bouncing

In my experience abroad, Americans have a decent handle on it, at least compared to Europeans. I've met more than one Irish person who, for example, did not know that the Six Day War ever happened.

I'm bringing up Hamas because they're the belligerent. The same reason I'm bringing up Israel. Who should we be talking about? Fatah? The PLO? They aren't in power.

The apartheid narrative is also a false one. Apartheid was under a racial test. It was a system of South Africa's white minority's choosing. That isn't the case in Palestine. There are millions of Arab Israelis. There were no "Black Whites" in South Africa's apartheid.

From 1948 to 1967, Palestine existed for 19 years as a presumed state. To get UN membership, all they had to do was form a government. Not a single Israeli soldier stepped foot into Palestine during those years. Then, the Egypt, Jordan, United Arab Republic (which included the Gaza Strip), Syria, Saudi Arabia, Iraq and Kuwait all attacked Israel unprovoked. Since then, Israel is at various levels occupied territories used to launch that war.

At various times, it's eased its occupation, most notably after Oslo and the 2000 Camp David conference. Palestine has held, at various points, elections with Israeli help. Ehud Barak worked earnestly on a Palestinian State. So did the international community.

Then in 2006, Gazans elected Hamas in a relatively democratic election. No election has been held since. Israel has not occupied Gaza since either, though it has controlled its radio waves, airspace, and ports with good reason.

Life in Gaza is intolerable and inhumane. The West Bank is also bad, though obviously not as dire (Israel does directly occupy the West Bank). It's a complex and sad story, with plenty of Palestinian suffering, but apartheid it is not.

you keep falling into this Pro Israeli or Pro Hamas dichotomy, those arnt the only options. We can be anti-apartheid and anti-hamas at the same time, but recognize the systemic nature of the violence that arises because of the oppression.

But see, you're falling into the exact dichotomy you said you wanted to avoid. It's far too simplistic to just frame it as "oppressor" and "oppressed." By labeling one group as the oppressed and another group as the oppressor, you're taking a side.

It's easy to fall into that narrative, because Israel has most of the power. Life in Israel is far better than life in Gaza. In response to 10/7, Israel pushed Gaza into a humanitarian crisis by cutting off power, medicine, food, and even drinking water into Gaza (though Biden managed to get them to turn the water back on).

So it's easy to look at them and say, "oh, one group is oppressed and the other is an oppressor." But it's also naive. Hamas's stated goal is genocide. It's not really an "oppressor and oppressed" situation when the allegedly oppressed are explicitly genocidal.

The Israeli Arabs are a good example of what a integrated Palestine Israel might look like to start with, just expand that to the entire population. Of course there are some outstanding issues to hammer out even with our model Israeli Arab integration wikipedia which ultimately means the government needs to change from being a ethnostate government to a national citizenship based government secular of religion. But I’m not going to let perfection get in the way of good enough, if we could integrate everyone today even with the racism issues, thats a huge win.

But then you're essentially playing the role of a colonial power, telling the locals how it's going to be. That's what George W. Bush tried to do in Iraq and Afghanistan. It didn't work.

If you did a poll people of any ethnic and religious group between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River, and you asked them, "would you like to live in a secular state with both Israelis and Palestinian Arabs sharing the same land," do you think you'd get a majority? I bet you'd get fewer than 20%.

Probably more Israelis would be open and willing to agree to that than Palestinian Arabs, but I doubt you'd see a majority from either camp. And a "one secular state" solution isn't something any world leader is really talking about. It wasn't part of the Oslo or Camp David accords, isn't what anyone is proposing, etc.

I'm an American living in Europe. In both countries, I'd say people are aware there is a context. Maybe they don't fully know what the context is, but they know there is a context.

But again, you don't need context to condemn Hamas. You might need it to understand Hamas, but you don't need it to condemn Hamas.

Of course it's accurate. All world events, all of them, happen in some kind of context. Everyone knows that. No one believes that there was some kind of parallel universe where Israel and Hamas were just plopped down onto a map with no history and no context. Everyone knows the context.

The problem, however, is when people say stupid shit like, "Well, we can't condemn Hamas without first discussing--..."

That's when you can stop them. You can say, actually, yes, you can condemn Hamas without caveat or whataboutism. It's a really simple thing to do. We do it all the time.

I mean, maybe there was some kind of conspiracy to pit Hamas against Fatah.

To me, it seems more likely that they were trying to treat Hamas as what people here act like it is: some kind of governing party in Gaza to be negotiated with. That was obviously an error.

It's not a majority sentiment in the US, no.

It's surprisingly common in certain circles though.

Aren't they?

A lot of people however, are rationally, and correctly, pointing out that organizations like Hamas are a symptom of an oppressed people. Like an apartheid state, or slave state, we can look at history for examples of people striking out over and over again.

You can see it that way, but you also have to take Hamas's stated goal into consideration. Their stated goal is not to liberate their people, it's to be the new oppressor, and a far worse one than that.

Let's put it another way. There are around two million Arab Israelis. They're in the Israeli parliament, they serve in its courts, in the military, etc. Would they be liberated if Hamas achieved its goal? They would probably be viewed as collaborators and executed.

This myth that Hamas are just freedom fighters, like Nelson Mandela or Gandhi, really needs to be dispelled. It has no basis in reality.

There's this weird urge in the minds of people to try to find a hero story. There's no hero story. And if groups like Hamas weren't wreaking havoc in the area for the past 50+ years, realistically, a Palestinian state would probably exist.

I can’t speak for the next 10 to 20 years, but the long-term viable solution in 30 years is going to be a single country encompassing both current Israel and current Palestine, in a secular, non-ethnocentric, non-religious democratic organization. Where people are equal regardless of their ethnicity, religion, or language.

Except no one in the region wants that. Certainly not Hamas.

I didn't mention the Israeli government, except to point out that they were delusional. This isn't whataboutism.

This is a statement free of whataboutism: Hamas is a terrorist organization intent on killing as many Jews as possible, worldwide, without stopping.

That's it. No need to expand on that. That's a statement free of whataboutism.