the_dunk_tank

Hamas’ theory of success is that if you kill your oppressors they can’t oppress you any more.

What else should they do? Sit around and beg for mercy from genocidal zealots?

I imagine success looks like the destruction of the state. But that’s very difficult. The world is caught off guard because of the toll and efficiency of the attack, but Israel is still very advanced and has the US as the main benefactor. We’ve seen scrappy guerrillas take down advanced countries before, but it’s likely to happen in this case. But I’m hoping for a miracle

The strategy so far seems to be to take prisoners and use them as leverage, while shattering the myth of Israeli military invincibility and jeopardizing the top-down campaign of Israeli normalization across the Arab world

Where did you get this idea that blood is being spilt for a "Holy Land."

This is not a war between different religions. There are Palestinian Jews who are just as oppressed under Israel's apartheid regime as Palestinian Muslims are.

Palestinian armed resistance is an entirely justified response to a settler-colonial regime occupying Palestinian territory, tearing native Palestinians out of their homes so that they could be given to colonizers, massacring the native population and stripping them of rights in an ongoing project of ethnic cleansing and genocide over the last ~75 years. Nothing about this is a holy war, Israel is a settler-colonial state that has been militarily occupying Palestinian land, relegating Palestinians into a status of second class citizens in their own homes and ushering them into what are effectively open air prisons in places like the Gaza Strip where they are unable to leave from, all while their labor is exploited to make the lives of the Zionist colonizers more comfortable.

This war is a response to decades of extreme oppression. This is not two groups of roughly equal standing bickering with each other, this is is a brutal military occupation financed by the largest military empire in the history of the world so that the US military can have a technologically advanced military ally in the middle east, fighting against the people who have had their land stolen and lives torn apart who are trying to mount an armed resistance to the injustice they have been forced to live under for generations.

There is absolutely no possible world where this is an issue where "both sides" are at fault. Different religious factions will be able to co-exist when it is Palestinian land once again. There is no co-existence with a settler-colonial state whose existence is predicated on the genocide and ethnic cleansing of the native population, theft of their land, and exploitation of their labor as colonial subjects/second-class citizens living under and apartheid regime.

this has nothing to do with religion anymore

it literally never did. the "thousand year holy war" is a fairy tale version of the "conflict" that americans parrot as fact because it's easier to believe that everyone in the middle east is superstitious to the point of bloodlust than the complicated truth that there are deeper historical reasons that implicate western imperial projects. Hamas is a religous organization, but the movement to liberate palestine -- of which they are merely the last remaining militant segment -- is and has been largely secular, and concerned not with fulfilling some scriptural destiny so much as securing for the people of palestine a dignified, safe, and free life which has been denied to them by the settler colonial ethnostate which begin slaughtering and imprisoning them in 1948 and has not stopped.

I say this in all love and understanding, but you do not have even a baseline understanding of the Israeli occupation of Palestine to begin to comment on it, and the explanations of it most readily available to you are only going to make you more confused and ignorant. As a starting point, I recommend the essay collection The Other Israel: Voices of Refusal and Dissent ISBN 1-56584-914-0, or else the website https://electronicintifada.net/.