I genuinely do not know who the bad guys are. S lot of my leftist friends are against Israel, but from what I know Israel was attacked and is responding and trying to get their hostages back.
Enlighten me. Am I wrong? Why am I wrong?
And dumb it down for me, because apparently I’m an idiot.
If you would not have called Rhodesia or Apartheid South Africa the good guys then you should not consider Israel to be the good guys either.
I don’t think a lot of westerners realize how highly propagandized and pro-colonialist their media is.
The US deemed the African National Congress (ANC, the main group resisting apartheid south africa) a terrorist group just like they do hamas now, and only removed Mandela from the US terrorist watchlist in 2008.
US media is saying all the same things about Palestine’s resistance that they did in the 80s w/ to south african apartheid.
The amount of bias, propaganda, and straight-up misinformation from western media regarding this “conflict” (more like massacre) is truly outrageous.
I mean the whole reason why you are confused is that this is the most complex conflict in the world and here (like everywhere else) you are going to get responses in both directions. I suggest you read what each side has to say for itself: for unconditional pro-Israeli propaganda I suggest https://elderofziyon.blogspot.com/ and for unconditional pro-Palestinian propaganda I suggest https://mondoweiss.net/ – read both of these and decide for yourself what arguments on both sides you believe more.
I do not think there are any truly good guys in the conflict; but I do think that Israel is worse and tend to side with the Palestinians. This is mainly because Israel is the side with vastly more power and I think it’s up to the powerful, the oppressor, to try to treat the people they have power over with dignity and try to give up the power they have.
Of course, even that argument of mine has a counter-argument! You can (and should!) read it here: https://elderofziyon.blogspot.com/2016/07/the-parameters-of-discussion-michael.html
It is not complex at all, it is just genocidal settler colonialism and resistance to it. “Complexity” is just a proxy for being uncomfortable acknowledging this, which is something you should do some introspection on as someone from a German instance. Ever hear of the Holocaust? Of Lebensraum?
Never again means never again for anyone.
The thing is that I actually mostly agree with you, but I do not think that the other side is entirely illegitimate.
Which part of genocidal racist settler colonists is legitimate to you?
What legitimacy do you see in Israeli Apartheid? Because, long story short, that’s what the Israeli side is selling.
I’m not here for a drawn out debate. I think Israel’s settlement program is a major reason why there is no peace and I would find Israel a lot easier to defend if they weren’t doing it. It is only one piece of the puzzle though.
Mondoweiss isn’t unconditional pro-Palestine propaganda. It’s a well-sourced pro-Palestinian news site.
If you believe that, you’re just as biased as they are. Check the archive page from last October and tell us that with a straight face. https://mondoweiss.net/news/page/61/
Maybe provide examples? I see nothing that would prevent me from saying that with a straight face. There, lemme just…
Mondoweiss isn’t unconditional pro-Palestine propaganda. It’s a well-sourced pro-Palestinian news site.
Maybe provide examples? I see nothing that would prevent me from saying that with a straight face.
Gee, I don’t know, I vaguely recall a (perhaps minor) news item happening on the 7th, something about a music festival? I may be misremembering though, since this very impartial news site has no mention of it whatsoever.
So omission bias? All this fanfare for omission bias? Nobody is using Mondoweiss as their primary news source; they have no reason to report on everything, especially an event like Nova music festival was reported on by everyone and their mother.
Mondoweiss is using the same kind of euphemisms around the 7.10 that the rest of the press is using for Israels crimes.
Every person I’ve talked to that had some real qualifications on that topic says that Israel are the good guys and the people of Palestine are caught in the crossfire of the war.
Are the real qualifications a caliper set and an unwillingness to talk about what they used to do before they got a position in the west German military?
No, the qualifications are people who have studied that conflict for decades and journalists that have been to Gaza and Israel themselves.
I value their opinion significantly higher than the opinion of people on Lemmy that haven’t taken 5 minutes out of their day to read up on the conflict.
And all these people think Israel are the good guys? I wonder what their opinions about apartheid South Africa were at the time.
Israel was explicitly founded as a settler-colonial project, you can look up quotes from famous founding zionists.
“You are being invited to help make history … it doesn’t involve Africa, but a piece of Asia Minor; not Englishmen, but Jews … How, then, do I happen to turn to you since this is an out-of-the-way matter for you? How indeed? Because it is something colonial.”
Theodore Herzl to a Rhodesian representative
So, because the foundations were colonial, we should … kill everyone living in said country?
Is that a serious argument? Because then we have a lot of places to eradicate.
First off, the foundations remain the same, colonial.
Second off, is creating a secular democracy without an apartheid system, aka “destroying Israel” going to kill everyone? Did the collapse of apartheid South Africa kill all the white people there?
The collapse didn’t. But the goal or “Mission” of the Hamas is to eradicate all jews.
So yes, Israel falling would result in the eradication of a vast majority of the Jewish people.
But the goal or “Mission” of the Hamas is to eradicate all jews.
Source that isn’t from the 90s when they were a marginal fundamentalist group and not a leading member of a coalition fighting for a secular democracy?
Every “qualified” person you talked to says the ethnic supremacist apartheid settler colonists are the good guys?
Which Nazi bars do you hang out in?
Funny you call me “Nazi” when you’re apparently the antisemite who wants to see the state of Israel destroyed.
The state of Israel is an apartheid ethnostate. No apartheid ethnostate should exist, just like it is good that apartheid South Africa no longer exists and was displaced through armed resistance, negotiations, and a plebiscite.
So, tell me which Nazi bars you hang out in where the only “qualified” people are pro-ethnostate.
In US academia anyone who advocates for the Palestinian cause are regularly purged
The Middle East has been cooking for so long, it’s impossible to point at a faction that is the “Good Guys”. But right now, one faction is hell-bent on exterminating another nation’s people, both military and civilian, so it should be pretty fucking obvious who the worst “Bad Guys” are. There are no good guys, only victims.
You should read Ramzi Yousef’s statement at his 1998 trial. Terrorist factions like Hezbollah and Hamas exist only because Israel is consistently refusing to make peace through diplomacy.
How about not calling the municipal governments of populations targeted with genocide ‘terrorists’ unless you’re one of the nazis trying to use that as an excuse to exterminate them?
The good guys are the citizens who want none of this.
The bad guys are the citizens who want all of this, and the military personal behind the weapons, and the generals calling the shots.
Same as it ever was.
This simplistic one size fits all argument falls flat when one side is being occupied and ethnically cleansed by the other side. It implies that Hamas is the “bad guy” and all other occupied Palestinians are the “good guy,” and it implies that non-military Israeli settlers are the “‘good guy.” But the truth is that the great majority of adult Israelis are militant settler-colonizers; and that Palestinians have the legal right under UN law to struggle against their occupiers by any means necessary, including armed struggle; and that Israel, as an occupier, has no right to “self defense.”
What does your both-sidesing accomplish here? Are you trying to say that Palestine’s resistance to colonialism isn’t justified?
If so, then you’re doing this gandhi quote, but for the palestinian resistance.
Another lemmy.ml user to the rescue.
Blocked.
The good guys are the citizens
I’m going to have to stop you right there, because the Palestinians are not the citizens of any state: they are a people being occupied, apatheided, and genocided by the state of Israel. So there’s a “very, very simple truth” for you.
Oh my goodness would you look at that it’s lemmy.ml again
Bye 👋
Don’t let the door hit you on the way out 👋
When you can’t support your own arguments, you could of course just acknowledge this or even just not comment at all instead of lashing out at those who can.
It is particularly disgusting when your arguments serve to obscure genocide.
thank you for telling me I should block you.
Can we please block .world already?
You want to defederate from the largest Lemmy instance, the poster child, and the mascot of Lemmy? Good luck. They are Lemmy now.
Don’t care. If I gave a shit about the biggest instance because it has the most users, then I would have stayed on Reddit which has orders of magnitudes more users and to put it in the linked comment’s words, they still are link aggregators in the the commenter thinks .world “are” Lemmy. The whole damn point of federation is your instance is not locked into what the biggest instance wants to do.
That’s your own mess lol
Everyone who opposes genocide, colonialism, and terrorism are the good guys, so neither Israel or Hamas.
But Hamas is not Palestine/Palestinians, the same way that Israel/Zionism is not Jewish/Judaism; no matter how much Israel, Hamas, the media, or military industrial complex tries to conflate them all.
IMO Israel is more to blame than Hamas as they should know better given a) their history of persecution b) their significantly greater wealth and education, and c) their demographics — more than half of all Palestinians are technically children, below 18.
Don’t forget that Hamas has been supported by Netanyahu in the past because they are a useful tool to prevent a longer standing peace…
War rarely decides who’s right, just who’s left.
In the face of genocide, you chose to dodge the question.
Forget everything you know (or think you know) about the conflict for a second. Now look at what human rights groups, including the UN, have to say about what’s happening in Gaza and Lebanon. It’s called a genocide because it is; it’s really that simple and there are mountains of evidence published by the likes of Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and, again the UN. Also to dispell that particular piece of propaganda: they’re not trying to get the hostages back. If they were they’d turn the first ceasefire agreement into a “permanent” ceasefire (there are no permanent ceasefires in this conflict) and end the whole thing. They want to genocide and settle Gaza, so they’re doing that while sabotaging ceasefire negotiations.
By the way if you’re going to side with the side that has hostages, then you should read up on Palestinian detainees first. Long story short: Israel arrests Palestinians from the West Bank or (until 2005) Gaza for dubious or no charges—which they can do because these places are governed under Israeli military law rather than civil law—and sometimes torture them while stealing years of their life. Part of Palestinian resistance organizations’ raison d’etre is to return those people to their homes, which requires constant action because Israel arrests more Palestinians every day. There were already thousands of those detainees before October 7th and thousands more have been arrested after. Note: We’re not talking about Palestinians who are arrested for legitimate crimes doing their time here; these people were kidnapped as a punishment against Palestinians for existing. If this doesn’t sound like hostages to you, you should do some soul searching and ask yourself if you’re trying to learn or justify your beliefs.
This probably sounds biased to you, but I took care to only state verifiable, indisputably objective facts here Sometimes things are just that simple. That doesn’t make Hamas good guys; they’re more gray with some legitimate resistance actions and some straight up terrorism, and it’s not always clear which is which.
Finally, if you want to learn more about the conflict in general and about the conditions that drove Hamas to launch the October 7th attack to begin with, you should see what Amnesty International and other human rights groups have to say on the topic. The long story short is that Israel subjects Palestinians to Apartheid conditions along with a slow-burn genocide to serve their long-term goal of colonizing the whole Palestine and (to their more extremist factions) expand beyond it.
I just want to briefly make one point because I think most of the important points have been very well covered by others already.
What’s terrorism and what’s freedom fighters is determined by history. By the same standards that Hamas are being called terrorists, you could easily make an argument that 1910s Irish republicans, black South Africans under apartheid, and British suffragettes (not to be confused with suffragists) could easily be considered terrorists. Innocent civilians were killed by all these groups, but looking back on it today we almost universally say they were in the right, because they were fighting for their groups to receive rights denied to them by the ruling class. Their methods weren’t always as perfectly clean as we might ideally want, but the primary target was always someone oppressing them in some way. And right now and for the last half century+, Israel have been oppressing the Palestinian people.
1910s Irish republicans,
Wait really? I thought terrorism was more of a Troubles tactic.
The brits set up a giant military garrison in northern Ireland called the Plantation of Ulster in the 1600s, and used it to turn nearly the entire population of Ireland into slaves, and project english military might onto Ireland and colonize it for hundreds of years. They have always labelled resistance to their imperialist project as “terrorism”.
The british army should absolutely be the ones labelled as terrorists, not the ones opposing them.
It is rather ironic that all he fighting the Irish did, blowing UK’s corpo assets turned out to be the most effective one.
Blowing up money changers offices is terrorrism?
I actually deliberately avoided mentioning the Troubles because I wanted to bring up cases where everyone today could fairly uniformly agree that we were discussing freedom fighters more than terrorists. Too many today would still say that the Provisional IRA were the bad guys (or at the very least that they were “as bad as” the other side). But the point I wanted to make was how given enough time, even terroristic actions can end up being viewed on the whole as coming from the “good guys”, if their cause is viewed as just.
I could also have mentioned American revolutionaries.
The good guys are the humanitarian aid workers risking their lives bringing food and medical care into the region.
The same folks being killed by Israel? Those ones?
You know it!
There are no “good guys” in a conflict between religious people.
Read the excellent Decolonize Palestine website to learn about the vital context that makes Israel’s claim of self defense deeply disingenuous, and to learn about some of the falsehoods about Israel and Palestine that are present in mainstream discourse.
Where are the good guys in non-religious (scientific) people?
They are all scheming to gain more power and control.
Humans are just not emotionally ready to recognize where all this leads.
There are no “good guys” in a conflict between religious people.
Religion does play a role in the conflict, particularly over the question of where the border between an Israeli and Palestian state should go (so that holy sites end up on the appropriate side), but I don’t think it’s very useful to understand this as a religious conflict.
The Jews who moved to Israel in the early 20th century weren’t pilgrims. They were refugees fleeing political persecution. The founder of Zionism wasn’t even religious.
And Israel didn’t happen because religious Jews enthusiastically got behind the idea of Zionism. Israel happened because Britain got behind the idea of Zionism.
Because the Crusdaes of the 11th to 13th centuries still loom large in Western culture (Richard the Lionheart and all that), I think Westerners have a tendency to think that the situation in Israel/Palestine is a continuation of those conflicts. But it’s really not. It’s a 20th century creation.
Arabs leaders was also so stupid, they kicked most of the non zionist jews from Arabs lands in response to kicking out Palestinians after 48 loss instead of trying to make them allies
The first violent Zionist settlers started migrating in the late 1800s, not the 20th century, this is more Zionist propaganda that leaves out the early terror in Palestine that foreshadowed the rest of the conflict. These early terror groups were mostly ineffective, but their eventual dissolution lead to Zionist thought spreading to what are now the top supporters and financiers of Israel. the rest of the comment is spot on though.
The largest armed force in the gaza strip is deeply religious and the entire reason the support they receive from their biggest ally, the IRR, is religion. If Hamas were Sunni muslims instead of Shia, Iran would remain silent. Just as they were, when their Shia allies in Syria and Yemen started to massacre non-Shia in the region.
If Hamas were Sunni muslims instead of Shia
Hamas are Sunni.
Hezbollah are Shia.
Your link is broke https://decolonizepalestine.com/
The one who is colonizing the other. When Nate Turner killed children in his revolt it didn’t make the slaves the bad guys and the slave owner the good guy. In the Indian Rebellion of 1857, resistance promised safety to British including kids and women but ended up attacking them, it didn’t make the British empire the good guy and the Indian the bad guys
deleted by creator
Israel does genocide. That’s it.
Israel and its settler garrison are carrying out the standard colonialist formula throughout history (epitomized by the US model in its conquest) : eviction and genocide of the indigenous inhabitants, and theft of their lands.
This is defended under many premises, a “religious” calling, a “civilizing” venture (with orientalist undertones), and many others, but the goal is the same as all imperialist ventures: theft of land, labor, and natural resources. People from around the world, no matter how rich or poor, are invited to join in this colonial project, and many do, because of the promise of cheap land.
Predictably, Israel calls anyone who opposes this genocide as “terrorists”, even though by all reasonable definition of terrorism, its the settler garrison who are the real terrorists: murdering innocent civilians, stealing their towns, and erasing the old names. In Palestine, the largest of this event was called the Nakba, whereas in the US, the entire 1800s was a westward-expanding colonial war defeating hundreds of native tribes and killing anyone who resisted.
The US is the primary supporter of this project, because Israel is for them, a giant, unsinkable aircraft carrier / military base in the middle east, which can be used to project western military power on the resource-rich middle east. As Joe Biden said: “If Israel didn’t exist, it would be necessary for the US to invent one herself.”
I suggest watching this video, as its the best short introduction: How Palestine became Colonized.
Thanks for the info. I’ve saved this video to my watch later list, and I’ll let you know what I think about it when I do.
👍
