That’s what I find insane. It’s like people have lost the ability to say, “what Israel is/was doing was fucked, but also fuck Hamas for mass murder and rape”. People get upset when you say, “I feel bad for the Israelis and Palestinians”. You’re either pro-hamas, anti-israel or pro-israel, anti-hamas. You’re either pro-palestine and anti-israel, or anti-palestine and pro-israel.
You know you can be sympathetic to the civilians on both sides and hate the extremists right?
Yeah, it’s one of those polarizing issues, where people on both sides decide that any opinion is binary and you either are all in for Israel or all in for Palestina and you can’t have any empathy or understanding for both sides.
These past days people yelled at me in the fediverse that I chill for Israel’s illegal occuption and also that I chill for Hamas and blame their atrocities on Israel. It’s insane. You can hardly have any other opinion than either Israel all bad or Palestine all bad.
It’s disgusting how many people on both sides support slaughtering civilians of the other side while at the same time saying that the other side are monsters for slaughtering civilians.
Welcome to modern politics, where the range of opinions that a person accepts is so small that it doesn’t overlap with the range that a person on the other side accepts.
If you have an opinion in the middle, everyone will just hate you and having a discussion is impossible.
I blame Western media’s fairness bias. Decades of pushing the idea that every issue has exactly two sides, no more and no less, and those sides are exactly opposite each other and fully equal.
Israel, represented by their hardline zionist governments, on one side. Palestine, represented by the hardline islamists of Hamas, on the other. Nothing exists off that axis, nothing exists between those poles but Enlightened Centrist fence sitters. Fairness.
The Israeli-Palestinian conflict has taken on symbolic importance to many people. In one sense whatever is going on there is not really important for most of the world. It’s some kind of internal conflict/civil war with essentially neighbors beating each other up. But it doesn’t really affect anyone else significantly. And yet everyone has a take on who is right and who is wrong and the thinking is very black and white and absolutist, even if you really don’t know what’s going on or the history behind it or the stakes.
Contrast this with other similar conflicts that most people have no opinion on. Like Ethiopia-Tigray or the ongoing civil war in Myanmar. Most people probably haven’t even heard of this stuff and have no clue as to who is fighting who. Hell, how many people had the barest inkling of who Hamas was a week ago. And now they feel they can take some absolute morally superior position on the issue.
It’s because the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has become symbolic of who you are. The other conflicts I mentioned have no symbolic meaning or importance to people outside those regions. The Ukraine war is another highly symbolic conflict and that’s why it’s often mentioned in the same breath, but the myriad of other ethnic conflicts going on throughout the world are ignored.
The power of symbolic positions is that they strongly ensure group cohesion. You wear these symbols on your chest like a medal or a placard. They superficially resemble personal opinions, but actually they’re badges of membership. Most people don’t actually think hard about these issues or try to understand deeply what’s going on. Instead they are told what to believe and what to say by people that they trust and identify with. Once it’s clear what the “correct” position is, people will wear it with pride.
Deeply thinking about a complex issue is extremely resource intensive and most people just don’t care that much. We also want to clearly delineate things into categories of good/bad. It’s a natural heuristic that feels good. Once you know a thing is “good” you cheer it on. If a thing is “bad” you loudly denounce it with your peers. If a big thing happens, but you don’t know if it’s good or bad then you feel uncomfortable mental dissonance. Big things can’t just be left in a state of psychological limbo. You need to decide if it’s good or bad. And so we do, collectively.
And when you take that stance, you get called an enlightened centrist. I lack the words to express my frustration. Why is life so cheap to these people? Do they even fathom what’s being lost?
No, they don’t have any clue what’s being lost because they haven’t seen anything other than the flickering blue light of their computer monitor for the past 4 years.
The people least well adjusted (terminally online) are the ones online all the time upvoting and posting things and only generally interacting with others that are terminally online. This lack of interaction with other ideas leads to this radicalization and lack of care for others.
There’s no use in trying to convince the guy that hasn’t left mom’s basement in 6 years. What’s he gonna do? Get cheeto dust on me?
That, or they’re college pseudointellectuals who have become so isolated from the world outside their campus and the surrounding neighborhood and are lied to so constantly about how the world works (as it’s an institution where ideas don’t have to be factual or practical in order to keep being taught) that they’ve been brainwashed into thinking those ideas are applicable to every current problem in existence and into always being contrarian and automatically disagreeing with everything the mainstream says.
Doesn’t help that people conflate Hamas with Palestinian civilians.
This is why I mostly stay out of that conversation. I don’t know enough about the history or politics or general demographics of the region to have an informed and nuanced perspective. I just know it’s not good
What!? But! My brain! 2 things!? No . . . One thing! Only pro or anti! Cannot compute!! slams fists on keyboard
McConnell mode activated
😶… 😶…
Reality is a team sport, to some people.
free palestine from hamas
awfully lot of people make the mistake of conflating palestinians with hamas, especially considering that the last elections were out there almost 20 years ago and weren’t allowed since. west bank effectively treats gaza as under rebel government
(same goes for conflating israelis with israeli govt of course. they have mostly-functional elections, but bibi tries hard to undo it with his judiciary fuckery. this might be one reason for intelligence lapse - some army people resigned as a result of these moves and in parallel some seats were stuffed with bibi’s people)
then you have this bit where likud needs hamas because this riles up israeli nationalists, which harass and contain gaza and send out settlers which radicalizes palestinian right wingers, which
this has been going on for considerable time and is deliberate strategy of likud https://www.vox.com/23910085/netanyahu-israel-right-hamas-gaza-war-history https://theintercept.com/2018/02/19/hamas-israel-palestine-conflict/
goes without saying that you can’t really have peaceful palestine with hamas existing but i’d also say that you can’t really have peaceful palestine with likud in power
This is the right take. Likud and Hamas (and the other minor parties/terror groups aligned with those two) deserve each other. The civilians don’t deserve to be caught between them. They’re both fairly popular afaik, but I can’t necessarily blame the people when either side unilaterally disarming would face atrocities.
It’s all so fucked. I can’t even imagine what it’s like to be one of the millions of civilians caught between two groups of shitty opportunists.
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Apparently the infants are supposed to take up arms against hamas or they deserve it.
how have you got to this conclusion
I’ve been told disenfranchised Palestinians need to fight Hamas.
you gotta be arguing with somebody else, because i didn’t say any of that
in a hypothetical world where you can mount meaningful opposition to hamas while living in gaza for long enough for it to matter, then yeah
but i don’t deal with counterfactuals and while this would be morally correct, heroic etc i don’t expect any of this
what i have said is that if you want to have lasting peace, you need to have both likud and hamas out of the picture. note: i’m not saying who should do it, or how, or when, or if it even will happen at all. that’s because there’s plenty of people whose plans and incentives don’t include lasting peace and actively work against it, for example likud and hamas. and i’m not predicting anything, i’m just saying that shit’s fucked and whatever happens now, it won’t be pretty
Oh, no. It wasn’t you I was talking to. I was making a joke about another conversation I had.
Sorry that came off so awkwardly.
i don’t sit inside your head, go get some sleep if you think otherwise
I was agreeing with you lol
It’s funny you say that, though. I was getting an infusion when I sent that and sleep is about all my body is interested in now.
After the Hamas attack the news showed video of Palestinians singing and dancing in the street. My buddy just took a sip of his coffee “What are they celebrating, their last day of having houses? For every action there is a reaction, and an Israeli reaction is quite a fucking thing”
I shouldnt have laughed but not only did I know he was right but he managed to make it a Snatch reference.
Trust noncredibledefense to have the proper takes.
Which is true and also sad. When the Ukraine Boogaloo started r/noncredibledefense was one of the best sources there. Which isn’t shining a good light on the rest of that site.
nah this is expected. non-specialist won’t find IR/geopolitics/defense shitsposts funny, or even understand them in more obscure cases
Gotta know what’s right in order to REALLY get it wrong.
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aaah yes all these hamas sympathizers… where exactly?
hexbear and lemmygrad are riddled with them, I’ve had to block all comms and almost every user I come across
Acknowledging that Hamas and their atrocities is the obvious outcome of the atrocities of Isreal’s colonialism on the Palestinian people as a whole is being sympathetic to Hamas as far as I can tell. Most people seem to think that Palestine = Hamas.
It’s quite spectactular. I think the politcs on both sides are awful, and I really feel for the civillians who are just trying to live their lives under this bullshit. Both sides need to step up and take responsibility for their major, horrific fuckups and problems; and the west in general needs to take responsibility for kicking people out of their homes to make homes for others… but also both sides just need to stop fucking hurting each other for a minute in order to progress.
So Israel needs to stop colonizing Palestine, as that is the primary cause of death and conflict.
Saying both sides just need to stop when one is constantly the aggressor and the other is responding to that aggression is zero tolerance logic. Blaming the victim is why things have escalated to the point we are at now.
They’re not colonizing Palestine. They’re eradicating it.
And this has been going on for almost 80 years. Anything anyone does, is always, in response to some shitty thing someone did before. But fact of the matter is, Israel benefits more than Palistine to have a conflict. So much that the time when it actually looked like someone could talk both sides to a peaceful conclusion. Israel had him assassinated.
Colonization is the method Isreal is using to eradicate Palestine.
Look. I get that you heard that word somewhere. But everything isn’t colonizing.
Annexing would be a better description to what they’re doing.
Its literally colonizing though. It’s sending their citizens to build settlements in areas that do not belong to them.
Annexing does not imply the use of force, colonizing does.
Annexing implies bringing an area under the control of a government; colonization implies mass movement of people into undeveloped land. If it’s occupied land (necessitating the eviction of the occupants), then it’s ethnic cleansing. Any or all are correct depending on which specific part of Israeli policy one is discussing.
Colonization does not mean unoccupied land.
Crimea circa 2014 disagrees
Russia circa 2024 disagrees because they wanted it to sound voluntary. News went with it because annex is technically correct in the close by/far away context, but not the whole colonialism is always by force context.
The Day Israel became a country they were attacked. They’ve been on defense since day 1.
They’re too heavy handed that’s clear but they are not the aggressor or instigator in this fight. They’ve offered dozens of peace deals, brokered by a variety of 3rd parties, only to be rejected because Hamas wants Jews dead. It’s in their founding Charter, just to be clear about who’s intent is what over there in terms of aggression.
Evicting Palestinians from Palestinian territory by force so that Isreali settlers can occupy their land is being defensive?
I don’t understand how you could see that in any other context? They’re obviously developing settlements to maintain a front in the region. You can see from this week’s events that having settlements adjacent to the border prevent the incursion from penetrating deeper into the country where the larger population centers are.
20, or 30 years ago you were seeing bombings in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. I was in Jerusalem for a bus bombing and just missed it… Those have died down and been replaced with border skirmishes.
Whether that’s a reasonable or effective strategy is a different question.
“Developing settlements to maintain a front” is a pretty wild tactic, let alone a defensive one.
Advancing the front is a tactic as old as warfare… that’s how borders moved historically.
Israel isn’t doing the whole rape and pillage thing, those savages at Hamas are doing that. Israel has taken the plunder part too far imo though.
i appreciate that you admitted unprompted that settlers conduct warfare against palestinians, now have a timeout and do better next time
Well, uh, I guess the community name here applies rather aptly. Well done.
When the response to that aggression is also genocide fantasies, sometimes a conflict has no good guys.
That is correct, there are no good guys in ths situation.
Then stop scoffing when people condemn both sides.
I’m not, but ok.
You really are. You’re directly responding to someone saying ‘both sides need to stop,’ and your response is sharply negative. You explicitly call it blaming the victim.
A blanket statement like ‘both sides need to stop’ by itself as some simple solution ignoring the fact that one side with more power is continuously provoking the other. When a bully constantly picks on someone until they respond with too much violence both sides are wrong AND one of them is still a victim and the other the aggressor. The same thing is true when we are talking about nation states.
Palestine is still the victim, even if their actions were completely unreasonable, because Israel has far more military and diplomatic power in comparison in addition to being the ones who are constantly invading the land of Palestine. Plus, the most recent peace accords did not require Israel to give the land back, just to stop taking more. It is a one sided situation with a victim that is being dismissed as an equal conflict where both sides just need to get along.
What plan would please both sides?
Ur mum
Blow up the radical zionists and hamas, maybe blood eagle the prime minister of Israel (I am not even gonna try to spell his name) threaten to bomb Tel Aviv if Israel tries anything again. Best idea I have.
Pm of Israel and the leader of Hamas in a hell in the cell cage match? Fight to the death, bare knuckles because they’re both obviously savages.
Losing side walks away peacefully… winner gets shot in the head for being a pos and replaced with a less assholish pm? Step 4: Profit/peace.
Where can you buy tickets?
“both sides just need to stop fucking hurting each other”
Just apply that one to the other invasion we’ve been talking about of late, that of Russia in Ukraine, and see how well that “both sides” “argument” sounds to you.
If one puts on hold any feelings that lead to one favoring one side over the other (say, because one side is culturally quite close and familiar whilst the other is filled with people who will shout “god is great” whenever shit happens), it’s pretty clear that you can’t apply a “both sides” demand to a situation were one side is the invading one and has overwhelming force, whilst the other side is a far weaker resistance movement living in a tiny slice under siege of a much vaster occupied land.
Your point would make absolute sense if the Palestinians had all of their land (or at least to the Oslo Agreement borders) and still kept sending rockets to and attacking Israel, but that’s not at all the situation that we have now.
I’m sure we would be saying the exact same about the Ukraine war if Ukrainians were treating the Russians the same way Hamas was treating Israelians.
But they aren’t, so it is a moot point.
You are comparing apples to oranges.
There are 3 big differences in their situation:
- In Ukraine, the Western powers actually helped the weaker side with weaponry, whilst in Palestine they helped the stronger side.
- More than half a century has passed in Palestine since the invasion started. The situation in Palestine now is like if all Ukraine had been conquered with 80% of the Ukranian population living abroad and 2 small Ukranian enclaves were left surrounded by occupied Ukraine - one in Kyiv and one in Odessa - containing the remaining 20% of the Ukranian population in 1/100th of the territory previously occupied by the entire population.
- Last but not least, as maybe the most shocking, is that the Russians are nowhere as racist towards the Ukranians as the Israelis are towards the Palestinians: Russia actually wants the Ukranians to stay in the occupied territories as long as they become Russians and obbey the Russian Government (to the point of activelly trying to force them to become Russians), whilst the Israelis want the Palestinians to either leave or die and are activelly against them becoming Israelian Citiziens. Israeli racism is so widespread, entrenched and endorsed at the highest level that the nation of Israel split their citizenship into Israeli Arab Citizenship and Israeli Jewish Citizienship and gave fewer rights to the former than to the latter: Israeli Law makes the fewer Palestinians who got Israeli Nationality (back when it was still possible) second class citizens, whilst Russian Law does no such thing for Ukranians in Russian occupied territories in Ukraine who become Russian Nationals.
Two sides going ‘I’m gonna wipe you off the map!’ ‘No I’m gonna wipe you off the map!’ is not comparable to one side going ‘get back on your side the line’ while the other goes ‘half your country is our side, actually all your country, also we’re not here, also it’s a special police double-secret operation, also nice kids you got there.’
I condemn and disagree with Hamas as well. The way they’ve attacked Israel does nothing but invite suffering for both nations involved, especially Palestinians.
But let’s be honest. What’s Palestine really getting in aid? Hamas, although extreme and definitely a terrorist group, are the only ones fighting back against Israel? I can’t remember anyone putting sanctions on Israel and threatening military action if they continue to destroy settlements in Gaza. It’s always just a slap on the wrist.
Sure, free Palestine from Hamas, but then what? Israel gets to continue doing what it has been doing for decades? How does that not just create Hamas 2.0?
The people losing their families don’t need thoughts and prayers, and aid money to keep them on a life support machine. I’m genuinely looking for an answer here, because for Palestinians, it does seem like Hamas is their only option?
Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable
Violent revolution is never chosen by the oppressed, it is imposed by the oppressor
The people losing their families don’t need thoughts and prayers, and aid money to keep them on a life support machine. I’m genuinely looking for an answer here, because for Palestinians, it does seem like Hamas is their only option?
Fatah was an option. But a mixture of Israeli behind-the-scenes manipulation and Palestinian frustration cratered their support in Gaza.
Wtf this is way too credible
It’s been genuinely distressing to see people condoning such horrific behaviour. Thank you for the small dose of sanity.
I’ve never seen a single person advocating Palenstein ever offer their support for Hamas. Yet social media out pouring suggests otherwise.
It’s been weird seeing moral grandstanding from right wingers supporting Israel, because of the war crimes committed by hamas yet when the same thing is reported happening to Ukranians by Russia, its suddenly all fake and we shouldn’t get involved and other shinty excuses.
*Palestine
Palenstein sounds like a castle in Germany.
Something happened to my keyboard yo on the ol mobile and now It doesn’t correct my shinty typing anymore.
I came across this recruitment ‘meme’
Over the last few days I’ve noticed that the Venn diagram “Russia’s recent attacks on Ukraine are good, actually” and “Hamas’ recent attacks on Israel are good, actually” posters is a circle.
Seriously, whenever you find the most extremist pro-atrocity stuff you can search their names and “ukraine” and find the worst Vatnik crap.
If you’re rooting for either team in Israel vs Hamas, I’m giving you the stink-eye.
Same same.
We must achieve peace, by force!
PEACE! THROUGH! POWER!
This is to credible!
Can someone explain this meme to me?
It is illustrating the only reasonable position in regards to Israel and the Gaza Strip: denouncing the inhumane treatment for many years against the Palestinian people, and at the same time also denouncing Hamas and their terrorism which focuses on non-military targets for maximum impact
Many people, including outspoken Hamas supporters will read “fuck what Israel has done” as vocal support to their cause which is not true as their cause is to kill Israelis by any and all means innocent or not armed or not, children or not, etc.
Oh ok, I get it now. I guess I expected meme to be more funny than just true.
