Who are the good guys in the Israel/Palestine conflict?
I genuinely do not know who the bad guys are. S lot of my leftist friends are against Israel, but from what I know Israel was attacked and is responding and trying to get their hostages back.
Enlighten me. Am I wrong? Why am I wrong?
And dumb it down for me, because apparently I'm an idiot.
Up until 1967, the bad guys were Britain.
Britain seized Palestine from the Ottomans during WWI with the help of the local Palestinians, promising the Palestinians sovereignty in exchange for their help overthrowing the Ottomans.
At the same time, Britain promised to create a homeland for Jews in Palestine (in the Balfour Declaration), and Jewish refugees from Europe began settling in Palestine. Britain did this because they thought they might gain the support of Jewish financiers for their war efforts.
The Balfour Declaration was deliberately vague about whether Britain was giving all of the land to the Jews or just some of the land. It was vague because Britain wanted to appeal to Jewish Zionists (who wanted all of Palestine) while not alienating the Palestinians.
Britain never did divide the land, resulting in two different populations who felt they legally owned the land, one who had always been there, and one who mostly arrived as refugees.
When Britain left following WWII, a civil war broke out for control of the land. A border was eventually drawn at the line of control (which ran through the middle of Jerusalem), and Israelis declared the new State of Israel, while Palestinian refugees fled to their side of the border or neighbouring states. That was in 1948.
So, up until then, it's a messy situation created by Britain, but one which eventually resulted in the land being split (albeit violently), with both Israelis and Palestinians having a state, and each having part of Jerusalem. The world accepted this as the new status quo and hoped it would be sustained peacefully.
That changed in 1967 when Israel annexed the Palestinian lands (the West Bank and the Gaza Strip) in the Six Days War. Since then, Palestinians have been living under a harsh Israeli occcupation as a stateless people (meaning no citizenship), with their rights and freedoms strictly curtailed. Palestinians have been resisting through a number of resistance movements, usually designated as terrorist groups in the Western media.
There was a political movement towards peace and repartitioning of the land that peaked in the 1990s, but since then it has been held up by a series of right-wing governments in Israel. Meanwhile, Israel has been aggressively building Jewish neighbourhoods (called settlements) in the formerly Palestinian lands of the West Bank.
So since 1967, Israel has pretty clearly been the bad guy.
The terrorist attack that killed 1200 young Israelis was horrific, and we should all hope nothing like that ever happens again. But the root cause of the attack was Israel's occupation of Gaza and the West Bank. The way to prevent future terror attacks is to end the oppression of the Palestinian people.
while Palestinian refugees fled to their side of the border or neighbouring states.
Technically not incorrect, but too much passive voice. Palestinian refugees were expelled by Israel, either by being directly told to leave or die or through massacres.
The terrorist attack that killed 1200 young Israelis
Another correction: The attack that killed 1200 Israelis, 33% of which were legitimate military targets and 66% of which were civilians. Don't let Israel trick you into thinking Hamas just entered, killed a bunch of civilians and left, because that creates what they consider justification for their genocide.
Also do not forget that on 10/7 Israeli helicopters were firing on civilians and the state censors have been covering this up. There are attempts to ban Haaretz, a friendly mouthpiece for state interests, because they have been reporting on this.
If 66% of 1200 are civilians killed by Hamas then
Don't let Israel trick you into thinking Hamas just entered, killed a bunch of civilians and left
is false (they indeed came and killed a bunch of civilians).
I'm not a pro-Israel person, I hate Netanyahu with a passion but still Hamas killing innocent people is not deserving of compassion albeit I understand their reason.
They entered, killed soldiers and shot up a music festival. They killed both soldiers AND civilians. Which makes most of them shitheads. Neither Hamas nor the IGF are good. Both should die in a ditch.
There's something else I want to mention.
In 1947, the UN attempted to sort out Britain's mess by creating a "partition plan" in which the land would be split between a state of Israel and a state of Palestine.
Though adopted as a UN resolution, it was never implemented, and the aforementioned civil war broke out instead.
I just mention this because I find a lot of people are under the misimpression that Israel was created by the UN in 1947 as some kind of compensation for the Holocaust, and that's not what happened.
That's a pretty good summary. I will add that the partition plan was deliberate tactic by Ben-Gurion to set a precedent for the Ethnic Cleansing needed to create the Settler Colonialist Ethnostate within Palestine. The alternative presented by Palestinian Representatives was a Unitary State for both Israelis and Palestinians.
Concise, eloquent, and fair. I regret that I have but one upvote to give.
Nice of you to gloss over the fact that the 6 day war was an attempt to annihilate Israel's existence...
Israel started the six day war by striking its neighbors. It wanted that war, it knew it had dedicated sponsors that would back them up.
PS Israel, as an apartheid ethnostare premised on settler colonialism, should not exist. The "state" of Israel should be abolished and replaced by a non-apartheid, non-ethnostate that includes all of the people and guarantees a return of stolen homes and land.
Israel struck first in the Six Days War.
Over a shipping route.
The good guys are the humanitarian aid workers risking their lives bringing food and medical care into the region.
The same folks being killed by Israel? Those ones?
You know it!
The good guys are aid workers and Palestinian and Israeli civilians who do not like the conflict.
💯 this. The people doing the kidnapping, murdering, and genocide are the bad guys. The people trying to help are the good guys.
Can you please show me a single protest of an Israeli citizen against the war specifically because of the genocide?
The good guys are the citizens who want none of this.
The bad guys are the citizens who want all of this, and the military personal behind the weapons, and the generals calling the shots.
Same as it ever was.
Edit: Lemmy.ml disagreed and nobody was surprised 🙀
This simplistic one size fits all argument falls flat when one side is being occupied and ethnically cleansed by the other side. It implies that Hamas is the “bad guy” and all other occupied Palestinians are the “good guy,” and it implies that non-military Israeli settlers are the “‘good guy.” But the truth is that the great majority of adult Israelis are militant settler-colonizers; and that Palestinians have the legal right under UN law to struggle against their occupiers by any means necessary, including armed struggle; and that Israel, as an occupier, has no right to “self defense.”
Okay:
In 1948, just after WWII, the UK decided to carve a chunk out of Palestine and create a new state there, called Israel - as a Jewish homeland that would take all the refugees that the rest of Europe didn't want to deal with.
Palestine was not happy about this - the land was taken without their consent, a great chunk of their country just taken from them by decree, backed up by a still highly militarized Europe.
Over the following decades, Palestine tried several times to take their country back, and each time got slapped down (since Israel had vast backing from UK/USA/Europe, both from postwar guilt and because Israel had a lot of strategic value as a platform from which to project military power in the middle east).
Cut to today, and Israel has expanded to take virtually the entire area, apart from some tiny scattered patches of land, and the Gaza strip - a strip of land 40km by 10km, containing most of the Palestinian population, blockaded by sea and land by the Israeli military.
Israel also runs an apartheid regime very similar to the old South African one - Palestinians have very few human or civil rights, generally get no protection from the Israeli police or military, while being treated as hostile outsiders that can be assaulted or have their land 'settled' at will by Israelis.
It has been decades since Palestine has had any kind of organised military, and it's also not recognised as its own country by most of the world, so there's virtually no way for it to push back, or to call on assistance.
In a situation like that, the only recourse is guerilla warfare, which often descends into (and is exploited by bad actors as) terrorist attacks. It's a damn good way to farm martyrs, and this hugely serves Israel's ends, since it can keep pointing to terrorim as justification for their ongoing oppression. Israel in fact provided a great deal of ongoing funding for Hamas, while blocking more moderate groups.
Back in October, a small organised group raided across the border from Gaza into Israel, killing about 1200 people and taking a couple of hundred hostages.
In response, Israel has killed over 40,000 Palestinans in Gaza - mainly women and children - systematically destroying the city's infrastructure, water, power, food production and distribution, hospitals, universities and schools, bombing refugee camps and destroying the majority of all housing and shelter in the area. It's also bombing humanitarian aid convoys, preventing food and medicine from reaching the people there. The death toll is expected to reach many hundreds of thousands, since people are already starving and there is no medical care available.
The rest of the world is wringing their hands about the 'regrettable' loss of life, while continuing to sell Israel all the weapons and bombs it needs to continue the genocide.
Fuck Israel.
In 1948, just after WWII, the UK decided to carve a chunk out of Palestine and create a new state there, called Israel - as a Jewish homeland that would take all the refugees that the rest of Europe didn't want to deal with
That's not what happened.
Firstly, the Balfour Declaration was in 1917, during World War I. By 1948, the Jews were already living there, and fighting for the land.
Secondly, Britain never partitioned the land, and never announced any intention to partition the land. (Things might have been very different if they had.) I think you're getting confused with the UN's partition plan, which was never implemented.
That's a very polite way to explain Israeli savagery.
Mandatory Palestine was long before 1948. Zionist settlers were doing terrorism on the indigenous Palestinians for decades by 1948. And with British support.
Permanently Deleted
I just want to briefly make one point because I think most of the important points have been very well covered by others already.
What's terrorism and what's freedom fighters is determined by history. By the same standards that Hamas are being called terrorists, you could easily make an argument that 1910s Irish republicans, black South Africans under apartheid, and British suffragettes (not to be confused with suffragists) could easily be considered terrorists. Innocent civilians were killed by all these groups, but looking back on it today we almost universally say they were in the right, because they were fighting for their groups to receive rights denied to them by the ruling class. Their methods weren't always as perfectly clean as we might ideally want, but the primary target was always someone oppressing them in some way. And right now and for the last half century+, Israel have been oppressing the Palestinian people.
1910s Irish republicans,
Wait really? I thought terrorism was more of a Troubles tactic.
The brits set up a giant military garrison in northern Ireland called the Plantation of Ulster in the 1600s, and used it to turn nearly the entire population of Ireland into slaves, and project english military might onto Ireland and colonize it for hundreds of years. They have always labelled resistance to their imperialist project as "terrorism".
The british army should absolutely be the ones labelled as terrorists, not the ones opposing them.
I actually deliberately avoided mentioning the Troubles because I wanted to bring up cases where everyone today could fairly uniformly agree that we were discussing freedom fighters more than terrorists. Too many today would still say that the Provisional IRA were the bad guys (or at the very least that they were "as bad as" the other side). But the point I wanted to make was how given enough time, even terroristic actions can end up being viewed on the whole as coming from the "good guys", if their cause is viewed as just.
I could also have mentioned American revolutionaries.
Blowing up money changers offices is terrorrism?
There are no "good guys" in a conflict between religious people.
Read the excellent Decolonize Palestine website to learn about the vital context that makes Israel's claim of self defense deeply disingenuous, and to learn about some of the falsehoods about Israel and Palestine that are present in mainstream discourse.
There are no "good guys" in a conflict between religious people.
Religion does play a role in the conflict, particularly over the question of where the border between an Israeli and Palestian state should go (so that holy sites end up on the appropriate side), but I don't think it's very useful to understand this as a religious conflict.
The Jews who moved to Israel in the early 20th century weren't pilgrims. They were refugees fleeing political persecution. The founder of Zionism wasn't even religious.
And Israel didn't happen because religious Jews enthusiastically got behind the idea of Zionism. Israel happened because Britain got behind the idea of Zionism.
Because the Crusdaes of the 11th to 13th centuries still loom large in Western culture (Richard the Lionheart and all that), I think Westerners have a tendency to think that the situation in Israel/Palestine is a continuation of those conflicts. But it's really not. It's a 20th century creation.
Arabs leaders was also so stupid, they kicked most of the non zionist jews from Arabs lands in response to kicking out Palestinians after 48 loss instead of trying to make them allies
The largest armed force in the gaza strip is deeply religious and the entire reason the support they receive from their biggest ally, the IRR, is religion. If Hamas were Sunni muslims instead of Shia, Iran would remain silent. Just as they were, when their Shia allies in Syria and Yemen started to massacre non-Shia in the region.
Your link is broke https://decolonizepalestine.com/
Where are the good guys in non-religious (scientific) leaders?
They are all scheming to gain more power and control.
Humans are just not emotionally ready to recognize where all this leads.
Yes, both sides are bad. And yes, one is vastly more powerful than the other.
I absolutely agree that the more pressing matter is stopping the Israeli advance in Gaza. But I dislike this argument because it brushes off impact of the October 7th attacks by Hamas.
It cannot be denied that Gaza is a terrible neighbor, same as Israel. No one is in the right here. Everyone is terrible. Yes, stopping the Israeli attack is the most important action now. But Gaza's actions need to be recognized. Ignoring such things will only create more division and undermine a diplomatic solution.
If you were born in Israel you would hate Gaza. If you were born in Gaza you would hate Israel. What is the solution? In the short term is stop the attacks. But in the long term the solution for both sides is empathy, compassion and diplomacy.
Just count the dead, injured, displaced, starved, and dehydrated on either side. You'll find pretty quickly the numbers are extremely disproportionate. If that's [not] a baseline consideration for your judgment then you should think on that.
[Edit in brackets]
I generally agree that the response seems lopsided. However, I also find it odd that Hamas simply hasn't returned the hostages. This to me signifies two possibilities- they are not actually interested in peace, or they don't believe that returning the hostages will stop Israel's destruction.
Would that appraisal of the situation seem reasonable?
There is a lot more to this way than just the hostage situation - Israel has been in control of Palestinian territory for a long time (they consider it theirs) and they have been fighting with the Hamas organization for years now. This is the single worst escalation of it.
Hamas doesn't want peace. The status quo is domination of Palestine under Israel government - erasure of Palestine effectively if they laid down arms and disbanded. They want liberty, and payback for hardships.
There isn't reason to believe Israel will stop the attacks on return of the hostages, as they have gone overwhelmingly above and beyond the total damage done by Hamas (even comparing women and children victims vs. the concert raid that started it all) and given Netanyahu's far right government is at the helm, so your second point has merit.
Hamas wants to trade those hostages for Palestinian hostages. Which have been imprisoned for decades.
It is a tale of "Israel started it" and the Palestinians have no other possible way to make demands from Israel than using the same tactics.
Israel openly says they will continue the destruction. Even if Hamas releases the hostages. Their government does not care about hostages. But the Israeli people do. Hamas would be giving up the only leverage they have against Israel by releasing the hostages.
I think the problem with that is you shouldn't judge either side by the numher of casualties they've committed but rather the casualties they would commit if they could. I legitimately think if Hamas could kill every last Jew in Israel with the push of a button they probably would. Or at least, every Jew that refused to leave the middle east.
This is absolutely false, hamas is not anti-semitic, they're anti-zionist. You're doing the british / murican tabloid thing of equating the two.
- Hamas affirms that its conflict is with the Zionist project not with the Jews because of their religion. Hamas does not wage a struggle against the Jews because they are Jewish but wages a struggle against the Zionists who occupy Palestine. Yet, it is the Zionists who constantly identify Judaism and the Jews with their own colonial project and illegal entity.
Nope. That only shows how competent or well equipped the side, we are speaking about, is. That there are much less dead or wounded Israelians cannot be attributed to Hamas. They are the same murderous, genocidal fucks as the Israelian government.
I've made no claims about the ethics of Hamas here. Simply put, genocide is not an act of strategy, and putting the ethics of retaliation aside, does nothing to further the security of your own citizens. Israel has not made its people safer, rather the opposite. It has paved the road to open war with other nations, and is walking it.
It's important to separate out the government from the people, especially as it pertains to governments that don't listen to their population and don't have overwhelming support. Neither government is good. Most of the civilians from both sides are perfectly decent, though a number of them are misguided.
It's really impossible to simplify it, but I'll give it a shot with a quick timeline:
This leaves out a lot. It's just not possible to condense it. But (mostly) off the top of my head, that's what I'd consider most of the most important bits.
The way I see it, whether or not you think Israel is "the good guys" largely hinges on whether or not you think Jews have a right to the land of Israel, and whether or not you think that claim was executed in a humane way.
I would compare it to the Native Americans - were the Americans of that time period the "good guys"? In my opinion, absolutely not. Were the Native Americans wrong for defending their land? Again, absolutely not. Were they wrong for attacking innocent civilians in retribution (for their land being taken, their own innocent civilians being killed, a genocide in progress)? Maybe, but it's also understandable that when you're working from a position of basically zero power against a behemoth, you can't fight the way the behemoth fights, or you're going to lose.
The way I see it, the Palestinian people just want a place to live and develop, and nobody's giving them a way out, so they're trying anything and everything they can.
- 1896 CE: Theodor Herzl writes “The Jewish State”
Herzl believed that there were two types of Jews, Jiden (Yids) and Juden (Jews), and considered any Jew who openly opposed his proposals for a Zionist solution to the Jewish question to be a Mauschel. The article has often been taken, since its publication, to be emblematic of an antisemitic strain of thinking in Zionism, and has been described as an antisemitic rant.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theodor_Herzl
Due to his Zionist work, he is known in Hebrew as Chozeh HaMedinah (חוֹזֵה הַמְדִינָה), lit. 'Visionary of the State'. He is specifically mentioned in the Israeli Declaration of Independence and is officially referred to as "the spiritual father of the Jewish State".
the powers that be (UK and US primarily) already have control of the area (still Mandatory Palestine), and a desire to maintain control of the area, they decide to give most of that land to the Jews and call it Israel.
Israel wasn't created by the UK or the US (or the UN). Israelis declared the state of Israel themselves after seizing territory in the 1948 Arab-Israeli War.
The UN did have a plan to create an Israel in 1947, but that didn't happen, because neither the Jews, the Arabs, nor the UK were on board.
I think this might be a semantic argument - it's not important to me if we use the words "give" or "create." Happy to use whatever words you prefer for allies having power and control of an area and ensuring that power and control is transferred to their chosen ally.
British Mandatory Palestine was officially ending May 15, 1948. Israel announced its independence on May 14, 1948. The United States officially recognized Israel as a state 11 minutes after it declared itself a sovereign state. It's strange to suggest these are coincidences rather than planned action with their allies, but there's plenty of evidence in addition to this to make it very clear that Israel wouldn't have stood a chance without the backing of their superpower friends.
You left out the protocol of the elders of zion and the backlash it caused against Jews. It's fairly important as a catalyst for some of the 20th century shit.
I'm actually okay with that not being included as a critical point in Israeli history. My understanding is it was one piece in a long line of antisemitism, and while it was known by the Nazi party, it was known by the leadership to be fictional and wasn't used seriously as propaganda by them. That's not to say it didn't have any effect, just that I'm not convinced it made much difference when it comes to the creation of Israel as a state.
I'm open to alternative viewpoints if you want to provide evidence or just offer some book titles that might change my mind.
One minor, but important detail: The First Aliyah began in the 1880s, a decade before Herzl's work. Land was purchased for settlements, and a few tens of thousands came, mostly from Eastern Europe. Within a couple decades the kibbutz system was established, small socialist communities where it was decided, unfortunately, to try to rely exclusively on Jewish labor and economy. This led to the first significant frictions between the settlers and the Palestinians, setting the stage for our situation today.
Very true! It's hard to imagine Israel would be the same today without the particular cultural choices those first immigrants made. Thanks for the addition.
Thank you for the detailed timeline. However, it raises a serious question for me. Am I misreading, or does your timeline show that the Jews were systematically oppressed and dislocated from their home land for about 2400 years? If so, wouldn't that make it understandable why they're so hostile to a foreign group that again wants to displace them from their home?
Here's the issue: who's home is it? Is it the home of people who haven't lived there for hundreds of years or the home of the people who currently do? Neither of these two groups had anything to do with what happened previously.
Jews had lived in the area for a very long time even after most were expelled. This was relatively peaceful (though not perfect). The current issues started when settlers came, who were not from there, and purchased farms. They later decided they would only hire Jewish workers, despite Muslims traditionally tending it (which hurt production because the Jewish settlers had no idea how to do so, but production wasn't the goal). Muslims then fought back as their livelihood was being taken from them. The settlers used militias to attack back and used it as justification to take more.
Those militias became the IDF when Israel formed. Israel still uses this tactic of provoking an attack and then using that as an excuse to use more force to take more territory. This has happened many times now and the current fight is just the latest, but not a new event.
There are no "good guys" but there are victims. Anyone just trying to live their lives is a victim. The bad guys are the ones trying to take this away from others.
does your timeline show that the Jews were systematically oppressed and dislocated from their home land for about 2400 years?
That's one interpretation, though I'd disagree with it. I have Jewish heritage - enough that a significant portion of my ancestry was wiped out in the Holocaust, though obviously a few of them were lucky and escaped to the US with the help of a sponsor. I don't practice Judaism as a religion and don't really relate much to any of my heritage. Is Israel my homeland? Not at all. The United States is my homeland. Before that, Germany would be my homeland. Before that... well, I'm not sure, but history would suggest it's highly unlikely it was Israel. I have zero attachment to that land, much like I expect you have zero attachment to the land of your ancestors from millennia ago. (I also have zero attachment to the land of my non-Jewish ancestry. I have no idea what it is from thousands of years ago, but I wouldn't care if I did.)
Would I and other Jewish people be justified in kicking out Germans, because they spent hundreds of years there? What about the Russians? Poles? The Jewish diaspora has gone all over the place and made just about everything their home. Why should they have claim to land that their great great great great great ancestors once conquered and stole from somebody else?
If so, wouldn’t that make it understandable why they’re so hostile to a foreign group that again wants to displace them from their home?
I would argue Israel wasn't their home until they moved there over the last hundred or so years. Home isn't where some of your family lived 3000 years ago. The individuals in question never lived there. Their parents never lived there. Their grandparents never lived there. None of these people had any idea what Israel was even like. Today, there are more Jewish people in the United States than there are in Israel, and they're happy to call the United States home.
If we're going to make the argument that people should be allowed to lay claim to land their ancestry owned 3000 years ago, we open up a lot of questions.
First, it's worth noting that this is also the home of Palestinians. The origins of Palestinians are much less clear than the origins of Jewish people in large part because the Jews have been uniquely good at maintaining their culture, so we have a much better grasp on Jewish people throughout history than we do of Palestinians. But at its core, the fact is Palestinians haven't ever lived anywhere else. This means they're also "so hostile to a foreign group that again wants to displace them from their home."
Second, to be consistent, we'd have to revert a lot of borders to ancient times. Does that mean we should all revert borders to what they were 3000 years ago? Why 3000? Why not 2000? 4000? Regardless, you're uprooting a lot of people - and you'd have to provide a really good justification for that, and I don't see it.
Third, even if we agreed the Jews have a right to this land and we should revert to their ancient borders and give them control, that doesn't mean they have a right to attempt genocide on those living there. The moment they embarked on the Nakba, they should have lost their allies in their mission. Assuming they have a right to the land, they have to humanely displace the people there, ensure they have a new place to live, and give them adequate compensation for the land and the massive inconvenience you've caused by uprooting their entire lives. Sort of a "sorry we're doing this, but we're trying to make it right." Instead, they've killed millions of people over the decades.
As you now know, the Zionist project is one by Europeans who colonized and ethnically cleansed large regions of Palestine in the last 120 years or so. Ethnic supremacist myths about stolen Palestinian homes being on Israeli homelands are unacceptable.
Also, approximately 900,000 Jews migrated, fled, or were expelled from Muslim-majority countries throughout Africa and Asia, primarily as a consequence of the 1948 Arab–Israeli War and the establishment of the State of Israel.
True! That's a good one to point out. It's hard to overstate how significantly and suddenly the Arabs turned against the Jews. Plenty were understandably going to emigrate from Europe, but Israel made them very unwelcome in the Arab world, too. It's also another good example of how Israel couldn't have been established without their allies, since the US/UK were the primary providers of air travel for Jews seeking refuge from Arab states to Israel.
lmao 1200 BC
Buddy, Zionism is a European settler colonial project from the 1800s that emerged as a response to European antisemitism but is of course, itself, deeply ethnocentric and racist.
All resistance to the occupation, which has repeatedly engaged in ethnic cleansing, is justified under international law. They have now, for a years engaged in a fast genocide, which makes choosing a side very easy so long as you aren't yourself deeply racist.
1967: Six Day War. Israel invades a variety of areas that it borders
You've made a pretty good summary, but I have one quibble: Egypt, Syria and Jordan were planning to attack Israel. Israel launched pre-emptive strikes.
lmao imagine being this easy to fool
I find it very difficult to justify most historical claims of anticipatory self-defense - it usually looks to me that it's an aggressor using an excuse to justify their aggression. I haven't seen nearly enough evidence to suggest Israel wasn't the aggressor in the Six Day War. While the military mobilization of their neighbors certainly contributed toward Israel's mobilization, that alone isn't justification for invasion. Nasser thought Israel was preparing to invade Syria, but he didn't preemptively invade Israel, he lined up his troops on the Israel-Egypt border and waited. We know now that Israel was not mobilizing troops on Syria's border, but Nasser's choice to defend his border was reasonable and nonviolent, even with false information.
But aside from that, I think it's reasonable to suggest Israel would have attacked even had there been no mobilization of troops from the Arab states. We saw Israel attack Egypt during the Suez Crisis where they forcibly re-opened passage through the Straits of Tiran, their only shipping route to the south other than the also-Egyptian Suez Canal. Just prior to the Six Day War, Egypt cut off Israel from the Straits of Tiran again, something Israel publicly called an act of war. It's not a coincidence Israel went ahead and took Sinai (immediately adjacent to the Straits of Tiran) during this war and didn't give it back until the Camp David Accords. (It's worth noting that had Nasser not gotten the original false information, he wouldn't have done any of this, and it's entirely possible the entire thing would have been averted. But he did, and that was a huge blunder on his part. Still, I disagree with Israel that refusing them passage through shipping routes is an act of war.)
I would also suggest that Israel's behavior after the Six Day War doesn't seem like the actions of a country that was acting in self-defense. They conquered land during that war and continue to occupy most of it to this day. They've invaded other countries since, with stated reasons that are as believable as the United States' reasons for invading Iraq. They've continued to occupy additional land. These actions indicate a country interested in expansionism and power growth, not peaceful co-existence.
The humanitarian aide workers.
There are no good guys and bad guys.
2 groups of people who are neighbors and relatives and share a common heritage keep killing each other, mostly due to shitty rulers who have no interest in their peoples' well-being.
You should look into the history of WHY Hamas formed in the first place. Palestinians have been forcibly relocated and had their land taken since the 40's. I will say, is there any justification for the destruction and genocide Israel is committing? They've destroyed practically ALL infrastructure in Gaza including hospitals, they've got snipers shooting kids, targeting UN aid workers. Hamas and hostages are convenient excuses for them to keep doing what they started in the 40's - killing an entire native population and taking their land.
Hamas are still not the good guys. Every time the conflict calms down, Hamas approval sinks because of their absolute unwillingness to fuck all for their own populace. Most of the money supplied to the gaza strips admin goes into weapons, not into infrastructure for their people.
And to answer your question: ah, fuck no. Israels rightwing shitheads are responsible for never letting the cycle of violence rest. Its to profitable for them.
This is what Israel defending itself actually means
Israel does genocide. That’s it.
The palestinian people. Sure, they have done some horrible things but it's been mostly out of desperation for decades of abuse from Israel, who are actively invading their country.
Yeah the conflict started way before october the 7th.
Forget everything you know (or think you know) about the conflict for a second. Now look at what human rights groups, including the UN, have to say about what's happening in Gaza and Lebanon. It's called a genocide because it is; it's really that simple and there are mountains of evidence published by the likes of Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and, again the UN. Also to dispell that particular piece of propaganda: they're not trying to get the hostages back. If they were they'd turn the first ceasefire agreement into a "permanent" ceasefire (there are no permanent ceasefires in this conflict) and end the whole thing. They want to genocide and settle Gaza, so they're doing that while sabotaging ceasefire negotiations.
By the way if you're going to side with the side that has hostages, then you should read up on Palestinian detainees first. Long story short: Israel arrests Palestinians from the West Bank or (until 2005) Gaza for dubious or no charges—which they can do because these places are governed under Israeli military law rather than civil law—and sometimes torture them while stealing years of their life. Part of Palestinian resistance organizations' raison d'etre is to return those people to their homes, which requires constant action because Israel arrests more Palestinians every day. There were already thousands of those detainees before October 7th and thousands more have been arrested after. Note: We're not talking about Palestinians who are arrested for legitimate crimes doing their time here; these people were kidnapped as a punishment against Palestinians for existing. If this doesn't sound like hostages to you, you should do some soul searching and ask yourself if you're trying to learn or justify your beliefs.
This probably sounds biased to you, but I took care to only state verifiable, indisputably objective facts here Sometimes things are just that simple. That doesn't make Hamas good guys; they're more gray with some legitimate resistance actions and some straight up terrorism, and it's not always clear which is which.
Finally, if you want to learn more about the conflict in general and about the conditions that drove Hamas to launch the October 7th attack to begin with, you should see what Amnesty International and other human rights groups have to say on the topic. The long story short is that Israel subjects Palestinians to Apartheid conditions along with a slow-burn genocide to serve their long-term goal of colonizing the whole Palestine and (to their more extremist factions) expand beyond it.
In Western fiction, you are taught to support the scrappy underdogs facing oppression from a racist occupying force. You root for them and cheer when they blow up military facilities and you feel for them when they lose their compatriots to oppressor violence. You know very well who the good guys and bad guys are.
But then, in Western media, with a mere change of labeling and some paper-thin propaganda, they will have you believing the opposite. All they need to do is call the freedom fighter resistance "terrorists", say that the occupiers "have a right to defend themselves", and pretend the "conflict" is "complicated" and really about religion. And they will so this even when the occupier ramps up genocide to unignorable levels.
The good guys remain those fighting occupation. This is consistent with a basic understanding of liberation, with nearly everyone's stated beliefs about self-determination, and international law. The bad guys are the ethnic supremacist apartheid settler colonist occupiers doing a genocide as well as their supporters.
Question- isn't Hamas constantly attacking Israel with the stated goal to eradicate them?
Israel is a racist genocidal settler-colonial ethnostate. All good people wish for the destruction of such a thing just like all good people wished for the destruction of the apartheid South African ethnostate. If Hamas wishes this, they should be commended for it, don't you think? And anyone who disagrees called out for the racial supremacist that they are?
Just to be clear, Hamas does not want to eradicate the Jews. That is a myth propagated by Israel.
Hamas wants to eliminate Israel, by which they mean they want Israel replaced by an Arab-majority state in which both Jews and Arabs live. (Hamas want the return of 4 million Palestinian refugees to Israel/Palestine, which would make it an Arab-majority state.)
Furthermore, they have indicated they are open to negotiating a Two-State solution.
I don't think it makes any sense to portray Hamas as unreasonable for wanting Arabs to control the whole land (from the river to the sea) when Israel want the same thing for Jews.
Israel has been keeping Palestinians in a brutal and murderous apartheid state and brutalizing them for 80 years-- imprisoning them indefinitely without charges too. But you want to question what the oppressed do and why, as if it was mysterious. I'm having a hard time beleiving you when you say you want this explained to you, but I suppose I'll take it at face value and hope for the best.
If you truly want to understand this stuff, start with a deep dive-- several actually, into history. Start with the jewish-roman wars to understand the zionist/zealot motivations. At this point the original states of Israel were 1000 years gone, having weakened themselves with civil war over taxation, then plundered and abosrbed by the neo-babylonians. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish–Roman_wars
From there you'll want to look at the expansion of the ottoman empire and jewish place in it, and how they were governed. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Jews_in_the_Ottoman_Empire This overlapped with the crusades. I recommend "empires of the sea" by crowley. Crucial in there is how the Ottoman empire depended on slaves to function, but their religion only allowed them to get slaves by capturing them in battle, and it forbade muslims from trading in slaves thesmelves, but allowed buying them. Hence the birth of slave traders as a caste, who were foriegn, and became largely a jewish group. This understandably was not well received back in Europe, where the slaves came from. The ottomans almost totally depopulated the mediteranean coasts gathering slaves. https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-031-13260-5_14 Toward the end of the ottoman empire (it was an 800 year empire), they officially tolerated muslims as slave traders. (Progress?)
You can also read up on how jews participated in and were persecuted in the crusades, and draw some conclusions as to why and how that played out. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Jews_and_the_Crusades#:~:text=In%20the%20First%20Crusade%2C%20Jewish,Jews%20in%20France%20suffered%20especially.
Then move on to jewish presence in the region during the ottoman empire https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Jews_in_Turkey
Read up on how jewish expulsions from european countries came about because of christianities Vix pervenit. Theres a lot there. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vix_pervenit
See how because of medeival views of usury, Jews were ejcted by monarchs in europe as a way to justify seizing their assets, only to allow them back a bit later and starting the process over https://humsci.stanford.edu/feature/stanford-historian-explores-how-expulsions-became-widespread-medieval-europe
From there you can end up in the start of WW2, the jewish holocaust, and then Haganah and Irgun. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haganah https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irgun
Partition, the UN creating a state of Israel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Nations_Partition_Plan_for_Palestine
Israel's leadership thoughts at the time: https://www.progressiveisrael.org/ben-gurions-notorious-quotes-their-polemical-uses-abuses/
From there, the Nakba https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nakba
The six day war https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Six-Day_War The USS liberty incident https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Liberty_incident
The first and second intifada https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Intifada https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Intifada
Oslo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oslo_I_Accord
The creation of hamas by Israel to thwart the PLO peace plans and two state solution https://theintercept.com/2018/02/19/hamas-israel-palestine-conflict/
9/11 and Osama bin laden, and the use and weaponization of his logic by western powers https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/binladen/who/miller.html
The rise of indefinite administrative detention https://apnews.com/article/israel-detention-jails-palestinians-west-bank-793a3b2a1ce8439d08756da8c63e5435
Storming of al aqsa mosque on oct 4 2023 https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/10/4/israeli-settlers-storm-al-aqsa-mosque-complex-on-fifth-day-of-sukkot
October 7 2023 attacks https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-67039975
The use of the hannibal directive https://www.progressiveisrael.org/ben-gurions-notorious-quotes-their-polemical-uses-abuses/
You can google and read a lot about the negoatiations and doubts for whether Netenyahu wanted to negotiate for the release of hostages at all, and the Israelis protesting his lack of interest in getting the hostages back. You can also look at settler groups auctioning off peices of gaza, and now lebanon.
Everyone who opposes genocide, colonialism, and terrorism are the good guys, so neither Israel or Hamas.
But Hamas is not Palestine/Palestinians, the same way that Israel/Zionism is not Jewish/Judaism; no matter how much Israel, Hamas, the media, or military industrial complex tries to conflate them all.
IMO Israel is more to blame than Hamas as they should know better given a) their history of persecution b) their significantly greater wealth and education, and c) their demographics — more than half of all Palestinians are technically children, below 18.
Don't forget that Hamas has been supported by Netanyahu in the past because they are a useful tool to prevent a longer standing peace...
The resistance including Hamas, Ansar Allah, Iraqi resistance, Hezbollah, etc.
but from what I know Israel was attacked and is responding and trying to get their hostages back.
lol what. You do realize gaza is a concentration camp right? That's like saying the Jews who fought back during the warsaw ghetto uprising were bad guys. Also they aren't trying to get their hostages back at all. On oct 7 the IDF was responsible for the MAJORITY of deaths. Look up hannibal directive.
The bad guys are Zionists. Simply put they think they are superior to anyone that's not Jewish. Not all Jews are Zionists and not all Zionists are Jews.
I actually didn't realize Gaza was a concentration camp.
In 1948, during the Nakba, Israel ethnically cleansed much of Palestine. From that (and a good portion of the ethnic cleansing Israel has done since), many of the people were driven into Gaza.
In 2006, when Israel got kicked out of Gaza due to an uprising, they built a wall around it and restricted the amount of food, fuel, and other items, and banned the gazans from constructing wells, water containers, and other things that would allow the people in Gaza to stay alive longer if Israel cut off food/water supplies.
The working class in both nations. The people, divided and conquered.
If Israel has a working class, it is one of settlers, IDF soldiers, etc. Those are not the "good guys".
There is a longstanding and incorrect view of Western leftists in the capacity of the Israeli working class to build their power and address the injustices. That class has no capacity to do so whatsoever. They are fully bought-off by the ethnocentric project, both materially and psychologically. This is not very different from how other settler colonist "working classes" did the same. If anything, it is an important lesson that the working class is not a moral quantity, it is a group defined by its relation to production, and only through political education can it gain agency for positive change.
They do have a working class, but your second point is all too true, which is why it has made no impact.
If you would not have called Rhodesia or Apartheid South Africa the good guys then you should not consider Israel to be the good guys either.
I don't think a lot of westerners realize how highly propagandized and pro-colonialist their media is.
The US deemed the African National Congress (ANC, the main group resisting apartheid south africa) a terrorist group just like they do hamas now, and only removed Mandela from the US terrorist watchlist in 2008.
US media is saying all the same things about Palestine's resistance that they did in the 80s w/ to south african apartheid.
The amount of bias, propaganda, and straight-up misinformation from western media regarding this "conflict" (more like massacre) is truly outrageous.
Depends really. What do you value in your life? What ethical framework do you use? Do you value freedom and self determination, do you value people different from you as much as people of your nationality/race? Or perhaps do you value the Western stability, growth, dominance and wellbeing at the expense of the economic South more? There's no objective answer, it depends on you and your viewpoint.
If we do away with the propaganda and misinformation we are left with this question. Because the US and Europe would never support anyone for the sake of them being the only democracy in the middle east or fighting terrorists or whatever. If that were the case the US wouldn't have been complicit with the dictatorships of the gulf countries or any other of the innumerable dictatorships they have established throughout the years in the world. And they would also not be funding the ISIS or other terrorist groups in Columbia, Cuba, Nicaragua and so many other countries.
No dominant organisation in the world like the US state would give a significant amount of money(like it does for Israel) for something that doesn't serve their material interests, namely the perpetuation and/or increase of their power and influence.
So what do you value? Freedom and dignity for all, or more power for the Western states and corporations (- and whatever religious crap you want to excuse colonising and ethnically cleansing a nation)?
If you see this, it'd save you a lot of time from arguing about every single event of the conflict. If you see every human in the world as equal and deserving of freedom, then you'd see that Israel and the West is bringing these people at the brink of extinction, torturing, killing, humiliating, starving them, expelling them from their land, destroying their vital civil infrastructure, stealing their land and property for 75 years now. And when you see all this (not from Western mainstream media though), you'd recognise the right for armed struggle against a colonizing entity that Israel is. No civilian casualties are acceptable, but the ones affected in 7/10/23 would have to turn against their government for ethnically cleansing Palestinians, bringing them to that desperate point of retaliation, not Palestinians.
No dominant organisation in the world like the US state would give a significant amount of money(like it does for Israel) for something that doesn’t serve their material interests, namely the perpetuation and/or increase of their power and influence.
I disagree with the notion that dominant organizations would never give significant of money away in a manner contrary to their material interests. If anything, the opposite is true: if you are dominant, then you have more freedom to get away with acting against your material interests (intentionally or not).
I think that our treatment of Israel is an example of this. All of the money we have been throwing at them does not buy anything at all, since the Israeli government does not even seem to be that grateful for it but just expects it as a matter of course. They seem hell-bent on bringing the entire region into a war that would pull us in and cause a ton of damage to our material interests, and we have barely any ability to stop them from doing this. Worst, this situation is entirely avoidable because we could, at the very least, put strings on our military aid and then enforce them, rather than just giving Israel whatever it wants and ignoring whenever it crosses any of our supposed lines.
Just to be clear, I am not arguing that our material interests are the only reason to care about what is happening or to criticize our government's actions, I am just saying that it makes no sense to just take as given that a dominant organization will always act in its own best material interests in this way.
Undermining of independent states in the middle east is in the material interest of the US empire. They just disagree internally about how to best go about doing this. A regional war is not directly against US ruling interests unless they think they would lose that fight or if it would shut down the Strait of Hormuz for a long time. The US has not exactly reined in its Israeli attack dog in any meaningful way, which us what they could do and would do if they wanted descalation.
It's not in the interests of the wider civilian population of the planet, or even just those in the US, but those things barely register for empire.
US leaders repeatedly tell you why supporting Israel is in the US's interests: its a giant unsinkable aircraft carrier in the middle east to project power on this resource rich region. The US would never support even another colonialist project with the same values, unless it was in its material interests.
on a scale from 1 to 10 how serious are you in asking this, I ask because I am genuinly unsure if you are confused and unaware of what is happening, or if you are trying to start some shit
I've answered this in the post to another commenter, but I am 100% serious.
Well for Decades the Irealies have both been genociding the Palistinians, and have been on a long push to try to conflait zionism, an origionaly anti-symetic idea in eurpope, that was even embraced by the Nazis, and quinticentialy jewish, so they could use anti-semitism to shield themselvs.
The good guys are the palistinians who where there before anyone else got there, and have been being genocided agian for decades on end, and are being genocided now.
Identify good and bad based on what people do. Not why they are doing it. Otherwise you're simply agreeing that the ends justify the means.
Someone kills a noncombatant? Bad. Doesn't matter why.
By that logic every single fight has been between bad guys. Abolitionists vs. slavers? Sorry buddy, they both killed noncombatants, they're both just bad guys. Nazis doing genocide vs. partisabs? Sorry buddy, they're both just bad guys.
There are no perfect fights, perfect armies, perfect struggles for liberation. You will have to accept what it takes to fight oppression or force yourself to a mealy-mouthed sidelines from which you declare everyone that isn't passive is always a villain.
I think I generally agree with your viewpoint here. This seems to be separate from the original conversation, and more about whether or not war is sometimes necessary, and if it is then you've got to step back and look at the larger picture and realize there's going to be a lot of pain on both sides, the good side and the bad side. I think it's ok to empathize with that, but probably not ok to say that fighting is never necessary. The same people will then go on to say it's ok to physically assault modern day Nazis.
I wouldn't mind punching a Nazi personally. But I also realize war sometimes is necessary, and that it will be a painful process.
Not necessarily. If that were the case, then peaceful civil rights movements wouldn't be effective. We can point to things like women's right to vote to indicate that isn't the case though. While they're not as dramatic, peaceful reform movements have a reasonably high success rate, contrasted against all the uprisings and revolts which have been mercilessly crushed throughout history.
It's a terrorist organization vs terrorist state. The only good guys are the civilians dying on both sides.
I mean the whole reason why you are confused is that this is the most complex conflict in the world and here (like everywhere else) you are going to get responses in both directions. I suggest you read what each side has to say for itself: for unconditional pro-Israeli propaganda I suggest https://elderofziyon.blogspot.com/ and for unconditional pro-Palestinian propaganda I suggest https://mondoweiss.net/ – read both of these and decide for yourself what arguments on both sides you believe more.
I do not think there are any truly good guys in the conflict; but I do think that Israel is worse and tend to side with the Palestinians. This is mainly because Israel is the side with vastly more power and I think it's up to the powerful, the oppressor, to try to treat the people they have power over with dignity and try to give up the power they have.
Of course, even that argument of mine has a counter-argument! You can (and should!) read it here: https://elderofziyon.blogspot.com/2016/07/the-parameters-of-discussion-michael.html
Mondoweiss isn't unconditional pro-Palestine propaganda. It's a well-sourced pro-Palestinian news site.
If you believe that, you're just as biased as they are. Check the archive page from last October and tell us that with a straight face. https://mondoweiss.net/news/page/61/
It is not complex at all, it is just genocidal settler colonialism and resistance to it. "Complexity" is just a proxy for being uncomfortable acknowledging this, which is something you should do some introspection on as someone from a German instance. Ever hear of the Holocaust? Of Lebensraum?
Never again means never again for anyone.
Hamas are, I think, a lesser bad guy to Israel's big bad. Hamas are an inevitable consequence of a settler neighnour like Israel.. the conflict is very old. Perhaps really the bad guy was Britain & the UN back in the 40s, who carved up Mandatory Palestine to create Israel & Palestine. You can trace it farther back to the origins of Zionism, too, in the late 19th century, and again British Zionists allowing settlers into Mandatory Palestine in the 20s.
I'd suggest reading over the history yourself and making up your own mind. The Wikipedia article is a good starting point imo. It's a long and complex conflict with no clear "good" or "bad" side.
What I think personally is that Israel was founded by colonist settlers, supported by imperial western powers. The Arab locals have resisted as best they could but been repeatedly defeated, while Israel's western support has allowed it to grow and grow. They have expanded far beyond the original borders by settling and stealing land from the Palestinians. Hamas is the most recent military faction in opposition, and it certainly has done terrible things... But a terrorist insurgency is an inevitable consequence of a settler nation attempting to take over a much less powerful neighbour. If it wasn't Hamas, it would be another group.
Maybe if Hamas are truly wiped out, we'll get lucky and the next one will be slightly less insane... But I doubt it. And you can bet Israel will use whoever they are as an excuse to continue their brutal occupation and wage yet more war in the region, while the rest of the world looks on.
Israel and its settler garrison are carrying out the standard colonialist formula throughout history (epitomized by the US model in its conquest) : eviction and genocide of the indigenous inhabitants, and theft of their lands.
This is defended under many premises, a "religious" calling, a "civilizing" venture (with orientalist undertones), and many others, but the goal is the same as all imperialist ventures: theft of land, labor, and natural resources. People from around the world, no matter how rich or poor, are invited to join in this colonial project, and many do, because of the promise of cheap land.
Predictably, Israel calls anyone who opposes this genocide as "terrorists", even though by all reasonable definition of terrorism, its the settler garrison who are the real terrorists: murdering innocent civilians, stealing their towns, and erasing the old names. In Palestine, the largest of this event was called the Nakba, whereas in the US, the entire 1800s was a westward-expanding colonial war defeating hundreds of native tribes and killing anyone who resisted.
The US is the primary supporter of this project, because Israel is for them, a giant, unsinkable aircraft carrier / military base in the middle east, which can be used to project western military power on the resource-rich middle east. As Joe Biden said: "If Israel didn't exist, it would be necessary for the US to invent one herself."
I suggest watching this video, as its the best short introduction: How Palestine became Colonized.
Thanks for the info. I've saved this video to my watch later list, and I'll let you know what I think about it when I do.
👍
They are the israeli and Palestinians civilians that just want peace. The majority of the people in these 2 countries just want peace. A year+ of war is not ez or good for anything.
It's not two countries and you have a delusional idea of what the average settler is like if you think they want peace. Crossing the line to nazi apologia.
Unless of course you're saying that the Muslim population, which is the suppressed majority under the evil apartheid state, want peace. Then and only then would you be correct.
We see the majority of israelis on TV as for this war. The reality is that most of them rather have peace. Its a few really bad apples that are pusing for this genocide. You really think an israel wants war on all their front? Bombs falling on their cities. War is always a few old men arguing and a shit load of young men dying. If we were just to get rid of the people pushing for this including US weapons manufacturers. This war would be over tomorrow!
Many civilians probably prefer peace, but it seems like each side wants peace on their own terms which seem at odds with the other sides terms.
I could be wrong.
I hope I am, and that the vast majority just want to settle everything peacefully.
The volunteers that risk going to do stuff in either side. It’s crazy out there
The good guys, like in every war, is everybody who doesn't want to violently impose something on someone else - i.e. in this case, the populations of Israel and Gaza who aren't IDF or Hamas and just want a better life for their loved ones without hurting anyone else to get it.
And like in all wars, that's the vast majority of the populations of both warring parties.
Well obviously it's the Western powers that gave a bunch of displaced Jews land after WWII, despite no legitimate claim to the area, and then proceeded to keep meddling in Middle Eastern affairs so they could get cheap oil. And the biggest of those Western powers directly gives taxpayer money to war profiteers so there's a direct financial incentive to keep the genocide going.
Those are the goodest guys.
The Zionist project was going full steam ahead prior to WWII. Zionists collaborated with Nazis to get Jewish people to emigrate or get deported to Palestine. And Holocaust survivors were often looked down on there are Jews that had not done the "right" thing of abandoning their homes to steal someone else's in Palestine. Zionists spread some of the most antisemitix things you have ever heard when it comes to this topic.
The backer of Zionism simply switched hands after WWII. Before it was the British, then it was the US.
I don't have any inherent support either side, and there's too much history along with bias, propaganda, and outright misinformation to make a determination of who the "good guys" are, if anyone.
However, in such cases I will support the underdog on the principle that you don't really want one side to have too much power over the other. That's how we end up with things like ethnic cleansing and genocide. If Palestine (and Lebanon) had powerful militaries, you wouldn't be seeing the mass devastation and huge loss of civilian lives. I'd prefer to see the sides more balanced so that they can keep each other in check.
Another angle to consider is that I consider the state of Israel to be actively harmful to Americans on the basis of:
Bottom line is I'd say everyone sucks, but in different ways. But I am anti-Israel on the basis of them being way out of control (and without anyone to keep them in check) and due to the threat they pose to the American public.
The one who is colonizing the other. When Nate Turner killed children in his revolt it didn't make the slaves the bad guys and the slave owner the good guy. In the Indian Rebellion of 1857, resistance promised safety to British including kids and women but ended up attacking them, it didn't make the British empire the good guy and the Indian the bad guys
War rarely decides who's right, just who's left.
In the face of genocide, you chose to dodge the question.
Just like everywhere else, the bad guys are the leaders killing people and creating hate to keep themselves in power, and the good guys are the people who are just trying to live their lives in dignity anr freedom. Both sides have both. You could make an argument that the leaders on one side arr worse because they have more deadly firepower at their disposal, but that seems like a moot point to me. The hate is the problem and the people who need it to stay in power are the bad guys.
Have you watched the Mandalorian? Palestinians are Grogu and the Mandalorian, Israel / US and Zionists are the Empire.
Where are you getting news, and how often?
There are no good guys in that conflict. Only innocent civilians.
The guys doing the genocide and the guys fighting the genocide and for a secular democracy are the same actually /s
So many enlightened centrists both-sidesing in this thread.
On one side we have Israel; a very ironic imperialist nation, who's leaders, military, and not insignificant number of civilians are behaving a lot like, if not a little worse than, the nazis that they had a history with. I'd also say hypocritical besides ironic.
The other side we have Hamas; an organisation that, in their 25 articles which explain why they're doing what they're doing, state they wish to kill ALL Jews everywhere, that Jewish people are responsible for all the world's problems (standard Jewish conspiracy stuff, with a solid helping of Holocaust denial), that they are the one true believers of the Islamic faith, and that they'll create an oppressive, religious controlled government that upholds "traditional family values" and completely takes away all rights from women (I remember reading they say the idea that women are free to do what men do is "Western corruption").
The war needs to end, and the Palestinians need to be able to just live without getting oppressed. But I don't see either side winning as a good thing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2017_Hamas_charter
Hamas affirms that its conflict is with the Zionist project not with the Jews because of their religion. Hamas does not wage a struggle against the Jews because they are Jewish but wages a struggle against the Zionists who occupy Palestine. Yet, it is the Zionists who constantly identify Judaism and the Jews with their own colonial project and illegal entity. Hamas rejects the persecution of any human being or the undermining of his or her rights on nationalist, religious or sectarian grounds.
Note that Hamas is not the only Palestinian faction, but as the one everyone sees fighting Israel, the other factions, and the people of Gaza support them. When the people of Palestine are no longer fighting for their existence, I have no doubt they will support more secular factions as they did before.
Muslims and Jews believe in the same sky man but have very different views on him. Jews didn’t have a country until Israel was created after world war two. Lots of Arab people lost land and their rights overnight. Israel and its neighbours never really got on from the start. On both sides people took their religion too far. Zionist Jews and Hamas-type Muslims essentially believe that their mission is to drive the other lot off the land / out of existence. Nutters took control of each side and pushed their personal agendas. Both civilians suffer - although undoubtedly Arab civilians have it way way worse. In short both sets of civilians are led by bad people - but the Gazan civilians suffer terribly in comparison to the Israeli civilians.
The civilians.
The people who won't accept a two state solution are the bad guys, so much is clear.
To me that seems the most optimal and level headed solution, but as you can see many people disagree. A lot of people in this thread are calling for the elimination of Israel as a state, and that confuses me, because they're saying the things that Israel is SAYING that their enemies are saying, further justifying, in Israel's eyes, their own actions.
With this post, I guess I was looking for more historical facts and context on who is historically the bad guy in this situation. I've gotten some of that. I'll keep studying the situation and I think I'm going to actively try to avoid getting sucked into the idea that one side or the other should be completely eliminated. My gut just has a really negative reaction to that sort of talk.
Yeah, and the problem is that the history of the conflict didn't even start with the current state of Israel being established. There really is no simple good/bad narrative to be had. It's just a shitty situation for anyone who happens to live there.
The reality is simple. Their are "bad guys" on both sides. The "good guys" are stuck between them. The degree to which one is badder than the other really shouldn't matter. Anyone making a living prolonging conflict should just be removed from the gene pool. Ideally by locking large numbers of them in a room with very limited supplies, just enough to fight over.
The ideal situation would be for good guys from both sides to take up on arms and overthrow their own governments to make this cycle stop, but then something will happen that they will come to hate each other again and the cycle will continue.
The Middle East has been cooking for so long, it's impossible to point at a faction that is the "Good Guys". But right now, one faction is hell-bent on exterminating another nation's people, both military and civilian, so it should be pretty fucking obvious who the worst "Bad Guys" are. There are no good guys, only victims.
You should read Ramzi Yousef's statement at his 1998 trial. Terrorist factions like Hezbollah and Hamas exist only because Israel is consistently refusing to make peace through diplomacy.
How about not calling the municipal governments of populations targeted with genocide 'terrorists' unless you're one of the nazis trying to use that as an excuse to exterminate them?
It's really easy. Everybody killing other people? Committing rape and violence? Those are the bad guys. Both sides. The good guys are the innocent victims, the women and children, the ordinary people who have nothing to do with it. Both militaries are equally at fault for being monsters.
You can't argue that in good faith when one military has so much more resources than the other.
It's like if a child hits you, then you beat the shit out of him and use the "he started it" excuse.
It's not just "hitting" when it's done with explosives and bullets, and the ones doing the killing aren't children. They're all bad and all need to be stopped from abusing and slaughtering noncombatants. If you think that's a hot take, hey congrats, you've discovered the thinking that perpetuates the violence.
Hamas are the good guys
Stay away from humanity, please.
you would have condemned the jews in the Warsaw ghetto uprising, if you were alive in 1943
I don't think there is a good guy:
Hamas Attacked Israel and killed more people in the attack relative to the population then 9/11. They used the population of the Gazastrip as human shields, building there bases in the City sometimes near hospitals. Using human shields is a war crime. UN schools use(d) books in which Israels existence is disclaimed. Hamas doesn't want a two state solution, they want the complete destruction of Israel. Remember, not every Palestinian is Hamas, but a large portion of them supported the terror attack.
On the other side is Israel, the only democratic nation in the near east. Occupying parts of Syria, Lebanon, the west Bank and Gaza. Building villages in the occupied partes of West Bank for decades, illegally. The occupied Gaza just like the westbank until the mid 2000s when they retreated and left the villages. Hamas got into power and attacked Israel many times with simple rockets. After the devastating terror attack last year the responded with hard force killing many hamas fighters, but much more civilians. To be clear, it isn't a war crime when there are some civilians under the casualties. But in my opinion, Israel wasn't killing many hamas and there where a few civilians, they killed some Hamas and there were many normal people, sometimes ignoring them. But remember, Hamas wants this they want the world to hate Israel. If that means that many Palestinians die, so what. They used civilians as shields, hiding in them (war crime) Whether in city's or refugee camps, hamas tried to hide there, putting normal Palestinians in danger.
To be honest, I don't think we will see a solution to this decade long conflict in the near future. :(
Israel is using Palestinians as human shield. How do you expect Hamas to not be in civilians area in a highly populated 365 square kilometers area? Do you expect Hamas to kill themselves or to let Israel occupy land with no resistance at all? By resistance, I don't mean things like 7 of October but something like attacking military target
They used the population of the Gazastrip as human shields, building there bases in the City sometimes near hospitals. Using human shields is a war crime.
Correction: Israel claims they used (and still use) human shields. Those claims have not been proven in any way. You'll say they build their military bases and headquarters in cities, but literally every military in the world does that.
Hamas doesn't want a two state solution,
Look up the 2008 and 2012 ceasefires. Hamas isn't fundamentally opposed to a two-state solution. It's not their preferred result, but they've taken part in serious peace deals more than once only for Israel to destroy the whole thing.
Don't forget that Israel's government also has explicitly said it wants to ethnically cleanse and genocide the Palestinians, on multiple occassions. It also isn't democratic, considering there quite literally is a case of apartheid state.
I'm happy they are a "democracy", but they need to actually live up to the word instead of the former victim becoming the perpetrator themselves.
I doubt most Palestinians actually support the terror attack. If they do, they probably want revenge for the Nakba in 1948, in where Israel has systematically expulsed and cleansed Palestinians from their native soil.
Not that it solves anything, but it's hard to feel sympathy and anger to both, when it is overall a tragedy that only has one true solution:
Both sides living in peace, equal among kin, with no animosity, with no fascist Israeli government, with no calls to genocide from either side.
There certainly is a good guy and it's called the citizens who just don't want their governments to be shit, and to cooperate instead. The citizens who want to return to their country. The citizens that don't settle. The citizens that want loved ones back, but don't call for murder. Those are your good guys: normal people, who do not contribute to hatred.
I think there certainly is a solution. The question is whether the US actually has the balls to put multiple warships near the fascist Israel government and Hamas' repression and credibly threaten both sides (with actual consequences following if neither listens), unless if the former retreats from all settlements and actually contributes to cooperation with the right to return and full citizenship, and the latter releases the prisoners alive and well, and agrees to cooperate as well.
This, all while guaranteeing the right of queers to be enshrined, the seculars to actually have secular marriages, the religious to cooperate and build an interfaith communion.
Hatred needs to be exterminated. If fascists and dictatorships do not listen (they never do), they need to be fought on all fronts.
If they do, they probably want revenge for the Nakba in 1948, in where Israel has systematically expulsed and cleansed Palestinians from their native soil.
The Nakba was really bad and heavily shapes modern Palestinian consciousness, but nobody is seeking revenge for the Nakba itself anymore. It's more about retaliating against much more recent and current offenses, mainly the Gaza blockade and settlements, resisting Israeli occupation and freeing Palestinian detainees.
the ones staying out of it
Permanently Deleted
Israelis and Palestinians. Many Jews are against what Israel is doing.
Asking lemmy.ml if Israel is bad is not a great idea if you actually want a nuanced/balanced answer. Honestly, I'd recommend just taking your research elsewhere and steering clear of social media on this one.
Yes, we oppose Israel's genocide here.
Palestine / Hamas.
Every person I've talked to that had some real qualifications on that topic says that Israel are the good guys and the people of Palestine are caught in the crossfire of the war.
Every "qualified" person you talked to says the ethnic supremacist apartheid settler colonists are the good guys?
Which Nazi bars do you hang out in?
Are the real qualifications a caliper set and an unwillingness to talk about what they used to do before they got a position in the west German military?
