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.
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.
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
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.
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.
