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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   28222 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 23, 2023

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But it's not a mirror image argument. Davis admin was unarguably the leading institution of the Confederacy. Hamas isn't unarguably the leading institution of the Palestinians, while there's not an unarguable leading institution the PA still is the formal representative of Palestinians (in abroad contexts, for example). Hamas runs Gaza, mostly, but that's different from the Palestinians.

While I agree with your point of 'that's different from the Palestinians,' I'd also point that- from my perspective- 'The Palestinians' as a coherent collective has been degrading over the last many years, at the very least since the 2007 Hamas-Fatah conflict in which Hamas notably publicly executed Fatah officials by throwing them off of tall buildings, which was then accompanied by the attacks on Israel that led to the Gaza blockade and the loss of Gaza-West Bank travel.

We're about 15 years into not just the political, but cultural divergence between Gaza and the West Bank. Different social services, different education systems, different lived experiences, and so on, with increasingly little interaction or cultural exchange between them to produce a meaningful 'average' Palestinian experience. Gaza and Westbank were already heavily divergent from the Palestinian experiences in regional refugee groups, where- for example- Jordanian-Palestinians had different degrees of 'authentically Palestinian experience' from the Kuwaiti-Palestinians (at least before their expulsion), and so on.

To a degree, 'Palestinian' is becoming less and less a meaningful political identity, and more of a sub-ethnic/social descriptor, whose meaning changes by geographic area.

Were the videos of the Oct 7 attack meet with delight or dismay in Palestine?

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