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You think you're going to get a better answer by asking that here rather than by reading the Wikipedia article or a media company's summary of what Hamas is?!
As neutrally as possible:
Hamas is an organization in the area of historical Palestine. It has been governing the Gaza Strip, a small piece of land between Israel, Egypt and the Mediterranean Sea, since 2007.
Ever since then, Israel has been blockading the Gaza Strip. Every few years, eg. in 2014 and 2021 and now again, Hamas fires rockets at Israel or otherwise attacks it, to which Israel responds with airstrikes.
Palestinian narrative: Israel is a settler colonial state that has taken away Palestinian land and is imprisoning Gazans in Gaza. Fighting against that is legitimate resistance against oppression. Israel's goal is ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians.
Israeli narrative: Israel is a safe haven for the historically oppressed Jewish people. Arabs have plenty of other countries for themselves. The aim of Hamas is to eliminate the Jewish state and maybe even the Jewish people. Israel is doing its best to avoid civilian casualties in its airstrikes against Gaza.
The actual truth: There is no such thing as the actual truth. There is a reason why this is the most difficult conflict in the world.
inb4 people with strong opinions on both sides tell me their opinion is obviously right and the above is nowhere near neutral
Adding onto this: the conflict has been going on since way earlier than hamas emergence.
Of course. If you read older history, you'll notice that this used to be an Arab-Israeli conflict with Arab states on one side and Israel on the other. They fought wars against each other like in 1948, 1967 and whenever the Yom Kippur War was.
Nowadays Arab states and Israel aren't anywhere near as hostile to each other as they used to be, so the conflict now is mostly between Israel and Palestinian organizations (PLO, Hamas).
Tom Kippur war was 1973
Tom Kippur war was 1973
Ah, yes. When the Arabs tried to dislodge the Israelis on Tom's birthday.
I’ve been had by autocorrect yet again
Lmao tom and jerry
Ideologically Muslim Arab states by in large.
If you go back a bit further, you realize this started with a genocide of Palestinians in 48 by Israeli forces, in the Nakba. And if you go further a bit even, you see that it started with terror campaigns by far-right Zionist militias in British Palestine.
See? I wrote above I would get answers from people with strong opinions insisting that their narrative was the only correct one. Thank you for confirming that.
Prove me wrong lmao. Just saying shit like this is worthless buddy.
Yeah, I really don't understand why people always repeat the line that "Jews and Muslims have been fighting forever". This conflict is a direct result of outside interference, and it seems difficult to understand why things were set up the way they were. I need to do much more reading, because from what I understand, there doesn't seem to be a plausible explanation, other than the powers that be wanted endless conflict. Generations later, you can't ask Israelis to give up everything they've known, but the Palestinians were made to do the same thing, already. It makes sense for Israel to do most of what it does, now, in defense of itself, but it doesn't make sense that we're here, in the first place. Meanwhile, the Palestinians are screwed over and over. There doesn't seem to be a way out of this that doesn't involve one group wiping the other group out. Nobody is going to come along and say "screw ethnic and religious histories, let's just be human and share the land".
The more and more I read and study about it, it does seem the main root of this issue really was anti-semitism. But maybe not in the way most people would think.
When the Zionist movement first started, it had a lot of opponents within the Jewish communities of Europe. Many thought it was “giving up against anti-semitism”. To in essence, accept that Jews and non-Jews really couldn’t live together.
One of the earlier and main proponents of Zionism, Herzl, said that Zionism and anti-semitism had the same goals. To separate the Jews from the non-Jews. He believed Jews were incapable of assimilating, and would always bring hatred to themselves. The dude was pretty much an anti-semite himself… (see evidence).
He is now a hero and considered one of the spiritual founders of Israel…
I really don’t think we’ll ever see peace in the region as long as the Zionist ideology has a stronghold there. It’s a racist, supremacists, chauvinist ideology.
The only way to peace is for a state to exist in the region for all peoples, religions and cultures to live together in peace and equality.
I know it might not seem like it from the mainstream media, but that really is what the vast majority of Palestinians want too.
You can ask anyone who lived there, and worked or lived among them. They are FAR more progressive and peaceful than they should be. Any other people would’ve been turned into much harsher and more bigoted angry people. But they are just sad. And it’s so fucking sad. To think that we will be witness to an entire people maybe stopping to exist. Just for the crime of existing.
And if you go further just a tiny bit you will see that the jews were being genocided all over the world in WW2 and if you go further even more you will see that jews were being targeted by Muslims for religious reasons and if you go further....
We get it. Your world starts way after ww2 so you can have an excuse for supporting antisemitism and in general religious wars.
This conflict started way before 1920.Naaaah my friend. You are actually getting things backwards.
Ottoman Palestine and British Palestine both had Arab Muslims and Arab Jews living there. And they lived in peace. In fact, Jews and Muslims lived in peace for most of their histories in Iraq, Syria, Palestine etc.
The British, with their divide and conquer tactics, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, started to put Jews, Muslims, Christians, Hindus, Sikh, all an any religious or ethnic groups against each other.
There was no conflicts between Muslims and Jews in Palestine before the British allowed the European Zionists to colonise it, armed and trained their right-wing militias and allowed them to form a government (the only dual colonial government in British history). The Zionist militias attacked and terrorised Palestinians (Muslims, Christians and even Arab Jews) under British oversight for decades before WW2.
There was mass migration of Jews from Europe to British Palestine (and other places) right before, during and after WW2 (understandably of course). This increased tensions, as Palestinians already felt they were being slowly colonised.
But only when the British officially left Palestine, and the Zionists declared the State of Israel that true violence began. There was a literal genocide of the Palestinians by the Zionists.
70% of all Palestinian villages and cities were destroyed. More than half of the people were expelled from the land, with a good portion also being killed, which is ethnic cleansing.
This is the start of the conflict.
Before it was the prelude. And now we live the epilogue.
Israel always intended on genociding the Palestinians, since the state was first created. It was in fact, built on top of genocide.
Yeah, it is infuriating that this history is being down voted. In fact, the secular Plastinian national movements (PLO and its constituent organizations) considered Plastinian Jews (ie, indigenous Jews living in the British Mandate prior to 1948) to be Palestinians.
The truth is infuriating if all you live by is ideology spoon-fed to you by the mainstream media. And it’s not even their fault. The system really is set up for the vast majority of people to fall into this brain melting rot.
But there is hope. I do believe this event is radicalizing people and making them question things a lot more than most others before…
No matter what "narrative" you seek to believe, the fact is that Hamas hasn't been firing every once in awhile - They have been firing rockets and mortars regularly. Sometimes daily. You can see a list here and more info here
These attacks almost exclusively target civilians. more than 20,000 rockets in the past 20 years.
Additionally, airborne arson attacks are carried out..
edit:fixed links
You fucked up your links by putting bangs in front of them. Don't put bangs in front of your links. That's for embedding images
Thanks, just started using boost and I used it's link function. either I don't know what I'm doing (probably), or it's a big.
Point taken. The point was mainly that the escalations (to which Israel responds with airstrikes or invasions) happen every few years. Most of the time, people in other parts of the world don't really hear about what's going on there in the media. The times when we do are probably because such an escalation happens (e.g. now).
Your links don't work for me by the way, I can see in the source code what you meant to link to, but they don't display as links for me.
Thanks, fixed the links.
What most people don't realize is how much this situation is constant. these escalations are only peaks in an ongoing conflict.
Imagine if Germany launched V2 rockets at Britain for so long the British had built automated defenses to shoot them down.
Largely ineffective rocket attacks. See these charts for what near daily rocket attacks and near daily snipers, police beatings, etc, do for relative casualties between Israeli and Palestinian peoples.
Bravo. This is the right answer.
It's used to put nails in
TLDR
The Holocaust cannot possibly be true because "enlightened centrists" cannot handle truth and simply declares "there is no such thing as the actual truth."
The funny thing about this comment is that it tells me nothing about whether you are sympathetic to Israel or to the Palestinians, they might both write exactly this and think they've completely destroyed me.
I looked into your comment history and see you're pro-Palestinian, but I would not have been able to guess this just from this comment.
that it tells me nothing about whether you are sympathetic to Israel or to the Palestinians
Why should that matter to a centrist?
After all... the whole reason centrists love this whole "there is no truth" trope is because it's one of the bitterly few ways to justify clinging to whichever false narrative is least threatening to the status quo.
So why should you care?
The aim of Hamas is to eliminate the Jewish state and maybe even the Jewish people.
Should be in the "actual truth" section, as this was confirmed by hamas many times.
Some people in hamas and we should add that multiple Israeli government members have called for genocide of Palestinians as well dive the raid and well well before.
You can't really mention one without the other.
It's written as hamas' goal in their documents.
multiple Israeli government members have called for genocide of Palestinians
There are no signs of it being a real vector of their policy because otherwise they would act unprovoked upon it. When did that happen at all?
Sure, and there's good reason to believe they weren't actually elected.
Bro they've killed 3000 plus kids in less than a month, of genocide isn't their intent it is certainly the inevitable outcome. When did Israel act unprovoked? Like at least once a week for 30 years, pay attention.
Sure, and there's good reason to believe they weren't actually elected.
They operate Gaza and all the humanitarian aid. If someone has power over Gaza it's them. And if not, then there is no one to talk to.
Bro they've killed 3000 plus kids in less than a month
3000 Palestinians? These numbers come from hamas so they are not to be trusted by default. Also, you have to consider how hamas forces Israel to attack civillian infrastructure by firing missiles from it. And hamas doesn't provide any defense for Palestinians, and they say it's not their responsibility. Man, "let us fire rockets at Jews, don't let them attack us back, don't stop those funds coming so we could build more rockets, and look how we promise to repeat mad attacks again and again until we destroy Israel, because we are victims", pretty cool guys. And people are like "wtf do as they say, they are freedom fighters".
When did Israel act unprovoked? Like at least once a week for 30 years, pay attention.
Please provide exact cases of 2 unprovoked attacks between September 22 and October 7.
They operate part of Gaza. Also no, there are hundreds of third party groups that organize aid, the fact Israel calls them all Hamas does not make it true.
Those numbers come from third party groups like the UN. https://www.ochaopt.org/data/casualties
Hamas doesn't force anything, Israel refusing to think of humanity and instead of ground assault just bomb the whole place off the face of earth. if I hold a gun to a child to force a bank robber to give up am I the bad person or are we both shitty examples of humanity?
Bro, settlers spit from their raised walkways onto Palestinians literally every day. Small slights matter and I'm pretty sure they roof knocked a building on the 19th anyway.
They operate part of Gaza.
Who operates the rest of it then?
Those numbers come from third party groups like the UN. https://www.ochaopt.org/data/casualties
This website is promising but there are no "over 3000 children over a month" figures here.
Hamas doesn't force anything
When you attack a developed country with an army from a specific location, you are asking to bomb this location as a response. Don't know if it's s surprise to anyone, but it just works like that. You wouldn't suppose it would mean "please don't bomb this location" instead?
if I hold a gun to a child to force a bank robber to give up am I the bad person or are we both shitty examples of humanity?
If before doing so you shoot that robber's friends and pretend it never happened, you are worse than those robbers.
But really, this analogy is beautiful. I now know the proper solution to all our problems, and with no bloodshed. Here is what Hamas should say: "We are martyrs and you are oppressors. We refuse to live under oppression. We mined every single house and every single Palestinian. If you don't reconsider we will detonate it all at once."
Bro, settlers spit from their raised walkways onto Palestinians literally every day.
What walkways? As if anyone has the time to spit at all anywhere, damn.
Small slights matter and I'm pretty sure they roof knocked a building on the 19th anyway.
What building? Who? I'm not getting it. "It doesn't matter that Israel didn't bombed a hospital because at the same day they bombed another building anyway"?