site banner

Israel-Gaza Megathread #2

This is a refreshed megathread for any posts on the conflict between (so far, and so far as I know) Hamas and the Israeli government, as well as related geopolitics. Culture War thread rules apply.

6
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

The more I reflect on why they would ever do what they did, the more convinced I am that the actions of Hamas and those who prefer to fight to the death rather than accept life under the Israelis are, in a word, simply Satanic.

I can't tell if you're just being cheeky, or if you're actually passing moral judgment here.

Note that the Palestinians have no good plan for how they would materially improve the lives of their citizens if Israel sudden disappeared in the blink of an eye beyond going in an feeding off the surplus left behind.

This reminds me of the (fallacious, imo) argument that people make against the alt right:

"An ethnically homogeneous society isn't a utopia, it'll still have problems, so why even bother?"

This sort of deeply rooted concern with Fixing Everything At Once is something that I associate mainly with Marxists. It is foreign to other types of minds and other styles of thinking.

Rightly or wrongly, Hamas perceives Israel as a problem. They don't have to provide a solution to every possible problem that anyone could think up. They're only focused on fixing this one particular problem that's in front of them right now.

They don't even bother to try and demonstrate that they are serious about improving life for the common man

Again, this is (historically speaking) a highly idiosyncratic conception of the aim of politics, loaded with implicit assumptions, largely able to flourish only in the soil of modern Western liberalism. Not everyone thinks in these terms (including many "common men" themselves!).