The neocolony’s goal is not ‘defeating Hamas’. It’s exterminating Palestinians. (lemmygrad.ml)

submitted 2 years ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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I know that this conclusion is obvious to us, but it doesn’t look like anybody has laid out its reasoning, so I’ll still say it:

If the rulers simply wanted to weed out Hamas, there are dozens of smarter, less destructive ways that they could have taken. They could have used, for example, the ‘hearts and minds’ strategies that the British and Japanese Empires sometimes used. They could have bribed people into tattling on Hamas. They could have consulted forensic scientists. They could have resorted to espionage. They could have resorted to all these things, and they would have been more effective.

Responding to terrorism with more terrorism would have been brainless. You can argue that that applies to the neocolony’s rulers, but brainless people don’t become rulers, let alone for long periods of time. All that bombing and shooting the shit of Palestinians would accomplish is drive up support for Hamas, because Hamas are the only ones directly involved in resisting the aggression. The neocolony’s goal is freeing up land and other resources for the neocolonists. Both the pretensions and the real goals are similar to the Ottoman Empire’s in the 1910s.

I hate to state the obvious, but after listening to an Al Jazeera interview with Massachusetts politician Seth Moulton ridiculously assuming good faith on the neocolonists’ part, I needed to rant.

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[-] [email protected] 14 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

I've been thinking about the same kinds of arguments today, too.

Another line of reasoning I'm too tired to fully lay out right now but that I've seen elsewhere and I think is compelling:

Israel's history of targeted assassinations and arbitrary imprisonment of activists in the occupied Palestinian territories, taken together with the fact of the Oct 7 attack itself, proves that the state of Israel doesn't know who or where the Hamas leaders they supposedly want to target are. So the only 'targeting' they can do is indiscriminate, and the only end point of their bombing campaign is total destruction. And this is borne out in the rhetoric of many officials and much of the Israeli public, and of course in the atrocious, ongoing violence the IDF is right now carrying out.

The impossible goal becomes an excuse for 'no red lines' because no matter how far they go, they can always say they are still not done. This dovetails as well with the analogizing of Oct 7 as an 'Israeli 9/11', the 'War on Terror', and the USA's forever wars in the Middle East.

But your point about the reflexive brutality, the observation that somehow a military response is the only one considered or undertaken here, is also extremely vital. Because part of the rationalization here is absolutely this idea that 'there was no choice', given the desire to uproot Hamas. But of course that's bullshit.

this post was submitted on 12 Nov 2023

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