussion is impossible.
I blame Western media’s fairness bias. Decades of pushing the idea that every issue has exactly two sides, no more and no less, and those sides are exactly opposite each other and fully equal.
Israel, represented by their hardline zionist governments, on one side. Palestine, represented by the hardline islamists of Hamas, on the other. Nothing exists off that axis, nothing exists between those poles but Enlightened Centrist fence sitters. Fairness.
The Israeli-Palestinian conflict has taken on symbolic importance to many people. In one sense whatever is going on there is not really important for most of the world. It’s some kind of internal conflict/civil war with essentially neighbors beating each other up. But it doesn’t really affect anyone else significantly. And yet everyone has a take on who is right and who is wrong and the thinking is very black and white and absolutist, even if you really don’t know what’s going on or the history behind it or the stakes.
Contrast this with other similar conflicts that most people have no opinion on. Like Ethiopia-Tigray or the ongoing civil war in Myanmar. Most people probably haven’t even heard of this stuff and have no clue as to who is fighting who. Hell, how many people had the barest inkling of who Hamas was a week ago. And now they feel they can take some absolute morally superior position on the issue.
It’s because the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has become symbolic of who you are. The other conflicts I mentioned have no symbolic meaning or importance to people outside those regions. The Ukraine war is another highly symbolic conflict and that’s why it’s often mentioned in the same breath, but the myriad of other ethnic conflicts going on throughout the world are ignored.
The power of symbolic positions is that they strongly ensure group cohesion. You wear these symbols on your chest like a medal or a placard. They superficially resemble personal opinions, but actually they’re badges of membership. Most people don’t actually think hard about these issues or try to understand deeply what’s going on. Instead they are told what to believe and what to say by people that they trust and identify with. Once it’s clear what the “correct” position is, people will wear it with pride.
Deeply thinking about a complex issue is extremely resource intensive and most people just don’t care that much. We also want to clearly delineate things into categories of good/bad. It’s a natural heuristic that feels good. Once you know a thing is “good” you cheer it on. If a thing is “bad” you loudly denounce it with your peers. If a big thing happens, but you don’t know if it’s good or bad then you feel uncomfortable mental dissonance. Big things can’t just be left in a state of psychological limbo. You need to decide if it’s good or bad. And so we do, collectively.
free palestine from hamas
awfully lot of people make the mistake of conflating palestinians with hamas, especially considering that the last elections were out there almost 20 years ago and weren’t allowed since. west bank effectively treats gaza as under rebel government
(same goes for conflating israelis with israeli govt of course. they have mostly-functional elections, but bibi tries hard to undo it with his judiciary fuckery. this might be one reason for intelligence lapse - some army people resigned as a result of these moves and in parallel some seats were stuffed with bibi’s people)
then you have this bit where likud needs hamas because this riles up israeli nationalists, which harass and contain gaza and send out settlers which radicalizes palestinian right wingers, which
this has been going on for considerable time and is deliberate strategy of likud https://www.vox.com/23910085/netanyahu-israel-right-hamas-gaza-war-history https://theintercept.com/2018/02/19/hamas-israel-palestine-conflict/
goes without saying that you can’t really have peaceful palestine with hamas existing but i’d also say that you can’t really have peaceful palestine with likud in power
This is the right take. Likud and Hamas (and the other minor parties/terror groups aligned with those two) deserve each other. The civilians don’t deserve to be caught between them. They’re both fairly popular afaik, but I can’t necessarily blame the people when either side unilaterally disarming would face atrocities.
It’s all so fucked. I can’t even imagine what it’s like to be one of the millions of civilians caught between two groups of shitty opportunists.
Apparently the infants are supposed to take up arms against hamas or they deserve it.
how have you got to this conclusion
I’ve been told disenfranchised Palestinians need to fight Hamas.
you gotta be arguing with somebody else, because i didn’t say any of that
in a hypothetical world where you can mount meaningful opposition to hamas while living in gaza for long enough for it to matter, then yeah
but i don’t deal with counterfactuals and while this would be morally correct, heroic etc i don’t expect any of this
what i have said is that if you want to have lasting peace, you need to have both likud and hamas out of the picture. note: i’m not saying who should do it, or how, or when, or if it even will happen at all. that’s because there’s plenty of people whose plans and incentives don’t include lasting peace and actively work against it, for example likud and hamas. and i’m not predicting anything, i’m just saying that shit’s fucked and whatever happens now, it won’t be pretty
Oh, no. It wasn’t you I was talking to. I was making a joke about another conversation I had.
Sorry that came off so awkwardly.
i don’t sit inside your head, go get some sleep if you think otherwise
I was agreeing with you lol
It’s funny you say that, though. I was getting an infusion when I sent that and sleep is about all my body is interested in now.
Over the last few days I’ve noticed that the Venn diagram “Russia’s recent attacks on Ukraine are good, actually” and “Hamas’ recent attacks on Israel are good, actually” posters is a circle.
Seriously, whenever you find the most extremist pro-atrocity stuff you can search their names and “ukraine” and find the worst Vatnik crap.
If you’re rooting for either team in Israel vs Hamas, I’m giving you the stink-eye.
Trust noncredibledefense to have the proper takes.
Which is true and also sad. When the Ukraine Boogaloo started r/noncredibledefense was one of the best sources there. Which isn’t shining a good light on the rest of that site.
nah this is expected. non-specialist won’t find IR/geopolitics/defense shitsposts funny, or even understand them in more obscure cases
Gotta know what’s right in order to REALLY get it wrong.
aaah yes all these hamas sympathizers… where exactly?
hexbear and lemmygrad are riddled with them, I’ve had to block all comms and almost every user I come across
Acknowledging that Hamas and their atrocities is the obvious outcome of the atrocities of Isreal’s colonialism on the Palestinian people as a whole is being sympathetic to Hamas as far as I can tell. Most people seem to think that Palestine = Hamas.
I found this just now after searching for related topics. This is still going on, my comments were removed and I was banned from two different communities for daring to say both Hamas and Israeli are bad (when the comments I was replying to were only blaming Israeli)
Censorship is very much alive across lemmy, and certain communities definitely seem to allow only one viewpoint to exist.
I made a summary where you can see my comments which were deleted and for which I was banned, and judge for yourself: https://lemmy.world/post/12344087
It’s quite spectactular. I think the politcs on both sides are awful, and I really feel for the civillians who are just trying to live their lives under this bullshit. Both sides need to step up and take responsibility for their major, horrific fuckups and problems; and the west in general needs to take responsibility for kicking people out of their homes to make homes for others… but also both sides just need to stop fucking hurting each other for a minute in order to progress.
“both sides just need to stop fucking hurting each other”
Just apply that one to the other invasion we’ve been talking about of late, that of Russia in Ukraine, and see how well that “both sides” “argument” sounds to you.
If one puts on hold any feelings that lead to one favoring one side over the other (say, because one side is culturally quite close and familiar whilst the other is filled with people who will shout “god is great” whenever shit happens), it’s pretty clear that you can’t apply a “both sides” demand to a situation were one side is the invading one and has overwhelming force, whilst the other side is a far weaker resistance movement living in a tiny slice under siege of a much vaster occupied land.
Your point would make absolute sense if the Palestinians had all of their land (or at least to the Oslo Agreement borders) and still kept sending rockets to and attacking Israel, but that’s not at all the situation that we have now.
Two sides going ‘I’m gonna wipe you off the map!’ ‘No I’m gonna wipe you off the map!’ is not comparable to one side going ‘get back on your side the line’ while the other goes ‘half your country is our side, actually all your country, also we’re not here, also it’s a special police double-secret operation, also nice kids you got there.’
I’m sure we would be saying the exact same about the Ukraine war if Ukrainians were treating the Russians the same way Hamas was treating Israelians.
But they aren’t, so it is a moot point.
You are comparing apples to oranges.
What plan would please both sides?
Blow up the radical zionists and hamas, maybe blood eagle the prime minister of Israel (I am not even gonna try to spell his name) threaten to bomb Tel Aviv if Israel tries anything again. Best idea I have.
So Israel needs to stop colonizing Palestine, as that is the primary cause of death and conflict.
Saying both sides just need to stop when one is constantly the aggressor and the other is responding to that aggression is zero tolerance logic. Blaming the victim is why things have escalated to the point we are at now.
They’re not colonizing Palestine. They’re eradicating it.
And this has been going on for almost 80 years. Anything anyone does, is always, in response to some shitty thing someone did before. But fact of the matter is, Israel benefits more than Palistine to have a conflict. So much that the time when it actually looked like someone could talk both sides to a peaceful conclusion. Israel had him assassinated.
Colonization is the method Isreal is using to eradicate Palestine.
Look. I get that you heard that word somewhere. But everything isn’t colonizing.
Annexing would be a better description to what they’re doing.
Annexing does not imply the use of force, colonizing does.
Crimea circa 2014 disagrees
Russia circa 2024 disagrees because they wanted it to sound voluntary. News went with it because annex is technically correct in the close by/far away context, but not the whole colonialism is always by force context.
When the response to that aggression is also genocide fantasies, sometimes a conflict has no good guys.
That is correct, there are no good guys in ths situation.
Then stop scoffing when people condemn both sides.
It’s been genuinely distressing to see people condoning such horrific behaviour. Thank you for the small dose of sanity.
You’re going to have to live with it for the rest of your life. Taiwan is next.
