I don’t think Arabs are all the same and neither does Hamas. That’s why they kidnap Bedouin civilians and take them hostage too. That’s why they shoot at Druze IDF soldiers.
The Hebron massacre was terrible, I agree with you. And I know that Arabs also sheltered Jews in 1929. But we can’t ignore facts: Old Yishuv Jews were killed for things they had nothing to do with. They were not marching at the Wailing Wall. They were simply soft targets for Arab militants. Militants do not distinguish between good and bad. They reduce to ethnic identity — on both sides.
I also know that Deir Yassin was terrible. That the Hadassah Hospital massacre was terrible. That the Cave of the Patriarchs massacre was terrible. That Entebbe was terrible.
But I’m fucking sick of the left-tankie-Hamas alliance on social media that overlooks the reality of the conflict. They simply spout off about Israeli “apartheid” and “genocide” without any 1) reference to legal definitions of those terms or 2) historical knowledge.
But there is a reality we cannot ignore: Hamas will never accept Jews west of the Jordan River, period. That’s what they showed on October 7. It’s not about the occupation. It’s not about the Green Line. It’s not about the settlements in the West Bank. It’s about killing Jews and those who collaborate with Jews. It’s about establishing an Islamic theocracy from the river to the sea and killing Jews who remain.
For too long the left tried to contextualize and explain away Hamas’ brutal hate. We need to accept what they say is what they believe. We need to believe what they wrote in their first charter.
Yes, its almost like Hamas recognizes that their support stems from opposing the occupation as a whole and not Jews as an ethnic group. They literally changed their charter to reflect this. Thanks for making my argument for me.
I was merely pointing out that you were completely misrepresenting the chain of events that led to the massacre, and even here calling an angry mob “militants” is still misrepresenting the situation. Listing more violent events doesn’t change my argument at all. There were probably tens of thousands of raids by Native Americans on white settlers and it still doesn’t justify the almost entire wholesale destruction of their population, eradication of culture, and relegation of the survivors to reservations.
Almost no one on the left supports Hamas as an actual governing body (you know, given that they’re explicitly anticommunist and Islamic fundamentalist), or wholesale supports their tactics. We just recognize that they are the only force that are on the ground fighting for the liberation of the Palestinians as a people. I’d much rather the charge be led by the PFLP or even the PLO, but that’s not the world we live in. If Hamas hadn’t been propped up by Likud (who also want a theocratic ethno state, you know believe what they say) and the US hadn’t forced an election when the PLO was at its weakest we wouldn’t be in this situation.
I call it an apartheid state because experts on apartheid like Nelson Mandela called it one and I call it a genocide because it’s as close to the textbook definition of one as it gets. If the Rohingya genocide, which is internationally recognized as a genocide, is one, this absolutely is as well. Hamas’s original charter being openly antiemetic doesn’t excuse that.
If we were in the situation where Hamas was governing over a unified Palestine and were trying to ethnically cleanse the historic Jewish population of Palestine, I would absolutely be screaming genocide as well. But that’s not the world we live in, and it never will be. Acknowledging the realities of the situation means acknowledging that sometimes an oppressed people resorts to supporting extremists when they’re the only ones left fighting for them. The only two ways to get rid of Hamas are ending the oppression that feeds them or a full scale successful genocide of the Palestinian people.
