this post was submitted on 08 Nov 2023
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By Alice Cuddy BBC News, Jerusalem


The call to Mahmoud Shaheen came at dawn.

It was Thursday 19 October at about 06:30, and Israel had been bombing Gaza for 12 days straight.

He'd been in his third-floor, three-bedroom flat in al-Zahra, a middle-class area in the north of the Gaza Strip. Until now, it had been largely untouched by air strikes.

He'd heard a rising clamour outside. People were screaming. "You need to escape," somebody in the street shouted, "because they will bomb the towers".

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[–] [email protected] 192 points 1 year ago (131 children)

Everytime I read an article like this, my immediate reaction is posting a comment expressing my disgust with the Israeli State's actions and everytime I hesitate because I don't want to suffer the inevitable wave of people defending the Israeli State's actions as somehow justifiable because Hamas did something vile first.

It's a continuing cycle of violence and the Israeli State holds a humongous power advantage. They don't use that power disparity to deescalate and integrate the Palestinian people to prevent Hamas from having support. Instead they do shit like this where they drive Palestinians straight into Hamas' hands, because the Palestinian people are given no other option to turn to.

[–] [email protected] 50 points 1 year ago (29 children)

Your last point is why I feel like what Israel is doing is just straight up illogical, even from a purely selfish point of view. The only thing they are doing here is basically proving Hamas "right" in the eyes of many Gazans, and fueling a fervent desire for revenge. If someone living in Gaza wasn't already a terrorist, they sure as hell are much much more likely to be one now.

Imagine how you would feel if your home and possibly moved ones were bombed like this, losing you everything or nearly everything you hold dear. You lose autonomy over your own life, you lose your independence and rights. I imagine it feels a lot like losing rights as a minority, or something like getting an abortion becoming illegal, turned to the extreme. And these things being threatened to be done to me already cause me to feel strong contempt against the perpetrators. If pushed far enough, things like this would cause me to become a "terrorist", in the sense of being willing to strongly resist it in an attempt to maintain my rights and autonomy.

But of course, whether I would be called a terrorist or not depends on how it's framed, and how much compassion or understanding people would give me. Hell, in the US LGBTQ+ activists, or anti-racist/anti-fascist activists are already called terrorists sometimes.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 year ago (2 children)

No, what Israel is doing makes sense from a strictly selfish point of view.

The question of 'Why doesn't Israel integrate the Palestinians?' is a good one. The answer is numbers.

Israel was founded as a Jewish ethnostate. Those who have immigrated there have done so because they wanted to live in a Jewish ethnostate. So one of the core values of the country is that it is primarily a place for Jews.

If Israel absorbed the populations of Gaza and the West Bank into Israel, the Jewish population would become a minority in Israel if not immediately then within a generation.

I don't agree with the idea of ethnostates in general and I do believe establishing Israel as one was a mistake.

... But if you imagine the viewpoint of someone who does want a Jewish ethnostate like so many in Israel you can see why this solution is a non starter.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Worse than that, it's become a Palestinian vs. Jewish ethnostate competition:

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Israel has integrated what, 1.6 million Palestinians I to it's society?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Something like that, yes.

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