@Thisworld10
what I don’t understand is why can’t people openly sympathise with the people of Palestine.
Yeah, I think the problem many people have with your, I would argue flawed, assessment of the existing situation is that you seem to be giving the Palestinian leadership a free pass when it comes to determining responsibility for everything that has happened up to this point. You just ignore Palestine’s history of initiating wars, their violence, their faulty leadership and - most crucially of all - their constant refusal to take opportunities for accommodation. You also seem to be infantilising the Palestinians, which is kind of condescending IMO.
The “leaders” of Gaza are adults with agency. They have sovereignty over their respective territories (Hamas even more so than the PA for instance, since there is obviously still a military occupation of the West Bank). They are the governing bodies of their people.
They have the resources their civilians need. The second in command at Hamas quite literally is worth more than Kim Kardashian.
Hamas clearly has enough fuel and water to continue its bombathon while Gazan civilians suffer from shortages.
The responsibility of a government is to take care of its people. Hamas are not babies. When they won their election in 2006 - and subsequently threw the opposition off buildings in 2007 - they took on the responsibility of taking care of the Palestinian people.
The idea that Israel is responsible for Palestinian civilians (such as supplying them with water and energy - which they don’t have to do by the way!) because Hamas cannot take care of them is racist, infantilizing, and orientalist. THEY are foregoing their responsibilities toward their own citizens.
Israel is responsible for Israelis. Hamas is supposed to be responsible for Gazans. Instead, they hoard their resources because they are more interested in slaughtering Jews than they are interested in taking on the responsibility that was bestowed upon them when they became the government of Gaza.
Moving on, I would also like to agree with the PPs who have pointed out your lack of interest in what occurred prior to 1948 is somewhat suspicious. Claiming that this whole dispute only took off from 1948 is certainly convenient, since it ignores the fact that Arabs had been massacring Jews in Palestine for centuries beforehand. And even more recently than that, towards the end of 1933, the Nazis themselves revealed that they had established a direct contact with the Arab leadership in Palestine, with the hopes of “adapting the Nazi program” to the Holy Land. To reiterate: the Nazis hoped to extend their antisemitic policies to the Holy Land, with the enthusiastic consent of the Palestinian Arab leadership.
Then as WWII progressed, the Palestinian leadership’s and the Nazi’s relationship grew stronger. In November of 1941, Mohammed Amin al-Husseini, the leader of mandatory Palestine, met with German foreign minister Joachim von Ribbentrop and with Hitler himself. Hitler promised al-Husseini that once the German troops reached the Arab world, “Germany’s objective would then be solely the destruction of the Jewish element residing in the Arab sphere…”
In 1957, a top secret document came to light, which revealed that Germany and Italy recognized the right of the Arabs to “solve the Jewish question” in Palestine and other Arab nations. During the meeting, Hitler told the al-Husseini: “Germany is resolved, step by step, to ask one European nation after the other to solve its Jewish problem, and at the proper time to direct a similar appeal to non-European nations as well” and “Germany supports an uncompromising struggle against the Jews…[this] would include, of course, opposition to a Jewish homeland in Palestine, which is nothing more than a hub for the destructive influence of Jewish interests.”
So yeah, the roots of this conflict go way back, and if you don’t have the curiosity to even bother to read up on the history, then. “Shame on you” for posting about a highly sensitive, emotive - and still ongoing! - subject with ideas that are, at best, half baked.
Finally, this might be unpopular to say, but the fact that in this discussion we have to reaffirm every other sentence that we feel for innocent Palestinian civilians, when so many were of the pro-Palestine side - in the Middle East, across cities in US, in European cities like London, Manchester, Berlin etc. - we’re celebrating the massacre of 7 October is a fucking double standard.
That’s all.