I’m gonna ignore the Bush bit here, but I’m not trying to prove Hamas right, I’m explaining why it happened, why Hamas did that, and what made them mad enough to do that. Short answer: colonization, decades of it. The soldiers of Hamas are the kids and relatives of those who’d previously lived in the land the Israelis took during the war. They were breaking into places they had memories of, places they’d lived in and remembered the loss of for generations. When someone has to know that the homes they lived in are being inhabited by the people who forced them out,… Read more while they are in the concentration camp that is modern-day Gaza. When their access to food, water, electricity, basic healthcare, and shelter is threatened and controlled by those very same people, of COURSE they will rebel.
Hamas resists, the Israelis crush resistance, that’s been the consistent formula for nearly a century. As of yesterday, it’s the 76th anniversary of the Nakba, the event that forced over 75,000 Palestinians out of their homes. Even Arab Jews were displaced or killed during then. You don’t even try to defend the colonization, the literal core of israel’s validity.
Israel is an apartheid-based colonial entity, and when it shoves the Gazans into a corner with no access to food or water, it better dam well know it’ll get pushback from resistance groups. Israel has killed over 5,000 Palestinians from 2008-2020, and recently, that’s skyrocketed to a higher rate than the Nakba with a ratio of death starting at LEAST at 30:1. There is no “self defense” Israel could ever claim here, their enemy managed to break through one time when they were stupid enough to expect them to just sit there and die. Israel isn’t any “haven” of Western civilization, they’ve been handing out rights based upon ethnicity and still seriously debate allowance of inter-religious and inter-racial marriage. They’re not anything like the West in most terms, and the “save haven” has only been seen as such since World War 2 because it’s illegal and colonialist formation sparked ethnic cleansing in the Middle East to solidly the conflict. The storm around them was a reaction to massive and devastatingly blatant atrocities, and though it doesn’t justify it, that still explains and continually points to the source of the issue: Israel wasn’t supposed to happen.
The Torah also consistently tells of the same goals, desires, and demands, with consistently genocidal, ethnically violent, or revolutionary ideas. But, there’s the small details that most miss: both of those religions don’t actually follow or espouse the rhetoric that’s misrepresented kn their texts. The more violent fundamentalists are just that: fundamentalists. That’s their issue, fundamentalists won because of their material conditions and long history of being promised things and never getting it, or being attacked by outside forces. It is both unacceptable and irresponsible to claim that Islam itself, the religion with 2 billion followers, is somehow supporting every teaching being claimed in the Quran, which frequently says things that SEEMINGLY contradict their more violent verses. The problem lies in cultural norms rather than the religion itself, because the Quran, like the Bible, Torah, and Vedas, have a million interpretations, which shift as societies view to be convenient.
72% support Hamas because it’s the only thing actually claiming to assist them, it’s the only thing claiming to fight for their access to food, water, healthcare, and necessary resources. If a fascist organization was legitimately assisting America when a massive invasion forced us all into a small section of the country, I’d be tempted to support them as well. We always say they’re unnecessary, ruthless, barbarous murderers until we’re in the same situation. It is hypocrisy to not put this in any form of context or explanation for its relevance. I don’t support Hamas, I don’t like what they did, and I’ll never condone the slaughter of civilians they committed, but I understand WHY they did it, and by doing so, I come to the conclusion that the Israelis must either assist the Palestinians at a rate far higher than ever before, allow them their own truly self determined state, or it must disappear and merge into one non-ethnic state for all Palestinians and Jews.
The Israelis offered them multiple false states, they strapped unlivable conditions to the “deals” that ruined its worth and relevance. Israel has openly, publicly, and repeatedly stated the only reason they’d allow a two-state solution is for tactical purposes in their intended conquest of the entire region. They want the land, the whole thing, which is why they condone and encourage illegal settlements further and further into Gaza and the West Bank, it’s why they’re obsessed with the demography of every region they intend to occupy. They’ve intentionally been trying to make themselves the majority in every region they have no real ownership of, often by using those very same settlers to tip the scales.
Hamas has been gradually advocating less and less for a fight, their attack on Israel was a response with three objectives: respond to persecution of Palestinians in the West Bank, take soldier hostages to prevent immediate retaliation (failed because the Israelis truly do have a habit of ignoring threats in favor of collective punishment), and move settlers away from the Al-Aqsa Mosque. They accomplished all three in most aspects that matter, they did this as a response and because they’d been shoved into a corner while getting beaten up by starvation. The Palestinians at large have advocated more for peace than anyone else in this conflict, with over 50% of Arabs advocating strongly for continuing the peace process, while Jews have done the exact opposite.
Genocide isn’t something that happens all at once, nor is it specific to extremely stringent conditions, otherwise most genocides wouldn’t be classified as such by the UN’s rules. What is going on in Palestine DOES fit the bill of every single criterion in the Genocide Convention, they are deliberately being destroyed in part or in whole, they are being isolated and othered by the Israelis, they are being dehumanized by this SAME rhetoric you’re spewing at a much more extreme level than usual, and they have been put into conditions that could easily be deemed unnecessary and designed to assist in a genocide. They fit the bill, they fit it so obviously that the shorter reports South Africa provided as evidence span over 78 pages of short and sweet reports.
The Nazis warned plenty of Jewish populations when they moved them out, that’s not exactly the dividing point between good and evil here, and they’re not stupid enough to drop a nuke because that would kill their own people too. That would result in war untold to mankind, they know it and we know it. The fallout would span Egypt to Saudi Arabia if they got unlucky, and that would most definitely result in their own destruction. However, their more right-wing members have more than often floated that idea when speaking on the subject. The Israelis have used human shields MANY times, Hamas is far from the only one that does this, and instead of using the tactically effective methods to invade, they use massive indiscriminate air strikes instead, which still have no justification regardless of if they warn them or not.
Their genocide has been slow, the same way as the Rohingya genocide in Myanmar, it’s a process over time driven by racial, ethnic, or religious hatred, with all three aspects being subjects of hatred in the context of Palestine. Their people have an extremely strong atmosphere of treating the Palestinians as subhuman animals who deserve everything they get. Only by that mentality can they justify atrocities of a far higher level than they take, which often come in response to the Israelis past actions. The isolation, the hatred, the use of unnecessary force, and the lack of restraint show just how obviously and clearly this constitutes the title of a genocide, even by the UN’s strict standards.
