God help them. The slaughter to come is probably beyond our imagining
happy there had finally been any kind of response to the regular killings of Palestinian civilians
What is there to be happy about? When this is over we’ll return to the regular scheduled sporadic killing of Palestinian civilians, but in the meantime we’re going to be inundated in a wholesale slaughter of Palestinian civilians, with some Israeli citizens thrown in as well. That’s the material consequences of the current uprising, which are universally bad.
natives shouldn’t fight against their oppressors, because their opressors will opress them
I didn’t say anything remotely like that. If you care about actually ending the oppresion, nominally your strategic goals should be ending that oppression, not doomed violence for it’s own sake. We even have a word for this on the left: ‘adventurism’. The Viet Minh opposition to the French may have been violent, but it wasn’t a fruitless and doomed affair, and their leadership went to incredible lengths to make sure their attacks where strategically fruitful.
what are do you people want Palestine to do?
Uhh not this, because it won’t achieve any of their political aims and is just going to get a bunch of civilians killed. I don’t need to posit a better idea to point out how much of a shit-sandwich that this is going to be for the Palestinians and that leftists shouldn’t be treating it like their team scoring a goal in a football match.
On the flip side, can you point to why this is a good thing to be happy about from a material perspective, and not a vibes based ‘psychological’ victory?
Honestly, I think that you’re wrong on the possibility of material victory. This offensive has shown the world that Palestinian resistance is not dead and that they can stand up to deal a devastating blow. If they can disrupt Israel’s attempts to re-align various Arab nations, and if the hostages and threat of Hezbollah intervention can pre-empt a ground invasion in Gaza, then the resistance could make significant material concessions/gains. Depending on how the next few days go, then I think there’s a chance of reforging the broader pro-Palestinian coalition amongst the various countries of the Middle East, especially in light of the Saudi-Iran rapprochement. If changing the geopolitical alignment into one that’s much more favorable to the survival of the Palestinian people isn’t a material gain, than I don’t know what is.
There was clearly an incredible degree of effort and coordination to pull off an operation of this scale without alerting the Israeli security apparatus. I don’t think this operation is particularly irrational or feckless. It’s a gamble, but the alternative to action is a slow death.