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.
Can’t both sides be driven by bloodlust? It’s all horrific and a never-ending cycle of pain and rage.
Yes, there are no good guys in this conflict. Israel has spent decades commiting low level offences against Palestine and her people, and Hamas has spent the same amount of time launching small attacks against Israel. They both have legitimate grievances with each other, but it’s the civilians on both sides that suffer for it. Unfortunately there’s no good solution to the problem, there’s too much bad blood between them at this point that any hope for peace would be short lived. Even if Israel and Hamas agreed to stand down some other group on one side or the other would start things up again.
Israel has spent decades commiting low level offences against Palestine and her people
“Low level”… Yeah no.
Low level as in murdering a dozen people there, evicting and bulldozing a bunch of houses over there, that sort of thing, as opposed to like, rolling tanks into the middle of Gaza and opening fire, dropping bombs on them, or like what they’re planning on doing now where they’ve ordered them to evacuate in 24 hours before they presumably march in and most likely just start murdering people. Israel tends to keep up a constant low level attack. It’s not one big thing, but thousands of small offenses happening nearly constantly. Hamas on the other hand tends to do less, but what they do is bigger. Bombs that kill or injure hundreds, launching indiscriminate rockets into Israel, that sort of thing.
For better or worse, Hamas attack is exactly what Netanyahu wanted. It’s an excuse for Israel to escalate things even further. In many ways Hamas played right into his hands. To be clear, they were absolutely provoked into it, but there’s still an inbalance of power at play. Now Netanyahu is going to use that attack to justify even more atrocities, and there’s not much Palestine or Hamas can really do about it. It will get very ugly over there before too much longer and both Palestinians and Israelis are going to suffer, but I fear the Palestinians are going to suffer a lot more before this is over. There’s a distinct possibility that this is going to result in Israel completely occupying Palestine and them effectively ceasing to exist as an independent state.
Both governments (Israel and Hamas) are driven by an urge to seek more power by claiming land and killing their “enemies”. The populace are witting and unwitting pawns of that. I am not surprised people back the Israeli government with the amount of propaganda being put forth and I’m not surprised that people who have been murdered and had their homes destroyed for decades are willing to tacitly support the only group that seems like it can fight back. Desperate people don’t make rational decisions.
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
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.
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.
Let’s definitely get into an uproar over the opinions of teenagers
College campuses are filled with more than just 17-18 yos.
The average undergrad is 22.
And call it what you will, but these folks are the future of the nation.
As a 35 year old, I’d feel a lot better about 25 year olds running the country than I do about the current geriatric shit show we’ve got.
Your brain is fully developed at age 25. Sometime around then I’ll start to give a fuck what you think… depending on your life experience up to that point.
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.
Fucking great! That’s what universities are for. Debate.
It’s gotten worse than debate in quite a few places. People protest memorial services saying that the murder of civilians was justified. This is some real WBC-level shit.
