To quote other commenters in another thread.

What does it mean to be a “civilian” when the violence against Palestine is settler-colonial ethnic cleansing?

I do not advocate for the actual assault of children, but the “civilians” in the settlements are the perpetrators of decades long genocide. People who not only do not care that countless Palestinians, children included, have been murdered, but actually support it. It is not a meaningful distinction in this type of conflict.

They put themselves there because they are ideologically committed to ethnically cleansing the land of Palestinians and taking it for themselves. They are thieves and murderers and actions against them by Palestinian forces is self defence.

With all due respect, I think there a lot of serious confusion running through your comment, to the extent that I can make out what you ‘argument’ is supposed to be as it seems to be jumping a bit inexplicably between unrelated pointed (although feel free to clarify). I really not sure what your points about Mussolini and ideology being mandatory or not are trying to say. Like are you saying that the children should be killed because they were subject to fascist propaganda? Should every Hindu child be murdered because they subject to fascist Hindutva propaganda? Should every Ukrainian child? Islamism serves a similar function to fascism in Islamic societies. Should every child whose parents are Islamist been killed? Wtf are you talking about? Like how the fuck can anyone thing this kind of reasoning is not only moronically fucking stupid, and insane, but also evil is beyond me and speaks volumes about how far the modern left has fallen in nihilism.

Nowhere have I criticized Palestinian resistance, but you seem to be inferring that, from, I guess, the recognize of the trivially obvious fact of how reactionary Hamas are (just read their history or charter). So what? Nothing at all could ever be criticized if there’s a power imbalance? That’s insane. The Khmer Rouge originally were the underdogs, as were the Shining Path in Peru. If they should obviously not get a pass, it’s not clear to me why Islamists should without a lot of argument. And yes, if a particular form of your resistance is killing children, then your resistance is not progressive or politically sensible to that degree. That in no way means that Palestinian right to self-defence should not be unequivocally supported, but that doesn’t contradict in the slightest condemnation of certain acts that any sane Marxist.

This also says alot about your ignorance of actual historical Marxist and Bolshevik policy on these points. The Bolsheviks never supported any national liberation movement unconditionally. It had to be a relatively progressive force. In certain cases they made mistakes, such as in the degree of their support for, say, the Guomingdang. The 20th century has provided ample evidence that bourgeois national liberation movements are dangerous, though in many circumstances should be provided critical support, in the interests of creating a context where communist movements can develop. We could also take another Islamist group, the FLN in Algeria. On the one hand, they were the only feasible body capable of defeating the French colonizers, but they detracts in no way from how intrinsically reactionary they were socially or politically, as evidenced by the fact that they massacred, tortured, wiped out the Communist revolutionaries. Hamas would do the exact same if they had a full state of their own. Specific national liberation movements should be supported to the extent that they are progressive forces in their historical context.

Suffice it to say that if the question is whether it is ever justified to kill children I’d say the answer is in 99.99999999999% of cases a resounding “obviously fucking not you fucking moronic psychopath”, not only because of moral and ethical considerations which are not changed by the political circumstances, but also because it is politically stupid of the highest degree, unless you are a fascistic Islamist group whose political ideology is intrinsically apocalyptic and whose long-term political interests are in accelerated destabilization of the geopolitical region, which will only benefit Islamists, not leftists and so not, in the long-term, the interests of the masses who live in this region.

People making some kind of mysterious jump in their ‘reasoning’ from the correct point that ‘Palestinians in Gaza have the right to defend themselves, and the only way they have to currently do so is through political and military structures which are dominated by Hamas’, to ‘we cannot recognize as evil and depraved the torture, rape, and the murder of children’. Or the insane assumption that they are actually politically productive.

There’s a similarly piss-poor, vague, ambiguous suggestion you seem to be making when you compare a point to fascism apologism (first off, if you are actually accusing me of that, go fuck yourself with a cactus), which is bizarre. The fact that a fascism engages in poor reasoning by using that kind of statement proves absolutely nothing, and thinking otherwise is obviously confused. I don’t give a fuck what it reminds you over. Refute the point or don’t, but don’t pretend you are by vague associations. I can make the exact same kind of argument to someone who says ‘vegetarism is good’ but responding ‘reminds me of something Hitler apologists would say, as Hitler was a vegetarian’. You seem to be making no less insane a ‘point’ there. If you really that stuck at a level of reasoning by vibes, associations, connotations, or that you cannot recognize the obvious point that different people can use the same set of words in different contexts with radically different purposes, meanings, and that in one case it could be done logically and in another illogically, then you really need to read some fucking theory. If we were talking about a hypothetical Eastern European society which the US was bombing, and the main opposition force was an explicitly fascist party, then I wonder how many people on this site would support it, though it seems to be as self-evident a political proposition as there could be for a Marxist that fascists should not be supported under any circumstances. In that case, we could still make arguments

The current strategy of Hamas, which restrains that of all others in Gaza because it is dominant, is not the optimal one imo, though I’m not there, though that doesn’t seem to matter when we make the obvious realization that it will lessen, not strengthen the likelihood of the construction of actual secular socialist movements. That being said, Hamas is the fault of Israel, and Israel bears ultimate responsibility for what is happening. Palestinians are in a completely fucked situation where armed resistance can only happen through or in conjunction with Hamas. The united from with Hamas and Islamic Jihad from the more progressive Palestinian groups is the only thing they can do. I agree. But that does not mean in any way that the regressive aspects and tactics they use, which are not going to aid the communist movement of history in the long-term, should not be recognized.

You last comment seems to be going from a triviality to a depraved insanity. Children do have a (developing) will. Yes. Fucking obviously. But going from that to ‘they are genocidal’ is such a vague jump in argument. They are born into the structures of Israeli apartheid, and the apartheid program of much of Israeli society. But frankly, Westerners on here do not benefit less in many cases than many poorer Israelis from structures of exploitation. Does anyone here think it would actually be either morally or politically non-fucked to arbitrarily torture and murder their children? Is a working class baby born in Detroit genocidal? Some people have literally lost their mind, and are nihilistic ultras larping as Marxists.

If you haven’t seem atrocities, you are not on the correct telegrams.

It’s not a question of equating or equivocating. That Israeli is a fascist apartheid settler colonial state goes without question. That there is an asymmetric balance of power which makes inevitable methods which will be immediately labelled as ‘terroristic’, and are of course terroristic in the literal sense of the term, though of course no less so than what Israel practices, should also go without saying. Hamas is also, literally, and in many ways, a product of Israel. But the very reason why they financed them and ensured their ascendancy in Gaza was to split the Palestinian opposition, crush the secular left of the Palestinian liberation movement, and ensure they had an enemy who would be perfect in terms of optics, rhetoric and propaganda because they can very believable present them as a menace (by-the-bye, Hamas is an acronymn but sounds very similar to the word ‘hamas’ in Hebrew, which means ‘violence’).

Aside from moral and ethical questions (which are not irrelevant), there is also the obvious point that not all tactics or strategies used by particular national liberation movements are equal. It’s a mystery to me how people are able to wrap their heads around this very simple and obvious point in the case of, say, the Khmer Rouge or the Sendero Luminoso but not in the context of the Islamic world, and seems to me to have something to do with a lot of guilt that Westerners (on this site, seemingly clearly the majority) justifiably have in relation to the Islamic world. Tbh it’s embarrassing in the first place that the comparison even has to be made to get the point about its incoherence across. All this applies even if the situation is so fucked that there are no other avenues left open to progressive forces than to collaborate with your local far-right reactionaries who are going to commit war-crimes. That is the current situation. I’m certainly not saying that I would not have done the same were I a Marxist Palestinian militant. But that’s because they have no other choice, and we have to respect their opinion that the most immediate issue and the one on which their legitimacy depends is that of Israeli fascism, apartheid and settler colonialism. Ideally there would be a movement more akin to the First Intifada, but Hamas do not want that, because Islamists are fully aware that their interests are not served by actual working-class mass movements.

If you mean that most people in Hamas are not disgusting, well, that was neither my point nor is is possible quite frankly for you or I to confidently make that statement one way or the other. Like is the head of Hamas more or less reactionary that a working-class Israeli in Jerusalem? That’s not that clear. Though it does make me think that there’s a continued, fundamental misunderstanding of what Islamism actually is that’s going on here. Islamism is a far-right, extremely reactionary version of politics which is very similar in many ways to fascism, noticeably in that it is a mass movement and in its emphasis on a return to a mythical past through violence, warfare and blood, it’s death-cult characteristics, its extreme emphasis on hierarchy, is relation to women as essentially one of rape and seeing them as cattle for the bearing of children, its hypermasculinity, and the fact that Islamism is also a result of a (global) crisis in capitalist-imperialist production, but one affecting locally the Islamic global south, or poor proletariat or lumpenproletariat Muslim populations in the imperial core. Like fascism, it functions politically as a a mechanism to divert radical energy from socialist and Communist forces and then to crush them mercilessly.