Hamas, after years of being supressed, is a group of militants with handguns.
The Isrealli response to those terrorist with guns killing and abducting some of their people, was to flatten and impose collective punishment on the whole country that those people came from.
I have no issues with them defending themselves, but I do with the disproportionate nature of what has been happening.
It’s especially ironic because the jews are one of the few people in the world that should have learned that lesson.
HAMAS spent this time to build a network of tunnels below the streets, and to stockpile ammo/explosives. They could care less about the people, using them only as human shields. They also actively brainwashed the population: https://www.ynetnews.com/magazine/article/b1fjucpdgg
So what would be a "proportional" answer from Israel? They don't have any good options.
> The Isrealli response to those terrorist with guns killing and abducting some of their people, was to flatten and impose collective punishment on the whole country that those people came from.
To give you the sense of scale, HAMAS murdered 1195 people, and they also took 250 people as hostages (somehow pro-Palestinian protesters almost never knew about this!). And 1500 people is a HUGE number for a tiny country like Israel (Jewish population of 7200000). Scaled to the size of the US, this would be aroud 70000 people, many times the size of 9/11.
It’s pure cowardice that they fight the way they do, mixing all their military equipment with civilian infrastructure like hospitals and schools, and they rely on propagandizing gullible Western liberals (as well as anti-semites) to get support for their murderous cause.
There is no way to fight them that doesn’t endanger civilians. And there’s no way for Israeli Jews to continue breathing without fighting Hamas. Anyone who doesn’t believe that is living in a fantasy.
How about murdering 17,000 children in a country with a population of 2M total?
Does that sound better?
Nearly one in 20 people in Gaza was murdered by the Israelli military. That’s an ridiculous number. Since Nazi germany managed about 10% of their occupied population in 5 years, I guess they were right on track to hit those numbers before (can’t believe I’m saying this) Trump thought it was necessary to intervene, whatever his reasons.
(It hasn't been militarily meaningful for over 18 months; you could call it that today! If what you are, principally, is angry about war crimes in Gaza, you have ample evidence to muster without telling fairy tales about what the situation was in 2023.)
You can avoid a lot of trouble by avoiding sentence structures where the subject is "Jewish people" and the verb is "should (x)".
This is beyond ridiculous. Israel is a nuclear-armed regional power with tanks, a modern navy, a state of the art air force, the best missile defence system in the world, and one of the best counterintelligence operations. It can project force thousands of kilometres away into Iran. Hamas is none of that.
Even on sheer manpower, sources from 2023 put Hamas at 3 to 30 times smaller than the IDF, depending on who you trust and how you count reservists. [0]
If Hamas had been a near peer to the IDF, the October 7th attackers wouldn't have been shootings and stabbings within 5 miles of the Gaza border, they would have been successful missile attacks on Tel Aviv or tanks rolling down the streets of West Jerusalem. Or do you think Hamas just wanted to start a limited war with border skirmishes and kept its real military might in reserve?
Perhaps "small arms" or "light weapons" would be more precise than "handguns", but Hamas's capabilities have always been closer to the latter than to Israel's.
[0] https://www.france24.com/en/live-news/20231016-the-israel-ha...
I can't believe people still peddle this bullshit. Hamas are a well organised and a well-funded terrorist organisation that is also the governing body in Gaza.
So anything from "back alley" support from Iran to fingers in hundreds of millions in yearly humanitarian aid. I wouldn't be surprised if Hamas had total funding near the same level as IDF.
You don't get a separate "rocket attacks on Israel" Wikipedia entry with "just guns": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palestinian_rocket_attacks_on_... You don't get to fire Russian- and Iranian-built Grad, Katyusha, or Fajr-5 and pretend "it's just a group of militants with guns"
How much damage has those Russian and Iranian built rockets done in Israel? How many tanks do Hamas have? How many fighter jets do Hamas have? How many nuclear weapons do Hamas have?
The fact is, Hamas is a product of being a military in a territory that is subject to blockade by Israel. You can say Israel left Gaza in [insert year], but the fact of the matter is that a blockade has been there up to now.
And so if Hamas was a democratically elected government of Gaza, with the opportunity of becoming a 'Singapore' of the Middle East and having full agency (as Israel claims), why is it outside the bounds of reasonableness that they do acquire weapons from Russia and Iran, just like any other country in the world does for their own military needs?
Your "assymetrical" point is especially bizzare. Palestinian terrorists have shown nothing but tremendous willingness and enthusiasm for attacking jews with literally anything they can lay their hands on including screwdrivers and vehicles. The total imbalance of forces doesn't deter them at all. Why would they having more weapons or Israel less change anything?
The main reason large portions of the strip has been flattened is because Hamas built tunnels underneath it.
You say it's disproportionate, but spend a couple of hours reading up israels history and geography. You might arrive at some conclusions about the nature of Palestinian terror (if the parent story wasn't enough). I doubt you could come up with literally any other solution. The only one i can think of is a mass evacuation of the gaza strip. It would have prevented a huge amount of deaths.
I think the main lesson jews learnt from the holocaust is not to rely on the rest of the world to help them when they are in trouble. I have absolutely no idea why you would think they must prioritise the moral lessons they learned above their own safety.
In full anarchy, the bigger person is rational. Regardless, the bigger person seeks to make some semblance of a case of why their perspective is not immoral, and they mostly can’t. It’s not both rational and moral (as much as they want delude themselves out of moral accountability), it is simply just rational which means one actor is truly psychopathic.
Wow, what a daring and brave opinion. I'm in awe that you're willing to share it publically!
Like, a bunch of my local social media bubble has been talking about "media literacy" and "illiteracy" and related concepts and this is a great example.
If, for example, someone is telling you that a publically terrible act of violence by someone associated with palestine is probably a response to previous israeli actions, they are not, in fact, secretly trying to imply that the terrorist is a hero.
They're simply trying to explain the likely consequences of actions.
One of the things that I find most frustrating in certain types of discussions is the idea that we can't do something that will improve the lives of large numbers of people on the off chance that a bad person won't get punished or someone undeserving will be rewarded.
It's entirely probable that the solution that improves the lives of the most people in that region will also involve quite a few awful people not getting punished.
