For mental health reasons, I had taken myself out of most political topics. But lately there seems to be a surge of talk about Palestine and Hamas (forgive me if I spelled this wrong). I do know it’s something to do with land rights, but it also seems to be so much more at the same time. I’m not trying to start any fights. I just want to understand. Thank you.
It’s complex and I encourage you to do research as this is all from the hip and might not be accurate.
It goes back to World War 2 and the suffering the Jewish people endured. The countries involved decided to give Israel their historical lands as a place where they could self-determinate and be safe. The problem is that other people owned that land at the time and had little say… these same people are understandably upset with that decision and have been fighting for their own land inside Israel since then. So there’s automatically two sides living in the same country wanting the other out.
Terrorism was really coming into its own during the first couple decades, and terrorism works best for those that don’t have an organized military… so the Palestinians sided with them. Black September, the PLA, Hamas… one after another these groups caused a lot of damage, which meant Israel locked all of them into one tiny part of Israel for their own security. Gaza.
But Israel isn’t a saint in all this. They keep expanding their settlements into claimed territory and rarely through any civil means. They treat the Palestinians as the enemy, even when not all of them are. Same sort of struggle the whole west is having at the moment. There’s lots of politics at play in the Middle East, and those countries also don’t want Palestinians to come into their countries because of the damage those terrorist groups have done to them too. I believe it was Jordan that was completely destabilized after taking in a bunch of Palestinian refugees.
Then Hamas attacked Israel and killed a ton of people, have innocent hostages, and have vowed to never ever stop. Israel is at a crossroads. They obviously have to wipe them out… same way America felt about Al’Qaeda. But Hamas is hiding in Gaza, right in the middle of population centers. What to do?
Israel announced to everyone in Gaza that they needed to move south, dropped fliers saying they were going to attack, all the things. Then they attacked. Now innocent Palestinians are getting killed because they either couldn’t or wouldn’t leave, and Israel isn’t allowing humanitarian aid in.
It’s a giant cluster, is what it is.
Ok, that gives me better insight. I think my confusion has been who the actors are. So Hamas is a (terrorist) group within Palestine?
And it’s not like Israel didn’t drop bombs on the south you know? Nor that forced displacement of people doesn’t amount to a war crime. And one should expect a country having such a sizeable military superiority to be a little bit more concerned about civilian casualties and human suffering, but apparently they care very little.
And if you want to see it from a different perspective. Israel used the killing of 1200 Israeli citizens a pretext to kill 11K and counting civilians, cut their electricity, food, fuel and water, considerably restricting the humanitarian aid entering the enclave and almost completely destroying a city that was once hosting 1.1M people.
After continuously refusing to admit that with their own actions they have created a humanitarian catastrophe and refused all international calls for humanitarian pauses or ceasefire.
No one is refusing their right to defend themselves, but the way they are doing it is very much recalling a blind revenge and with those actions they portrayed themselves in not a very good light, even though western politicians are very adamant on publicly condemning them.
Mind you that during that time there were an increase of violent settlers attacks in the West bank, a lot of Palestinians got evicted, killed, injured with the silent approval of the authorities and the IDF, which is additionally stirring the conflict.
