Hamas nearly gone?

I cannot stand Hamas and would like them gone completely, they have horribly abused the people of Gaza. Israel’s objective is to obliterate them but at the cost of thousands of civilians lives. Hamas make money (amongst other ways) by stealing aid trucks and selling the food at inflated prices to civilians. They have used Gazan’s as human shields for far too long.
But what replaces them? Something that will no doubt inflict more misery on the people who live there.

I'm an Arab and a refugee. I've seen middle eastern terrorism upfront as well as brutal opression and torture. Up close and personal. I know what trauma is, and I've never felt the slightest inclination to harm anyone, much less kidnap or kill them.

You are possessed of the typical western attitude to these things, which while well-meaning is also deeply misguided.

This behavior isn't a reaction to trauma. You will not find Ukraine citizens reacting to their trauma in such ways.

In my culture many things are normalised: Jew hatred, violence and opression. Our world doesn't work like yours. It has nothing to do with evil or not evil. All people are capable of atrocity.

It comes down to culture: being told its okay to do this. Being told it's good to do this. And while you might say not all Palestinians are terrorists, I can assure you that the ones who are, are lauded and treated like heroes and celebrities.

Really think about that, because it might give you an understanding of the deep fractures in a society that build up to that, and opression simply doesn't factor in.

The evils conmitted by man through history largely had nothing to do with opression. Black people weren't opressing white people in 1700 - slave traders weren't driven to it by trauma. Something was actually deeply malignant in their ideology and they needed to be educated out of it.

Infantalising this is unhelpful. Palestinian people are no different to any other people, with the exception that they are trapped as pawns in an ideological war and their lives simply do not matter to the very people charged with their governance.

There is objectively no reason they couldn't have spent the last 20, 30, 40 years living really nice lives, aside from the fact that they were trapped in a largely manufactured battle.

We have a great deal of work to do. And anybody who thinks Palestinians are opresssed and traumatised (as I do) cannot solve that problem by simply blaming Israel and pretending the behaviour and existence of groups like Hamas is an Israeli issue. I assure you, it's not.

Another excellent post.

I would also add that Jewish people weren’t oppressing the Nazis or any of the other countries around the world which persecuted, exterminated and exiled them for centuries.

I think it is disgustingly dumb and inherently evil to try to use their own history against them as victim blaming gaslighting in a war started by a real genocide and ethnic cleansing against them as many do on this board.

I'm an Arab and a refugee. I've seen middle eastern terrorism upfront as well as brutal opression and torture. Up close and personal. I know what trauma is, and I've never felt the slightest inclination to harm anyone, much less kidnap or kill them.

You are possessed of the typical western attitude to these things, which while well-meaning is also deeply misguided.

This behavior isn't a reaction to trauma. You will not find Ukraine citizens reacting to their trauma in such ways.

In my culture many things are normalised: Jew hatred, violence and opression. Our world doesn't work like yours. It has nothing to do with evil or not evil. All people are capable of atrocity.

It comes down to culture: being told its okay to do this. Being told it's good to do this. And while you might say not all Palestinians are terrorists, I can assure you that the ones who are, are lauded and treated like heroes and celebrities.

Really think about that, because it might give you an understanding of the deep fractures in a society that build up to that, and opression simply doesn't factor in.

The evils conmitted by man through history largely had nothing to do with opression. Black people weren't opressing white people in 1700 - slave traders weren't driven to it by trauma. Something was actually deeply malignant in their ideology and they needed to be educated out of it.

Infantalising this is unhelpful. Palestinian people are no different to any other people, with the exception that they are trapped as pawns in an ideological war and their lives simply do not matter to the very people charged with their governance.

There is objectively no reason they couldn't have spent the last 20, 30, 40 years living really nice lives, aside from the fact that they were trapped in a largely manufactured battle.

We have a great deal of work to do. And anybody who thinks Palestinians are opresssed and traumatised (as I do) cannot solve that problem by simply blaming Israel and pretending the behaviour and existence of groups like Hamas is an Israeli issue. I assure you, it's not.

I'm an Arab and a refugee. I've seen middle eastern terrorism upfront as well as brutal opression and torture. Up close and personal. I know what trauma is, and I've never felt the slightest inclination to harm anyone, much less kidnap or kill them.

You are possessed of the typical western attitude to these things, which while well-meaning is also deeply misguided.

This behavior isn't a reaction to trauma. You will not find Ukraine citizens reacting to their trauma in such ways.

In my culture many things are normalised: Jew hatred, violence and opression. Our world doesn't work like yours. It has nothing to do with evil or not evil. All people are capable of atrocity.

It comes down to culture: being told its okay to do this. Being told it's good to do this. And while you might say not all Palestinians are terrorists, I can assure you that the ones who are, are lauded and treated like heroes and celebrities.

Really think about that, because it might give you an understanding of the deep fractures in a society that build up to that, and opression simply doesn't factor in.

The evils conmitted by man through history largely had nothing to do with opression. Black people weren't opressing white people in 1700 - slave traders weren't driven to it by trauma. Something was actually deeply malignant in their ideology and they needed to be educated out of it.

Infantalising this is unhelpful. Palestinian people are no different to any other people, with the exception that they are trapped as pawns in an ideological war and their lives simply do not matter to the very people charged with their governance.

There is objectively no reason they couldn't have spent the last 20, 30, 40 years living really nice lives, aside from the fact that they were trapped in a largely manufactured battle.

We have a great deal of work to do. And anybody who thinks Palestinians are opresssed and traumatised (as I do) cannot solve that problem by simply blaming Israel and pretending the behaviour and existence of groups like Hamas is an Israeli issue. I assure you, it's not.

Plenty of people have been displaced, myself included. It isn't a given that you will decide to kidnap people, and it certainly isn't natural.

No it isn't natural, and as a result the majority of people in the world who have experienced oppression and trauma are not terrorists and the majority of Palestinians aren't terrorists or have kidnapped people. I do think though you are showing a lack of understanding about the psychology of trauma and the reasons why people who have experienced similar events or conditions behave or react differently to them. It's not a justification for something but an explanation for it and if we better understand it we are better equipped to deal with the root causes of it and prevent it. It mainly comes down to protective factors but of course some people are just pure evil

not a hard luck story
How patronising.

This is just not true though. The vast majority of people who are oppressed one way or another, in poverty or living with restricted rights do not blow up school buses. I understand you mean well, but this is the racism of low expectations.

It also denies the point. Hamas didn't invade Israel to get rights for Palestinians. In actual fact, Hamas control the vast majority of the "rights" Palestinians have and they denied their population:

freedom of movement (they charged extortionate fees for exit visas)
freedom of press
freedom to expression
freedom from torture
right to a fair trial
right to equality under law regardless of religion, sexual orientation or gender
freedom from arbitrary detention
political participation in elections
adequate health, food, housing

Israel was not denying those things. Hamas was. So their invasion on 7 October wasn't to gain freedom from oppression. It was to kill Jews and annihilate their country so they could turn it into a slightly bigger terrorist dictatorship!

Palestinians would have been much better served by stopping the killing and violence, stopping vowing to annihilate Israel and building peace than they would be trying to indiscriminately kill Israelis which is what led to the blockade to begin with.

It is simply nothing like the Ireland situation and it's not a hard luck story, but more a case of making choices. Plenty of people have been displaced, myself included. It isn't a given that you will decide to kidnap people, and it certainly isn't natural.

Excellent post.

This is just not true though. The vast majority of people who are oppressed one way or another, in poverty or living with restricted rights do not blow up school buses. I understand you mean well, but this is the racism of low expectations.

It also denies the point. Hamas didn't invade Israel to get rights for Palestinians. In actual fact, Hamas control the vast majority of the "rights" Palestinians have and they denied their population:

freedom of movement (they charged extortionate fees for exit visas)
freedom of press
freedom to expression
freedom from torture
right to a fair trial
right to equality under law regardless of religion, sexual orientation or gender
freedom from arbitrary detention
political participation in elections
adequate health, food, housing

Israel was not denying those things. Hamas was. So their invasion on 7 October wasn't to gain freedom from oppression. It was to kill Jews and annihilate their country so they could turn it into a slightly bigger terrorist dictatorship!

Palestinians would have been much better served by stopping the killing and violence, stopping vowing to annihilate Israel and building peace than they would be trying to indiscriminately kill Israelis which is what led to the blockade to begin with.

It is simply nothing like the Ireland situation and it's not a hard luck story, but more a case of making choices. Plenty of people have been displaced, myself included. It isn't a given that you will decide to kidnap people, and it certainly isn't natural.

If there is going to be anything like peace between Paelstinians and Israel you need to reduce the fear of the Israelis and the animosity of Palestinians and this is going to be long hard slog. The Palestinians now have to stop becoming a population of for ever grievance and look to support ideas of statehood and respecting the sovreignty of Israel. Reducing the grievance of the people of Gaza will ultimately prevent the support of future groups like Hamas and the reintroduction of Islamist terror. German views of Jews changed after WW2 and so if a society is willing anti senitism can be motivated even after holding horrendous views. At the core any Palestoanain autonomous state cannot have an ideology of the destruction of Israel at its core.

For Gaza this repudiation of violence is important as no country will be willing to invest in the massive reconstruction needed if there is scope for future conflict with Israel and would leave a population in a permanent refugee camp which in reality is no basis for statehood.

Israel for its part needs to limit settler expansion so borders with a Palestinian state can be established.

Hard agree.

This is just not true though. The vast majority of people who are oppressed one way or another, in poverty or living with restricted rights do not blow up school buses. I understand you mean well, but this is the racism of low expectations.

It also denies the point. Hamas didn't invade Israel to get rights for Palestinians. In actual fact, Hamas control the vast majority of the "rights" Palestinians have and they denied their population:

freedom of movement (they charged extortionate fees for exit visas)
freedom of press
freedom to expression
freedom from torture
right to a fair trial
right to equality under law regardless of religion, sexual orientation or gender
freedom from arbitrary detention
political participation in elections
adequate health, food, housing

Israel was not denying those things. Hamas was. So their invasion on 7 October wasn't to gain freedom from oppression. It was to kill Jews and annihilate their country so they could turn it into a slightly bigger terrorist dictatorship!

Palestinians would have been much better served by stopping the killing and violence, stopping vowing to annihilate Israel and building peace than they would be trying to indiscriminately kill Israelis which is what led to the blockade to begin with.

It is simply nothing like the Ireland situation and it's not a hard luck story, but more a case of making choices. Plenty of people have been displaced, myself included. It isn't a given that you will decide to kidnap people, and it certainly isn't natural.

People talk about “wiping out” Hamas as if that would solve everything. But history shows us that when a people are oppressed, something always rises in resistance. After the Great Famine in Ireland when over a million died and many more were forced to emigration groups like the Fenian Brotherhood emerged. They weren’t born in a vacuum. They were born of starvation, grief, humiliation, and injustice under British rule.

It’s not so different in Palestine. Since the Nakba in 1948, millions of Palestinians have lived as refugees, or under military occupation, or trapped behind blockades. Generations have grown up stateless, with no rights and no hope. Of course people resist. Sometimes violently, sometimes peacefully but always from a place of deep pain.

Unless Israel truly reckons with the original injustice of the Nakba the mass displacement of Palestinians it will never understand why so many feel they have nothing left to lose. Lip service to peace won’t fix it. You can’t bomb away the anger and grief of entire generations. That only makes it worse.

This isn’t about justifying violence. It’s about recognising that crushing people into poverty and despair doesn’t make them compliant it makes them desperate. Just like in Ireland, you can’t eliminate the resistance without addressing what gave rise to it.

Until there’s justice and dignity for Palestinians, the rubble of Gaza will keep producing something new and probably something more desperate.

As Israeli journalist Gideon Levy wrote:

“Israelis believe, with terrifying sincerity, that if they only bomb Gaza harder, if they only kill a few more Hamas commanders, if they only show even less mercy then maybe finally the Palestinians will give up. But the opposite is true. You can kill the people, but you can’t kill the idea. You can flatten Gaza, but you can’t destroy the rage. When you trap people for generations and deny them basic human rights, don’t ask why they fight back. Ask what kind of peace you expected from people you’ve kept caged for decades.”

@ComeAsYouAreAsAFriend

You're right it is a long read, but nonetheless very helpful to the debate.

The introduction neatly sums up the charge of genocide as:

"The acts and omissions by Israel complained of by South Africa are genocidal in character because they are intended to bring about the destruction of a substantial part of the Palestinian national, racial and ethnical group, that being the part of the Palestinian group in the Gaza Strip ("Palestinians in Gaza"). The acts in question include killing Palestinians in Gaza, causing them serious bodily and mental harm, and inflicting on them conditions of life calculated to bring about their physical destruction. The acts are all attributable to Israel, which has failed to prevent genocide and is committing genocide in manifest violation of the Genocide Convention, and which has also violated and is continuing to violate its other fundamental obligations under the Genocide Convention,"

With the key part being "they are intended to bring about the destruction of a substantial part of the Palestinian national, racial and ethnical group, that being the part of the Palestinian group in the Gaza Strip ("Palestinians in Gaza").".

Now given that so far less than 2% of the 2.1 million Gazan national, racial and ethnic group has been killed whereas 6.8% of the 80 million German national, racial and ethnic group were killed by the allies, I would argue that a far greater or substantial part the German national, racial and ethnic group were destroyed than what is happening in Gaza. Secondly at exactly what percentage of deaths of a country's population mean that it is genocide?

So I then return to my original point of why is the Israeli attacks on Hamas and Gaza considered a genocide despite much lower numbers when the Allied attacks on the Nazis and Germany is not considered a genocide. The obvious answer has nothing to do with the figures and everything to do with political motivation in that the Allies won.

Yes - the BBC sounds quite upset it’s on its way out

@User37482

"I think for genocide ypu have to show the intent is to actually genocide a people. The British weren’t trying to kill all Germans when they dropped a bomb on Dresden they were trying to win a war"

But if the basis for the claim that Israel is committing genocide by dropping bombs on civilian areas in Gaza then surely the British are equally guilty of genocide for dropping bombs on German cities.