Tensions spill across universities like Columbia and Harvard as students on each side accuse the other of a kind of bloodlust
To one side, Columbia students stood silently, wrapped in the blue and white of Israel as they gripped pictures of the murdered and abducted. Across the grass and brick divide, a slightly larger cohort of students chanted “Free, free Palestine.”
The faultline between the two ran along the claim by each that the other was pursuing a kind of bloodlust – a charge that has divided university campuses across America in the wake of the bloody Hamas attack on Israeli communities and Israel’s ongoing military assault on Gaza.
Reactions within US universities to the killing of at least 1,300 Israelis and the abduction of about 100 more have swung from celebration of the Hamas assault as a legitimate act of resistance to occupation to condemnation along with a demand that it not be used to ignore the deaths of Palestinians killed in Israel’s retaliation on Gaza.
I don’t give a fuck what their reasoning is, I don’t root for people that take civilian hostages.
Or groups that #Trump supports.
Not do I root for murdering thousands of children over decades and committing crimes against humanity against millions as they’re colonised.
You can support the Palestinians and their right to end occupation and not support Hamas. You can be an advocate of Palestinians’ rights and not endorse Hezbollah or Iran’s regime. You can be pro-Palestinian without being anti-semitic. You can support Ukraine’s sovereignty and decry Israel’s human rights abuses. You can condemn terrorism and the killing of innocent civilians and still believe in one’s right to resist.
These stances are not mutually exclusive.
End the genocide of Palestinians.
Do you root for people stealing stealing peoples land and killing people for decades?
No.
But that in no way justifies killing a thousand or so people, injuring several thousand more, and kidnapping and threatening to execute hundreds (including children) in an orgy of violence. Both sides are in the wrong here.
Fuck yes they are both in the wrong, maybe criticize both instead of giving passive carte blanche to one.
You can support the Palestinians and their right to end occupation and not support Hamas. You can be an advocate of Palestinians’ rights and not endorse Hezbollah or Iran’s regime. You can be pro-Palestinian without being anti-semitic. You can support Ukraine’s sovereignty and decry Israel’s human rights abuses. You can condemn terrorism and the killing of innocent civilians and still believe in one’s right to resist.
These stances are not mutually exclusive.
End the genocide of Palestinians.
Yeah! Fuck the Israeli terrorists and terrorist sympathizers!
I am glad you stand for the freedom of Gazans against the Israeli errorists, thieves and occupiers
“It’s about standing with the people of Gaza, and reminding the world that these are humans who deserve to live in dignity, to deserve to live free from occupation, free from colonial brutality, free from the violence that Israel constantly is constantly throwing at them,” she said.
“Since Saturday, a little over 1,500 people have already died in Gaza, and a third of them are children. And yet that level of violence against Palestinians is very rarely discussed. Entire families have been killed.”
Avila Chevalier said she did not regard the protest as celebrating killing but that the violence against Israelis did not happen in a vacuum.
“No one wants violence, right? What people who are engaging in these protests are trying to get across is that this violence didn’t start five days ago, this violence started with Israeli occupation of Palestine,” she said.
Desperate people being the victims of genocide and colonial atrocities for decades side with desperate people. More at 11.
Even if you sympathize with the colonizers, how is the seige of Gaza an appropriate response? Murdering over a million innocents for what?
It’s not and they know it. They’re just grasping at anything hoping to mollify the indignation they feel for Israel’s government. They’re digging in their heels, because the propaganda of, “Israel good,” is dissonant with the reality that their manufactured beliefs were wrong.
I see you’re already counting people as dead before they’re killed. If so, how do you feel about Hamas murdering 9.3 million Israelis? They haven’t done it yet, but they want to. Israel of course doesn’t want any civilian deaths, but Hamas builds terror tunnels under their homes, launches rockets from their schools and hospitals, and uses the civilians as expendable meat shields.
You are right that Palestinian civilians deserve to be able to live in peace and safety but Hamas is the one taking civilians hostages and using them as human shields. Either Israel has a right to defend its borders against its neighbors who hate them and wish to kill their innocent citizens or it has no right to exist.
What are you waffling about. There been less than than a few thousand deaths in early strikes and they’ve issues evacuation warnings to avoid collateral before launching the main operation.
What flag do I wave for “both sides are terrible and neither deserves the religious sites, just nuke the entire area”? /s
You’ll be called a asshole by the “Free Palestine” folks for not supporting them.
The “Support Israel” people never say shit to me.
…and I’m pretty sure “nuke all of ‘Holy Land’ so hard the desert becomes a large, flat lump of glass” would not go over well with them. Not with the Muslims, either.
How the fuck did Jerusalem became the epicenter of all major monotheist religion in the first place? Delete the fucking city if nobody wants peace
A bunch of dudes realized they could gain power, land, wealth, and sexual access by peddling fairy tales to the masses. Not surprising that this happened many times, in many places, over the early historic record, primarily at population centers located relatively close to the river deltas that gave rise to the first cities. You know, just human shit. Same as it ever was.
Jerusalem has been a significant city of the eastern Mediterranean world for thousands of years, so multiple religions with eastern Mediterranean roots sharing significance for that city is hardly surprising.
IIRC a similar coincidence has formed in SEA where a particular mountain has gained religious significance for local Christians Muslims and Buddhists, although with much less international controversy over it.
The case of the temple mount in particular is especially weird since it’s a part of zealous Christian and Jewish prophetic narratives (despite revelations saying getting the rapture to happen by checking a list is a fool’s errand and non zionist consensus among jews agreeing that the “third temple” is the state of internationalization and diaspora which the destruction of the second temple initiated) and also being a major site of religious history to Muslims, with the site apparently being where Mohammed ascended to heaven at the end of his life.
There’s a church in Jerusalem with a ladder still left up there from the 1800s because all christian denominations that share control over the site can’t agree to remove the ladder, so you can imagine how hard the squabbling goes when not even the base religion is held in common.
The boomers spent a lifetime equating blind, unconditional support of israel to benevolence, in the same way they blindly equate being anti abortion to being pro life despite supporting little to no assistance for unwanted children and unwilling mothers. Its FREE and it sounds pretty at face value so they made it their position.
I can read and see the white hot hatred of boomers in power over the fact that younger generations don’t value an Israeli life over a Palestinian life or vice versa. It literally seems to dumbfound them that we didn’t come to their same shallow from the inception conclusion. Sorry, fuck your team sports, and fuck all the imaginary friends you use to rationalize killing real human beings that exist here in reality. I would never pick a religion or a skin tone to determine who is more worthy to love.
And the fact is, neither the Israeli government or Hamas that controls the Palestinian government take care to spare civilian life. That isn’t a Hamas thing, that is a this conflict thing.
And the Israeli government is the force with more responsibility to temper their response for 2 reasons: They’re a much larger military. Something something power, something something responsibility, peter parker. Israel always gets a global pass retaliating against Palestinian civilians when Hamas attacks Israeli soldiers, which doesn’t exactly scream “keep our civilians out of this.” And 2: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blockade_of_the_Gaza_Strip
You can’t run the world’s largest open air prison, largely filled with people guilty of no crime, and get credibly angry when the prisoners robbed of hope turn to desparation and vengeance.
There are no heroes in this conflict, and with the blood dripping off both parties, Im inclined to be more supportive of the force less capable of defending themselves and their side’s civilians.
This is the first year in a long time that could be considered a conflict, rather than a globally sanctioned, continuous slaughter.
What a shame. These “smart” people should be leading by example and coming together in solidarity against violence on all sides. What a great image that would have been to see both groups protesting the war together. Fools.
You know that only Israel can stop the violence, right? If Palestine stops fighting, Israel continues the violence until they are eliminated. If Israel stops, then Palestine doesn’t have to fight back. It’s really very simple.
I have to disagree. If this was like the Russia Ukraine situation and one side was destroying and killing people in the other while the other was just defending their country then yes. If Russia stopped today, the war would be over as Ukraine has no history and is not attacking Russia or its people.
In the Israel / Palestine situation they are both attaching each others countries and people and have been doing so for years so if only one side stops, they will be in the same situation Ukraine is in with another still attacking them. Both sides need to stop if this is to end and I had hoped the smart people at Universities would have supported this versus taking a side.
I would take a side if only one was attacking but both are and have been doing so for a long time. I know it is all much more complicated than that,but it really does not have to be. If both sides stopped today, I mean really stopped and let each other just be, it would finally be over. If only one side stops, it will be another Russia / Ukraine Situation which is barely better.
It is easy to destroy, but really solves nothing and worse fosters hate and more destruction.
The worst part about your comment, is that I see the exact same comment but flipped in that it would all stop if Palestine stopped the violence. If both sides feel this way, then both sides are entrenched and committed to more of the same. Unfortunate as I hate seeing the destruction and deaths on both sides including children. Can we please just stop it.
Like in Ukraine, it is not enough for one side to stop the violence, they must also reverse the occupation.
