Reminder

Since October it's been a really easy concept to grasp. Hamas is a terrorist group that murdered and kidnapped a bunch (don't know the exact number something around 200+) of Israeli civilians, the IDF responded in a predictably overzealous way and have now killed somewhere in the neighborhood of 20,000 civilians in Palestine. Neither Hamas nor the IDF have a moral high ground here. They both need to stop killing civilians. Super easy.

Neither Hamas nor the IDF have a moral high ground here. They both need to stop killing civilians.
The one thing both have in common is refusal to take peace talks seriously. Hamas refuses to let go of their hostages, and Israel continues their bombing campaign against Hamas.
Its a difficult situation because these are the "adults" in the room. The civilians involved have little power at all.
- Hamas did let some hostages go fwiw.
  Both Hamas and the Israeli government do not want peace, though. They're on the same side in that. (Hence Israel sending cash and stuff to keep Hamas in power.)
  
  Israel sending cash…to keep Hamas in power
  Oh no…
  NYT article (no paywall)
  That’s… bad.
  Vetted one of the Times’ claims too: the Israeli press decrying the Qatari payments in 2014.
  
  It's pretty fucking bad.
  The Israeli government directly aided the terrorist attack that killed over 1000 people. They're not protecting their citizens. Leveling Gaza doesn't protect shit. They're not changing their policies. They are a disaster both for the Israeli and Palestinian people.
  
  Meanwhile Israel has bombed known locations of hostages AND shot a few of them.
- Hell, if anything, hamas is more interested in releasing the hostages than Israel is. They've let a few go, meanwhile the idf says "never forget" while turning Gaza into a crater. They don't give a flying fuck about the hostages.
  
  Hell, if anything, hamas is more interested in releasing the hostages than Israel is.
  What the fuck? Hamas fucking took those hostages to begin with and started this mess.
  There's a comprehensive peace plan proposed by Egypt and Qatar. When Hamas steps up to the table and accepts the peace deal, then maybe you'd have grounds to stand on. But for now, Hamas refuses to give up the hostages, and continues to fight.
  
  They took hostages for a reason, ostensibly to exchange them for something. Hamas doesn't want peace though, so why would they care about a peace plan? Also, as mentioned before, they have released a few already.
  
  They took hostages for a reason, ostensibly to exchange them for something.
  Yeah. Human shields. And they're still using them as human shields. Its like terrorist tactics 101 here.
  
  "terrorist" is loaded language
  
  Fine
  Hamas fights using plain clothes, blending in with the civilian population and uses irregular and dishonorable tactics, like building military bases inside or under Hospitals to use as a human shield.
  Or like how most people would call it, they're fucking terrorists.
  If you want a more precise legal terms, perhaps violating Geniva conventions, irregular, human shields, asymmetric. These are people who pretend to be civilians while fighting, while kidnapping civilians to use as shields.
  
  firing on a hospital is indefensible.
  
  does Israel recognize a Palestinian state? it seems like they own Gaza when they want to treat them like subjects, and they don't when they want to treat them like an opposing state.
  
  Hamas is a political party. does likud wear plain clothes?
- Israel tried peace talks for over 60 years. When one side's non-negotiable is "you all have a to die" it's hard to secure lasting peace.
  
  People don't seem to understand that the Genocide / Nazi argument plays against Hamas, lol.
  But yeah, it's a tough situation. I'd argue that Bibi's government was pretty shit at pursuing peace though.
  But that's outside the scope of the conflict today. Almost everything has to do with Oct 7th. The good news is that Egypt and Qatar want a peace to work, and as Muslim countries they're going to be Muslim-favored / more likely to have a lasting effect in the region (rather than say, a US brokered peace deal).
  So a path to peace ... Or at least a ceasefire in this current flareup in hostilities... still exists. There is reason for hope.
  
  But yeah, it's a tough situation. I'd argue that Bibi's government was pretty shit at pursuing peace though.
  Totally. He's massively implicated in propping up Hamas and undermining support for the non-militant Palestinian Authority in the West Bank. This is well-known in Israel at this point, and one reason for the coming reckoning he's going to face at the ballot box.
  
  This is not accepted fact anywhere but conspiracy land, there are articles saying that Israel have been far too soft on Hamas by letting aid through, limiting the effectiveness of bombing missions to limit civilian casualties, and ending prior conflicts before totally destroying them. These are all things which the international community loudly calls for, you can't be pro Palestine and say that Israel is responsible for Hamas because they have ceasefires and allow aid deliveries - you're using hardline arguments to call for a soft line, it doesn't make sense
Your number is dangerously misleading.
According to Hamas, 20,000 Palestinians have been killed. As a matter of methodology, they do not distinguish between Hamas terrorists and civilians. It also does not distinguish between those killed by Israel and those killed by Hamas/Palestinian Islamic Jihad, whether through guns or misfired rockets. The IDF claims to have killed at minimum 8,000 Hamas terrorists, which would immediately bring the total of civilian dead down to 12,000.
Haaretz explains this:
The Hamas-run Health Ministry in Gaza regularly issues statistics on the dead and wounded in the Strip. As of Sunday, the tally stands at 20,424 deaths. The ministry does not differentiate between armed men and civilians, nor does it denote the people killed by Israeli strikes and those felled by errant rockets fired by Hamas and other Palestinian factions.
This time the Israeli reprisal has been far greater. "The fundamental difference in this war is that almost zero organizations in Gaza are reporting on the number of casualties, save for the Palestinian Health Ministry, which is controlled by Hamas – and the Health Ministry is working with the Media Ministry," Khoury says.
According to the Israeli military, 10 to 12 percent of the 10,000-plus rockets fired at Israel have actually landed in Gaza. According to Prof. Kobi Michael, a senior researcher at Israel's Institute of National Security Studies and the Misgav Institute for National Security and Zionist Strategy, "I would say that there is a significant number of casualties ... caused by failed rockets from Hamas and Islamic Jihad."
**Michael, as well as others relying on the Israeli military numbers, put the number of Hamas members killed at over 8,000. If Hamas' total numbers are used, this would put the civilian toll at about 60 percent. When asked how it has determined the number of Hamas militants among the dead, the IDF Spokesperson's Unit declined to comment. **
If that's even close to the correct percentage, then it's actually a remarkable achievement by the Israeli military to keep the proportion of civilian deaths so low.
According to the United Nations on 25 May 2022, on average 90% of deaths in war are civilians. If the Israeli military has managed to keep it down to 60%, as the analysts above suggest, then actually they're doing a very good job.

Judaism =/= the Israeli government

I'd make this into a T-shirt but the amount of people that have no idea what ≠ means is too damn high.

Genuine question, would it be appropriate to say that the respective religions at play are not actually the core of the conflict? It seems like the only religious motivation would be concerning Jerusalem and not the entirety of the contested land.

On broad analysis, it seems similar to how the conflict between Irish Catholics and Protestants isn't really religious, more just shorthand for idealogical differences between the two groups. Is that an apt comparison, or does religion play a more active role in this conflict?

No. I think it's about Palestinians being imprisoned and dispossessed and robbed of their rights on their own land
The religious aspect is used to make it seem more complicated than it is. There is some, but the more I learn about it, the more the central issues reveal themselves to be about land and resources than anything else.
Israel is a secular democracy with a minority political wing motivated by religious beliefs, so it's fair to say Jewish belief is not at the core of the conflict for them. Muslim states such as Egypt, Jordan, and UAE have established peaceful relations with Israel, so it's fair to say that Israel is willing to make peace with Muslim nations and Muslim nations are not motivated to religiously attack Israel.
No, NI is not a great analogy. There are some superficial similarities, but the differences are significant enough such that analogies can only be made at the risk of potentially misunderstanding one or both of the conflicts.

That's great until you encounter all the people condemning Israel, then committing hate crimes against the local Jews. The people that are pro Palestinians and cheer on Hamas. There are also plenty of people that condemn Hamas and support Israel in the same breath.

None of those people are the vocal minority. They're the majority of supporters of these causes.

No they're not. Most of the west was supporting Israel in defending against Hamas up until they started committing war crimes and committing Genocide. It's no more complex than that

Zionism = the belief that the Jewish people have the right of self-determination in the form of the state of Israel in which their national aspirations

Anti-zionism = the belief that the Jewish people, uniquely among all the peoples of the world, have no right of self-determination or a state in which their national aspirations can be pursued.

Can you see why that's antisemitic?

Israel is, besides all that, already established. Zionism was completed. It's not going anywhere.

Anti-zionism = the belief that the Jewish people, uniquely among all the peoples of the world, have no right of self-determination or a state in which their national aspirations can be pursued.
How is that "unique?" I don't think white nationalists or Christian nationalists have a right to their own state either. I don't think Israel has the right to be the apartheid state it currently is.
Anti-zionism = the belief that the Jewish people, uniquely among all the peoples of the world, have no right of self-determination or a state in which their national aspirations can be pursued.
I don't believe in rights at all. I believe the existence of nation states is an abhorration. but neither of those are why you are wrong.
antizionism is the belief that the Jewish people are part of a diaspora, and the creation of an Israeli state undermines that culture in addition to necessitating mass killing that is indistinguishable from genocide. antizionism simply opposes zionism, and makes no claims about denying rights to anyone.
- I believe the existence of nation states is an abhorration.
  But it's only when the Jews claim the same right as every other people that you have a problem.
  Think about that for a minute.
  antizionism is the belief that the Jewish people are part of a diaspora, and the creation of an Israeli state undermines that culture in addition to necessitating mass killing that is indistinguishable from genocide. antizionism simply opposes zionism, and makes no claims about denying rights to anyone.
  This isn't what Anti-Zionism is. It might be what you mean by it, but it isn't Anti-Zionism. Partly because Zionism – and the establishment of an Israeli state – does not, and never has, necessitated mass killing.
  It does in fact make claims about rights – it specifically selects out Jews as the only people who are not entitled to self-determination and the aspiration to nationhood in a state of their own and in their homeland to which they are indigenous.
  
  It does in fact make claims about rights – it specifically selects out Jews as the only people who are not entitled to self-determination
  is that what you tell the antizionist Jews?
  
  A tiny, tiny proportion of Jews who take that view for specific theological reasons. You don't get to weaponise them in your fight against the Jewish state by acting like they're representative.
  
  You don’t get to weaponise them in your fight ... by acting like they’re representative.
  holy fuck imagine writing all these words in this order and not realising what you're doing.
  
  the establishment of an Israeli state – does not, and never has, necessitated mass killing.
  so they're just doing it for funsies.
  
  it’s only when the Jews claim the same right as every other people that you have a problem.
  wrong
  
  Show me where all the white people are displacing and killing others so they can create their perfect ethno-state. Show me where black people are doing that too. While we are at it, let's throw in every other ethnicity on the planet and see where their rightful ethnostates are.
The problem is that the term 'Zionism' has had scope creep.
Now it also includes a political movement in Israel that endorses the idea of Israel's expansion and sees the Palestinian neighbors as occupying land to be.
So when many people say that they are "anti-Zionist" they aren't necessarily saying that they don't think Israel has a right to exist at all, but that they don't think it has a right to have expanded and to effectively annex its neighbors (a 2023 theme that's not very favorable to Israel with whom it shares the association). Or additionally that it doesn't have a right to exist by committing war crimes and human rights violations to make that happen (another association with the same).
Some are saying that it doesn't have a right to exist at all. And I agree in that instance it is pretty anti-Semetic. But Zionist expansion attitudes are also technically anti-Semetic given that both Israelis and Palestinians are Semetic populations, and both can trace their ancestry to the same exact ancestral indigenous Canaanite populations.
The problem is that telling which attitude of "anti-Zionism" is which just from the term "anti-Zionist" has become impossible because the term Zionism itself now means a spectrum of things.
- Well then the ball is in the court of the anti-zionists to better educate themselves and understand the words they're using and ideologies they claim to be espousing.
  Let's stick with the definition of Zionism that almost all Jews across the world and in Israel would actually recognise, which is the one I already gave above. And the reality is that almost any Jew interprets "Anti-Zionism" to be "Israel should be destroyed", which is unsurprising when recent opinion polling shows that among 18-24 year old Americans want "Israel to be ended and given to Hamas".
  A big part of the problem is that many, many Palestinians still refuse to accept that Israel is a state which exists, has the right to exist, and is going nowhere. It's part of a very cruel cycle of delusion that their Arab neighbours subject them to. Ezra Klein at the New York Times talks about this at about 7 minutes into this podcast episode – there's this cruel idea perpetuated across Palestinian "refugees" (who are not refugees by any standard definition) that they will one day 'go home'. They won't, and the consequence for those Palestinian 'refugees' of not grasping this has been devastating for them.
  Some are saying that it doesn't have a right to exist at all. And I agree in that instance it is pretty anti-Semetic. But Zionist expansion attitudes are also technically anti-Semetic given that both Israelis and Palestinians are Semetic populations, and both can trace their ancestry to the same exact ancestral indigenous Canaanite populations.
  Antisemitism isn't about hatred of Semites, it's specifically hatred of Jews. It's impossible to be antisemitic to non-Jews. While it's common and understandable, most Jews would also ask that you don't hyphenate antisemitism precisely because it leads people to make that above mistake.
  https://evolve.reconstructingjudaism.org/antisemitism-hyphen/
  However, without intending it, by hyphenating the term “antisemitism,” one implicitly reproduces antisemitic stereotypes. Every time journalists or a social-media users writes “anti-Semitism” (with a hyphen), they signify that there is something called “semitism” or even, “Semitism” with a capital “s.” This way, one justifies a form of pseudo-scientific racial classification, which is the core of antisemitism. To understand this, we have to go back two centuries to the origins of the term.
  Jewish Telegraph Agency: The New York Times updates style guide to ‘antisemitism,’ losing the hyphen
  That said, I of course acknowledge there are ideological extremists in Israel too. Palestinians and Jews are both indigenous to the land – this is the whole problem. It would have been an easy issue to settle long ago if that wasn't the case. Jonathan Freedland has written very movingly on this in The Guardian, and Haaretz have reported on DNA testing verifying the common ancestry of Jews and Palestinians. It's likely that many Palestinains (not all, but many) are the descendents of Jews who later converted to Christianity and, later still, to Islam.
  
  And the reality is that almost any Jew interprets "Anti-Zionism" to be "Israel should be destroyed", which is unsurprising when recent opinion polling shows that among 18-24 year old Americans want "Israel to be ended and given to Hamas".
  It's pretty weird phrasing for a poll where "58 percent said Hamas should be removed from running Gaza, and a plurality, 45 percent, said Israel should be the one to run Gaza if Hamas is removed."
  And if we're talking about polls, less than 30% of Jewish Israelis support a two state solution, so the idea of polls dictating foreign policy might not be the best idea in general for either Israel or Palestine.
  Antisemitism isn't about hatred of Semites, it's specifically hatred of Jews. It's impossible to be antisemitic to non-Jews. While it's common and understandable, most Jews would also ask that you don't hyphenate antisemitism precisely because it leads people to make that above mistake.
  The term has come to be exclusively applied, but at a technical level the word's construction relates to a broader set of people who are closely related to the population it is exclusively applied to. Ironically the desire to avoid hyphenation is to distance Jewish identity from the notion of the ethnic associations of Semites, which really just goes to how inappropriate the term is in general. Prejudice against a Japanese person who converted to Judaism for their religion probably shouldn't be labeled with a term relating to an ethnic origin, but prejudice against an ethnically Jewish atheist is quite appropriately labeled as such. The problem is we're lumping two very different prejudices together (against religion vs against ethnicity).
  Also, as someone who is ethnically Jewish, you might want to check your "almost any Jew interprets" or "most Jews would ask" - it's a bit gross to be Jew-splained to, especially when you certainly don't speak for me or most of my family.
  
  The term has come to be exclusively applied, but at a technical level the word’s construction relates to a broader set of people who are closely related to the population it is exclusively applied to.
  This isn't true. It surprises me that you understand antisemitism so poorly given your own exposure to the risk of it.
  https://www.adl.org/spelling-antisemitism-vs-anti-semitism
  The word “Semitic” was first used by a German historian in 1781 to bind together languages of Middle Eastern origin that have some linguistic similarities. The speakers of those languages, however, do not otherwise have shared heritage or history. There is no such thing as a Semitic peoplehood. Additionally, one could speak a Semitic language and still have anti-Semitic views.
  And in 1879, German journalist Wilhelm Marr coined “Antisemitismus” to mean hatred of the Jewish “race,” adding racial and pseudo-scientific overtones to the animus behind the word. But hatred toward Jews, both today and in the past, goes beyond any false perception of a Jewish race; it is wrapped up in complicated historical, political, religious, and social dynamics.
  
  Many of the peoples who speak Semetic languages are in fact closely related, even if not all of the peoples are by basis of speaking the languages.
  And yes, I agree with the second paragraph that the term is a poor one (for reasons I further laid out in my comment) and should be retired for two different terms regarding bias against Judaism and bias against ethnic Jews.
Either every race has a right to their own ethno-state or none of them do. Reasonable people assert the latter.