> Sorry I won’t support terrorism and support what Israel is doing.
This just means you support State Terrorism instead of non-state terrorism.
> Sometimes you have to defend yourself though.
Unless you're Palestinian. In which case defending yourself isn't authorized. Just ask the West Bank residents being regularly killed by armed illegal settlers pre-October 7th how laying down their arms has worked out for them.
I'm trying to follow your logic, seriously please help me. You are suggesting that murdering people at a music festival and kidnapping children and kidnapping elderly and beheading civilians is a form of defense against other people hurting other people in a different geographic region? Please, tell me I'm wrong and do tell me how you see things.
> You are suggesting that murdering people at a music festival and kidnapping children and kidnapping elderly and beheading civilians is a form of defense against other people hurting other people in a different geographic region?
I'm suggesting murdering people at a music festival occupies the same space, morally, as bombing entire families with aviation ordnance. One of them is painted as wrong, and the other isn't, because state terrorism is tacitly approved in the Western mainstream information space....depending on the perpetrators. When Hamas (or Russia) does it, it's "kidnapping", when Israel does it, they are "detaining suspects". From August 2023 (before the Hamas attack) AP News was reporting Israel had 1,200 detainees without charges. Why aren't they called hostages? ( https://apnews.com/article/israel-detention-jails-palestinia... )
The two regions are both enclaves of Palestine, engaged in a joint struggle for emancipation. There were 100+ Palestinians killed in the West Bank in 2022: ( https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-63073541 ) and 200+ killed in 2023 before the October 7th attack ( https://news.un.org/en/story/2023/08/1139922 ). Clearly disarmament and NOT being ruled by Hamas is not working for the West Bank Palestinians. I'm sure if you asked any of the various Palestinian militant groups, yes they are engaged in a joint defense of their people. After all, the primary purpose of the Al-Aqsa Flood Operation was to try to capture enough Israelis to force a prisoner exchange and get their own people back (similar to snatching Gilad Shalit and trading just him for 1,000 Palestinians). They suffered from "catastrophic success" mixed with undisciplined follow-on echelons (Palestinian Islamic Jihad as well as others) who inflicted far more civilian damage than just a cross-border snatch & grab....and they are definitely paying for it in blood now.
> I'm suggesting murdering people at a music festival occupies the same space, morally, as bombing entire families with aviation ordnance.
Then I'll address that. You are again, 100% correct. Bombing entire families with aviation ordnance would be abhorrent.
When the Gazans set out to attack a music festival, they did so with the explicit intention to murder civilians. When Israel drops a JDAM on a civilian home in Gaza, one of two things happen: Either the target is a high-ranking militant, and unfortunately the civilians he lives with (like everybody else, they have families) are collateral damage. Or, the target is military infrastructure in those civilian homes, and the home gets warnings to evacuate before the bombs fall.
Let's be clear: Israel has been willing to cause far more collateral damage since the 7th of October last year than beforehand. Every Israeli I know mourns the civilians killed as a result. I am certain that there exist Israelis who celebrate Gazan civilian deaths, I see them online. But nobody that I've ever met - and I served in a combat unit here - has ever felt that way.
If you really feel that bombing entire families is wrong, you should know that a rocket from Gaza fell not far from my apartment in November 2012. We had just a broken window, but other neighbours had far more damage and one was critically injured. The rocket fell where one of my daughters was playing just as the sirens rang - that siren saved her life and others.
This is a dishonest take. The innocent civilians now being bombed didn't do this. That you try to commingle them into Hamas' actions tells a lot about you.
> When Israel drops a JDAM on a civilian home in Gaza, one of two things happen: Either the target is a high-ranking militant, and unfortunately the civilians he lives with (like everybody else, they have families) are collateral damage. Or, the target is military infrastructure in those civilian homes,
How many thousands of "high ranking" militants were there that had to be killed while with their families? Was no pattern of life analysis done to enable killing them outside of their homes? Let's just say 10,000 bombs were dropped on these high-ranking guys. That leaves the balance of ordnance of ~12,000 targets. So you are telling me Israel had TIMELY and ACCURATE intelligence on the locations of ~12,000 pieces of military infrastructure in Gaza....but couldn't anticipate that Hamas's attack plans were serious? That you know the location of damn near every RPG under some guy's floorboards....but couldn't rapidly locate and recover your abducted citizens in the same battlespace? I've seen the Joint Prioritized Target List for the Korean Peninsula and even though North Korea has been digging underground facilities since 1953, I don't think that List has ~12,000 targets on it, and North Korea has 330 times the land area of Gaza. And we KNOW that the targeting process isn't accurate and timely, because we get incidents like this: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c985y78d0g1o
Anyone who has planned aviation support and executed a targeting lifecycle can tell that this doesn't pass the sniff test.
> I am certain that there exist Israelis who celebrate Gazan civilian deaths, I see them online. But nobody that I've ever met - and I served in a combat unit here - has ever felt that way.
I served in a National Guard infantry battalion before I commissioned, and we definitely had a few sociopaths in our company. How does nobody in the IDF know anyone malevolent, yet we get a constant stream of self-incriminating IDF war crimes on social media?
> If you really feel that bombing entire families is wrong, you should know that a rocket from Gaza fell not far from my apartment in November 2012. We had just a broken window, but other neighbours had far more damage and one was critically injured.
Do you feel that your neighbor was "just collateral damage"? Probably not, right? It's such a dehumanizing euphemism.
General terror bombardment of residential areas is morally wrong and even militarily stupid in my opinion. It's wrong when Hamas and Hezbollah do it, and it's wrong when the IDF does it. Whether that is Greater Israel or Greater Palestine, neither will accomplish their objective by blindly chucking ordnance at people's houses.
> After all, the primary purpose of the Al-Aqsa Flood Operation was to try to capture enough Israelis to force a prisoner exchange and get their own people back
You can't possibly believe this when there are numerous confirmed reports of entire families being massacred with 0 hostages taken. If your purpose was really to take hostages; those could have been easy bargain chips; instead they raped them, murdered them and paraded their bodies in front of cheerful crowds.
If the central point of the operation was to grab hostages; their whereabouts and well being (or at least survival) would have been central to the whole ordeal; instead the were disseminated with little to no proof of life. It doesn't even appear that the Hamas leadership knew what to do with them, or even had them accounted for and located.
The goal of the attacks was to inflict a major blow to the Israeli government by forcing a strong military response that would delay the normalisation of the relations between Israel and other arab states. To do so Hamas was wiling to sacrifice civilian blood which is exactly what is happening now. They placed their hideouts in schools hospitals, and NGO headquarters to maximise the political cost of any military operation. Hostages were "nice to have" as they were supposed to further increase the pressure on the Israeli government by people who would be pushing for their return.
They did not anticipate how far BiBi was willing to go and they are definitely paying for it in blood now.
Most are anti palestine because Hamas is a terrorist. Sorry I won’t support terrorism and support what Israel is doing.
I support Ukraine because I know what Russia needs Ukraine for.
Do I want to see people shooting? No because I’ve been to war and seen how ugly it is. Sometimes you have to defend yourself though.
I still voted for Trump.